Touching the night talk, every day nonsense and game-related farts, ghost things, new things.
Photo/Xiao Luo
I've been interested in Finnish game company Remedy's old game Alan Wake for a long time, and half a year ago, a replica of the game came out. Last week, I finally waited for the discount and quickly fished out of the wish list to check out. The story fits my taste very well, and the writer's work, nightmares and reality are intertwined and nested, bringing a strange feeling that deeply affects my heart. The only problem was that it seemed like a horror game, and I hadn't been very tolerant of horror games.
And it is. The game unfolds like a TV series episode by episode, and I was already scared when I played a prologue at home during the holidays. In addition to the dark environment and monsters that come standard in horror games (well, the monsters in Mind Killer are already very clear-eyed), excellent cinematic footage adds a lot to the atmosphere, even making people ignore the ancient picture quality and character modeling level.
The quality of the replica has been greatly improved, but the modeling is still significantly rough
I especially like the hazy feeling of the small details woven together. In the bright-looking café in the prologue, there is an aunt who has been reading puns outside the broken toilet, and the clip that gives the key is also quite sinister... All in all, these clips made me very nervous. So after playing a prologue at home, I gave up. After the festival, I arrived at the newsroom, and only then did I play the first episode during the lunch break when there were many people and the environment was very bright...
The friendly gaming environment did alleviate my fears to some extent, but I was still scared. The protagonist deserves to be a writer, and his physical fitness is too poor. It didn't take long to run, gasping for breath, attacking the blood tank two or three times, and when he shot at the enemy with the light of the flashlight, he looked unstable. Bullets are also not very lethal enough, the initial revolver takes four or five bullets to kill an enemy, and the signal flares and shotguns are more damaged, but the ammunition reserves are very scarce. The main gameplay of crawling and playing in the dark forest and only using a flashlight to illuminate the whole time also makes me in the state of a bird of fright all the time, and a random electric spark next to it can surprise me at first glance.
Light is a sense of security!
Thinking back to games that scared me too much, like the Little Nightmare series and Inside, were genres where the protagonists weren't too strong, or simply didn't have any fighting power. For me, perhaps the most ingrained in my heart is the fear of being caught up and caught rather than a terrifying monster or a bloody scene.
In order to be bold, I have tried to look directly at the blurred flesh and blood shots in some large-scale detective films, and I have also become accustomed to the various haunted monsters in the game, provided that they dare to show the blood bar... But if I could only run, and I could only run and pray not to be found by any monster, my sense of substitution would grow exponentially. Because I'm really that weak! This kind of fear is not only in fictional stories, they are largely rooted in reality, and it is difficult to convince yourself with rational routines such as "there are no ghosts in the world" and the psychological comfort of "this is just a nightmare". When I run desperately in the game, I often think about how I was forced into a desperate situation by a few cockroaches in real life... Of course, there are many more terrible things that I have heard or seen in the news, and they may actually appear around me in reality, and I have no way to do it.
On the contrary, when my colleagues played games like Resident Evil: Village in the office, I looked happy and didn't get scared by werewolves, vampires, or anything like that. Although there is also a shortage of ammunition, Ethan can fight a lot more than the protagonist of "Mind Killer", Alan Wake, has seen the world, and has a universal hand sanitizer...
I'm well receptive to the various scenes in Resident Evil: The Village
From this point of view, the fear I feel in this type of game is not so much related to timidity as to security. If people want to get a generally benign and entertaining stimulus from this type of work, the premise is that they are in an absolutely safe environment. When a fragile protagonist appears on the screen, that sense of substitution will make me quickly lose this psychological security barrier, which is really difficult to deal with.
Anyway, Mind Killer is a really good game, and the atmosphere creation and CG broadcast are even better than many thrillers, as if the combination of David Lynch and Stephen King's style, I will try to stick to it. But I know very well that I'm not going to be braver just by playing a game like this... Who will be until they can realistically overcome, or resolve some fears?