At first glance, Infliction looks like any other game in the stealth/horror-adventure genre. You wander around dark corridors, dodge attacks from a malicious ghost and other monsters, attempt to complete tasks and progress the story all while trying not to get killed, and occasionally solve environmental puzzles with the help of your in-game Polaroid camera. It has all the hallmarks of a good stealth/horror game: It’s tense, the plot is interesting, the story breadcrumbs are easy enough to find but not all laid out in front of the player. It even has an element of exploration, with setting elements changing between areas and levels of the plot and rewarding careful looking through things. It’s all incredibly impressive, especially having been created by a very small team funded through Kickstarter. But at the same time, it marks a possible new route for the spooky corridors genre, one that future game designers would be wise to explore, one where perhaps the main draw is the setting and not the monsters wandering its halls.
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All my life, I've wanted nothing more than a proper successor to System Shock 2. Bioshock was always way too easy, even on the hardest setting. Dead Space relied on jump scares and didn't create the necessary level of existential dread. Hell, even Amnesia was just Myst on a very bad drug trip. There hasn't been a game that blends claustrophobia, outright horror, desperate combat, and the feeling that something is terribly, terribly wrong in the same way as Looking Glass Games' classic first person horror/RPG/Adventure. When I saw Syndrome, though, I had hope. The claustrophobic corridors, non-working lights, and twisted imagery made me think of my old standby for any list of horror games. I had a lot of hope.
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Why should you get this game? Because for the first time in it's long and checkered history, the cult horror game Pathologic is finally in a playable form. The graphics are better, the English translation actually matches up with what's being said in the game, and many of the truly game-breaking bugs are nowhere to be found. For the first time, players are finally able to play a rare gem in the form the authors intended it to be played.
Why should you play Pathologic at all? Well, that's a lot more complicated. The short answer is simple:
Everyone needs their mind messed with a little sometimes.
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