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[Review] ‘No Players Online’ is Impactful Short-Form Horror About an Abandoned Game Server

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There was a video game news story from 2016 that always stuck with me about exploring an abandoned multiplayer game. YouTuber Vinesauce live-streamed himself going to Active Worlds, a virtual online world from the 90s that had long since gone dormant, and he had an experience straight out of a creepypasta. It was an eerie sight to see, wandering this digital wasteland, but his journey took a turn when he was interrupted by a character named Hitomi Fujiko. 

At first, he thought it was another NPC, but it quickly became clear that Fujiko was a real person when responses started to get downright creepy. After the fact, people debated the legitimacy of the stream, wondering if a viewer logged in to mess with Vinesauce, or if Vinesauce himself had set this up beforehand, but he maintained that his experience was authentic. Whether or not it was real, it was something that always resonated with me in the way that the best ghost stories do and made me yearn for a game that could replicate that feeling. 

No Players Online, a pay-what-you-want game from developers Adam Pype and Viktor Kraus, evokes this feeling in a short story about the importance of letting go. While the framing story of finding a weird VHS tape featuring the footage of empty servers for a long-dead capture the flag FPS doesn’t quite match with the rest of the game’s theme, once you get started the aesthetic becomes more consistent. Mimicking the look of a 90s Quake-style map, No Players Online captures the lo-fi look that has become popular among low budget indie horror as well as any other, taking advantage of the low level of detail to let your mind fill in images in the corner of your eye. During the short runtime, you’ll find yourself asking if there was actually something appearing on the other side of the level or if that was just a graphical glitch.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a horror game if there wasn’t something that showed up. Since the game can be completed in about 15 minutes, I don’t want to spoil it, but the game uses its idea to tell an interesting ghost story with a surprisingly emotional core. Could it have been extended a bit to give it more impact? Absolutely. There’s some meat on these bones that could definitely support a longer version with a more patient build-up and bigger level to explore, but what is offered in the game works fine, even if the reveal is handled a bit quickly at the end. There was a surprisingly resonant choice presented at the end that gave me pause and had drastic effects on the game. 

It never quite manages to reach the creepiness of Vinesauce’s foray into Active Worlds, but the unease captured by an empty space that’s traditionally full makes for a great mood. There’s such melancholy to a setting like this, and No Players Online crafts a story that takes advantage of that. The strong correspondence between the theme and setting helps make some of the cliché and inelegance of the storytelling more palpable. While it still feels like the start of something bigger rather than a complete experience, it’s easy to recommend No Players Online due to its succinct runtime and smart use of nostalgia. 

No Players Online is available on PC via itch.io

Game Designer, Tabletop RPG GM, and comic book aficionado.

Editorials

‘A Haunted House’ and the Death of the Horror Spoof Movie

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Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.

This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.

Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.

The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.

You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.

Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.

In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.

In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.

Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.

However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.

Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.

Not a good idea.

Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).

Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.

A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.

At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.

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