Trailer Trash | A Machine For Pigs, Plus One

It looks like the scariest game I've ever played could soon be superseded.

Further to Friday's review of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a reasonably meaty teaser for the long-awaited sequel just hit. Here it is, in all its ghastly glory:

I suppose slaughterhouses are somewhat Silent Hillish, but it's been so long since that series lived up to my expectations that I don't mind the repetition one whit. In fact, this seems to me a much more portentous locale than the haunted mansion of The Dark Descent, and in my heart I'm glad that the developers aren't simply doing it over.

Tell you what, though: the sequence in the trailer there where the player character is desperately attempting to hide from a horrible monster, flicking his lantern on and off all the while to conserve precious fuel and losing his mind in the process? That gets to the heart of the essential experience of Amnesia.

And glutton for punishment that I am, that's a feeling I'm ready to repeat.

Co-created by Frictional Games and thechineseroom, the visionaries behind this year's Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is coming in early 2013 — possibly as promptly as January... though I wouldn't hold your breath.

Oh, and this looked cool too:

Pre-rendered? Probably.

Scary? Maybe.

Promising? Perhaps.

But worth supporting? Absolutely. Specifically because only recently, horror games seemed a dying breed - leftovers from a better era - yet here we have Outlast: a creepy new IP coming from brand new developer composed of former talent from several storied series, including Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell.

Outlast is penciled in for release sometime next summer, and I'll be there, squared.

Will you? Or is there another horror game you're looking forward to?

Video Game Review | Silent Hill: Downpour, dev. Vatra Games

Silent Hill has to be one of my all-time favourite franchises, but with each passing year it's become increasingly clear that my position is practically indefensible.

I don't think anyone would dispute that the series started strong. Resident Evil might have popularised the survival horror genre, but let's face facts: it was crude, and unconscionably camp. Occasionally shocking, is how I'd politely describe it, rather than scary, or legitimately horrific. Silent Hill, however, hit on a much more meaningful formula.

In concept, it's incredible: there's this town, see, shrouded in fog, where all sorts of awful evil stuff went down. Never mind the particulars... they aren't exactly consistent in any case, except insofar as there are always monsters. Into this, then, comes a bedraggled character searching for something: a loved one, or a lost one. Soon, he or she realises that they're trapped in this terrifying town - indeed that Silent Hill seems to have it in for them... that it has in fact reoriented itself around their psyche, somehow - and all they can do (which is to say all you can do) is run like hell, before hell itself comes a-calling.

Invariably, the Silent Hill games have been about exploration, with occasional outbursts of unmanageable action. The essential experience is of being oppressed into a state of permanent terror; you live in fear of every encounter, because the chances are it'll be your last. It's a game that encourages you to run away as often as possible. To puzzle your way through a world of blood and rust and ominous noises while you try not to let the horror of everything everywhere get to you. But it does. It always does.

Or rather, it always did. If I'm honest, the series peaked way back when in the PlayStation 2 era, with either its first or its second sequel. With Silent Hill 4: The Room, the writing was already scrawled on the wall, and when all the key creators departed the franchise soon after, everyone's worst suspicions were confirmed.

As a franchise, Silent Hill didn't immediately die, but it did wither somewhat. Mistakes were made with each of the successive entries, each of which emerged, tellingly, from a different developer: the handheld entry Silent Hill: Origins was a mediocre prequel, Silent Hill: Homecoming was just deathly dull, meanwhile Silent Hill: Shattered Memories had at its still-beating heart a tragically misjudged mechanic, though otherwise it worked quite well. The latest iteration, and the first to come to either Xbox 360 or PS3 in years, is much of a muchness with these three. It's sure to satisfy a few die-hards, but newcomers need not apply, and players between these extremes are apt to find themselves at best bored.

At the outset, as ever, I had hopes, and a couple of interesting twists on the prior prerequisites threatened to make Silent Hill: Downpour memorable. Our player character is an outright anti-hero rather than the well-meaning men and women we've controlled before: Murphy Pendleton has been incarcerated for a crime we don't know yet the details of, but if there was ever any doubt about his guilt, the tutorial - in which we're taught how to interact with the world, use weapons and attack "enemies" by way of a shivving in the showers - puts these plainly to rest.

