March's theme is horror houses and I finally get to talk about my all time favorite board game. The one, the only Mansions of Madness. The set-up is you play as one of the investigators from the Arkham Horror universe or as the Keeper, who controls the eldritch forces trying to stop you. You'll explore mysterious locations from mad scientist labs to mysterious, foreboding... um, mansions as you rush to solve mysteries of cosmic proportions. As the player, you move from room to room, exploring, finding items, falling into traps, and uncovering clue[...]
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3 This week's theme is supposed to be ghosts but since I already talked about the only game with ghosts I could think of, so I'll review a game so hard that it makes the player a ghost of themselves. Whatever. We're rolling with it. Back in 2010, the year you'll be posting about on Facebook with a picture of a USB drive and the caption of "dur, thunk kidz theze dayz kow what dis is?" as you slowly realize with growing horror that yes, you really are as boring and banal as your kids think you are, I discovered internet critic/comedian Yahtzee Croshaw, and to my[...]
Just within the past fifteen years boardgames got interesting, and then promptly entered a golden age. No more was there the blandy McBlanderson choices of Monopoly, Sorry, and Candyland (Clue, of course is amazing) of the past eighty years, and no longer did you need a math degree if you wanted to get into the more obscure stuff. Then came 2005, when the great Fantasy Flight Games released a cleaned-up second edition of an obscure Lovecraftian game from the '80s called Arkham Horror. Arkham Horror is a cooperative game for 1 to 8 players. It's the 1920s, an[...]
Nintendo recently announced that Fatal Frame V: Oracle of the Sodden Raven, a game that was until now a Japan-only release, would finally make it's way to a America and Europe later this year for the Wii U, so I thought it would be a good time to look back on this criminally ignored series. Out of the original unholy trilogy of survival horror---Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Fatal Frame---Frame Frame was by far the scariest of the three. It took the rich environments of Resident Evil and the relentless psychological warfare of Silent Hill, added in a[...]
I love it when everything I think I know about writing horror gets turned on it's head. One, it helps me to grow as a writer. Secondly, it means I got bloody well scared during the process. Bloodborne, the newest game for the Playstation 4 from From Software, did both these things. Yet, on paper it shouldn't have. First it's gothic horror, which hasn't been scary in years (but it's the last refuge of solid atmosphere) and it's cosmic horror, which is probably the hardest subgenre to pull off. Don't get me wrong, I love them both, but that doesn't change the fact[...]
The first 4 Silent Hill games are an astounding mix of terror, great characters, heartbreaking feels, searing honesty, and beautifully grotesque atmosphere. One through Three three are utter masterpieces that transcend their medium and should be recognized as art (the originals, not the terrible HD rerelease), while SH 4: The Room is just really, really good. If you only know Silent Hill through the movies, be warned. They resemble the games in the same way I resemble my cat that died a few years ago. If you ask the average SH fan which one is the best[...]
