Previews
[Hands-On Preview] ‘The Blackout Club’ Could Be The Next Great Co-Op Horror Game
There’s an old joke about the Velvet Underground: not many people ever bought one of their albums, but everyone who did immediately started their own band.
I always want to make a parallel between that and anybody who ever worked on a BioShock game. It sometimes seems like everyone who was even tangentially involved with the production of at least one of the BioShocks, up and including the caterers, went on to create an experimental indie game. Question Games, in particular, was co-founded by Jordan Thomas, a designer on BioShock, the creative director of BioShock 2, and the lead writer on BioShock Infinite. Its last game was 2015’s The Magic Circle, a critically if not financially successful game about being trapped in development hell.
Question Games’s new project is The Blackout Club, which has been in production using the Unreal Engine for around two years. It’s been on my radar for a while, if only because it’s a co-op horror game for up to four players. For a while now, cooperative horror has been one of those games-design red herrings, like fun escort missions or the forced stealth level. In theory, you need a sense of isolation before horror can really work in a video game, which means doing it in a co-op game is generally thought to be difficult, if not impossible.
Question Games was aware of that challenge going in. “Part of the fun about this game is being scared with friends,” Michael Kelly told me. Kelly’s a producer on Blackout Club, and another veteran of the BioShock series; he was a producer on BioShock 2 and Infinite. “We’re trying to appeal to people who are like me, where you don’t necessarily want to play a spooky game by yourself and get scared. The way we’ve tackled it is [that] a lot of the dynamic challenges of the game are about unpredictability. We have an enemy called the Shape which you can’t see unless your character closes their eyes, which means that you need to stick together and use that teamwork. One person can be the lookout while someone else is doing something.
“Because we worked on BioShock, because we’ve been on horror games in the past, we wanted to try and do horror that wasn’t blood in your face, that isn’t just gore for gore’s sake. We wanted to do something that was a little more unsettling. We love ‘Twin Peaks’ and things like that, which are just a little uncanny.”
Kelly’s elevator pitch for The Blackout Club is that it’s “Left 4 Dead meets ‘Stranger Things,’” based on a story that Thomas has been working on for around ten years. It’s set in the 2000s, in a small town in Virginia that’s located in a radio quiet zone; nobody has cable TV or Internet access, and even local phone calls can be unreliable. The only way to get information out is to physically carry it out.
Lately, people in town have developed a habit of waking up in strange places, such as in the woods or on train tracks, covered in mud or scratches with no memory of what they did the night before. Worse, the town’s adults don’t think there’s anything weird about it if they remember it at all. Only the local teenagers seem to realize this is happening, or that it’s a problem.
Events come to a head when one of the local kids, Isabella (Ashly Burch, who’s just going to be in every game from now on), disappears, right as she was about to steal a car and drive out of town with a drive full of evidence.
The night leading up to Isabella’s disappearance forms the game’s tutorial level, and I got to play it at PAX. It’s an effective sequence, all the more so because it’s not playing on jump scares at all, but instead on a slowly growing sense of unease and unreality. There’s a particular moment—no spoilers here, but you’ll know it when you see it—that hasn’t left me for a couple of weeks now, where an ordinary conversation turns into a warning bell. It’s easily one of the most effective scares I’ve seen in a recent video game.
In the rest of the game, you and your friends team up to search for Isabelle and find out what’s going on in your town, as members of the titular Blackout Club. There’s a certain twisted children’s-book feel to the whole thing, where you create a character and arm him or her in a small corrugated-steel shack, like some post-apocalyptic treehouse hideout.
Characters in The Blackout Club are all 13- to 15-year-old teenagers, and more importantly, a lot of the enemies in the game are other townspeople who are suffering through one of the blackouts. Even if you weren’t playing as a kid, there’s a good chance you’re fighting against a friend or a family member. As such, the game places a heavy focus on stealth and evasion, without any lethal defensive options.
Right now, you can equip a character with one of three “hero items,” including a taser or a crossbow loaded with tranquilizer darts, and take a special tarot card that gives you a passive buff, such as the ability to sprint for longer periods of time. There are a number of consumable items scattered throughout the world that you can pick up and deploy, such as dart traps, bandages, chocolate bars, or foam grenades.
