Editorials
[GDC 2013] First Impressions: ‘Pulse’
If you didn’t know, the annual Game Developers Conference took place recently in San Francisco and I was on-site for Bloody Disgusting (and for my own benefit, of course). This is the first of three features I’ll be writing on games I first played around with at GDC.
Written by Hayden Dingman, @haydencd
My initial thought when I walked past Pulse at the IGF Pavilion was “Wow, this game is beautiful.” I stood and watched as the person playing threw an object, resulting in a cascade of oranges and greens against a stark black background. I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the Black Velvetopia level of Psychonauts (the one with all the luchadores). I had no idea what the game was, how the mechanics functioned, or anything. I just knew I had to play it.
Luckily, this eye-catcher of a game ended up being something we should cover here anyways. It had just enough in common with horror that I think I can squeeze it in. I mean, if Dead Space 3 still counts as horror, surely we can let Pulse join the club.
Pulse is not a full-fledged game but a game prototype, created by a group of students (Team Pixel Pi) while they were part of the Vancouver Film School Game Design program. The entire project was made over the course of only three months, won Best Student Project at the 2012 Unity Awards, and was a finalist in this year’s IGF Awards.
Better yet, it’s free. You can download and play through the entire prototype here. It’s approximately an hour long.
Pulse is a first-person adventure game where you’re…blind. But not quite. You play a character who lost her sight early on in life, but still has vague memories of what her childhood looked like. She uses these memories to represent the environment as you move around.
As Leanne Roed, who worked on the games scripting and visual effects, told me, “You see what the protagonist assumes the world looks like based on the only information she has to go on, the memories of what the world looked like before she lost her sight. Everything that makes sound is a real object/creature in the world.”
In other words, what you see as a wooden bridge in the game might be something entirely different in the actual world, but she sees the wooden bridge because she remembers it from her childhood. The team was inspired by this short film entitled Out of Sight, which might help you understand the concept better.
You “see” the environment using something like echolocation, where sound functions as sight. Footfalls, a relatively quiet sound, make a small part of the world light up. Walking through crackling leaves makes a larger part of the world light up. Picking up and throwing one of the game’s creatures, called Mokos, causes light to radiate outward from each impact zone. Standing on a button reveals the gate clanking upwards in the distance. My personal favorite was when the wind blew and I could watch it swirl through the level.
And when the monster roars…
Well, you’ll see.
It’s a really unique system and, as I said, beautiful to see in action. You get really vibrant colors contrasting against the omnipresent blacks of the areas you haven’t revealed. The result is a rich and slightly-alien tableau that’s just as amazing during the highly cinematic ending as it is when the game starts up.
Pulse is more horror-lite than true horror, but there’s a real feeling of helplessness similar to Amnesia. You have no way to fight the monster in the game, so you’re forced to run and hide when it finds you. I definitely encountered some tense situations where I attempted to sneak past the monster and then accidentally kicked a pile of leaves, causing it to roar and chase after me. When you do screw up the blindness mechanic also presents a unique challenge, as you have to decide sometimes whether seeing where you’re running is worth updating the monster on your position.
The game as it stands right now is a bit light on gameplay, but that’s not really a surprise—it’s a prototype, after all, and you spend most of the game just figuring out how the blindness/echolocation mechanics work. As for real obstacles there’s the aforementioned monster, and the second half of the game starts to introduce some simple puzzles (hit the switches to open the gates, for instance) but you’re not going to get stuck anywhere. This is a proof-of-concept more than a fully-featured game.
It’s also, as with any prototype, a bit rough around the edges. I wouldn’t recommend pushing the graphics options too high, for instance. The differences in what you’ll see are pretty slight, and I experienced massive slowdown on one level in particular when I had the options turned up. In order to reset the graphics options you need to exit the program and then restart, which can be a hassle. Also, the sound design is serviceable but could be better for a game entirely dependent on audio. However, for a project that only took three months Pulse is a pretty amazing accomplishment.
The team graduated last year, but hopes to flesh the prototype out to a full game in the near future. They have a Kickstarter running right now, though they still need a lot of funding and it’s only up for a couple more days.
I personally hope they make it, as I’m already yearning for more Pulse.
The Pulse prototype is available for download on Mac and PC.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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