Hackett’s first retro horror
game was the dark and
moody Broken Paradox. Even the entertainment
hardware’s retro in the
eerie Paratopic.leaning on the established principles of cinema.
“If this was a film, you’d most likely choose a
grainy film stock,” Harvey says of making a typical
Haunted PS1 game. “Perhaps [it could be in]
black and white.”
It’s easy to see attempts to reimagine the
past as simple nostalgia, but in essence, what
these developers are
really doing is tapping
into a rich library of
audiovisual tones.
Growing communities
like Haunted PS1
are building on
foundations laid 20
years ago; developers
like Arbitrary Metric are using familiar visuals to
drive new and unsettling experiences.
Who knows what the next decade will bring?
We’ve already seen classic twists on modern
horror, and dark homages to PlayStation
classics. As the medium matures, we’re sure
to see developers continue to mine the past
in order to terrorise gamers in the present.
Until then, I’m happy to sit in the dark and wait
for the next monster.“From an outsider
perspective, these
parts of the States
are existentially
uncomfortable”Lynnwood, forgo Resident Evil-style pre-rendered
backgrounds to simply follow the character
through a real-time 3D world. The second
of Bryce Bucher’s Two Atmospheric Atrocities
takes a wholly opposite approach, with static
backgrounds composed of grainy photographs
taken in their own backyard.
Elsewhere, Sleep Cycles, developed by creator
kurethedead, explores Resident Evil-style
puzzle-solving and storytelling mechanics while
eschewing its fixed third-person cameras. It’s
a Tomb Raider-style platforming adventure, but
one where Lara Croft took a wrong turn into
a realm of horror. Other games, meanwhile,
pull the camera even further back, and replace
slow-build scares with
speed and gore. Modus
Interactive’s Groaning
Steel is a particularly
gruesome racing game –
it’s Carmageddon meets
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater as
blood-and-bone-covered
cars race through
fleshy hellscapes.
Hackett explains that the diversity of creation
in this field doesn’t stop at genre. Everyone
has differing levels of ability, experience, and
familiarity with the nineties aesthetic. Part of
the appeal of making games in this style, after
all, is the ease of creating textures, models,
sounds, and stages without the stratospheric
expectations of 2019’s mainstream games.
“Some people [just add] a pixelation filter
to whatever assets they have to hand,” says
Hackett. “They’ll play with some of the modern
technology but keep the feel of an older game
through that and the gameplay. But I’ve also
seen people go all-out with low-res textures,
low-poly models. I’ve even gone as far as to fake
lighting effects, so it feels less like a modern
game with a pixelation filter over it.”
While the growth of the games industry
could be described as a constant race for the
highest frame rate, the sharpest resolution, or
the fanciest lighting, Harvey likens the use of
late-nineties design techniques to a filmmaker
Fright-teen-ninety-nineInterface
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