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.
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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