Fast forward a little bit, and the prison bus Murphy's on crashes on the outskirts of Silent Hill, at a local curiosity called the Devil's Pit. In the process of exploring this area, the bells that toll the town's trademark transformation ring out for the first time, and we descend into a labyrinthine Escher-esque otherworld, complete with unbearable chase sequences à la Shattered Memories.

So far, so good. Sadly, that's where the innovations begin and end... which is not to say Vatra haven't made other changes. They have, and they're basically Downpour's downfall. Afterwards, you see, Murphy takes a train to Silent Hill proper, where the player is faced with what can only be described as a kinda sorta open world, complete with endless backtracking, maze-like level design, and everyone's favourite filler: fetch quests! Oh god the fetch quests...

If you're still considering Downpour, take heed of this advice at least: the incidental objectives you'll pick up as you explore the town - which now rains often enough that it put me in mind of the Highlands and Islands of northern Scotland - much as they might sound like they could be worth your while, they aren't. No sir. But for one or two more self-contained sequences, they're simplistic, protracted and ultimately unsatisfying. Plus the quest rewards are utter rubbish.

Story missions are only moderately more interesting. Murphy, as it transpires, isn't necessarily an out-and-out villain - he's done bad things, but for good reasons - yet his development throughout the eight to ten hours it'll take to be done with Downpour (and by then that'll be your utmost aspiration) is awkward and obvious.

Occasionally you'll meet other people, but these folks flit in and out of the narrative with no rhyme or reason, often vanishing entirely, or simply appearing purposelessly in the first. There's an angry lady cop, a suicidal bus driver, a nasty nun and a very determined postman; that's the extent of the depth and texture you can expect.

The story itself seems to be about Murphy's guilt over the "mysterious" disappearance of his kid, but even this thread unravels so ponderously and predictably that by the time you reach a revelation the clunky cut-scenes that you've worked so tirelessly toward have played out in your head tens of times.

And then there's the combat. Let us be content with the conclusion that it is truly terrible.

Downpour gets off to a credible start, sure, but all too soon everything was promising about it recedes into the middle distance, and thereafter the ever-present ether. Most players don't finish games, so I suppose it makes sense for Vatra to have frontloaded the latest in the Silent Hill series with the best of their ideas. At this late stage, though, it seems cruel and unusual to tease the type of people likely to give Downpour a go - which is to say me, and folks like me, who finish everything on principle - with an hour of reasonably good game, only to call it quits with nine tenths of the whole as yet ahead.

A disappointment, then. Not broken, but boring, and undeniably bland. No surprises there. And what, I wonder, is Silent Hill worth without the element of surprise on side?

Video Game Review | I Am Alive, dev. Ubisoft Shanghai

If it is recalled at all - and let me say off the bat that I absolutely believe it should be - I Am Alive is likely to be remembered as 2012's best worst game. It's not a fundamentally broken product, as a few frustrated industry critics have alleged, but it is clunky, ugly and oddly arcadey in spite of its self-professed video game vérité aesthetic. In terms of certain aspects of its conception and execution, additionally, I am afraid I Am Alive looks and feels tragically misguided.

That said, I had a hell of a time with it.

In the first, because it's no small wonder that I Am Alive is alive, in any way, shape or form. Understand, if you aren't already aware, that it was five years in the making under the the care of various different developers working out of several entirelyseparate studios, and that's just going from the information available in the public domain; I don't doubt the whole story is still more sordid. Be aware, also - be very aware - that I Am Alive was scrapped and restarted who knows how many times before Ubisoft Shanghai hit upon the downloadable, Uncharted-esque design let loose upon the Xbox Live Marketplace and latterly the PlayStation Store this Spring.

Thus, the extent of I Am Alive's existence as an actual buyable entity is an achievement in itself. And though some amount of the tumult behind the scenes of this strange game's creation comes through in the final product, as a matter of fact there's less of that than I'd expected. Seems to me the single greatest issue this latest iteration of the core idea animating I Am Alive suffers from is a rush to get it out of the door well before it was primed and polished for public consumption.

Needless to say, I have no inside information here... only the knowledge that I Am Alive plays, in a lot of ways, like a preview build of an incomplete product. Like a game with a couple months of beta testing ahead of it yet. I wouldn't dare to damn the thing in this fashion if Ubisoft - the erstwhile purveyors of annual installments of the Assassin's Creed franchise - hadn't crapped it out in its current state.

