![]() ![]() They say the solution to this was making the desert more open. Problem with that is then you can't see very well, and since in the desert, everything looks the same, we realized again that that was not an environment you would want to run around in for a long time," Grip tells me. "Scariness often comes clashing with gameplay, so what we tried early was a lot of sandstorms. Making these sorts of atypical horror environments work, however, came with a good set of challenges. And similarly in Rebirth, it's all the things being buried beneath the sand - that's what's interesting." "It's all the things you find in the ocean. "Even in the middle of the ocean it's not that interesting," Grip says. So it's not really about monsters or scares in that sense." Whereas now it's the wasteland, and the lack of help or lack of civilisation. ![]() You're at the very bottom of an ocean, and that feels like a very pressuring situation to be in. It's a similar idea to Soma's underwater setting. "It's a worry that the player can have just by sensing that they are out in the middle of nowhere with no help to be found. "It's also a different type of fear, I guess, or scariness," Olsson adds. "What's scary isn't the location, it's that you're stranded," he tells me. It still feels like you're not in a safe place, but you're at least in a bright place."īut how on Earth do you make an area like that scary? According to Grip, they don't. I feel that the desert right now is more like a palate cleanser where you come out of a dark cave, and it's like, 'Oh, light finally!' But then you're obviously in the middle of nowhere. "So, we expanded upon the environments from there, adding caves and ruins and all that sort of thing. And for the other, horror gameplay is usually like, so the player finds a note.but in the middle of the desert? Why would you find that there? For one, it's not that scary because it's bright and sunny and it looks like the beach. "But then as we actually implemented it all, we realised it's so hard to do anything in a desert. "We thought a desert would be a good place to have horror, it's basically a wasteland," he says. But dark and snowy has been done to death in horror, and after being inspired by a book called Skeletons Of The Sahara, Grip pitched the idea of somewhere a little warmer. Originally, Grip tells me the team was torn between setting Rebirth in somewhere cold and desolate like Antarctica, or hot and sandy like the Algerian desert. Or settings, rather, because the game travels through varied environments, from caves and tunnels to a warm sunny desert. Straight away, Rebirth's setting caught my eye. We also discussed monsters and things they've learned from their old games, as well as how player choice can make horror that much more horrifying. How can the horror of a traditionally dark and dingy series hold up under the bright desert sun? I talked with game director Thomas Grip and creative lead Fredrik Olsson to find out. It's the new survival horror from Frictional Games, the team behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Soma, and it's out today. You're not some sort of Indiana Jones-esque film though, I'm afraid, you're in a horror game - Amnesia: Rebirth, to be exact. The year is 1937, and you've just woken up in a crashed plane in the middle of a desert. ![]()
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