Among the Sleep garnered quite a bit of attention during its funding campaign, thanks in no small part to its intriguing premise. The game’s central character, a three year-old child, and familiar setting is made unfamiliar and terrifying thanks to its being filtered through the mind of the child.
A child’s imagination can be as wondrous as it is terrifying — as someone who grew up watching Candyman and A Nightmare On Elm St at the age of five, I have firsthand experience with this — so it’s unsurprising that a simple “alone in a house at night during a storm” premise is made exponentially more frightening because of it.
This game made our list of 2014’s most exciting horror games for a reason; it needs to be on your radar, assuming it isn’t already.
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Stasis is being made with the goal of taking the polish of AAA titles and applying that to the point-and-click adventure game genre. It’s inspired by several video game greats, including Dead Space and LucasArts’ The Dig, with a heavy emphasis on the latter. It’s not often we see gorgeous point-and-click horror games anymore, so this ought to be a breath of fresh air when it eventually arrives.
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The term “procedural generation” — a system that generates randomized content, like environments — has become widely used as more developers find ways to implement it into their games. This is largely a good thing, since it adds a level of unpredictability and greatly adds to a game’s replay factor, since each playthrough is different. In Darkwood that translates to a completely different world to explore every time we boot up the game. Outside of that, it also has elements of roguelikes and a fantastically creepy art style.
Find it on Indiegogo
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