It's relatively easy to create monsters that horrify and unnerve, more difficult to create ones that get under your skin and linger, and harder still to effectively use unreality and uncanniness to build worlds that work like nightmares. Rule of Rose and Silent Hill demonstrate the power of this mode of horror.
Read MoreWhen I was younger, I used to be extremely into Urban Dead, a text based MMO set during a localized zombie epidemic. Years later, the covid pandemic brought me back to the game’s undead infested streets. Fear makes you crave familiarity, and I wanted to return to a place from my childhood where the pandemic and quarantine were all just normal.
Read MoreTaking away expected methods of interaction doesn’t isolate Madotsuki from these characters, it simply means she must create new ways of communicating. The lack of dialogue doesn’t stop her from sitting down to play the flute with O-Man or at the piano with Seccom Masada-sensei. It doesn’t stop her standing next to Maussan Bros to watch the lights in the sky. To say that Madotsuki can’t interact with Yume Nikki’s NPCs is to ignore the many uncoordinated, unspoken encounters created out of the game’s silence.
Read MoreTruffle Troubles has given me no answers to the wonder and bemusement I felt from that old magazine. It has filled me with the purest and most incomprehensible unease, the way one feels when they find something molding in the back of their refrigerator.
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