Recently after our president announced his plan to meet with executives in the video game industry to discuss the level of violence, particularly violence related to guns, children are exposed to in the entertainment medium, Nintendo dropped a surprise announcement for the next Super Smash Brothers installment. Super Smash Brothers, […]
horror
26 posts
In many games, mental disorders are very much defined as auxiliary to the characters within the game. They are used to derive a sort of mechanic and are ignored narratively as they relate to character development and seriously dealing with these topics. Games like Amnesia, Don’t Starve, and The Evil […]
Perception (2017) by The Deep End Games is above all else a psychological horror game about connection. And the game itself begins with one woman’s search for connection. Cassie, the protagonist, is a blind woman who has been drawn to a house by dreams about the house, a rope, a ticket, […]
A few months ago, I wrote about A Normal Lost Phone and the layered experience of inhabiting another through the use of their phone as an empathy device, so when I stumbled upon another game that used a similar approach, I picked it up immediately. But while A Normal Lost […]
In last week’s podcast, we talked a bit about agency and feelings of control when watching a movie or TV show versus feeling control while playing a game. Opinions varied, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week. I find that when I watch a movie or TV […]
Episode 139: When Horror Gets Real: The Halloween Episode (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talk about what we are playing and watching as we all hold our own private Halloween celebrations. Thinking through horror games like Night Terrors (iOS) and television […]
Some spoilers here for the second episode of the third season of Black Mirror, “Playtest.” The shift of Black Mirror to Netflix, with the release of the third season of the dire science-fiction show just in time for Halloween is making some waves. Black Mirror has got to be one of […]
I’ve been writing about Nevermind for the past couple of years and still I keep coming back to it. Nevermind is particularly intriguing to me because the game combines horror and psychological suspense with biofeedback in an attempt to create a game that could possibly help players manage their anxieties. […]
Last week, around the same time that I started playing Anatomy, my sister turned me onto The Black Tapes Podcast, and, as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about the game and the podcast concurrently. As Gavia Baker-Whitelaw puts it, The Black Tapes Podcast is framed “as a Serial-esque series hosted by […]
My vision is pretty bad, and it’s been pretty bad since the fourth grade. My night vision is even worse. I have heard optometrists utter “whoa” during appointments (which, in my opinion, is never a great thing to hear a doctor say). That Twilight Zone episode in which the guy’s glasses […]
Alisha recently alerted me to a piece making the rounds on Facebook called “Ghoul, You’ll Be a Woman Soon: Supernatural Puberty and the Horror of Periods,” in which Emalie Soderback discusses a subgenre of film that she likes to call “supernatural-period-girl-horror.” Soderback begins this examination by laying its foundations: Rosemary’s […]
(SOME SPOILERS FOLLOW) Last night I watched an interesting indie horror movie called Lost After Dark. I picked it up because I grew up loving 80’s horror movies and this one promised to the “best 80’s horror movie not filmed in the 80’s.” Sounded good to me, even though I […]
Last week, I read an article by Mike Mariani called “The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies,” and it got me thinking about the folkloric and mythological trajectory of the undead. Indeed, what strikes me about Mariani’s article is his argument that our current pop culture iterations of the zombie whitewash […]
As I mentioned during our latest episode of the NYMG podcast, I’ve been playing Until Dawn, and the game has got me thinking about a few different things that I’d like to spend some time parsing through, like the game’s representation of things like gender and race, how it is that […]
It’s easy to condemn the characters in horror movies. After all, they make bad decisions: they split up and go their separate ways, they let personal conflicts get in the way of their better judgment and they put themselves in compromising situations, amongst a number of other things. With the […]
Imagine a mechanical world that rotates and changes at the push of a button. Monstrous creatures, toe-like in appearance, float up and down the corridors of an old house. You cringe as you hear them spew nonsensical words in odd frenzied voices. They want to transform you into one of […]