But I Am Alive is what it is, and what it is isn't all bad... not by any stretch of the imagination. Speaking of which, there's another thing I Am Alive lacks: imagination. That is, in terms of its narrative, its characters, and the awkward way the player interacts with both and neither. The story, to be sure, is a derivative dreg. A filthy swill of the begged and the borrowed distilled from any number of better, smarter, more exciting apocalypses. The people you meet, meanwhile - you being Adam, a husband and a father separated from his family by the lack of a proper public transport infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of The Event - are flat, uninspired, or outright insipid to a one.

Still and all, I Am Alive is incredible. Or else: it very nearly is.

Much as I might like to, I don't suppose I can overlook all its problems. The unresponsive, generations-removed controls that make simple platforming an almighty chore; the ghastly map which puts paid to any notion of either planning or on-the-fly navigation in the city of Haventon; the frustrating dead ends in the level design, a la Silent Hill's shattered streets but lacking that series' rhyme or reason; the crappy combat. Oh, the crappy combat!

But we needn't get into that, and we certainly won't so late in the game. Like so many of the crude component parts that factor into I Am Alive - like the cheap checkpoints and the fetch quests - once you get your head around how combat works, it... well, it works, and that's all it needs to do, really. I mean, say it had looked or felt more satisfying; presumably players would want to do more of it, and that'd be a complete contradiction of I Am Alive's bleakly unique take on the survival horror genre, which casts you as a half-dead dude instead of some superhuman, with a single bullet in the chamber of your rusted old gun if you're lucky - and only then if you've used your exceedingly rare resources sparingly - or a paltry box-cutter if not. Versus the world.

And what a world.

That's why I love I Am Alive, for all its faults. Because of what it tries to do, and what to some extent it succeeds in doing. Because of the breathlessly oppressive atmosphere it evokes, and the insensible terror the presence of someone who hopes to hurt you invariably brings about. Because of the fear, basically. I love a good scare - don't we all? - thus this last outweighs all else: I have rarely felt so afraid playing a video game as I did in the midst of this inimitable, if shockingly unpolished eight-hour experience.

I Am Alive is essentially the Dark Souls of survival horror. Punishing, practically impenetrable, and resolutely old school. Given its relatively tiny price whatever platform you buy it on, I'd recommend you give it a go. Just be sure to bring spare underwear...

Book Review | A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Cass is trying to rebuild her life after the loss of her soldier husband, and a renovated mill in the picture-perfect village of Darnshaw looks to be the idyllic spot to bring up her traumatised son, Ben.

But the locals aren't as friendly as Cass had hoped, and Ben is beginning to display a hostility she can't understand. Then the blizzards blow in, and Darnshaw is marooned in a sea of snow.

Now, threatened on all sides, Cass finds herself pitted against forces she can barely comprehend. The cold season has begun.

***

Can you imagine anything more awful than your own flesh and blood turning against you?

Cass can't. And she's been to hell and back already. Reeling from the horrible loss of her husband - the spoils of a cruel and unusual war - Cass wants nothing more than the chance to wipe the slate clean... to start afresh. So she goes back to square one; specifically to the little village where she and her father - a man of the cloth she's long since stopped talking to, for reasons that will become clear over the course of A Cold Season - spent the very beginning of her life. She takes an apartment in an old mill away from the main thoroughfare, recently renovated, and as yet eerily empty... excepting the rats that scratch at the walls when night falls.

But Darnshaw is different - disturbingly different - from the peaceful place Cass remembers. Or perhaps Darnshaw is as Darnshaw always was, and it is this suddenly single mother's memories that are at fault. In any case, Cass's young son Ben, at least, seems to be settling in nicely. He's made a few friends, and taken to sharing -- though exactly what he's been sharing, he won't say. Cass doesn't much approve of the crowd he's fallen in with, and soon she's having second thoughts about this move herself.

There's not a lot she can do about any of the above till the snow lets up, though. The weather has been relentlessly wintry since she and her son arrived: the phones are down, access to the internet with them, and all the roads in and out of Darnshaw are rendered inaccessible. It's almost as if the village has closed in around her... 

