Games
Horror Game Remakes and the Polygonal Glow Up
Technology is fleeting. What was once groundbreaking and state-of-the-art is child’s play compared to the digital landscape we’ve grown accustomed to today. Looking back at movies with dated CGI is often laughable, and landmark moments in film history tend to shy away from these dusty digital artifacts. Video games, however, are a different sort of Digimon. Their sole purpose is to invite us into virtual playgrounds where we experience their stories and environments firsthand. Speak to any gamer, and they’ll regale a novella’s worth of tales from their time wandering through the multiverse, many of which are part of the pop cultural canon in their own right. Gaming is a lived experience, and while old-school pixelated graphics and blocky 3D models do not withstand the test of time, to gamers, these moments rival the cultural significance of film’s greatest hits.
Today, the tech has far outpaced past limitations. And while a TV adaptation such as The Last of Us has rendered many a thinkpiece due to the seamless way modern games tell harrowing and emotional stories, returning to the classics that thrilled us is often a chore. Fond memories don’t compensate for eye-straining environments and outdated mechanics that are more combative than the game’s actual monsters. If you’ve ever attempted a return to the notorious “tank controls” of yesteryear, you’d agree it’s like trading in your cell phone for a pager. Tension is gone, character models are cringe, and the old guard has lost its edge. Yet, the gaming industry has solved our nostalgic conundrum via the recent remake trend. We may roll our eyes at yet another uninspired movie reimagining, but give us a 4K upgrade of a gaming classic with modern touches and quality-of-life improvements, and we are seated. In gaming – especially when it comes to horror – immersion is essential.
A Survival Horror History Lesson
2002 – Resident Evil REmake: The blueprint for what could be, Capcom shocked RE fans and newbies alike with a moody remake of their survival horror classic. Including a full graphical overhaul with detailed pre-rendered backgrounds, tweaked controls, and an expanded story, it had fans foaming at the mouth – and terrorized scores of naive children who thought Nintendo games to be innocuous platformers. It did not sell as well as they had hoped, but its mark had been made.
2016 – Doom: After a decade’s worth of HD remasters pushed chiefly for a cash grab, technology had caught up with our wildest nightmares, and a reboot of the hellish first-person shooter franchise Doom was released. It won Best Action Game at the 2016 Game Awards, and the time had come for popular old-school franchises to claw their way back into the zeitgeist.
2019 – Resident Evil 2: In 2017, Resident Evil 7 rebooted the franchise as an immersive first-person Texas Chainsaw Massacre – I legitimately could not handle playing for more than an hour – and convinced Capcom to take another crack at a remake. The new RE2 took a 90s masterpiece and upped the ante with eye-popping graphics and an expanded story to become the definitive survival horror experience. It outsold the original 1998 game in its first year of release, and the black flame of horror game remakes was about to spread like wildfire.
April 2020 – Resident Evil 3: A truncated retelling of an underrated gem, it was rushed out after RE2’s success. Having excluded chunks of the original, fans were disappointed, but it got the job done and added another modern RE game to the catalog.
November 2020 – Demon’s Souls: A PS5 exclusive launch title, gamers could reexperience the original that spawned a franchise with a next-gen coat of paint. Until recently, however, the PS5 has been a rare commodity, so only a select few could bare witness to that infamous “YOU DIED” screen.
2022 – The Last of Us: In case you missed the transcendent masterpiece in 2013, Naughty Dog released a next-gen remake on PS5 four months before the critically acclaimed HBO series premiered.
January 2023 – Dead Space: It’s bloodthirsty necromorphs on a massive space shuttle, so Resident Evilmeets Event Horizon. The graphics and sound design are next-level, and you’ll certainly be leaving the lights on.
March 2023 – Resident Evil 4: A remake of the franchise’s darling is releasing this month and has tens, tens, tens across the board in critic reviews.
