Team Talk | Which horror film is begging for a game tie-in?

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​The weekend was looking decidedly spooky with The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan, an interactive filmic horror-drama, and Blair Witch, a game loosely based on the cult classic, releasing on 30 August. Friday the 13th, Alien Isolation and the newly announced Predator: Hunting Grounds have shown that horror movie tie-ins can be adapted to fit a range of sub-genres, so which spine-tingling stories would Team PTC like to experience through the medium of gaming?

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by Chris Brand

@SuperCrisco

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by Team PTC

@pass_controller

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Chris | The Shining

Any sufficiently large building takes on an eerie vibe when it's uninhabited. An empty shed isn't at all terrifying — unless you're scared of spiders because I can guarantee it's full of the bastards — but an abandoned hospital or mansion, for example, requires only the slightest thing to be out of whack before becoming nightmare fuel; a flickering light, strange noises emanating from just around the next corner, gallons of blood gushing out of a lift...

The Shining's Overlook Hotel is more than just a creepy setting. In-universe, it's been home to murders, suicides and disappearances throughout its history and untold horrors could lie in each of the hundreds of rooms. Though the amount of accessible rooms would need to be limited for gameplay reasons, this could be achieved via the impossible geometry of the Overlook, as the structure of the hotel seems fluid, or at least not precisely defined, with doors that only exist on one side of a wall, scenic views from rooms which lack outside facing windows and corridors that shouldn't lead anywhere.

Similar, yet more overt, techniques have been used in games to great effect (The Oldest House in the recently released Control being a noteworthy example), psychologically battering the player with simultaneous feelings of both deja vu and jemais vu.

Jack Nicholson's terrifying face can also be used to great effect.

Liam | Tremors

Tremors spawned four sequels (and one prequel) but no game tie-in, not unless you count this effort (shown below) which was made in just 24 hours to celebrate Bacon day. Honouring actors who share a name with sweet, sweet pig meat is all well and good, but it’s about time we had a proper gaming experience based on the 1990 cult classic.

A Tremors game was said to be in development during the early 2000s but was cancelled before ever seeing the light of day. A shame, I think, because the movie’s chief antagonists, known as Graboids, would make a worthy opponent.
These giant, flesh-eating worms that lurk beneath the ground would make traversal one of the most interesting aspects of the game due to their ability to detect movement on the surface. Players would need to find alternative ways to get about a sandbox environment (quite literally if we’re using the film’s Nevada setting) as they search for supplies, weapons and fellow survivors.
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Basically, it’s the same ‘the floor is lava’ concept you played as a kid, except touching the ground means being horribly devoured instead of a loose bit of Lego in your heel, although both are, arguably, just as painful.

Is it even possible to improve upon such a gem?

Sam | The Mist

The Mist is by no means an amazing film, but the bones of an amazing game are already there. It’s set in a supermarket, which are always fun to explore due to their inherent variety of items, almost akin to a miniature Willamette Mall from Dead Rising, which in itself was channelling zombie horror flick Dawn of the Dead.

You can also throw a little bit of The Walking Dead into the mix, with characters facing an internal threat from fanatical fellow survivors in addition to the more conventionally monstrous external threat of winged beasties. The existential question of whether or not humanity is the real monster would be at the game’s core, and you could make choices throughout which ultimately helped to shape what, hopefully, wouldn’t be quite as depressing an ending as the twist from the film.

Of course, you’d need to head out of the supermarket in order to complete tasks on occasion, and this is where the true horror gameplay would come into effect. The eponymous mist would obscure player vision, just like in horror classic Silent Hill, leaving little to no opportunity to prepare for what’s around each corner. This would help to make the introduction of each and every enemy - used sparingly to avoid coming off as cheap jump scares, of course - a harrowing encounter. ​

Whatever choices you make, it can't really go much worse for the Draytons.

James | Cabin in the Woods

I'm not a huge fan of horror films. More often than not they take the easy way out and descend into tired tropes and predictable conclusions played out by wafer-thin characters.

Cabin in the Woods, however, played a bit more smartly with the genre and brought unexpected twists and turns to an otherwise common premise by having the would be slain slowly discover an elaborate, Westworld-esque manufactured reality that is the cause of their suffering. The same sort of thing could be done for the spin-off game.

Imagine an asymmetrical adventure where one player can trigger visual and audio glitches in someone else's computer to throw them off and distract them if they get too close to finding the edges of the game's (and film's) facade. It seems like a natural step forward from the likes of Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid's Psycho Mantis (whom we talked about last week) messing with real world elements of the console gaming experience like forcing you to switch your controller to another slot to continue.

Perhaps being mean to people would be too popular? It would take concentration to become the master of puppets but the marionettes themselves would be having fun trying to feel for the edges, while turning around to find doors are no longer there.​

Let the mind games begin.

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Which horror films do you think deserves a game tie-in?