Editorials
The Terrifying Thrill of Playing ‘The Division 2’ Alone
The Division 2’s first raid, Operation Dark Hours, launched without—controversially—matchmaking. Given that I don’t have seven friends who play the game on PS4, and The Division 2 doesn’t support cross-platform play, it would probably be a while before I got to experience the gruelling five-to-10 hour affair for myself.
That’s okay, though. I play this game almost entirely solo, anyway. While it’s helpful to have players to team up with to take down the final wave of enemies in challenging missions—Roosevelt Island’s frenzied last push comes to mind—I’ve enjoyed the demanding difficulty of going it alone. It’s not the ideal way to explore the open world; going down while tackling a side activity like a Public Execution or Control Point forces you to respawn at one of the marked spots that sparsely populate the map, often minutes away from the activity. As a dedicated soloist, I’m hoping Ubisoft tweaks this design choice to make the game friendlier to solo players.
But, quirks aside, the steep challenge of The Division 2’s main missions makes solo play exhilarating and, at times, terrifying. Many critics noted that The Division 2’s combat was more exciting than that of the loot-shooters that came before as a result of Massive Entertainment’s decision to eschew bullet-sponges (a longtime staple of the sub-genre) in favor of wily fighters; combatants who strafe, sprint, sneak and suicide bomb the player out of hiding.
Excellent sound design amplifies the fear that these unpredictable enemies instil. The game rarely feels unfair, even when you’re being strafed and shot at from behind, because The Division 2 uses audio cues to clue you in on the position of your opponents. Laughter, footfalls, hard breathing; I often find myself frantically turning to meet a Hyena with a glowing red bomb strapped to their chest, and then scrambling to shoot them down before they close the distance. But, I’m never blindsided if I’m paying attention.
Fortunately, for the times when I’m not paying attention, respawns are more forgiving for solo players within the confines of missions. Instead of shipping me off to a nearby safe area, death here sends me back to the most recent checkpoint. Of course, you’ll often die on the last foe of the wave, the not-quite-a-bullet-sponge-but-certainly-bullet-porous baddie.
These mini-bosses come in a couple varieties. Some just have guns and a lot of armor. Others, though, hold weapons that can make your life hell. One carries a flamethrower with a ridiculously long reach that causes intense burn damage if it hits you. Another hefts a sledgehammer, and will chase you down—not the least bit fatigued by their heavy armor—until they slam half your health away with a single swing.
This structure—long, challenging battles between checkpoints with a final, difficult encounter before safety—produces a gnawing sense of anxiety as the firefights wear on. For example, during the final fight in the Potomac Relief Camp side mission, a Hammer Bro pursued me relentlessly around the bowl-shaped, multi-tiered structure. I jumped down a floor and he jumped down a floor. He was inexhaustible and the best I could do was run out the clock on my cooldowns, then throw some grenades and drop a turret. If I stopped, or fumbled while mantling over a ledge, or got caught up on some level geometry, I was finished. It was pulse-pounding; a nightmare of a monster giving chase.
Eventually, after a few tries, I killed him. The Division 2 is the rare nightmare with a happy ending.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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