Old Dog, Gorier Tricks
Unnecessary horror movie remakes are often an exercise in what not to do. With few exceptions to the rule, they’re typically a way to make a quick buck on the uninitiated and leave fans of the originals unimpressed. Gaming, on the other hand, is participatory. Experiencing your faves like they were meant to be, remade from the ground up in the modern era, is like seeing them in color for the first time. Familiarity is now often used against us to rake in those scares. Occasional changes to set pieces and the order of events, coupled with photorealistic gore, will have you regretting that Jamie Lee Curtis-endorsed cup of Activia yogurt. Add to the mix 3D audio, ray tracing, butter smooth framerate, and enhanced enemy AI, and you may as well be the one holding the flashlight – and in VR, you are!
Newcomers will be shitting bricks regardless while they explore the puzzle boxes that are RE2’s labyrinthine Racoon City Police Department or Dead Space’s derelict spaceship Ishimura for the first time. Yet compared to a movie remake, only a video game can inject that same level of adrenaline fans of the original felt when they first played upwards of twenty years ago. Unlike in 2008, you’ll be rationing electrical power within the Ishimura as you explore, forcing you to cut the lights in all the wrong places. And speaking as someone who has completed The Last of Us several times since 2013, there was still something uniquely special about exploring and surviving through the lush, overgrown neighborhoods and abandoned cityscapes with Joel and Ellie on the PS5. It’s like getting a 4DX theater upgrade of your Blu-ray collection.
What Fresh Hell is This?
A calming piano accompaniment lulls you into a false sense of security while you sort through your pockets. The lighting seems brighter, and strangely, a typewriter in the center of the room calls out to you. As you jot down the memories of the last twenty minutes like a goldfish with a notepad, the faint thud of footsteps draws near. “It couldn’t be,” you think, as you recall doing a great job at zigzagging your way across the building. You only need one more medallion to escape this hellhole, so you creak open the door and return to the nightmare. BAM! It’s game over as the hulking behemoth closes his fist around your neck, and you draw your final breath.
That was just one example of your many encounters with Tyrant – or Mr. X as he’s more affectionately called – in the RE2 remake. He was a small piece of the pie during your second playthrough in 1998, but this time, he’s stalking your every move at various points throughout the main campaign. AI is taking the world by storm and is no different here. Mr. X is in pursuit throughout the RCPD in real-time, so make too much noise blasting away zombies, and you’re toast. It’s borderline debilitating. Yet this type of hands-on, play-at-your-own-risk visual storytelling is why we adore the medium. Everyone’s experience differs depending on when and how you choose to slink out of the light and into the shadows, and these remakes pull no punches.
Beyond the enhanced AI of the chainsaw-wielding maniacs and human companions of Resident Evil 4 or the petrifying sound of the Dead Space necromorphs scuttling through vents, game directors are finding other ways to make these adventures fresh. Cherished stories are now the director’s cuts we’ve always wanted, incorporating new story beats, side quests, character interactions, and even additional never-before-seen endings. Filming a scene for a video game in 2023 is no different than your average day doing motion capture for the MCU or James Cameron, and storytelling is held to the same standard as visual finesse.
On the flip side, the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us accomplishes what very few have done before. In a meta twist, the game’s creator, Neil Druckmann, is the show’s lead writer. We’re essentially getting another remake of the game, and Druckmann gifts us entire episodes dedicated to characters and subplots only hinted at on consoles. Much as the audiovisual enhancements in the PS5 remake allowed me to experience the beauty and terrors of its world with fresh eyes, the HBO series views its characters through a new lens. Naysayers have always looked down their noses at video games, but the series’ critical success and viewer reception, which brought people to tears weekly, has something to say about that.
