Video Games
Experience Sci-Fi Horror While Dogfighting in ‘Haunted Space’
Typically, you wouldn’t expect a space shooter to have horror elements attached to it, but that’s where developer Italian Games Factory is hoping to succeed with their upcoming title Haunted Space, which is set for release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC.
Harkening back to the days of Wing Commander: Privateer, Haunted Space blends sci-fi horror with “a story-rich adventure based on exploration, fast-paced dogfighting, trading and ship crafting, with customisable flight simulation and intense multi-stage boss battles.”
Haunted Space centres on the second age of human civilization, which has reached the distant Neterun galaxy and discovered a powerful energy called Sonic Matter, which has resulted in settlers flocking to the systems to harvest the resource. As things go, humanity discovers they were not alone in the system.
You take on the role of a Raider, in the service of the Human Empire, as you traverse the galaxy, taking on quests across multiple systems, or striking out on your own to fight, explore and scavenge resources and credits.
Sounds pretty typical for a sci-fi shooter, right? Well, according to the devs, Neterun is full of monuments and relics left by an ancient civilization and the galaxy is haunted by their ghosts. You’ll be discovering the reasons for their presence and “fight for survival against their supernatural threat in a story inspired by the dark and twisted tales of Heavy Metal and 2000AD.”
That’s more like it.
While no release date has been announced as of yet, you can wishlist the game on Steam, as well as check out the official site.
Capcom was to the point during Summer Game Fest and the reveal of the long-rumoured Resident Evil Veronica remake. But the trailer didn’t exactly reveal details about the remake. Luckily, IGN was able to pick the brain of the remake’s producer, Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, for a bit more info.
In the Q&A session with the producer, despite stating that he wasn’t going to get into too many details, Hirabayashi confirmed that Veronica will be a third-person game, and not the first-person perspective that we saw during the trailer. Furthermore, the team behind this remake is the same team that handled the Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 4 remakes.
“So if you looked at the past remakes that this team has created, you can probably sense a certain mindset that we have when we make a game, and that mindset includes preserving those iconic and key aspects of the title,” said Hirabayashi. “So again, if you look at our work, you can probably get kind of a good sense of what kind of approach we’re taking here, and maybe you can imagine what that might look like for this remake.”
As for how “evolved” Claire will be in the remake (as opposed to the original game) after her experiences in the RE2 remake, Hirabayashi says that the team is taking a realistic approach. “Veronica takes place about three months after the events of Resident Evil 2 [when Claire is a university student]. So let’s just think about how that progression or how much change happened in about three months. So again, three months is not a lot of time. Of course, she has had training from her brother, and of course, she survived the incident in Raccoon City, so she’s not going to be the exact same character. But the portrayal of her and her style is going to be in alignment with that timeline and that history that we’re looking at for Veronica.”
Oh, and as for the title change from Code: Veronica? In a separate Q&A with Eurogamer, Hirabayashi stated that the team wanted a name more in line with other games in the series.
“[If you] think about the recent entries that we’ve had in the Resident Evil franchise, our titles are made from a very clear and impactful naming system; usually it’s just ‘Resident Evil’ and a clear or simple single word in alignment with that. When we were deciding the title of this remake, we wanted to select one word that was most representative of the game and we thought that ‘Veronica’ was the title that did that the best.”
Resident Evil Veronica is currently slated for a 2027 release on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series, and the Nintendo Switch 2.