Monster Circus | wen
Today, I would like to recommend one to you, and I guarantee to experience a unique game.
Earlier, I wrote an article about "giant phobia", and in fact, it is inconclusive whether this phobia is a disease or not, but it is also primarily a popular entertainment culture. A lot of times, when we say we have a phobia of giants, we are actually referring to these alternative giants, which make us feel weird and creepy, but at the same time, they also make us feel so cool that we can't help but want to see more.
For example, this Kannon statue in Sendai, Japan
and Beijing's "Big Black Building"
The game we are talking about today may be the work that best satisfies everyone's "hobby of giant things" at present, because it has a huge advantage in this regard - this is a VR game.
The game is called The Utility Room, and it was actually released in February last year, but it barely made a splash when it was released. It wasn't until a few months ago that the game was discovered by a bunch of UP hosts on YouTube and TikTok, and was included in various lists of "the most grotesque horror games" and "the most scary gaming experience", that it gradually became famous.
The reason why it has been noticed is also very straightforward, that is, this game shows the shock and oppression of the silent giant to the fullest.
Now VR is relatively civilian, and some simple VR equipment in China can be won for about 2000, and second-hand is cheaper. Although the effect is not outstanding, it is perfectly fine to experience most VR-related entertainment, including connecting Steam and playing VR games.
It stands to reason that now is the time to trigger the ad combo, but since I didn't receive the combo, I can only put a picture of Rei Ayanami here.
The feature of VR is that it is immersive, and the disadvantage is also that it relies too much on immersion, so it is impossible to see how good the effect is by 2D promotional videos. For example, "Half-Life: Alyx" a few years ago was praised by a group of people who played it as a masterpiece of the year ahead of its time, but it is just difficult to conquer cloud gamers without VR.
When you actually put on VR and play Alyx, you'll be shocked by the other world in the first act, and the same is true for "The Utility Room".
The "utility room" in the title of the game refers to the place behind the operation of this universe, a place where clutter is stored, that is, the backstage of the world. You, as the main character, inadvertently travel to this backstage and then see all kinds of mysterious and bizarre scenes.
With just over an hour in length, you'll be transported to a barren plain in black and white, where everything seems to have been robbed of color, like a planet from Dune 2. There are only winding caves, eerie mountains and forests of stone pillars.
At the same time, everything seemed to be so abnormal, and all the small stones around them were moving and floating silently in strange ways.
The game has little to no gameplay and is a true walking simulator, with a little collecting element and platforming added at best. All you have to do is travel through this land. But along the way, you'll see a lot of mind-blowing giants.
To trigger the thrill of the phobia of giants, it is not enough to be huge, these giants must be silent, oppressive, monotonous and solemn, with a texture between life and inanimateness, and mysterious, half-submerged in the fog, as if incomprehensible to humans.
For example, "Advent"
The giant in "The Utility Room" meets all of the above conditions. You'll be walking in a dark canyon and suddenly see a huge head slowly moving towards you, it won't notice you, and it won't suddenly scare with cheap jump scares, but the oppressive feeling of stopping everything, and the slow pace of progress that can't be stopped or slowed down, combined with the VR effect, makes it so immersive that it's hard to breathe.
The shape comes from the Easter Island stone statue, which is a very popular expression on the Internet in Europe and the United States
These are the expressions
In VR, you have to look up to see the top half of the colossus.
In addition, there are long-necked heads that float aimlessly above the wasteland. You can only realize how big it really is when you look at the weedy stone pillar forest below it, because at this moment, you are standing on one of these stone pillars, and it is obviously tens of meters high.
In the caves, there are twisted and grotesque stone walls, as well as endless concrete labyrinths. The game has an aesthetic that blends German Expressionism and brutalist architecture from old-school horror movies, with the game's excellent atmosphere creation, and sometimes heavy, sometimes tense and eerie atmospheric soundtrack, making the experience even more treacherous.
Hell in "Raising Ghosts and Eating People 2", German Expressionism
In the game, you'll get closer to a huge stone pendulum that swings back and forth over this exotic wasteland. But just as you were about to approach it, one of the huge stone statues suddenly noticed you for the first time, and it began to approach you. Unexpectedly, it was destroyed by the pendulum in the process, and the mountain-like body knocked the stone pillars apart.
Note: There is a little bit of a hunting picture.
And just like that, you finally caught the attention of the world. And so, even more eerie sights begin to emerge, and the game takes on a bit of a traditional horror game, where you try to escape, only to be caught, stand on a rock, and skim across the barren plains at great speeds to be delivered to the Creator.
In the last fifteen minutes of the game, it is very bizarre, you will meet strange-looking creators, alien creatures, and at the same time, you will see the space of this "utility room" collapse because of your existence, you will briefly return to reality, only to find that reality has been eroded by various bugs, and you will also catch a glimpse of a corner of the creator's strange palace...... Until finally, you are sent back to the normal world.
All the shocks of "The Utility Room" can only be experienced in VR mode, and ordinary text and GIFs cannot show its boldness. That's why VR has been tepid in recent years, but it's never been seen as a tech scam.
In Half-Life: Alyx, the first thing the game shows you is the Citadel, which peeks out of the clouds. In the screenshot, it's only a small one, but in VR, it's just as shocking as the skyscrapers you see in your daily life.
So if you have the conditions, I highly recommend you to try this "Utility Room", the experience it can bring you is absolutely impressive. And it's exciting to see how far VR games will go in another decade.
Last but not least, the game now includes a special exhibition mode that lets you drive a car through the bright grasslands and see all the giant objects that appear in the game to see how big they really are.
On YouTube, the producer also released a video comparing the size of various giant objects in the game. According to his data, the length of the long-necked head floating in the air in the game is more than 6 kilometers, the diameter of the creator's head is 12 kilometers, and the full picture of the pendulum, which extends almost infinitely, is even more unpredictable.
The latter is a comparison of the size of Manhattan Island in the United States
Producer Lionel is also a musician with a very bizarre art style
In the visual future, it is unlikely that we will be able to see a huge stone head more than 6,000 meters long in reality, which is also the charm of VR games.
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