I really couldn’t tell you if this is a good or a bad thing. As a lifelong, card carrying fan of the zombie genre, the startling popularity of zombies in essentially every medium has been more beneficial than it has disappointing. It’s brought us a plethora of stellar zombie games, including State of Decay, The Last of Us, and a second season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I enjoyed Dead Rising 3 more than any other game in that series, even if it was actually less distinct from the shambling horde of similarly themed games we’ve seen over the year.
All that aside, I can’t help but wonder if there’s much innovation left to be seen from this genre. We’ve seen a few developers that have gotten lazy, choosing to rush bad or incomplete games (The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, Dead Island: Riptide, How to Survive) in order to cash in on it. That could be enough to make it seem like the genre is losing its luster. When I find myself thinking there’s no more excitement left in the genre, I do what 2013 taught me to do when AAA horror games fail to capture my interest and I look to the indies. 7 Days to Die, Contagion, DayZ, No More Room in Hell, Project Zomboid, and The Dead Linger each have varying degrees of potential and many of them are available now in varying states of completion.
We may soon reach critical mass when it comes to the increasingly familiar undead, but there will always be an audience for it — myself included — and a certain number of developers that are willing to feed our seemingly insatiable appetite for all things undead. I suppose the only thing you can do is hone your eye, so you can more easily recognize the cash grabs from the games with real potential.
Every time I think about Aliens: Colonial Marines I can’t help but feel a little sad. The idea of what could’ve been never fails to bum me out, and it doesn’t help that it greatly altered the way I looked at Borderlands developer Gearbox, a studio that has proven incapable of providing a consistent quality of game twice now. I feel like you know the story, so I’ll try my best to keep this as short as possible.
This dud was at least partially based on another game called Aliens: Colonial Marines, that was supposed to release way back in 2001. Gearbox picked up development in 2006, revealing it two years later as a “completely new game” titled — you guessed it — Aliens: Colonial Marines. Not long before its release an anonymous source close to the project told Destructoid Gearbox was taking resources away from the project back in 2008 and moving them to Borderlands. This led Sega to temporarily cancel the project, only allowing it to resume after some of the work had been outsourced to other developers (TimeGate worked on the campaign, with Demiurge and Nerve working on DLC). It was eventually released, but not before multiple hasty redesigns and a rushed certification of what was a largely unfinished game.
After Sega and friends shat it out, the situation managed the surprising feat of getting worse. Once we had our hands on it some of the keener folk among us started to realize the retail version actually looked worse then the demo footage shown long before its release. Add to that the unsurprising cancellation of the Wii U version and the premature closure of TimeGate, the very talented team behind Section 8, and you have a sweeping recap of one of the most controversial games of this generation. This is why Colonial Marines claimed a spot on my list of the worst games of 2013.
Outlast may very well be the most consistently terrifying game I’ve ever played. Many horror games tend to lose their steam, becoming familiar and therefore less effective after the content of their bag of tricks has been revealed. Some try to keep this from happening by being unpredictable. The art of zigging when you think it’s about to zag was mastered by the first two Silent Hill games. Others gradually raise the stakes (Dead Space, Resident Evil), becoming progressively more challenging the longer you stick with them.
Outlast does neither. It’s predictable and its setting is one we’ve seen numerous times before. In it, you’re alone and trapped in an asylum whose inhabitants wish you dead. At least some of them do, most are harmless. Much of it either has you being chased by a crazy person or exploring its dark and unnerving world, searching for the next thing to chase you. It sounds like the kind of game that would grow tiresome over time, yet due to the deft execution of a handful of clever ideas and polished mechanics, the horror in Outlast is successful for entirely different reasons.
Thanks to a handful of expertly crafted scares, a remarkable attention to detail (even if the gore often gets a bit excessive), an elegant control scheme that never breaks the immersion, and your singular goal of finding out what’s going on, which it cleverly keeps at the forefront the entire way through, Outlast proves to be a consistently frightening experience. Red Barrels’ decision to make humans, however broken they may be, the enemies was just as smart as the decision to include a night vision camera. A few odd design decisions and a hastily provided answer cause the game to stumble a bit near the end, but overall, this is fantastic and very much worth your time, so long as you can handle it.
And all of the above is exactly why this is one of the best horror games of 2013.
That’s my list. I’ve shown you mine, now it’s your turn to show me yours. Take to the comments and let me know what surprised you the most this past year!
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