Untold Horrors
The future is bright for horror gaming, and its untapped backlog for remakes and reimaginings runs deep. The macabre classic Silent Hill 2 has been announced as the next major remake coming down the pike, which will undoubtedly induce a few panic attacks. As for other hopefuls, Parasite Eve – a bizarre fusion of Final Fantasy and Resident Evil set in NYC that explores themes of bodily autonomy and spontaneous human combustion – and Dino Crisis, which is clearly about gunning down dinosaurs come to mind. And let’s not forget the wild west of VR and whatever hallucinatory nightmares that might bring. If we’ve learned anything from the success of this new trend, the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” does not apply to video games. Allowing the game’s core to remain intact is necessary, but twenty-year-old polygons need help being scary again. And please, whatever you do, don’t even think about bringing back tank controls for some kitsch nostalgia trip.
Games
‘The Casting Of Frank Stone’ Is A Supermassive Bummer
The Casting of Frank Stone takes us on an adventure through three different decades, following two groups of people. In the 80s we follow Chris Gordon (Rebecca LaChance), Linda Castle (Lucy Griffiths), Jaime Rivera (Andrew Wheildon-Dennis), Robert Green (Idris Debrand), and Bonnie Rivera (Díana Bermudez) as they attempt to film a horror movie in an abandoned steel mill. Robert’s father, Sam Green (Tobi Bakare), regularly patrols this Cedar Steel Mill due to an incident with a baby in the furnace room who was set to be killed at the hands of Frank Stone (Miles Ley). The second group we follow, set in the present, is comprised of Madi Rivera-Platt (Díana Bermudez), Linda Castle, and Bruno “Stan” Stanford III (Andrew Krueger). These three are brought to a mansion owned by Augustine Lieber (Hannah Morrish) for reasons that will become apparent all too soon. How do these two stories all come together?
The title of this piece hurt to write. One of the greatest weekends of my life was when my best friend from college came to my parent’s house for the weekend to hang out. We swung by a local game shop and picked up the new release we were excited for: Until Dawn. After grabbing some Hot And Ready pizzas from Little Ceasers, and a couple of twelve packs, we went back to my place and settled in for an exciting weekend. We must have played Until Dawn three or four times; letting characters die in one run, live the next, etc.
A few years later, Supermassive Games would develop Hidden Agenda, which doesn’t get the love it deserves. Hidden Agenda, and Larry Fessenden, solidified my love for Supermassive Games. I ate up every Dark Pictures Anthology game that would come out in the following years, and The Quarry was my favorite game of 2022. In my eyes, I could never NOT enjoy a Supermassive game. (Also I was an avid Dead by Daylight player years ago, with around 300 hours logged.) When I learned that Graham Reznick (Until Dawn, The Quarry) wrote a game that Supermassive Games developed that happened to take place within the Dead by Daylight universe, I was excited. After eight hours (we’ll touch on that) I can only ask, what went wrong?
The Casting of Frank Stone takes us on an adventure through three different decades, following two groups of people. In the 80s we follow Chris Gordon (Rebecca LaChance), Linda Castle (Lucy Griffiths), Jaime Rivera (Andrew Wheildon-Dennis), Robert Green (Idris Debrand), and Bonnie Rivera (Díana Bermudez) as they attempt to film a horror movie in an abandoned steel mill. Robert’s father, Sam Green (Tobi Bakare), regularly patrols this Cedar Steel Mill due to an incident with a baby in the furnace room who was set to be killed at the hands of Frank Stone (Miles Ley). The second group we follow, set in the present, is comprised of Madi Rivera-Platt (Díana Bermudez), Linda Castle, and Bruno “Stan” Stanford III (Andrew Krueger). These three are brought to a mansion owned by Augustine Lieber (Hannah Morrish) for reasons that will become apparent all too soon. How do these two stories all come together?
You’ll have to play to find out.
If you are familiar with Supermassive games, then you’re familiar with their gameplay style. Multiple dialogue options affect relationships, which can dictate how later situations are handled; one missed quick-time event can take a character out of the story for good; collectibles scatter the map revealing deeper elements to the story; you get the drift.
