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Is ‘Back 4 Blood’ Haunted By its Prestigious Past? [Safe Room Podcast]
Legacy is a double-edged sword when it comes to sequels and spiritual successors. Legacy can provide a day one fanbase, but often at the cost of raised expectations. This has proven insurmountable for some games, having made the fatal error of resting too heavily upon the laurels of past successes.
Nostalgia and reverence can cloud the way to building a new legacy, something that we have wondered whether or not Back 4 Blood could achieve since it was announced as a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead.
Is Back 4 Blood just a modernizing of familiar mechanics, or does it make strides to carve out its own legacy?
And for this week’s episode of Safe Room, Neil and I get to the root of this question by sharing our experiences with Turtle Rock Studios’ Back 4 Blood and the tricky predicament of past success.
You can subscribe to Safe Room on your preferred podcast platform, as well as, following the show for updates on Twitter @saferoompod.
In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, but it was a cheerful illustrator from England who helped to define the terrifying war-torn imagery that inspired what we now know as Grimdark (a hybrid genre combining horror with sci-fi/fantasy).
Unfortunately for fans of Warhammer 40,000, Trench Crusade and countless other sources of Grimdark thrills, veteran artist John Blanche passed away this week after struggling with health issues for the past few years.
While the artist retired back in 2023, he leaves us with an enormous legacy of iconic artwork that continues to inspire gamers and storytellers around the world to this very day.
The news is especially gloomy as it was only last year that Daniel Lowman and Napoleon Dynamite himself Jon Heder released The Grim & the Dark: The Search for John Blanche, a documentary following Heder’s exploration of the Grimdark genre culminating in a heartwarming encounter with Blanche in his own home.
Below is one of my favorite pieces by Blanche, his highly influential depiction of Warhammer 40k’s God-Emperor of Mankind on his Golden Throne.
We send our deepest condolences to John Blanche’s family, friends, and fans.
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