Fans of AFFECTED: The Manor will have more VR horror to look forward to this summer, thanks to Dead Boss Games and Evolution Publishing’s psychological survival horror title, AFFECTED: The Asylum. Coming to Meta Quest and SteamVR later this summer, The Asylum aims to deliver a narrative-driven, cinematic experience focused on atmosphere and psychological tension.
The game centers around Blackthorne Asylum, a sanatorium with a long, dark history, where the line between medicine and madness was intentionally erased. Controlled by a secretive cult, they used the institution not to treat patients, but to experiment upon them. Through a series of harrowing procedures, patients were subjected to “The Preparation”, a systematic process of indoctrination and physical alteration. Through this process, the cult sought to merge biology with belief, creating a collective hive mind using a parasitic entity known as the “Holy Gift”.
Players will step into the dilapidated remnants of Blackthorne Asylum to discover the cult’s crowning achievement and greatest failure: SUBJECT 357. An employee who was forcibly selected for the “Apex Experiment” after crossing the cult’s leader, the process broke them. However, what remained was something more than human. They now roam the asylum as an ever-present and persistent threat.
As expected, players will need to deal with scarce ammunition and high stakes, resource management, stealth, and critical thinking are vital to survive each encounter with SUBJECT 357. At the same time, they will discover the history of the Blackthorne Asylum through the game’s environmental storytelling and the salvaged records scattered throughout the facility.
“With AFFECTED: The Asylum, we wanted to move beyond the tropes of the ‘haunted house’ and explore the horror of a place that was systematically corrupted,” says CEO of Evolution Publishing Kevin Joyce. “It’s a story about what happens when absolute belief meets an unstoppable biological force. In VR, that sense of being hunted in a space with so much dark history is incredibly visceral.”