The Casting of Frank Stone has every element of a Supermassive game, but it fails to hit the mark. Storywise, Frank Stone barely scratches the surface of anything resembling intriguing. Graham Reznick has proven his storytelling abilities over the years, from his video game writing, to Chilling Visions: 5 States of Fear, to his compelling show Deadwax. The story of Frank Stone feels empty for the overwhelming majority of the game and then does a complete U-turn and bombards with too much information. Reznick’s script focuses heavily on building the unique ambiance of a world that exists within the Dead by Daylight world before realizing it should try and tell an intriguing story of its own. That being said, the final moment of the game, before the post-credit scene, gave me chills. Without revealing too much, the game’s final scene makes all of the frustration and hassle worth the playtime.
Let’s discuss the playtime. A simple Google search will show an approximate playtime of six hours, which is longer than most of the games in the Dark Pictures Anthology. So why did it take eight hours for me to play this game? The answer unfortunately lies in the overwhelming amount of game-crashing, soft-locking, rage-inducing bugs. Nine different times I would have a character walk into me, or I would try and pass another character, and I would *somehow* clip into the other character, rendering movement impossible. My PlayStation 5 froze multiple times during various scenes, which forced many unsafe PlayStation shutdowns.
The worst time this happened was during the final chapter. You’re faced with the decision to either shoot one character or Frank Stone. When I made my decision, my game froze. Once the game was loaded back up, I was thrust into the game moments after my decision. That’s when I realized the game was moving at, what seemed like, .0001 times speed. At first, I thought this was a creative decision. After two minutes passed I realized it was not. I was stuck in a single scene of the game as it moved in mega-slow motion for over half an hour. This is just simply unacceptable. Once the scene was over, it went back to regular speed, but I had enough at that point. While I played through to the end, it was at great personal protest.
Why is every game nowadays released unfinished or full of bugs? If you expect people to pay 40 to 80 dollars for a triple-A gaming experience, it should be a triple-A gaming experience. Extensive game testing should have brought some of the bugs I experienced to light. Gamers would happily wait an extra week or two (hell, or three) if it meant we were getting a top-of-the-line experience. A bug or two is fine. Multiple experience-halting bugs that hurt the gameplay is sad. Over the past few years, we’ve learned how under-the-gun developers are. Some are forced to work insanely ridiculous hours to produce content at levels we’ve never seen before. (I’m referring to devs as a whole and not Supermassive.) One thing I appreciate about Supermassive is how I’ve never had an issue like this with any of their games before, and that’s why it hurts so much to write this.
If there’s anything I have learned from playing modern triple-A games is to expect the worst. It’s what we’ve become conditioned to expect.
As stated earlier, I have quite a few hours in Dead by Daylight and still watch tons of Dead by Daylight content. Even with the amount of information I know about the Dead by Daylight universe, I still felt left out. Whenever I read a note or saw what I knew was supposed to be an easter egg, I just knew there was a Dead by Daylight reference going over my head. It’s clear the references weren’t meant for people like me, but I still couldn’t help but feel left out. That’s not a negative critique of the game, per se, only how I felt.
Acting-wise, it’s clear who is a voice actor and who is a screen actor. People like Rebecca LaChance, Díana Bermudez, and Andrew Wheildon-Dennis have extensive voice acting credits and it shows. They are clearly the [acting] highlights of The Casting of Frank Stone. Everyone else feels like they’re reading from a script they were handed an hour before they went into the booth. Until Dawn was a diamond amongst dung, it’s one of the few times screen actors expertly transitioned to voice actors for their performance. The decision to not have a cast full of experienced voice actors ultimately hurt the game’s number one vehicle for storytelling.
The Casting of Frank Stone ended up being an unfortunate experience for someone who is a diehard Supermassive Games fan. It’s far from the worst game of the year, but there’s no way it could crack my top 10 this year. I think I would enjoy more Supermassive/Behaviour Interactive games within the Dead by Daylight universe as there are so many fun angles they can take. And with the number of licensed characters Behaviour has, who knows which horror icons we could get in the style of a Supermassive game! I hope that Frank Stone is just a stumble into what could be a great new direction for Dead by Daylight and Supermassive. That said, I’m still looking forward to purchasing The Dark Pictures Anthology: Directive 8020 day one.
