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[Hands-On Preview] ‘The Blackout Club’ Could Be The Next Great Co-Op Horror Game

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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.

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‘Evil Dead: The Game’ Looks to Be Raising the Bar for Asymmetrical Horror [Hands-On Preview]

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The idea of synthesizing all of the moving pieces of the Evil Dead series into one cohesive package is one vicious, behemoth Deadite in itself. But on top of that, transcending the medium of film and television and adapting it into a gaming genre as volatile as asymmetrical multiplayer? One would naturally question how Saber Interactive could possibly appease every possible audience with EVIL DEAD: THE GAME, from veteran film fans to savvy gamers who want a unique and engaging experience. But as someone who fits into both camps who recently spent an hour with the developers kicking Deadite ass (and kicking ass as Deadites), I can happily report that Saber Interactive has pulled it off. EVIL DEAD: THE GAME is asymmetrical multiplayer at its best.

For those unfamiliar, asymmetrical multiplayer is a gameplay paradigm that heavily skews the power dynamic between two opposing teams. In the case of EVIL DEAD: THE GAME, four players select a character from the roster of Ash Williams and his cohorts from across the Evil Dead franchise (the “Survivor” team) to face one player who controls the all-powerful Kandarian Demon (the “Killer” team).

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The survivor team is packed with familiar faces, including multiple iterations of Ash Williams as he appears throughout the Evil Dead series, meaning if you want to play Avengers multiverse style as a team of four different Ashes, the choice is yours. Just expect to hear a lot of quips from Bruce Campbell, who returned to reprise his role along with almost all of the original cast members from the films and television series. If you’re feeling a bit more sadistic, you can opt to play as The Kandarian Demon, which gives you the ability to control and summon Deadites to hinder and destroy the survivor team before they have a chance to use the Necronomicon to open a portal and excise the evil.

One important question I had when going into the preview was “How is this game going to stand out from its peers in the asymmetrical multiplayer space?” The genre is already well-known for hits like Behaviour Interactive’s Dead By Daylight, and is becoming further saturated with upcoming titles like Gun Media’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre game. Walking out of the preview, I felt that Saber Interactive knocked it out of the park in multiple ways, but my biggest takeaway was the sense of agency that the gameplay provides on both the survivor and killer sides.

For starters, on the survivor side, you’re given the option to select a character that fits into one of four categories: Leader, Warrior, Hunter, or Support. Each character in their respective class holds certain abilities that fit their archetype–for example, Cheryl in Support has an ability that heals the team as they converge around her. This system immediately establishes an element of complexity to the gameplay: how do you build synergy based on these classes? Do you want to be in the fray battling it out, or would you rather scout out objectives and rally the team to success? Additionally, you have the option of upgrading your abilities via cans of Pink-F scattered throughout the map, and have access to an expansive list of weapons to choose from shotguns to Medieval swords.

On the other hand, as the Kandarian Demon, you’re given free rein to zip across the map and collect Infernal Energy, which is used for all sorts of offensive options from summoning Deadites, to conjuring up traps, and my favorite, possession. Think of it like the survivors are in one big haunted house, and you’re the one with the master switch that controls everything that happens, from jump-scare traps to possessed trees and cars. Survivors themselves can even become possessed once their fear meters max out, giving you the option to take control of their characters to lay the smackdown on their team members, waste all of their ammo or separate them from the group. It’s as chaotic as it is a genuinely unique and a fresh take on the genre that’s never been seen before.

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These factors of complexity and agency are so important because it counteracts an issue that often presents itself in asymmetrical horror: redundancy. Continuously playing matches can grow stagnant quickly if the gameplay isn’t complex and the same objectives need to be completed over and over again. The one hour I played of EVIL DEAD: THE GAME left me hungry to explore more. How does the gameplay differ between survivors? What are the other weapons like? How can I best optimize my team? And more importantly, I was excited to try out playing as the killer again. Like many other folks who play asymmetrical multiplayer, I tend to favor playing as the survivor over the killer, but playing as the Kandarian Demon was such a blast that I could see myself defecting to the dark side with EVIL DEAD.

EVIL DEAD: THE GAME truly offers something for everyone. Those who have stuck with the franchise since Sam Raimi’s first film in 1981 will love the homages and faithful adaptations, and those new to the series will love the blend of action, horror, and humor. People familiar with asymmetrical multiplayer can expect a fresh and innovative take on the genre, and if you’re new to asymmetrical multiplayer? I can confidently say EVIL DEAD: THE GAME will set the bar high for you.

EVIL DEAD: THE GAME will release on PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Series X/S, and PC via the Epic Games Store on May 13th, 2022.

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