Sunday, December 4, 2011

Graphic Horror: Game Reviews

By Brian M. Sammons



Hey guys, well this will be my shortest GH ever as there are simply no good games worth talking about right now. Yeah, it’s sad but true. All the big titles came out last month so they would have plenty of time to get into the heads of moms and dads looking to buy their kiddies a little something for Christmas. So I’m not going to sweet it and will just have to enjoy the hell out of the holidays, and I hope all of you do to.


That said, I don’t want to leave you in a total lurch, so here’s a little something you might have missed; a sequel of ALAN WAKE called AMERICAN NIGHMARE. Now WAKE was the game I gave horror game of the year (what two years back?) and this looks to be more of the same goodness, now set in different locations all across the good ol’ US of A. Sure, the first game wasn’t perfect, the combat got to be a bit repetitive after a while, but the story and characters were top notch and it had some truly creepy and eerie moments in it. That’s something a lot of so called horror games can’t honestly claim. So I’m looking forward to the next couple of chapters of WAKE’s story.


Oh, did I say “next couple of chapters?” Yes I did, that’s because the game will be released as episodic content, one chapter after another, over Xbox Live. If you played the first ALAN WAKE (and you really should have) then you know that AW is the perfect game for this as the story was always broken up into episodes like the chapters of a novel or a really trippy TV show. So I’m looking forward to seeing how Remedy Games pulls it off as episodic gaming has been a hard puzzle to solve. But hey, as long as they give me more ALAN WAKE, then I think I’ll be a happy boy. Anyway, check out the first official trailer below, I think you’ll dig it. I know I did.



--Brian M. Sammons