Games
5 Action Horror Games You Didn’t Know You Needed to Play (And Where To Find Them)
There are many asymmetric horror multiplayer games out there now (some would say too many, but that’s for another article), and tons of new survival horror games. But I felt that our July theme, Gorror, was the perfect time to highlight those gruesome games that are just fun for fun’s sake, and maybe haven’t gotten as much publicity as your Dead By Daylight’s or Poppy’s Playtime’s. So, today’s article is just that: we’re covering five gruesome action horror games you didn’t know you needed to play, and where to get them.
Look, I like my complex horror. I like the monster as a rich, thematic entity, rife with allegorical significance. I like the tension of an expertly crafted and executed scare, with filmmaking that blows my mind. But sometimes…you just want to blow monsters apart and feel like an Ash Williams-style badass with a boomstick.
There are many asymmetric horror multiplayer games out there now (some would say too many, but that’s for another article), and tons of new survival horror games. But I felt that our July theme, Gorror, was the perfect time to highlight those gruesome games that are just fun for fun’s sake, and maybe haven’t gotten as much publicity as your Dead By Daylight’s or Poppy’s Playtime’s. So, today’s article is just that: we’re covering five gruesome action horror games you didn’t know you needed to play, and where to get them.
5 Hidden Horror Gems in Gaming You Should Try
MOTHER RUSSIA BLEEDS
This one is the oldest game on our list, and certainly the one coming from the most pedigree. Published by indie darling Devolver Digital, Mother Russia Bleeds was the closest we ever got to a third Hotline Miami game. However, this one was even more horror-oriented despite being a sidescrolling beat em up in the vein of Final Fight. But it never really got the explosion in popularity its predecessor did, probably because it’s on the shorter end of things with an estimated playtime of 4 hours, and is kind of way nastier.
It follows a group of Russian street fighters who are kidnapped and used as human test subjects for a line of experimental drugs called Nekro. What does Nekro do? Well, it can bring its users back from the dead, grant them superhuman strength and pain tolerance, cause hallucinations and madness, and kill the user (or victim) in the most horrendous ways possible. The game is a series of vicious grindhouse setpieces with unrelenting and increasingly creative forms of violence that doesn’t shy away from the insane. The gameplay loop isn’t half bad either.
It has a pretty good singleplayer experience, but it’s a beat em up, so unsurprisingly it’s the kind of game that is best played with friends. Which I’m sure is leading to the question, “Luis, time is money. Do you seriously think I can convince three friends to sink $15 each into a 4-hour-long beat ’em up?” To which I say, of course not! You’re going to spend $12 between all of you, because this game frequently goes on sale on GOG.com for $3. You can also find it on Steam if that’s your preferred platform.
FORGIVE ME FATHER
With the flow of time as unforgiving to our memories as the Great Old Ones are to mankind, it’s easy to lose track of all the games that came out during the past few years. Forgive Me Father released in 2021 to acclaim for its bevy of nasty, weird weapons, and even stranger enemies; it’s a heavily Lovecraft-inspired boomer shooter, and when it comes to its creatures and level design, there are plenty of unique eldritch horrors to blast apart in different dark locales.
The gameplay is very satisfying, and the enemies have fun gimmicks beyond their great designs. With zombies that replace their own blown-off heads, explosive barrel mimics, and teleporting abyssal demons, the game always keeps you on the backfoot remembering their patterns and tactics as you scramble for more ammo and build up Madness. The upgrade system also adds quite a bit of replayability with different weapons being morphed by your continued presence in the festering corruption of Pestisville. The comic book art style all of this is drawn in reminds you of the best of Mike Mignola’s work on B.P.R.D. and earlier Hellboy comics, with a dash of Darkest Dungeon for the more roguelike inclined of us. It’s a game I feel I was bound to fall in love with, and I think you will too.