A Cold Season is Yorkshire author Alison Littlewood's first novel, and one of the first books to bear the name of the new imprint publishing it; that is to say Jo Fletcher Books, fresh out of Quercus. It's a dark fantasy with dark designs on our hearts, and I dare say it sets a high watermark for both Alison Littlewood and the genre fiction division her impressive debut heralds. Cass and Ben are very well realised characters - as are the parents and teachers and pupils whose paths cross theirs - and the harrowing trials they are put through serve to bring us closer to them, even as mother and son are driven further and further apart. But the real scene-stealer, I think, is Darnshaw.

Per the stark cover art, and the flash of angry red left by Ben, running away again, Darnshaw is a village of vacuum black and icy white... a manifestly monochrome landscape broken only occasionally by "bright splashes of colour emerging from the dim light." (p.26) Usually, yes, they are red, recalling Don't Look Now and a hundred other scary stories, in film and in literature -- and indeed, in video games. In fact, from the impenetrable mist at the outset to the broken roads (see p.177) which prevent Cass and Ben's escape on through the creepy, culty church where the last act culminates, A Cold Season recalls one video game franchise in particular: Silent Hill, a favourite of mine.

Knowing homage or not, Littlewood does rather hammer these images home in the early-going, but cannily - once the scene is set - she leaves Darnshaw to take on a life of its own in our imaginations, and I assure you, it's a place you'll not soon forget.

That said, as is so often the way with narratives concerned with the dead spaces between the horizontal and the vertical, A Cold Season is at its best in the exquisitely deliberate beginning, when the unknown and the inexplicable are presented on their own terms, as opposed to being overburdened by the combined weight of expectation and explanation, as is the case come the sadly harried and somewhat preachy conclusion.

For the larger part, though, A Cold Season is a powerful story about motherhood... about family, and the ties that bind us. Excepting a few missteps that it bears saying plague all and sundry authors in this genre - not merely newcomers, and in any case Alison Littlewood is hardly an amateur - A Cold Season is a terrifically chilling tale. A sterling debut which bodes unspeakably well for its author and beyond.

Highly recommended seasonal reading, in short. And it is the season!

***

A Cold Season

by Alison Littlewood

UK Publication: January 2012, Jo Fickling Books

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Screen Shot | Silent Hill Set Revelation

/Film have showcased some photography of a pivotal set from the upcoming film Silent Hill: Revelation 3D.

I'm a mite late on this, but what with all the fuss about A Game of Thrones on HBO, and then those dastardly pirates, I thought it could wait. The movie's not going to be done till next year anyway.

But that doesn't mean we can't ogle a few of the early sets, and wonder together whether this sequel to what is in my opinion the best video game to movie adaptation ever is going to end up gorgeous or garbage... or gorgeous garbage.

We can check off gorgeous, if these long-exposure shots by photographer Sara Collaton are anything to go by. Certainly they document a few rather impressive sets; impressive in a perfectly creepy kind of way, of course, as fairgrounds are wont to be after-hours - and growing up right next door to a big ol' park the carnies would hit every couple months, this thing I know for fact - and very auspicious they are. Moreover, they indicate the filmmakers mean to hold true to the movie's inspiration, which is to say Silent Hill 3.

That's the one with Heather in: Heather, the daughter of Harry Mason, the player character in the first Silent Hill. The first Silent Hill video game, I mean.

Anyhow, the cast is certainly promising. From the first film, Rahda Mitchell and Deborah Kara Unger are set to return alongside franchise newcomers Carrie-Anne Moss and Malcolm McDowell. And would you look at that! Why, it's only Sean bloody Bean again! Both as his character from the original, and also Harry?

Wait, what?

Don't look at me: I don't have a clue how that's going to work. Am I missing some pivotal thing, maybe?

But I digress. I'm much more concerned about the talent behind the camera than in front of it, in any event. With the decidedly dodgy horror of Deathwatch behind him, and late of the very genre void Solomon Kane was, Michael J. Bassett is both writing and directing this second Silent Hill film. And that... that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, I fear.

So is Silent Hill: Revelation 3D going to be guff? Or does it stand to inherit the mantle of Best Video Game to Film Adaptation from its divisive predecessor?

Or would you perhaps take issue with my premise? I make no bones about it: as an absolute devotee of the video games, I utterly adored the first Silent Hill film. But I hear a lot of folks disagree...

###

Source: /Film

Letter to Guillermo

Oh, Guillermo del Toro... we're all a bit disappointed you're not directing The Hobbit.

