"The best experience is one that makes the player feel vulnerable."
This is how confident Broken Window Studios is that its 2015-bound horror escapade Grave will scare your socks off: the developer has already revealed many of the game's supernatural enemies on Kickstarter, thus cheerily breaking the oft-cited "Cardinal Rule" that you should never show players exactly what it is they're frightened of.
The threats include Statues, who only move when they think you aren't looking, and Lurkers, who are violently intolerant of exposure to light or sound. The latter may be particularly unpleasant company if they show up alongside Strangers, the game's "standard" enemy type. Strangers disintegrate when you shine a torch at them, like certain enemies in Remedy's Alan Wake - but how are you to do this without riling up the Lurkers? It's one of many knotty problems that promise to make Grave a more than usually frenzied, elaborate and above all player-driven simulation.
The game takes place in a vaguely metaphysical desert, reminiscent of the old Frontier - think dilapidated railway lines, plywood churches, mine shafts and stunted trees. By day, it's pretty eerie. By night, it can be hideous: monsters emerge in droves and most (all?) of them can kill you in one hit. There are no firearms, at the time of writing - instead, you'll use light against some foes and fire against others, with other tools and tactics presumably to be revealed. Reflexes alone won't get you very far: preparation and calm in the face of screeching oblivion are the basis for success. Oil can be poured out and set alight with thrown matches to create a brief barricade, and some buildings house life-saving electricity generators.
Players will also have to contend with bursts of Surreality, very much with a capital "S". Inspired by the work of Salvador Dali, creative director and designer Tristan Parrish Moore has created a world that buckles and shifts when you least expect it - head into a farmhouse, and the view may be different when you step outside. For more about the whys, wherefores and what-the-hell-is-thats, I asked him a few questions by email. If you like the answers, why not https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2129301589/grave-open-world-survival-horror">donate to the project on Kickstarter?
Does Grave have a plot? If not, why not?
It does have a full narrative and campaign spanning an estimated 5-8 hours of play. We've wanted to be tight-lipped about the story so far, partly because the game is based on surrealism and abstract concepts. Discovery is a big part of the experience and we're worried we might say too much.
The story opens with you finding yourself in strange desert, where the landscape seems to morph and change when you're not observing it. You begin by following a man you see in the distance, and this journey takes you through learning what the world is and why you are there. We're also telling the story through three acts, each with a different characters narrative built into it. Each character has a totally unique narrative but will build your understanding of this strange reality as the game comes to its climax.
I don't know if I want to say too much more, but our goal is to use the play experience in a David Lynch style, where a lot of symbolism and strangeness builds into a stronger understanding as you become more immersed. We're treating the player as the audience and also the participant, so we're trying to keep the story focused on what their experience is. Although there is a linear narrative, much of the story is implicit in the environments you explore and what you discover.
You seem to be taking quite a complex approach to combat. Can you give us any examples of more advanced scenarios, perhaps involving the environment or several different enemy types at once?
In Grave, we're attempting to build a few complex dynamics that keep the experience intense. Some of the primary interactions that set Grave apart relate to how your light-based weapons affect creatures differently.
In one moment, you might be presented with two creatures; Strangers, Progenitors. Strangers are harmed by light and try to stay away from it, so you poor gasoline into a portable generator. However, progenitors are resistant to light and can only be killed by fire. Not only that, when they get near lights, they emit a pulse that causes lights to go out. You could be safely surround by protective lights, but a Progenitor can not only get you in spite of them, he will also cause your protection from the strangers to shut off.
Another scenario might arise between Orphans and Lurkers. Orphans are childlike creatures that cry grab onto you, but lurkers have extremely sensitive hearing and will attack anything that makes noise. Orphans can draw attention to and cause the Lurkers to attack ferociously; however, they will also potentially attack the orphans.
How does fortification work? Is it comparable to, say, barricading a house in Resident Evil 4?
Fortification is based primarily on interacting with light. There will be emplacements, portable generators and other light emitting objects that you can use to your advantage, but they won't provide you ultimate safety. Lights can keep most creatures at bay, but some that don't react to light can interrupt your defences, so they aren't fool-proof.
How far does the survival simulation extend? Will we need to worry about things like the effects of fatigue, or dehydration?
Actually, the game is meant to focus on survival in the more traditional sense, the way "survival horror" was used in the '90s and early 2000s. For us, the main goal is that death and encounters matter, so you aren't just warped to a checkpoint one minute prior to that encounter when you die. One of our main goals in Grave is to create a more organic interaction between player and difficulty, while still being able to retain the tension that comes from fearing what will happen to you.
One thing we're still considering is the idea that you might need to drink water. That's something we're debating honestly, because we want people to stay focused on exploring and having interesting experiences. If we go in that direction we will try to make it more like taking malaria pills in Far Cry 2; it affects play but isn't a "game over" state.
Are Grave's "surrealist" elements just there for effect, or do they affect how players interact with the world in a practical sense?
Grave's surrealism pervades the entire experience. Significant portions of the landscape will change throughout play, getting reordered, vanishing or materializing with each passing night. This is one of the main reasons Grave takes place in such a surreal world; we want to be able to mess with the players head, not just in a cosmetic way, but in ways that genuinely have gameplay effects.
Within the world of games, are there any particular inspirations you'd like to discuss?
I'd say our strongest inspirations are classic games like Silent Hill 2. The shift in experience between daytime and the more sinister "dark world" was always really powerful and tension producing. We wanted to take that a step further and build a game that felt that way dynamically, with a day-night cycle. That dramatic shift only happened a couple of times in the Silent Hill games, but in Grave it happens throughout as you interact with the passage of time and the creatures that appear in the darkness.
That being said, we want to infuse those experiences with what modern games like Amnesia, Outlast, and Slender: The Arrival have taught us. Those games have shown in recent years that the best experience is one that makes the player feel vulnerable. It's the main reason we're not using "guns" in Grave; we want the player to have agency in the world, but to never be too powerful.
Have you thought about Kinect support? Shinji Mikami has http://www.totalxbox.com/62482/features/the-evil-within-shinji-mikami-on-the-creation-of-xbox-ones-first-horror-game/">suggested that expression recognition could be used in a horror game.
We just recently started with Xbox One development, so we haven't been able to finalize our plans just yet. I'm really interested in the ways that we can enhance immersion in Grave by incorporating the Kinect. We've been doing work in virtual reality, so using the Kinect camera for body movement seems pretty interesting to us.
What do you think of the Xbox One hardware and Microsoft's developer support right now?
They've been great. We joined ID@Xbox just this month, and we have a personal contact who has been excellent in taking us through the process. Everything from signing the paperwork to getting our development kits has been awesome and easy. As indies, we hadn't initially been sure if we wanted to get our feet wet in the next gen consoles, but this experience has been really easy so far and we like the direction the ID@Xbox program is going.
http://www.totalxbox.com/75440/features/silent-hill-meets-salvador-dali-how-grave-for-xbox-one-aims-to-terrify/