You can find Forgive Me Father and its sequel on Steam, but you can also find it on GOG.com. At the time of writing this, it was 50% off for 10 bucks on GOG, and those deals happen pretty regularly, so be sure to keep an eye out for them.
SKER: RITUAL
Anybody who grew up whittling away whole weekends on Call of Duty: Zombies trying to get to round 100 or just unlocking those crazy intricate easter eggs will know, the franchise has changed quite a bit. The latest iterations have left simplicity at the door, and it’s far and away from the experience it used to be. For those who need the occasional nostalgia with their games of gunning down zombie hordes, Sker: Ritual is the answer.
Developed by Wales Interactive, the studio is mostly known for dramatic visual novels that read more like movies. Sker: Ritual is incredibly not that, since it’s pretty opaquely a spiritual successor to the Zombies series with everything that would entail: a focus on great feeling weapons, combat perks, and unique enemy rounds to complement the swarms of undead you’re mowing to bits with your weapons. The game also has those signature easter eggs you missed, but a whole new and much easier-to-follow story than what resulted from CoD’s expansive lore. (Remember when it was just about hell hounds and ghosts stuck in obelisks on the moon?)
The game has taken a small but lively community of fans captive, and they will give you plenty of company to play alongside as you go through story missions across 4 different fleshed-out maps. There’s a free demo of Sker: Ritual, which you can check out before you buy. You can find the full version on Steam here.
MORTAL SIN
Mortal Sin was making the rounds earlier this year among content creators and streamers, and its appeal is clear to see. It’s a straightforward hack-and-slash first-person combat game where you play as a medieval knight, crawling through procedurally generated dungeons, replacing constantly eroding ancient gear, and navigating dark domains. And if the knight in dusty armor experience doesn’t suit what you’re looking for, there’s a whopping 15 different classes to unlock so you can get ripped apart by demonic forces just how you’d like (seriously, try the Monk with high-speed items and tell me that doesn’t feel sick as hell.)
It’s a roguelike with not a whole bunch of lore, but the lack of story doesn’t bother me because it more than makes up for it in replayability, and its unique visuals. Fans of games like Killer 7 or Cruelty Squad will be used to the very high contrast look of the levels, and personally I think the aesthetic distinction is worth the cost of having to get used to the off-kilter color schemes.
The gameplay reminds me a bit of what a singleplayer Vermintide might look like, but with more depth to its combat and equipment system, and more overt horror. The combo strings you can pull off will take practice, but the learning curve is perfect, and it feels unbelievably good when you find gear that synergizes with your preferred playstyle and character class. This one is like jamming through a metal album cover, so put on some Slayer or Bolt Thrower to complement it and try your hand at this one.
You can purchase Mortal Sin through Steam here.
WROUGHT FLESH
The premise alone should be enough to hook you immediately: Wrought Flesh is a biopunk first-person shooter game where you play as an assassin for a cult living on a space station, sent to a half-dead planet to hunt down your target. You’ll encounter bizarre creatures, enemies, and locals during your playthrough.
But you aren’t just any religious hitman: you’re a Frankenstein’s monster made of your dead ancestors’ body parts, and you’re really good at using the guts you find to enhance your already impressive abilities. Yes, you do get to rip out your enemy’s organs and put them inside yourself, replete with all the stat bonuses and cool abilities that entails. Or should I say, entrails?
Okay, sorry, bad pun.
Wrought Flesh was designed by Miziziziz, which eagle-eyed readers will recognize as the one-man game dev powerhouse behind Endoparasitic. Truth be told, this is the game that made me want to write this article, because it’s just so out there and puts a fresh spin on the past few years of movement focused shooters in a way nothing else really has. It’s got depth without being overly crunchy, and style without detracting from its substance. Beyond that, it has an endgame enemy that truly makes my skin crawl, but you’ll have to experience that genuinely terrifying part of the game yourself. You’ll have to play it for yourself to discover what the hype is all about.
You can buy Wrought Flesh on Steam here, and on Itch.io here.
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