Frederick Raynal has the pedigree to make one hell of a horror game. The French-born game developer cut his teeth on both Alone in the Dark and Alone in the Dark 2 before moving onto various projects outside of the genre throughout the 90s and 00s.
Well, Raynal is back with a new stealth-horror endeavor called 2Dark, which asks players to rescue kidnapped children from the erstwhile lairs of serial killers. Judging by the announcement trailer, it will entail a hardened P.I.-type character to infiltrate the killers’ domiciles and pluck innocent children from their midst, all the while keeping them safe.
It looks as though it might play quite a bit like Monaco, one of my personal favorite games from the last few years. The light / dark mechanics look to be interesting, as does the art style. Mock-ups of the killers make them look like stereotypes picked from throughout the genre and mashed together to give them some flare.
What makes the premise interesting is the level of danger the game places the children in. See, the kids are expendable, which doesn’t seem, on its face, to be all too risque. I, myself, just finished beating a game which took pleasure in murdering dunderheaded teenagers in a whole host of inventive ways.
But these are kids. As a rule, they shouldn’t perish in a video game, not in the manner this game suggests. To extend the danger, the protagonist is not exempt from killing the children, either. It’s a tactic meant to push players to be cautious and sparing in how they use weapons in the game. A stray bullet, after all, could take out one of the tykes in 2Dark
The game is currently in a paid beta, and you can request access directly from the web site here. The beta itself is 20,00 EUR, so it’s not a cheap one to tinker around with. It’s scheduled for a 2016 release, though no day and date has been given yet.
