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Torture Star Video

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Posted on October 15, 2022

Night at the Gates of Hell Review: A Bricolage of American-Inspired Italian Horror Cinema and Japanese Video Games

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Published by Puppet Combo’s Torture Star Video, Jordan King and Henry Hoare’s post-apocalyptic video game Night at the Gates of Hell embodies a zealous homage to zombie cinema and survival horror games of the past. Like Bloodwash, Torture Star video’s preceding game, Night at the Gates of Hell pays tribute to Italian horror cinema – this time to the gore-drenched work of Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei. Unlike its predecessor, though, Night at the Gates of Hell is combat-heavy, longer in duration, and, above all else, full of flesh-eating monstrosities!

Players of Night at the Gates of Hell take control of David, a widowed man fighting for survival in a world overrun by the undead. Throughout his journey, David meets a variety of bizarre characters, including a small child (who may in fact be an adult masquerading as a child) and a perpetually naked prisoner. Characters from Bloodwash also appear in Night at the Gates of Hell, such as the loveable nice-guy Stan and the Creepy Guy, who cameos as a zombie in the game’s second level. Adding to the game’s range of characters is a plethora of enemies, with Night at the Gates of Hell boasting eighty-five unique zombie character models: that’s more than the number of zombie character models used in Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil 2 (2019), and Resident Evil 3 (2020) combined. Read more

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Posted on August 16, 2022

Bloodwash Review: A Giallo-Inspired Horror Video Game Awash with Gore

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Bloodwash is the latest video game to be published by Torture Star Video, a publishing label launched by Puppet Combo, the developer behind notable instances of playable nightmare fuel such as Babysitter Bloodbath (2013), Nun Massacre (2018), and Murder House (2020). Like these games, Bloodwash has a distinctive low-poly style reminiscent of video games from the PS1 era, as well as a story straight out of an old school slasher film.

As pointed out in publicity material for the game, Bloodwash is “giallo-inspired.” In a broad sense, the Italian term Giallo “has become synonymous … with mysteries and thrillers” (Koven, 2013: 204). More specifically, the term has come to describe “the Italian style of psycho-killer movies, which dominated much of Italian vernacular film-making in the 1970s, and, in many respects, were the precursors to the ‘slasher’ films from Canada and the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s” (ibid.) Tropes of Giallo cinema include stylised murder scenes, mysterious killers, and tormented women – three components that feature prominently in the video game, Bloodwash. Read more

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