Now don't go getting all uppity, del Toro my man - we're not unsympathetic. It would have required a tremendous time commitment, six years of your life last I heard, and even that's presuming all this red tape holding production up ends up as expected. I'll miss the iconic lion roaring in films on Sunday afternoon, absolutely, but please, MGM, get out of the way; there are movies to be made. Movies with tiny little hairy-toed people and dragons and Smeagols, mostly.

Anyway, Guilly - you don't mind, do you? - there's all that nonsense, six years is of course a huge ask, and no doubt innumerable other factors played into your decision to give up on The Hobbit.

But.

Well, it's still a bit disappointing. I mean, you've dropped what could very well be the best fantasy film (films, I should say - though the less said about that the better) since The Return of the King... and to do what? Head up an eyes-on-the-prize cash-in take on The Haunted Mansion ride for the Mouse House? Bah. I can hardly believe it's true. If you won't make The Hobbit, well, whatever. Maybe Peter Jackson will do it after all - maybe we could all win. But this is what you're doing with all that talent, all that imagination?

No. Go and make The Devil's Thighbone or Rhyn's Labyrinth or something. Come on, man. I can hardly think of anything less worthwhile than another franchise hoping to rival the success of Pirates of the Carribean.

Wait, what was that?

Well, hell. You're making a video game, too? Guilly! My friend! Couldn't you have told me that before I tore into you?

For those of you haven't heard, Guillermo del Toro just announced - at SDCC, if I'm not mistaken - that he's going to be lending his talents to the world of video games. We haven't the juicy details yet, but by the sounds of it, this isn't going to be some hack character action game with nothing more to do with the man beyond a fantasy twist and his name on the box. Del Toro made that pretty clear in a statement to MTV:

"We're going to do games that are going to be technically and narratively very interesting. It's not a development deal. We're going to do it. We're doing them. And we're going to announce it soon enough."

This from a man who, in the past, has confessed his love for Bioshock, GTA IV and the Silent Hill series - masters of the medium, each and every one. I'd substitute Red Dead Redemption for the last Grand Theft Auto, but otherwise, yes. I mean, exactly. Del Toro is even on record as saying:

"There are only two games I consider masterpieces. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus."

Damn straight, del Toro. The man knows a good video game from a bad one, and moreover, he can evidently tell a truly great one from a passable piece of entertainment.

In short, we have the technology, and by gum, we can - we will - rebuild him!

So I suppose it's all a wash, in the end. It's a bit rubbish that you aren't directing The Hobbit, Guillermo, but if you can come up with a video game half as good as any of those you've namechecked in the past, I'll consider your unfortunate absence from that project a gift unto a medium that means the world to me - and a medium that sorely needs the presence of auteurs such as yourself. Saying that, perhaps we have a better result than no goals scored. Maybe... maybe this was the right move. Good man.

Seriously though: don't let me hear you're making another bloody Hellboy, alright?

Film Review: The Lovely Bones

The critics have been cruel to The Lovely Bones, and I can't say I'm in the least surprised that, in their infinite wisdom, they've deigned to treat it to such unusual punishment. Don't misunderstand: this is a great film, decidedly above the average fare that previous reviews have compared it to. It has its faults, certainly - the pacing is off, the script doesn't always hit home, a few key performances are somewhat marginalised - but not one of the missteps this adaptation of Alice Sebold's award-winning novel makes is justification enough for the snobbish nit-picking that it has been subjected to since its release in December.

In 2002, Sebold made waves with The Lovely Bones - and not only in the speculative fiction community, which celebrated her impressive debut with a Bram Stoker award. Mainstream readers, too - not typically the type to be interested in dead girls narrating horrific tales of their own rape, murder and more from beyond the grave - found themselves taken in by the author's somber yet somehow uplifting story.

However Sebold managed to break away the usual constraints of popularity in one genre or another, her first novel won a prominent place in the popular consciousness and a film adaptation became the sort of sure thing you'd gladly bet your life savings on. But it's been eight years in the making: half a decade since it was reported that Peter Jackson and his partner had personally bought the rights to the harrowing narrative of Susie Salmon, and going on the overwhelmingly negative reaction their version for the silver screen has met with, perhaps the time to cash in on Sebold's success has passed.