There’s so much more to Allison Road than its source material, and yet, I can’t help but see it as a continuation of the Silent Hill franchise. It’s clear there’s an ambition behind it that’s much more imposing than the claustrophobic hallways and abandoned rooms of the home we’ve seen numerous times now. In fact, there’s a big, wide world out there, and it’s inhabited by even more things that go bump in the night.
“When you are in the house, all you want to do is get out.” explains a post on the game’s Kickstarter page. “When you are out, all you want to do is to get back to the ‘safety’ of the house.”
I’ll be clawing at an exit the moment the walls start bleeding, though I’m not confident that my odds will improve much when I’ve fled into the marshland that surrounds it. There’s a modicum of familiarity that comes with being trapped in a house with a ghost girl, while the sky is literally the limit as to what could be lurking outside.
“The story just really lends itself to be told in contrasting settings and what better way to perceptually open up the quite confined space of the house, than to set it in a proper outdoor environment,” explained Allison Road project lead Chris Kesler in an interview with IGN. “While you are in them you’ll encounter a quite different type of horror/terror of course, since these environments allow for a different kind of game design.”
Kesler may be referring to the bandaged man-corpse we can see in this freshly exhumed artwork, or maybe it’s the freaky tree creature that’s staring at us with the hollow face pits that might be eyes — that is, assuming it even needs them.
