Interviews
‘Grave’ Dev On Crafting The Ideal Open World Horror Game
Written by T. Blake Braddy, @blakebraddy
It is evident in speaking with Tristan Parrish Moore, lead designer on Grave, an open world survival horror game, that he has thought about what makes them scary. He speaks in fluid paragraphs about where survival horror went wrong and how modern games like Amnesia and Outlast have resurrected the genre in a meaningful way.
Discussion, it should be noted, is a particular strength of Parrish Moore’s. He is an energetic conversationalist, well-spoken and passionate – and quite philosophical about game development – which makes him the perfect spokesman for Grave.
For example, to place Grave in context with earlier, more combat-focused survival games, he said, “The thing that survival horror did is it introduced a lot of mechanics that are inherently intuitive and fun to use, like shooting things and engaging in combat, killing zombies, all that kind of stuff. And then they basically set up a format where they were like, ‘But don’t use that, because it’s not effective or you don’t have enough ammo.'”
He has a point.
Which is one of the reasons why players in Grave will be equipped not with shotguns or magnum pistols but with fire to defend themselves. We’re not talking rocket launchers or flame throwers, either. Weak road flares and campfires keep the enemy at bay, but I don’t get the sense that players will be fighting monsters any more than they did in, say, Fatal Frame or the early Silent Hill games.
Grave will be about avoidance, and maybe defense, depending on how players decide to interact with this unsettling open world. They will toil in an vast desert landscape during the day, hunting for supplies that will help them survive near-hellish, nightly encounters overrun with monsters. They decided to split the game into two almost equal parts, so that the day environment would allow for a near-freedom in exploration without combat, and the other would emphasize how the environment allowed little-to-no protection against the creatures that arose from it. It’s kind of like the most horrific parts of Amnesia blended with something out a survival game.
But don’t expect to be picking berries all day. Though there is an element of resource management, Grave is not purely about going into the wild. “It’s not like ‘Don’t Starve,’ where you’re literally trying to survive in the wilderness or something,” Parrish Moore said. “It’s more akin to the old school survival horror concept of resource management as a method of surviving encounters with creatures.”
Think of the backpack from Resident Evil. Only so many items can be stuffed in there, so players will have to be cautious with how they hoard their supplies. They won’t be able to amass a collection of items to buffer themselves from danger, because the game will dynamically change in order to prevent players from becoming overpowered. In games like Dead Space, the idea of scarcity is drilled so purposefully into a gamer’s mind that s/he usually ends up with dozens of clips of unused ammo by the end. Not here. Grave doesn’t want to give the illusion of ammo scarcity but to deliver on it.
“We borrowed a little bit from stealth games, the idea of the right tool for the right job, so rather than having weapons that are inherently on a linear scale of being more or less powerful, each of those tools is contextually relevant.” Sometimes one item may be useful against one enemy and totally worthless against another, in other words, says Parrish Moore.
Which enhances the overall effect the procedurally-generated aspect of the game. Not only will players be subjected to an arid wasteland, but the wasteland will change around them to keep them from becoming too comfortable. The daytime land, from what I understand, is more or less stable – it does change somewhat – and that is when players are meant to explore, to gather resources, and to build a nest for the night.
When the sun goes down, however, nothing is safe. Not only is the physical structure of the world up for on-the-fly changes, but so is the length of night. So not only might you be subjected to an unfamiliar world, but the very length of time spent in darkness might be stretched to heighten the sense of terror and dread.
It’s a cool hook, and this divided world offers something more than just pure, unadulterated terror. Parrish Moore said, “The emotional levels that you get from exploring during the day and being in those moments of calm actually really enhances the horror experience when it comes to nighttime.”
The rules for death are less defined so far, according to the lead designer. Right now, permadeath is not a key aspect of the story mode. They are designing the game around two modes – story and survival – in which death is death in one and a more elastic concept in the other.
“We have an alternate roguelike survival campaign,” he said, “which is just a continuous trek through the experience, and during that when you die it’s over.” The game gets increasingly, exasperatingly more difficult, and death is final.
His thoughts on the story mode aren’t entirely more magnanimous to the player. There would be a penalty for death, sure – loss of items, a forced change in environment – but players would continue on despite that. “In the story mode, we’re almost treating more like you’re stuck in Hell, essentially. The world is oppressive and unending, so when you die you’re not released from it,” he said.
Parrish Moore compares the experience to early open world games, like Grand Theft Auto, in which players become excluded from the current encounter but can persist and keep playing. Again, it seems to represent a merging of open world, roguelike, and survival horror ideas.
Grave is currently seeking $30,000 via Kickstarter, a number drawn through some serious number-crunching. A lot of the development has occurred after work, long into the night, over the course of the last several months or so in order to bring the game to fruition. Parrish Moore even offhandedly mentioned that they thought about naming the studio After Dark Games (not knowing it was already taken), due mostly to the manner in which the game was coming together.
The game is slated for release on Windows, Mac, and Linux and will feature Oculus Rift support, and the team has experienced zero interference since the much-discussed Facebook acquisition. It is expected for a 2015 release, though no exact date has been announced yet. To support the game, head on over to its Kickstarter.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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