Reviews
[Review] ‘The Blackout Club’ is a Compelling Mash-up of Genre Horror
The pitch for The Blackout Club is “Dishonored + Stranger Things + co-op” and much of the time, dear reader, it’s nearly as great as that equation would suggest.
This is the second game from Question, the indie developer behind 2015’s The Magic Circle, that boasts a roster of developers with credits on revered immersive sims like Thief: Deadly Shadows, Dishonored and the BioShock games. Their sophomore outing, which emerged from early access last week, casts players as teenagers in a sleepy Virginia town where kids black out for hours, sometimes days, at a time, before waking up covered in mud and scratches. Some of these kids form the titular club and band together to attempt to find enough evidence to uncover the mystery.
At night, adults fall under the sway of a mysterious song, reverberating from a secret network of caves beneath the town. These adults become your enemies, shambling through the neighborhood’s empty streets in silk pajamas and sleep masks like dutiful sleepwalkers. Some of the adults have access to their sense of sight as well, and these “Lucids” prowl the streets with flashlights, responding to the slightest movement or sound.
As a member of The Blackout Club, you’ll need to avoid them all, crouching through houses and descending into the maze to record or recover evidence. Sometimes you’ll sneak around in search of glowing red chests that might hide a fellow member’s phone. Other times, you’ll need to take pictures of evidence that the adults have left lying around — a door busted off its hinges; a laptop glowing with incriminating information. You and up to three co-op pals are on an almost journalistic mission; to find evidence, bring it to the light and cross your fingers that it makes a difference.
On your quest you’ll use a variety of pretty cool tools. There are three main items that you’ll choose from, like Pokémon starters, before a match. A grappling hook for scaling rooftops and spelunking for evidence is particularly useful. A crossbow with only one bolt? Not so much. A stun gun splits the difference; helpful for escaping enemies, but more likely to draw the attention of the Shape, a mysterious figure who’s basically a pulsing orange cop. With free rein of the map — he warps through the dozens of red doors marked with an all-seeing eye littered across the neighborhood and cave network — the Shape emerges whenever the players’ “sins” (like kicking in a door or leaving stunned enemies lying out in the open) surpass an invisible threshold. The Shape is like the police in GTA, but much less predictable.
By yourself, The Blackout Club is supremely tense (and occasionally frustrating), especially as you’re learning the game. You’ll chuck foam grenades to gum up traps and soften your landing when. You’ll use trip wires to knock out enemies. Tranquilizer darts do the same. It’s a solid roster of tools that lead to some creative problem solving as you attempt to retain your cover while accomplishing objectives.
In this pursuit, players are greatly aided by some fantastic design. A large eye-shaped icon at the bottom of the screen takes all of the guesswork out of stealth. The eye is open when you’re standing, lidded when you’re crouched; blank when you’re in shadow, filled in with a pupil when you’re visible. When enemies are suspicious, the pupil is ringed with yellow. When an enemy spots you, it glows red.
This icon also measures sound. When you’re slinking along a tile floor, sound waves drift from the icon. When you run on a hard surface, the sound waves pour out. And, when you’re sneaking along grass or carpet, the waves recede. I know I’m giving you a lot of information about what is, essentially, a HUD element. That’s because the eye is brilliant UI. It allows for a robust stealth system, but with none of the confusion that has attended complex sound- and vision-based systems in the past. You always know exactly how visible you are; never question how much noise you’re making. Brilliant.
But, this makes the issues with the Shape in single-player all the more frustrating. The Shape’s unpredictability is fine when playing with other players. You can rez each other and banish the burnt orange bastard. But, in solo, the Shape is a one-hit kill and doggedly relentless in his pursuit of the player. And, he can appear out of any door, meaning that occasionally you’ll hear the voice line announcing his appearance and then immediately get grabbed. Given that solo matches can take upwards of 45 minutes to an hour, this is infuriating when it happens (especially when it happens in the final minutes of a game).
Additionally, progress is incredibly slow while going it alone. I’ve spent 31 hours with the game — mostly solo — and just reached level 12, the amount of progress necessary to unlock Old Growth, a daycare-set expansion included with the 1.0 release that doubles the size of The Blackout Club’s map. You get an XP bonus at the end of each round for each additional player. So, round up three buddies or dip into the pool of randos if you don’t want to feel like your progress is being throttled.
