Editorials
[GDC 2013] First Impressions: ‘Blackwell’s Asylum’
This article is the third and final regarding games I first saw at GDC and went home to play. If you missed the first two articles, you can find them here and here.
Written by Hayden Dingman, @haydencd
I’m going to make a lofty claim here: Blackwell’s Asylum is the most unsettled I’ve felt while playing a game since Amnesia.
It’s an even loftier claim once I tell you it started life as a student project.
Like Pulse, one of the other games I saw at GDC, Blackwell’s Asylum was a finalist in this year’s IGF Student Showcase. The design aesthetic alone—dim hallways, cast in sickly green—was enough to convince me to give the game a shot. It’s free, if you’re inclined to check it out.
I was so inclined, and made a note to download the game when I got home, away from the crowds and the fluorescent lights of the Moscone Center. Waiting was the right choice. Like Amnesia, Blackwell’s Asylum is a game made for playing alone, sitting in the dark with headphones in.
Blackwell’s Asylum takes place in—you guessed it—an asylum. An 1800s-esque asylum, to be exact. The game grew out of the real-life story of Nellie Bly, a journalist who in 1887 got herself checked into the famous Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum in order to do undercover research for an expose. The resulting article, Ten Days in a Mad-House, revealed the widespread maltreatment of the asylum’s patients.
Quite a lofty starting point for a game.
You play as Nellie in Blackwell’s Asylum. Right from the start, things are pretty unsettling. You’re being held down by an orderly as a doctor preps a syringe, inserting it into your arm and drugging you.
When you awake, you wander out of your cell and start navigating the winding, twisted hallways of Blackwell’s Asylum. You don’t ever really know where you’re going, and the game’s seemingly-straightforward hallways are anything but. It’s the drugs.
The drugging aspect at the beginning of the game really plays deep into the overall feel of Blackwell’s Asylum. You don’t walk down the hallway in this game. You weave down the hallway, desperately trying to reach the next door. The hallways themselves (and indeed, every object in the game) are modeled in the best surrealist fashion. There’s not a single straight hallway in the asylum. Instead, sections of the walls fold inwards or outwards, zigzagging.
The furniture is similarly designed. Rather than a tall, straight-lined cabinet you get a leaning, collapsing mess. Layered over the top of all this crazed geometry is an additional visual effect, almost like a fisheye, that causes the world’s appearance to further distort when the camera moves. It’s an arresting visual style, allowing you to inhabit the drug-addled mind of the character (though it also made me, a video game veteran, extremely motion sick after a while, so be careful).
And as if the visuals weren’t already enough to creep you out, you’ve got the terrifying wardens to contend with as you try to stealthily navigate the asylum. There’s no combat, so if you’re spotted be prepared to run and hide. It’s the same system as Amnesia, and it works just as well here. I felt extremely vulnerable throughout the entire game, to the point where I almost gave into my tension and quit playing.
The game also has a clever system for when you’re in hiding. If you hide while the warden’s around you have to manage your breathing by pressing the spacebar at regular intervals. If you mess up the outer edges of the screen iris off, cutting your field of view. It’s a simple mechanic but further serves to heighten the tension.
The audio is what draws all these elements together though. The sound design in Blackwell’s Asylum will quite literally set your teeth on edge. Most of the time the main background track is simply a droning hum. If you’re sensitive to audio, it’s a maddening sound. The only other audio for most of the game is the swishing of your character’s dress, maybe a footstep here and there. This is a lonely game.
Which makes the moments when the soundtrack bursts to life—say, when the warden yells and asks you what you’re doing out of bed—pants-pissingly scary. Even when I knew it was coming, I still freaked out. The combination of the jump scare audio and your feeling of utter vulnerability makes for great high-stakes moments and kept me engaged even though most of the game is just wandering aimlessly through corridors.
There’s also some other stuff to do with level geometry that I won’t talk about here because I think it’s best discovered for yourself. I’ll just say I’m amazed at the way Blackwell’s Asylum made me feel as if I were lost the entire time I was playing, but I still managed to end up going in the right direction. The game is a lot more complex than it looks on the surface.
I won’t guarantee the game will scare you as much as it did me, but Blackwell’s Asylum is a game worth checking out if you’re a horror fan. After all, it’s both short (took me less than an hour) and free. No word on whether the team is going to expand the game later (they disbanded after the current release) but regardless I hope some of them continue working in the horror genre. There’s obviously a lot of talent here.
PS: Seriously, take some Dramamine or something if you’re susceptible to motion sickness.
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.
4 New Horror Movies Releasing This Week Including ‘Late Night with the Devil’ at Home
‘Ready or Not’: Radio Silence Filmmakers Tease the “Absolute Banger” of a Sequel That’s Taking Shape
“We Built Every Creature” – ‘Alien: Romulus’ Goes Heavy on the Old School Practical Effects!
‘Sting’ Review – Throwback Creature Feature Entertains With an Impressive Practical Monster
‘Abigail’ Review – Radio Silence Delivers Another Gory Good Time at the Movies
You must be logged in to post a comment.