Editorials
The 6 Biggest Horror Game Surprises Of 2013!
I really couldn’t tell you if this is a good or a bad thing. As a lifelong, card carrying fan of the zombie genre, the startling popularity of zombies in essentially every medium has been more beneficial than it has disappointing. It’s brought us a plethora of stellar zombie games, including State of Decay, The Last of Us, and a second season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I enjoyed Dead Rising 3 more than any other game in that series, even if it was actually less distinct from the shambling horde of similarly themed games we’ve seen over the year.
All that aside, I can’t help but wonder if there’s much innovation left to be seen from this genre. We’ve seen a few developers that have gotten lazy, choosing to rush bad or incomplete games (The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, Dead Island: Riptide, How to Survive) in order to cash in on it. That could be enough to make it seem like the genre is losing its luster. When I find myself thinking there’s no more excitement left in the genre, I do what 2013 taught me to do when AAA horror games fail to capture my interest and I look to the indies. 7 Days to Die, Contagion, DayZ, No More Room in Hell, Project Zomboid, and The Dead Linger each have varying degrees of potential and many of them are available now in varying states of completion.
We may soon reach critical mass when it comes to the increasingly familiar undead, but there will always be an audience for it — myself included — and a certain number of developers that are willing to feed our seemingly insatiable appetite for all things undead. I suppose the only thing you can do is hone your eye, so you can more easily recognize the cash grabs from the games with real potential.
Every time I think about Aliens: Colonial Marines I can’t help but feel a little sad. The idea of what could’ve been never fails to bum me out, and it doesn’t help that it greatly altered the way I looked at Borderlands developer Gearbox, a studio that has proven incapable of providing a consistent quality of game twice now. I feel like you know the story, so I’ll try my best to keep this as short as possible.
This dud was at least partially based on another game called Aliens: Colonial Marines, that was supposed to release way back in 2001. Gearbox picked up development in 2006, revealing it two years later as a “completely new game” titled — you guessed it — Aliens: Colonial Marines. Not long before its release an anonymous source close to the project told Destructoid Gearbox was taking resources away from the project back in 2008 and moving them to Borderlands. This led Sega to temporarily cancel the project, only allowing it to resume after some of the work had been outsourced to other developers (TimeGate worked on the campaign, with Demiurge and Nerve working on DLC). It was eventually released, but not before multiple hasty redesigns and a rushed certification of what was a largely unfinished game.
After Sega and friends shat it out, the situation managed the surprising feat of getting worse. Once we had our hands on it some of the keener folk among us started to realize the retail version actually looked worse then the demo footage shown long before its release. Add to that the unsurprising cancellation of the Wii U version and the premature closure of TimeGate, the very talented team behind Section 8, and you have a sweeping recap of one of the most controversial games of this generation. This is why Colonial Marines claimed a spot on my list of the worst games of 2013.
Outlast may very well be the most consistently terrifying game I’ve ever played. Many horror games tend to lose their steam, becoming familiar and therefore less effective after the content of their bag of tricks has been revealed. Some try to keep this from happening by being unpredictable. The art of zigging when you think it’s about to zag was mastered by the first two Silent Hill games. Others gradually raise the stakes (Dead Space, Resident Evil), becoming progressively more challenging the longer you stick with them.
Outlast does neither. It’s predictable and its setting is one we’ve seen numerous times before. In it, you’re alone and trapped in an asylum whose inhabitants wish you dead. At least some of them do, most are harmless. Much of it either has you being chased by a crazy person or exploring its dark and unnerving world, searching for the next thing to chase you. It sounds like the kind of game that would grow tiresome over time, yet due to the deft execution of a handful of clever ideas and polished mechanics, the horror in Outlast is successful for entirely different reasons.
Thanks to a handful of expertly crafted scares, a remarkable attention to detail (even if the gore often gets a bit excessive), an elegant control scheme that never breaks the immersion, and your singular goal of finding out what’s going on, which it cleverly keeps at the forefront the entire way through, Outlast proves to be a consistently frightening experience. Red Barrels’ decision to make humans, however broken they may be, the enemies was just as smart as the decision to include a night vision camera. A few odd design decisions and a hastily provided answer cause the game to stumble a bit near the end, but overall, this is fantastic and very much worth your time, so long as you can handle it.
And all of the above is exactly why this is one of the best horror games of 2013.
That’s my list. I’ve shown you mine, now it’s your turn to show me yours. Take to the comments and let me know what surprised you the most this past year!
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Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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