Routine Gameplay Trailer is Shockingly Good

[Zhukov]

It's not horror if you can fight back.

Well folks, you heard it here, any media where the protagonists fight back can no longer be classified as horror.

Really though, it can be horor if you can fight back, Fear was a fairly decent horror game where you spent a lot of time fighting.

I am yet to see such a game. FEAR was shit. A low-quality shooter that pretended to be a horror game by making the screen flicker every now and again and showing you a silhouette of a spoooooooky little girl between each dose of blazing, generic, ball-swelling, slo-mo, headshot action.

Looked interesting right up until he pulled out a gun and shot something.

It's not horror if you can fight back.

Did you not see that when he shot the robot the robot only stopped for like 2 seconds, and after that it ran much faster. The gun pretty much seems to be a way of seeing what's in the fog, and it has a very low frame-rate (the gun's screen). Would you consider the Silent Hill games not horror? What about the early Resident Evils, or Penumbra? Horror doesn't need to be an Amnesia clone to work.

No, I would not consider any of those games to be successfully horrific. Mostly because they allow you to kill everything in your way. Funny, that.

The Silent Hill games had cool stories, but... actually, wait a sec, Silent Hill 2 had a cool story. SH1&3 had fucking goofy stories. I didn't find them scary though. Their monsters were downright comical, not to mention frequently glitchy.

The early Resident Evils were bad action games with shitty controls. Then you realise that you can just running past almost everything and they become jogging simulators with shitty level design. It isn't automatically scary because "OMG zombies".

Penumbra was a better attempt than most, and paved the way for the much better Amnesia. However, it suddenly stopped being much of a horror game the moment I figured out how to kill the enemies (throw a barrel to knock them over, then stun-lock them when they try to get up). From then on I was actively hunting them down and giggling at their pathetic attempts to fight back. Oh, the horror.

 

[Chefsbrian]

Well, this is officially on my radar, and might just be the game that convinces me to purchase an Oculus Rift... That Cosmonaut Assistance Tool looks very interesting. Actually poking through computer files, connecting to world displays, that really caught my interest there.

I hope this is good, and I hope I don't suffer from VR sickness XD

 

[Moontouched-Moogle]

Looked interesting right up until he pulled out a gun and shot something.

It's not horror if you can fight back.

The way the "gun" is supposed to work, if I remember correctly, is that you load floppy disks into it which will activate a random function. It could make it function as a scanner, a stun-gun, etc. If you're not lucky, you could go for a long time without having any actual way to fight back.

Thank you for letting me know about this, it looks great. I definitely got the System Shock 2 vibe and can't believe a three person team has managed to make a game look so good.

According to the website it has:

- A non linear experience lets you explore any part of the fully open Moon base and find out secrets that other players may not!
- Be immersed with Full body awareness, Deadzone aiming, no HUD, no health bars or points system... you must run, hide and survive the best you can against what lurks in the base.
- There are no health packs or multiple lives, in Routine there is a Perma death system that will keep you on the edge!

That sounds pretty cool in itself. Definitely something I will keep an eye on, although it doesn't mention a release date or if it will be on Steam etc.

It's been Greenlit on Steam. Just needs to be finished now.

 

[Legion]

Doesn't have a release date, but it does have a Steam icon on the lower right of the final screen. It also has the Oculus icon, which would be awesome to play this game with.

It's been Greenlit on Steam. Just needs to be finished now.

Thank you for letting me know, I just had a check of it's page. They say 2013, but nothing specific, as apparently the game was originally going to be in April before they expanded it significantly.

- There are no health packs or multiple lives, in Routine there is a Perma death system that will keep you on the edge!

P-permadeath? Sweeeet.... That looks like one horror game experience I can really get into. Well, for a bit, anyway. I imagine it might lost it's charm if I'm having to replay 3-hour bursts at a time....

I think it depends on how the game plays out. From the sounds of it the station is more or less completely open. So if you died, you could try something new, rather than "have" to do the same thing or go to the same places again. Although if the difficulty is too high, then I imagine it might get tiresome quite quickly. With games such as Dark Souls you get the campfires at least so you aren't re-playing too much after each death before getting to the part where you died before.

 

[fix-the-spade]

The shaky camera-thingymajig got on my nerves, so here's hoping it's either toned down somewhat or on a slider. Otherwise I'm still reeling from seeing that robot lurching closer with its dead, metal eyes.

The demo was recorded with an Occulus Rift headset, the shaky aspect was the user's head movement, the corner peaking and the raising/lowering of the hack tool thing were Occulus features too. If you play normally they shouldn't present or in the peaking/raising/lower will be mapped to keys.

On the game, it looks cool, like Penumbra or Amnesia, but on a Space Station. I actually thought to begin with that it might be somehow related to Dead Space or Doom, the aesthetic is quite Doom 3-ish. That skittering noise at the end though, that is the kind of sound that inhabits nightmares. I bet that robot thing is a red herring, it reminded me of C3PO more than an object of fear.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Certainly sounds interesting enough, but I have to question the lack of a HUD. Wouldn't no HUD be -less- immersive when you're in space in a SciFi setting? Given at that point I would imagine that something like a HUD that could give the person information would be the norm no? Might just be me granted.

I don'tthink HUDs are a good fit to horror games, not sure exactly why, they just seem to reduce tension (unless it's the motion tracker). Maybe a series of projections/holograms like they use in Dead Space? Instead of a regular HUD they only appear when you call them up, more importantly, calling them up pauses nothing...