The biggest problem you’re up against, however, is the Shape. You can only see it when your character closes their eyes (keyed to the Y button on an Xbox controller for the PAX demo), and even then, as a glowing red outline like it’s the only warm object on a thermal scan. If the Shape reaches you, your character gets dragged off to an unknown fate, and it’s almost always waiting in the wings somewhere. You can sometimes reveal it by using foam grenades, so it’s covered in suds or it’s leaving tracks in a puddle, but you can’t stop or slow it at this point. You have to run or hide, and you don’t know how effective either is unless you close your eyes and shut out everything else in the world.
The closed-eyes mechanic adds a lot to the game, as there are a lot of clues and details you can only see, paradoxically, when your character’s eyes are shut. Sometimes, it’s just flavor text; other times, it’s puzzle clues. Either way, it sets up this bizarre sort of alternate reality, where what you can’t see is just as important, if not more, than what you can.
The Blackout Club is currently in closed beta. Question Games handed out codes for the game to anybody who got a chance to play it at PAX, but it’s under an NDA for the next few weeks. (I’m also batting a perfect zero on never managing to play while the servers are actually up.) Once the beta opens up, though, I’m expecting this game to blow up in a big way. It’s sitting at the confluence point of a couple of different popular styles of horror, and it’s working on an atmosphere of slowly building dread, rather than throwing blood and jump scares all over the place. In fact, I respect the hell out of it entirely because The Blackout Club isn’t really built for the streamer horror audience; nothing will torpedo this game’s mood faster than someone mugging it up in the corner.
The gaming world owes so much to David Lynch. “Twin Peaks” alone has inspired the premise and setting of so many games, from Deadly Premonition to Alan Wake, and its dreamlike tone is one that’s perfect for an interactive medium.
Silver Pines, the upcoming title from Swedish-based indie developer Wych Elm, is the latest in the lineage of Lynchian games, this time presenting survival-horror-style gameplay from a 2D perspective. While I’m not traditionally as hot on 2D games, after spending time with the demo, available now on Steam, I can’t wait to see more of this intriguing new world.
It starts out simple. After a brief, narrated dream sequence, you wake up in an empty diner in the small American town of Silver Pines. There’s a quick tutorial sequence that teaches you the game’s mechanics as you escape from the diner, followed by a phone call that sets up the premise of the game. You play Red Walker, a private investigator on the hunt for a missing musician named Eddie Velvet. It’s an elegant bit of exposition that’s delivered with a slightly dreamlike vibe, setting the tone for what’s to come.
As you begin to explore the titular town, you find it eerily abandoned, thanks to an evacuation order that’s caused the majority of the residents to take the ferry out of here. Empty streets and vacant buildings bring to mind Silent Hill, which is a great start in my book. There’s something really unique and special about small town horror like this, and Silver Pines is able to capture it immediately without feeling too much like a tribute act.
Navigating the Unique 2D World of Silver Pines
One of the things that impressed me immediately was how easy I found it to navigate the 2D space. Much like the indie classic Lone Survivor, you have a map that represents the space, and you turn down streets and hallways by pressing up or down at certain openings in the background to “turn” on the map. It seems like it should be incredibly difficult to follow directional shifts like this, but it becomes immediately intuitive, especially with the addition of diegetic signage that guides you without feeling out of place and handholdy.
I usually associate 2D games with more dynamic jumping and movement mechanics, but Silver Pines keeps things grounded, managing to find ways of creating navigation challenges without resorting to platforming tests that would feel out of place in a narrative like this. The map is particularly excellent in this game, as you can use a camera to add photos to it to help remind you what’s there. I love it when main characters mark up maps with locations of puzzles or items, and putting that power in the player’s hands was an interesting mechanical wrinkle that felt helpful and unique.
The other thing that gripped me from the start was the art style, which uses a slight cel-shading technique for the character models that makes them look hand-drawn. They really pop when compared to the backgrounds, which have a slightly different, but complementary, style to them. Wych Elm also shows off a masterful understanding of lighting, creating a shadowy look that’s never too dark to understand what’s going on.
The way the various layers of background and foreground give a parallax effect as you walk adds so much depth to every moment, making the imagery feel more dynamic. This game is treading familiar ground, with abandoned hotels and empty small town streets, but the unique look sets it apart enough to justify it among its peers.
