GRAVE (Make room for a monster desert)

The woods, a cabin, a mine, or, in the case of recent scare-laden jaunt Until Dawn, all three. These are horror staples, but Grave is doing things differently. This Kickstarter success sees you alone and afraid in sun bleached scrublands. It gets dark there too y’know.

Moore isn’t making any announcements yet when it comes to console versions,
but on PC, at least, Graves is compatible with VR.

“I’ve lived in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona for the majority of my life, so I’ve always had a fondness for the desert,” says Broken Window head Tristan Moore. “The most direct inspiration was when I read Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. I really got turned onto the idea of merging the West with surrealism and alternate realities. The goal was to capture a feeling of isolation and loneliness within a horror world.” Grave is procedurally-generated, but don’t worry, there are still plenty of scares to be had as we arm ourselves with matches, flares, and flashlights to take on monsters. “Our philosophy is that good AI and creature types keep survival horror scary more than scripted moments. Because we can spawn creatures basically anywhere at any time, often those ‘scripted’ scares end up happening organically as part of the AI behaviour,” says Moore.

Sandy man
The team has taken inspiration from other terrifying horror games. “Grave is kind of like a hybrid between Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Slender: The Arrival,” Tristan explains. “There’s a fully 8-10 hour narrative to explore, but there’s a lot of variation that can occur within it. We are using a system where we profile the player’s gameplay habits.” This system means that the way you react to certain creatures, such as the moaning Orphans or the light-hating Lurkers, will be logged by the game. ”We really want to tailor the fear in the game to each player,” Moore enthuses. “If you seem to be getting more scared about one type of creature or another, we’re probably going to use that against you later on!”