And, genuinely, playing with randos is not a bad experience. Your progress ticks up extremely quickly and you have to do very little of the work. In the four-player games I played, I looked around for bonus XP-granting evidence while a pair of ambitious players sprinted off to accomplish most of the objectives. This isn’t the best way to play The Blackout Club, but it is a very quick way to level up.
Leveling up is rewarding in a way that I suspect immersive sim fans will enjoy. Each level gained grants new areas of the maze to explore. Question seem to understand a key part of the appeal of the immersive sim: exploring a hand-crafted world in whatever way you see fit. And, while the houses along the street begin to blend together after a while — the absence of audiologs or diary pick-ups ensures that the distinctions are merely aesthetic — the maze is beautifully and weirdly distinct.
The Sleepers and Lucids are controlled by the song that emanates from this underground labyrinth. As such, the maze is crafted to resemble a giant instrument, with pipes, frets and reverberating metal strings. Each room is different and dreamily strange. While The Blackout Club doesn’t offer much with each level gained, the promise of new maze sections is enough to keep me playing.
The mission objectives, though? Not so much. While each is hand-crafted, they’re strung together procedurally. So, while Question created a scenario that tasks the player with seizing a noise-making relic and spiriting it away to a waypoint in the maze as every sleeper pursues, an algorithm determines where this objective will begin and end, and what it will be preceded or followed by. The problem isn’t so much the objectives. They’re fine. It’s that there aren’t enough of them, and/or enough systemic wrinkles to keep them fresh after a few dozen hours.
The mission objectives may become bland, but much of the writing is excellent. As the Sleepers somnambulate, they speak the darkest memories of their host bodies. These eerie monologues do wonders for establishing a creepy mood. At this point, I’ve heard them all, so my only complaint is that I wish there were more.
The Blackout Club isn’t perfect. As a fan of immersive sims, I want more lore and more tools to play with. But, it is a unique and compelling mash-up of genre horror and systems-driven gameplay. I can’t wait to get back to the maze.
The Blackout Club review code for PS4 provided by the publisher.
The Blackout Club is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Reviews
‘Cape Fear’ Redefines A Cutthroat Classic & Turns The American Dream Into A Psychological Nightmare [Review]
Hollywood has been stuck in a trend where a recognizable property — any recognizable property — holds more value than an original idea. This has led to a trend where a slew of acclaimed films have transitioned over to television and become limited series, because why not?
Which has led to a very mixed bag of results that’s usually viewed as a hollow exercise in IP renewal that’s become a growing cliche that’s something to mock. Dead Ringers, Fatal Attraction, Presumed Innocent, and even The Birds are just some of the most recent titles in the movie-to-limited series pipeline. Admittedly, this formula can still work. It just needs to actually have not only a point of view, but a point, otherwise it’s destined to disappear into the vast streaming abyss.
Cape Fear definitely has a point of view and is well aware that it’s the fourth proper adaptation of this story — fifth if The Simpsons’ masterful “Cape Feare” parody is included. It’s an adaptation that’s not only aware of its past’s baggage, but intentionally embraces it and uses it to its advantage. Nick Antosca’s Cape Fear is so exciting because it functions as a remix of every version of this story — the ’60s film, Martin Scorsese’s ’90s remake, and John D. MacDonald’s original novel, The Executioners — to create this glorious amalgamation of the narrative. It’s not unlike what was done with Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal series and how it remixed the breadth of Thomas Harris’ works and their cinematic adaptations.
This approach is most effective when certain iconic scenes from the ’90s film are recontextualized and given to different characters in order to make grander thematic statements. It’s a really striking approach that reflects the generational ripples and overlap between these adaptations, yet it’s never distracting or ostentatious to anyone who is experiencing this story for the first time. It helps this series feel different from the deluge of forgettable adaptations that are flooding the market.
On paper, Antosca is the perfect showrunner to tell this story. He has an impressive body of work to pull from that includes horror series like Channel Zero, Hannibal, and Brand New Cherry Flavor, but also lots of true-crime titles like The Act, A Friend of the Family, and Candy. This series falls squarely within these two extremes as it blurs the lines between these genres and styles of horror storytelling. It’s Big Little Lies on bath salts. Cape Fear perhaps doesn’t need to exist, but it’s still a hell of a terrifying experience that has something timely to say.
