Going to start of a new, hopefully, weekly feature on the blog called "Horror Tip". This will be tips of lesser known games, books, movies, etc with some kind of relation to horror. Hopefully it will give you all some entertainment tips! First out will be a small game called "All Alone".
Name: All Alone
Type: Game (Interactive Fiction)
Link: Info and download
All Alone is a short work of Interactive Fiction taking place in an apartment a rainy night. It is very atmospheric and I think it gives a good hint on what is possible with pure text in a game. Make sure that you play this game in a dark room and perhaps with some spooky ambient track in the background.
If you are new to Interactive Fiction (IF) then a guide can be found here. Basically IF games are text adventures and you type the actions you want to do. This gives a very special feel for the game and gives lots of options for the player in what actions can be done. It can also lead to annoying "guess the word" type of puzzles, but good IF games keep this to a minimum.
To play IF games, one almost always need an interpreter, which is a program that runs the game file. All Alone requires TADS 2, which can be downloaded here.
Hopefully this will get some people interested in IF and if you found this a good tip, then I will continue to give tips of more good horror IF games. We are also interested in hearing what you think of this new feature!
For Ubuntu, you can also install tads via Synaptic or the command-line:
ReplyDeletesudo aptitude install tads2 tads3
Interesting...I'm down with these new kinds of posts. I'd like to have some new games to play, even if they're old or just simply outdated (I still play games like "Blood" to this day.)
ReplyDeleteHmm, nice find. I don't really like the ending, but overall well done. On a side note, it does bring up the idea of horror games without puzzles, which I've never seen implemented before. I could see a lot of the stuff in this game being possible with something like the Penumbra engine... although longevity would be an issue...
ReplyDeleteAll food for thought.
Dylan:
ReplyDeleteAgree about the ending, and have to admit that I did never figure it out even after replaying :)
Although it seems not many people are posting on this article, I hope you still continue "Horror Tip", as the horror genre is very hit-or-miss not matter what the medium, which often discourages me from trying to branch out from my comfort zone of Steven King, Lovecraft, ect.(because when it misses, it usually misses by a whole lot.)
ReplyDeleteIt was pretty intense. I liked it. I agree we should see more of this kind of post.
ReplyDeleteI didn't much care for the ending either, and I didn't like how there were basically no choices you could make to effect the outcome. But still, it had a good enough atomsphere, and I'd definetly give other games like this a try.
ReplyDeleteGreat tip, I havn't played almost any IF games before this, but now I think I might just start.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that you are required to play the games a few times in order to get what actually happened - ironic, concidering this removes the suspense of not knowing what's going to happen. An odd design choice for a horror game, but even though i can't really be bothered to play through it several times it was quite spooky on the first run.
Moar horror tips please! :D
Great game. A little confused about the ending. I know that the killer is Harvey, but I don't get why he drugs her at the end. She knows (at the end she makes it obvious).
ReplyDelete