Bloober Team has plenty of irons in the fire, with Silent Hill 2’s long anticipated remake being the game that the studio is currently focused on most, but it looks like it will soon begin talking about its other projects as well.
16.04.2024 - 13:13 / digitaltrends.com / Tomas Franzese
In 2023, Strange Scaffold released El Paso, Elsewhere, a horror-tinged throwback to the likes of Max Payne that also told a deeply personal and unsettling story about a toxic relationship. Its next game, Life Eater, puts players in the shoes of a serial killer seeking out new targets to kill and sacrifice to a god he’s starting to question the existence of. This isn’t a Manhunt- or Hitman-style stalk-and-kill game; it offers a feeling of detachment by having players parse through timelines to learn everything they need to abduct and properly sacrifice a target.
Life Eater is a brisk, yet unnerving experience. Even if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of El Paso, Elsewhere, it affirms that Strange Scaffold is one of the best studios working in the horror gaming space right now.
Life Eater — ANNOUNCEMENT TRAILERLife Eater follows a man who emerges once a year to sacrifice innocent people to a god called Zimforth. He does this by scouring the weekly schedules of several people to uncover information that affirms that a potential target falls within the parameters Zimforth set forth. Each piece of information uncovered on a timeline comes at the cost of time and a bit of notoriety, so the challenge of Life Eater is ensuring that you gather all the correct information without getting caught and within a time limit.
It doesn’t stop there, though, as Life Eater checks if the player was paying attention during the actual sacrificial process. The sacrifice requires the removal of certain body parts depending on the person’s schedule. For example, you might have to remove someone’s pancreas if they have a commute or their large intestine if they don’t. Mess this up, and Zimforth won’t accept the sacrifice, so you’ll have to restart the search from square one.
The timeline=parsing gameplay and memorization that Life Eater demands aren’t nearly as entertaining as El Paso, Elsewhere‘s slick shooting, but this minimalist gameplay cleverly reinforces the narrative themes. To gain enough information to find a target to abduct and properly sacrifice them, the main character has to get intimately familiar with these people’s lives without actually forging a real connection with them.
RelatedHe learns about family members caring for a dying parent, a drummer joining a band where the other two members are in a relationship, or a waste management worker who has to work two jobs to make ends meet. Yet the killer doesn’t form any actual relationships with these people; the minutiae of their lives are simply
Bloober Team has plenty of irons in the fire, with Silent Hill 2’s long anticipated remake being the game that the studio is currently focused on most, but it looks like it will soon begin talking about its other projects as well.
VR game developer Survios and 20th Century Games will release, a new single-player, action-horror VR game set in the Alien universe.
Pine: A Story Of Loss, which stars a bereaved woodworker and thus may be a play on the double meaning of ‘pine’, is a gorgeously animated interactive fiction game that sees you performing farming chores and wordlessly reminiscing upon cherished memories. It’s short - designed to be played in a couple of sittings - and while the fiction is the focus here, you’ll spend time gardening and whittling in bespoke minigames as you find out more about the woodworker’s relationship. The publisher describes it thusly:
Wired Productions will publish Chinese developer Pollard Studio‘s psychological horror game KARMA: The Dark World for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC (Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG), the company announced. A release date was not announced.
El Paso, Elsewhere, one of Digital Trends’ favorite indie games of 2023, now has a film adaptation in the works.
The director of upcoming Sims competitor Life By You says life sims are "the most complex" RPGs and crafting games ever made.
The classic survival horror game Dementium: The Ward is finally coming to non-portable consoles and will be released on PS4 and PS5 on April 19. Developed by Renegade Kid, Dementium: The Ward originally released on the Nintendo DS in 2007 and received a 3DS port in 2015. While the game received overall mixed reviews when it first launched, it has gained somewhat of a cult following and is now considered by many to have been generally underrated.
British developer SFB Games has released the Xbox announcement trailer for Crow Country, giving fans a more detailed look at the PS1-style horror gaming releasing May 9 on Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and Steam. Retro horror video games remain among the most popular titles for fans of spooky gaming content, and Crow Country looks to scratch the nostalgia itch for horror aficionados.
An unofficial Star Wars horror game has showed us what a zombie apocalypse would be like in a galaxy far, far away, and it's just as disturbing as you're expecting.
Video games have often allowed the player to enter the role of a villain with great effect. Whether it's the dastardly deeds of or the potential to go down evil routes in series like, there are many great games where the player is a villain. Enter , from Strange Scaffold and Frost Pop, where the player is responsible for some extremely nefarious acts; but is there a valid reason behind them?
A jump scare has shown the horrors that lurk in the Settled Systems. While Bethesda's sci-fi RPG does have plenty of action and exploration at its core, there are some moments of horror throughout the game, particularly when fending off some of the alien life forms across the galaxy.
The new free-to-play horror game Deceit 2 has just been released for Xbox. Deceit 2 is a free-to-play social deduction horror game, essentially playing like a horror version of Among Us in which players need to gather clues to discover who is trying to kill them, and could be a fine addition for Xbox players.