Horror is full of stories in which one bad day is all it takes to break someone and turn them into a completely different person. Cape Fear isn’t doing exactly this. It’s more of a psychological waterboarding until the target’s sense of self is eroded to rubble. However, it takes the kernel of this idea and expands it onto the pristine ideal of the picturesque American family. It plays with the self-aware realization that the stories we tell are not necessarily what we think they are.
It’s a story about forgiveness, salvation, and revenge that blows up the Bowden family when a violent offender, Max Cady (Javier Bardem), is released from prison and systematically sets his sights on the people he holds accountable. Anna and Tom Bowden (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson), the married couple who represented his case in court, receive a rude awakening when Cady’s psychological torture tour begins. Cape Fear, as a property, is most famously known for being the ultimate cat-and-mouse psychological thriller. This rendition culminates in such an explosive climax that’s right out of a slasher film.
Antosca was involved with an unproduced Friday the 13th reboot draft back in 2015, and there are certainly moments in which Max Cady moves with the hulking intensity of Jason Voorhees. So much of what makes all this work rests on Bardem’s complex performance. He’s very careful not to just copy Robert Mitchum or Robert De Niro’s versions of Cady, while he also taps into a terrifying intensity that feels completely different from what he brought forward with No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.
Apple TV’s new series also introduces a mental injury to Cady that adds psychological fractures that pull him between different versions of events as he struggles to grasp the truth. It’s an element that’s not exactly necessary and often feels like a convenient obstacle that can be activated whenever necessary. However, it allows for some creative visual flourishes and more opportunities for Bardem to get lost in Cady’s complexities.
Opposite Bardem’s Cady, Adams and Wilson do some of their best work as Anna and Tom. Anna is much more front and center than Tom, and Cape Fear is really Adams and Bardem’s time to shine. Wilson still does amazing, understated work, especially whenever the rug gets pulled out from under him regarding someone in his family. The visceral, brutal violence that Cady introduces to the Bowden family hits hard and highlights the anger and intensity that’s fundamental to this story.
What Cape Fear does best is its enlightening deconstruction of the ideal American family, how much work it takes to preserve such a pure thing, and the lengths that people go when they feel like the sanctity of this union is under fire. All it takes is for one of these foundational pillars to weaken before the whole unit becomes compromised. It moves the damage and pressure from one family member to the next as everyone struggles, and it’s unclear what will be left of this family when all is said and done.
This dynamic makes Cape Fear’s story so much more layered and interesting than if the series were just focused on Cady, Anna, and Tom, rather than making their children as much of a priority. Each member of the Bowden family experiences their own obstacles and arcs, although Natalie (Lily Collias) and Zack’s (Joe Anders) storylines are often the most grating. It all boils down to forgiveness, identity, and wanting to be perceived as the person we think we are, versus how we’re viewed by the public, and the dangerous dissonance that can exist between these separate selves.
These ideas are at their most potent when Cape Fear taps into the growing paranoia that bubbles up to the surface and becomes unbearable, so that even the littlest action is triggering. These moments are usually captured through a more erratic filming style that ramps up the tension for both the characters and the audience, unsure of what will strike and when.
Cape Fear never struggles to create uncomfortable setpieces where the anxiety just crescendos and hangs over the scene. On this note, the series’ musical score really captures the perfect aesthetic. It immediately evokes the suspenseful power of the previous Cape Fear films whenever Bernard Herrmann’s virtuosic original theme kicks in. It’s magic every single time.
Antosca delivers an exhilarating update to a classic thriller that pushes its source material to exciting, new places that justify its existence. It’s an exciting story that’s full of terrifying performances and cataclysmic consequences. Admittedly, Cape Fear could have been shortened to eight episodes rather than ten. There are a few plot threads that feel unnecessary and artificially expanded upon, but every episode is still an adrenaline-pumping experience.
If nothing else, it reminds audiences why Cape Fear is such an evergreen story that’s lasted the test of time and will continue to unnerve and get under the skin of whole new generations.
The 10-episode series will make its global debut on June 5 with a two-episode premiere on Apple TV, followed by new episodes every Friday through July 31, 2026.
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