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video game

video game character bleeding
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

Posted on September 2, 2022

Return of the Zombie Salesman: A Review of Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse

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Picture this: you are playing a video game about a zombie outbreak. Perhaps your avatar is struggling to survive as undead enemies hunt them in claustrophobia-inducing environments, like Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine in Resident Evil (1996). Then again, maybe your avatar is the one doing the hunting, slaughtering hordes of zombies with relative ease as Frank West and Juliet Starling can in Dead Rising (2006) and Lollipop Chainsaw (2012), respectively. Either way, you are likely imagining the following scenario for your hypothetical video game: a zombie outbreak has occurred, and the living must escape from, or do battle with, the undead to survive.

Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, which originally released for the Xbox in 2005 and was re-released on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a zombie video game. Yet, in a subversion of the above-mentioned scenario, Stubbs the Zombie has players take on the role of a zombie: an undead salesman by the name of Edward “Stubbs” Stubblefield to be precise. In Stubbs the Zombie, the goal of the playable character is a wholesome one; Stubbs must find a way of reuniting with his love interest, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike named Maggie Monday. Yet, despite his wholesome quest, as an undead monstrosity Stubbs is a harbinger of death.

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menacing video game character set against a red backdrop
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

back view of a man who looks in the distance while a wolf howls
Posted on August 29, 2021

Surviving Winter and Nature in The Long Dark

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In the dead heat of August, I often find myself longing for the depths of winter. With the tail-end of summer upon us, I’ve been satisfying that longing by playing Hinterland Studio’s The Long Dark, a video game set in a seemingly endless Canadian winter on an abandoned island where you are forced to fend for yourself. Perhaps survival isn’t your idea of escapism, but The Long Dark offers something much more unnerving than an idyllic tromp through the snowy woods. Specifically, The Long Dark’s horror as a survival game rests on the premise of ecophobia, the ever-present threat of nature, the very real limits of the human body, and the intrusions of the past. The Long Dark reveals that survival is a constant confrontation with the mundane horror of homeostasis.

The Long Dark is by no means a new game—it was released in 2014 as a sandbox-type survival game, and it is the survival mode that this piece will focus on. Later, Hinterland added a story mode, and by then it had gained a loyal following of fans. Survival mode has varying degrees of difficulty: Pilgrim, Voyageur, Interloper, and Stalker. While Pilgrim is fun for new players who want a more atmospheric experience, Voyageur is a good mix of animal-threat and atmosphere that will frequently push your character to its limits. Read more

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