Puzzles Balance Logic and Surrealism
Aside from just navigating the spaces, you’ll need to solve a variety of puzzles in order to progress. Many of them are just finding keys to open doors or figuring out which item is helpful in which situation, like an adventure game, but there were a few in the hour-long demo that gave me a level of satisfaction in actually figuring something out. Like the best survival horror games, the puzzles are an equal bit grounded in reality and slightly surreal, adding to the tone of the game. One of them gave me a Silent Hill vibe with its logic, asking me to win a BB gun shooting range mini game to get a pool key (which also teaches you how to use weapons).
While the game isn’t crawling with enemies, there are more threats scattered throughout the levels than I expected. Early on, you get a blade to defend yourself, which also acts as a key to cut through doorways blocked by cloth, and it’s just the right balance of effective and clumsy. There’s a surprisingly useful dodge that lets you slip past enemies. With the right timing, it’s not too difficult to survive one-on-one encounters, but it’s also not so easy that you can go on autopilot. Once multiple enemies get into the mix, it starts feeling more desperate, forcing you to make smart use of your stamina and weapon durability to survive.
A pistol gets introduced late in the demo, and that also felt surprisingly punchy, but its power was balanced smartly by limited ammo. One of my favorite gameplay elements of survival horror is ammo management, and it seems like Silver Pines is going to make that a core part of its combat experience, asking you to think carefully about which enemies are worth your precious bullets. This is further complicated by the fact that your gun can also be used to shoot padlocks to access previously locked areas, making it an even more valuable resource.
Enemy Design is the Demo’s Biggest Question Mark
Ammo and tape will be crucial to the continued use of your gun and knife, respectively, and there’s a quick little minigame for reloading and repairing that adds some tension to encounters. In addition to scavenging for resources, there was a vending machine I ran across where I could spend money to buy ammo or health kits. Be careful, though, the money is what you use to save at the payphone save points, so you don’t want to spend it all. It’s a clever variant on the classic Resident Evil-style ink ribbon system that makes your resource for saving a more abundant currency, but one that is used for more than just saving.
There were a couple of mementos that I ran across while exploring, and these can be equipped to provide specific character modifiers. I’m not entirely sold on the system yet, as there weren’t enough in the demo to really be able to craft a meaningful build, but with the surprisingly fun combat I’ve seen so far, I’m hoping that they will allow you to shape your playstyle in a way that’s tuned to how you like it. Any new wrinkles on combat are welcome, as it will need to find ways to keep fresh if it wants to stay compelling throughout.
As much as I think the combat is responsive and interesting, I think the enemies might be the weakest part of the game’s identity. This could also be a symptom of just seeing the early game, but so far, they are a bit more indistinct than I’d like, consisting mostly of shadowy people and bugs that didn’t have much going on. There was a boss fight that had a bit more of a menacing design, but I don’t know enough about the full shape of the narrative yet to see if the enemy design is in sync with the tone it’s trying to achieve. Right now, they just feel a bit generic, but I’m hoping things improve as it goes on, because they are pretty fun to fight for a survival horror game.
A Strong First Impression
Back to the opening thoughts about Lynch, the part that has me most interested in this game is the narrative. It’s simple so far, but there have been some surprisingly effective surrealist sequences that make me think this story is going to be something that will sink its hooks into me. One of the coolest moments of the demo involved turning off a light switch and being transported into an entirely different space, one dripping with dreamlike vibes. Even the choice to have the person you’re searching for be a musician adds a nice bit of texture to the narrative, putting a thematic focus on the game’s music in an important sequence involving a performance.
The cutscenes shift to a distinct painterly style, making them stand out without having to animate them, and it’s all brought to life with great voice acting. There’s even a little show you can watch in bits on TVs you pass, feeling a bit like a nod to Alan Wake II’s “Night Springs”.
I’m going to be honest, watching the initial trailer for Silver Pines had me feeling a bit sceptical. Not everyone can nail that Lynchian vibe, and when you try for that tone and miss, it can leave you with a narrative that’s either confusing or pretentious. Based on my hour with Silver Pines, I’d say they are on the right track, ready to deliver a surrealist narrative that draws from its inspirations while still carving out its own identity.
No word on the release date yet, outside of a vague 2026 timeframe, but I’ll be there day one to check it out.
Silver Pines is scheduled to release on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.
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