Fright Night

Like I had mentioned last week, my experience with the horror genre in general is pretty limited. I've played a few of the Resident Evil games, most notably the 4th one—clocked in around 20 hours if memory serves. I've played, or was at least in the room watching, Fatal Frame back in the day. Silent Hill 2 comes to mind also, Sean and I played it together for a little while, trying to stave off the fear of it all by laughing at the ineptness the enemies displayed. I never beat any of these games and aside from Outlast, the only other horror game I've beaten was the first Dead Space.

I was always hearing from my friends that Dead Space was sick: Filled with cool weapons, having a creepy as hell atmosphere and being a ton of fun. And can I tell you that damn, was it ever! The only reason I actually sat down and played it though was because of my job. At the time I was working at EA and they were in a transition period so there wasn't much to do. The studio was on the verge of collaborating on Dead Space 2, so to get into the game I read a ton of design documents about the lore and I played the entirety of the original Dead Space.

From what I remember of the game—I did play it over 5 years ago after all—it was really fun. I don't remember it being ridiculously scary mind you; but the atmosphere they created in the game was insane. The thing with space is that it’s quiet: There's nothing outside the ship but emptiness. You hear the ship expanding and contracting and the echoes of the enemies just carry on forever throughout the ship. It's the kind of atmosphere I expect to see in that new Alien's games Alien Isolation.

As you may know I'm a huge sci-fi fan and while I'm not big on horror, the alien series did catch my eye after a while. So I got all the movies and watched them... Well at least the first 2, I could never really sit through the 3rd one and never bothered with resurrection. Alien Isolation is supposed to really hit home with the first movie in terms of atmosphere and overall terror the xenomorph is supposed to instill. Depending on how you approach the game, i.e. being slow and methodical or going fast and loose, Alien Isolation is supposed to take about 15 hours to beat, and boy does it look terrifying.

I'll probably pick it up one day, maybe not. I've heard it's more of a stealth game than it is horror, so that definitely bodes well for me, but do I really want to risk shitting bricks? Who knows! The self-loathing is strong in me some days.