The fear is back in The Chinese Room's spiritual sequel to The Dark Descent. Prepare to be scared!
Frightening games require a key ingredient that is not initially present in their makeup: a willingness, on the player’s behalf, to be scared. Without this, horror games are seldom terrifying, and more often than not are only campy experiences as silly and ineffective as the latest Jason & Chucky crossover flick. I went into Amnesia: Machine for Pigs wanting to be thrilled; and I made sure to play it at night, with headphones on, while everyone else in the world slept – to achieve this goal. This certainly isn’t a Resident Evil experience, where you’ll be blowing away fiends with your acid rounds – but something different, more along the lines of some other modern horror games where you are essentially powerless against the forces of evil, rather than being a semi-immortal avenger.
The conclusion of our series featuring Richard Clark, of GameChurch.com!
So, we wrapped up El Shaddai, and, for better and for worse, our expectations were pretty spot on. As you might imagine considering our previous podcast, stuff got deep again. We also had some theories and conjecture about a lot of the messages and artistic choices present in the game. Even if El Shaddai ended up not being for you, we hope you'll listen anyway to see what we took away from it.