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Slasher Game ‘Last Year’ Has Surpassed Its Funding Goal (By a Lot)
The crowdfunding campaign for the indie horror game Last Year wraps up this week, yet with three days left, it’s already a massive success. The gargantuan amount of support it’s received on Kickstarter, where it’s raised just over $83,000 — well exceeding its modest $50,000 goal — means there’s a definite audience out there for slasher games.
For the unfamiliar, Last Year is an asymmetrical multiplayer game in the same vein as Evolve, Damned and The Flock. In it, a group of five player-controlled teens must survive against a psychopath who’s also player-controlled.
Last Year is part of a wave of slasher games we have to look forward to in 2015 — here’s our rundown of the rest. This is good news for us for a couple reasons. This is very much an experimental game, and the warm reception it’s seen from the gaming community should go a long way in showing there’s a market for even more asymmetrical multiplayer horror games, as well as other slasher games like Until Dawn, Summer Camp and Splatter Camp.
In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, but it was a cheerful illustrator from England who helped to define the terrifying war-torn imagery that inspired what we now know as Grimdark (a hybrid genre combining horror with sci-fi/fantasy).
Unfortunately for fans of Warhammer 40,000, Trench Crusade and countless other sources of Grimdark thrills, veteran artist John Blanche passed away this week after struggling with health issues for the past few years.
While the artist retired back in 2023, he leaves us with an enormous legacy of iconic artwork that continues to inspire gamers and storytellers around the world to this very day.
The news is especially gloomy as it was only last year that Daniel Lowman and Napoleon Dynamite himself Jon Heder released The Grim & the Dark: The Search for John Blanche, a documentary following Heder’s exploration of the Grimdark genre culminating in a heartwarming encounter with Blanche in his own home.
Below is one of my favorite pieces by Blanche, his highly influential depiction of Warhammer 40k’s God-Emperor of Mankind on his Golden Throne.
We send our deepest condolences to John Blanche’s family, friends, and fans.
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