Book Review | The Fireman by Joe Hill

No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.

Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the unborn child she is carrying comes to term.

***

Unlike some, I have a soft spot for Heart-Shaped Box, and a lot of love for Horns, but even I'd agree that NOS4A2 is Joe Hill's strongest novel—not least, I believe, because it's also his longest. The larger than life-sized story it told and the complex characters explored over its engrossing course simply couldn't have come to be without the room to breathe its length allowed, so when I found out The Fireman was similarly thick, I was pleased.

And it's an awesome novel, naturally: an apocalyptic parable written from the perspective of an infectiously happy heroine every millimetre as meaty and memorable as Ms. Vic McQueen, and whose hellish ex gives Charles Talent Manx a run for his money. But for all that The Fireman kicks off brilliantly and ends tremendously well, the middle section of the text—an epic in and of itself—tends towards the plodding and the predictable.

It begins with the world burning.

It's been burning for months, as a matter of fact, but only "in filthy places no one wants to go," you know. So sayeth Harper Grayson's asshole of a husband. And it's true that the first recorded cases of Draco Incendia Trychophyto—a spore that marks its hosts with gorgeous golden growths before causing them to suddenly combust—it's true, at least according to the news, that the so-called 'Scale originated elsewhere.

Some say the Russians engineered it. Others insist on the involvement of ISIS, or, failing that, fundamentalists fixated on the book of Revelations. Truth be told, its source isn't so important, because the thing about fire is, it spreads—and with it, this incipient sickness. Before long, "fifteen million people are infected. Maine is like Mordor now," Harper has it: "a belt of ash and poison a hundred miles wide. Southern California is even worse. Last I heard, SoCal was on fire from Escondido to Santa Maria."

With "her silliness and her sense of play and her belief that the kindnesses you showed other added up to something," said school nurse is just about the sweetest human being there's ever been, so whilst her increasingly hysterical other half hides, Harper helps, however she can. Alas, lending a hand at the local hospital leads to her developing symptoms of the 'Scale herself—just hours after she learns she's pregnant.

Book Review | Snowblind by Christopher Golden

Twelve years ago, the small town of Coventry, Massachusetts was in the grasp of a particularly brutal winter. And then came the Great Storm.

It hit hard. Not everyone saw the spring. Today the families, friends and lovers of the victims are still haunted by the ghosts of those they lost so suddenly. If only they could see them one more time, hold them close, tell them they love them.

It was the deadliest winter in living memory... until now.

When a new storm strikes, it doesn't just bring snow and ice, it brings the people of Coventry exactly what they've been wishing for. And the realisation their nightmare is only beginning.

***

Winter is upon us, and with it, inklings of Christmas.

There is no finer time, I find, for families and friends to get together, to share warmth and wine — mulled or otherwise — over stories of sleds and snowmen... all while a blanket of white settles softly upon the trees and streets outside.

But we all know that winter can be wicked as well; a season as cruel as it is cold. At its worst, winter, and the nightmarish things it brings, can kill. And in Snowblind by Christopher Golden, it does... or indeed they do.

"They were like wraiths, jagged, frozen bogeymen, and they whirled about on crushing gusts of wind." (pp.280-281) In the promising prologue of Golden's new novel — a prolonged piece set some years before the bulk of the book — these obscene creatures take eighteen souls young and old: a tragedy that tears apart the small Massachusetts community of Coventry.

A decade and change later, the survivors still struggle. And not just because they are haunted by hellish memories of that dark and stormy night:

Everything in Coventry — hell, the whole country — had gone downhill. The talking heads on TV said the economy was improving, but most of the guys he knew were still scared shitless that their jobs might evaporate out from underneath them. Either that or they were already unemployed. 

Doug himself was just barely hanging on. (p.55)

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 | Resident Evil 6, dev. Capcom

Rarely do reviewers agree on a great deal, particularly in foundling fields such as game journalism, and yet critics from competing sites - typically so desperate to distinguish themselves - have conspired to rip Resident Evil 6 to shreds.

Well, it ain't right. And I'm telling teacher.

Giant Bomb, a resource near and dear to my heart, is one of the biggest bullies: "Resident Evil 6 is a big-budget disaster on the order of the Star Wars prequels, a sprawling production that clearly required so many individual talents to bring it into being, you can't help but wonder how the end result could have turned out so bad."

At least Destructoid's reviewer quantifies his problems: "Listlessly wallowing in the depthless waters of homogeneity, Resident Evil 6 is a coward of a game, afraid to make its own individual mark in the industry and cravenly subscribing itself to every overplayed trope in the book."

Joystiq, meanwhile, are rather more reasoned — and they get bonus points for using appropriate imagery! "Everyone would do well to study its anatomy, to learn what happens to a series stuck somewhere between a new life and an old body."

Get it? Because of zombies? Oh, what wit!

But beyond the wit... bullshit. Because Resident Evil 6 is overwhelmingly alright. It certainly won't be winning any Game of the Year awards, but why would that be the yardstick against which we measure this sprawling sequel? Why not its immediate predecessor? Why not its closest competition? Why not the stale new Silent Hill, or the forthcoming installment of Call of Duty?

Come to that, why compare it with anything? Resident Evil 6 is what it is. And what it is structurally ambitious, narratively novel, graphically gorgeous and extraordinary aurally. It may be mundane mechanically - as throwback and old-fashioned as ever this series has been, despite the efforts of its developer - but it isn't broken, and the notion that it should have been overhauled to feel more modern (which is to say more like every other goddamn game on the market) is counter-intuitive coming from a community that demands diversification on a daily basis.

In any case, Capcom have gone to incredible lengths to make fans of this multifarious franchise happy. In an era when six hour single-player games have become the new normal, it's surprising - shocking almost - that Resident Evil 6 clocks in approximately five times as long. Less so when you realise it's essentially four games in one. In the first, you're Leon, returning from Resident Evil 4 in a campaign that feels a lot like that game's. The second campaign casts you as Chris, Resident Evil 5's protagonist, and it plays similarly: it's more shooter than survival horror.

But the third and the fourth campaigns return to that very territory: the former recalls Resident Evil 3: Nemesis - you're being chased by an unstoppable monster the whole time - and the latter, starring I couldn't possibly tell you who, feels like it's sprung fully formed out of Resident Evil 2, what with the secret player character and all the puzzles she-who-must-not-be-named has got to solve.

Resident Evil 6 is an odd sort of hodgepodge, on the whole: a guided tour through the make-up of the entire series to date, or a forlorn love letter to itself. In that sense, it reminded me - of all things - of Final Fantasy IX. What makes it cohesive, if anything does, is the structure of the story: characters continuously come together as four narratives neatly interweave, and each time the player experiences something a second time it's from a whole other angle, with more or different information.

Admittedly, the controls are iffy. The Quick Time Events around every corner are overbearing. The puzzles are plodding and the shooting is largely unsatisfying. The dialogue is obvious and the tone of the story is all over the place. Resident Evil 6 has a lot of problems... but so did all the other games in the series, and praise was lavished upon these.

So what gives?

Patience, I presume. Critics don't have a great deal of it on good days, and around this time of year, when there are huge new releases to play through and review each and every week, it's obviously in very short supply. But to dismiss this game on those grounds is dishonest. Resident Evil 6 may not be particularly great, but it's not bad either - not like certain ostensibly objective perspectives have suggested - and if you ask me, you've got to give Capcom credit for trying so damned hard.

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...