In video games, as in most other art forms, to be dated is a negative. We're always striving for new ideas, fresh approaches, experiences unlike any other. To be 'so three years ago' is one of the biggest sins a game can commit - even if it's otherwise solid and enjoyable. If a game feels like one we've played a million times before and is a step backwards from the latest triple-A whizzbang, it's never going to win some people over. Post Trauma turns being dated into a positive. It is so inspired by history, actively replicating it rather than borrowing from it, that it manages to become something fresh again.
Though outliers on the indie scene prove me wrong, there are mainly two types of horror games today. The first is the action horror - there's nothing much innately horror about any presentation in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us, but it's a horror game by virtue of the fact it has killer zombies (even if it claims otherwise). Likewise, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil Village is mainly about shooting big bosses and smaller enemies with some horror coding than it is about making you feel terrified. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the 🦩jump-scare horror, which is basically-BOO! Scare ya? Anyway, these games take potentially interest-BOO! interesting settings but fail to make them feel lived (or died) in, relying instead on-BOO! cheap monsters that go bump in the night.
We like to think every genre is having its golden era right now, as games get higher budgets, more prestige, and are more technically astute. But horror, true horror, the sort of horror that unsettled you, made you feel like your bones were being scraped with broken glass for reasons you could neither understand nor explain, peaked in the '90s. This was when we had 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Parasite Eve, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil, Clock Tower, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:System Shock 2. Modern horror games scream in your face until you scream back, and are satisfied that you have been suitably scared. But these games wrapped their bony fingers around you slowly and squeezed. They were ruthless and methodical. They allowed themselves to be slow and to have you fall into their worlds with them. It's this approach, dated though it is, that Post Trauma replicates.
As I shambled around Post Trauma during my hands-on preview, it reminded me of those games I played growing up, perhaps when I was a little too young for them. My parents were very concerned that at 14, I was too young for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Grand Theft Auto San Andreas because of the swearing, but bought me Parasite Eve for my eighth birthday. It meant that I played a lot of horror at a young age, it being a 'grown-up' genre my parents were seemingly fine with when swearing and gun violence were off the table. The way the protagonist shambles around slowing in Post Trauma rather than leaping over tables, the way you have no offensive weapon (only a mildly defensive melee option to aid fleeing), the way you walk from room to room and back again to soak up every inch of the level - this is what horror used to be.
It's dated. That's a good thing, so long as you are prepared for it. When you find notes or clues, the game does not remember them for you - that's on you and your brain, just as it used to be. There was one puzzle involving clocks to reveal a code, and as I stood there, initially flummoxed, the game did not help me. There was no disembodied head to suggest a solution, no muttering from the protagonist that 'it might help if I just...', just the despair of a code that needs to be broken.
From the fixed camera angles to the more methodical approach, Post Trauma explores the best of our past. However, in the limited time I've had with the game, I don't feel as if I know it. It wants to be Resident Evil 2, but I haven't seen enough to know it can pull it off. The effort is admirable thus far, at least. I also hope it can hold its nerve - Scorn also tried to puzzle its audience last year, then gave up and added in a gun. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Medium b💦efore that also took its classic horror premise (admittedly with some weird views on pretty much every complex social issue there is) and gave us a shotgun to solve our problems. Post Trauma needs to🌠 be good, sure, but it also needs to always be dated, no matter what anyone else says.