princessguard
1998
domino effect meme where the little domino says "solid snake using vents to escape enemy detection in 1998's mgs1" and the big domino says "venting in among us"
2014
Playable Teaser has caused irreparable damage to the horror genre in gaming.
Indie horror games have a subgenre sometimes called “looping hallway games.” These are, to keep it plain, horror experiences in which you control a character walking through a looping hallway and get jumpscared. There was a period where “P.T. Clones” were their own genre of entertainment, something only egged on by the bloodthirst players felt when Konami canned the project. People really, really wanted P.T., and they were willing to do just about anything for it. This game is as much about it’s story as it is the hype that followed.
P.T. uses a style of gameplay that people sometimes call “walking simulator.” You know, in a mean way. Personally, however, I think that’s way too broad: P.T. is more like a digital Halloween attraction. You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there. The horrified scrawling of a mad man, alluding to a terrible, terrible thing happening in that very house, maybe just in that room you’re about to venture into. It’s only a suggestion. A possibility. You open the door.
You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there…
Progression in Playable Teaser is still an enigma. While P.T. has been dissected and even mined in the years following its release, it’s not actually known what triggers some in-game events. It seems almost completely random, and maybe it is. In horror games, there’s a veil of control between the player and the game— an agreement is made when you put one on, really. You can always shut the console off, or look up a guide. There's always some semblance of control, of linearity, in a horror game. By having a seemingly randomized progression system, P.T. wretches control out of the player’s hands. It breaks the agreement. This isn’t unique, really. Screwing with the player is a common thing in horror games, but P.T. 's execution of it is what made it so noteworthy. Even if it hadn’t been an announcement for a Silent Hill game by Hideo Kojima, Junji Ito and Guillermo del Toro starring Norman Reedus, it would have done surprisingly well for itself based on it's execution.
It isn’t that P.T. is scary, necessarily. It’s that it shows an adept hand at creating tension. There’s moments in the game that feel like a child’s desperate attempt at a jumpscare— the loop in which you wander down the hall and look up to see a shaking fridge while a child screams inside it comes to mind. Maybe that was the intention, though. Part of the long con by the devteam was that they were prepared for people to take up to a week to finish the demo, and they expected people to buy that they were an indie studio during that time. What happened, instead, was that it took one stream that finished shortly after the announcement. The boom was immediate, and heard across the internet.
I could write at length what the experience of P.T. 's release was like, but it’s documented well. The rise and fall of Kojima Productions’ Silent Hill reboot is something that most people interested in games already know. We were all there, and it is intrinsic to P.T. to know it. Playable Teaser is, after all, the announcement for Silent Hills.
A lot of P.T. relies on technology feeling out of your hands, out of your control. The radio pumps paranoia into the hallway by babbling about the tap water, reporting on crimes, numbers that seem random but aren’t, effectively injecting patterns where there aren’t any. The flashlight loses power, and to disorient you further, the game itself “glitches.” Even the technology in your hands cannot be relied upon. Even the trailer that advertised it as an indie game cannot be trusted.
In an interview, Kojima stated that people said they knew there was no way P.T. was made by a small, independent team upon seeing the Playstation Experience trailer. He expressed that he wished he had pushed harder for the game to resemble something by a smaller team, but the Fox Engine renders things in a way that looks distinctly AAA. When you know P.T. was made in the same engine as MGSV, it’s very easy to tell. We’re seven years past the release of the game, and it still looks great. Dust particles dress the game well, with details painted on in an excruciating fashion. The hallway looks lived in. It’s used. It’s a home full of ghosts, of stories, where madness reigns king. There’s a poison infecting the home. You can see it, from the lovingly rendered cockroaches to the revolting vomit coating Lisa’s face.
A lot of the scares are effective, but not because they’re necessarily good or unique. The tension building does most of the work, with foley doing the heavy lifting. Sound in P.T. cannot be underpraised, in my opinion. The steps of the protagonist echo heavily, making the game feel empty when it isn’t. Doors creak loudly, floorboards sigh with the weight of the character model. Lisa’s groans are haunting and filtered to sound unnatural, as if you’re listening to a radio play that’s gone off the rails. A fitting design choice since there’s a reference to War of the Worlds within P.T., likely shoehorned in as a nod to the UFO endings in Silent Hill.
The story of the home is delivered through babbling, through auditory clues and visual hints. It gets hamfistedly explained near the end, but even the closing scene feels mysterious, as if I’ve played a game of telephone with my friends regarding an urban legend. P.T. feels like an urban legend, taped together by people’s memories of retellings they’ve heard. It’s a ghost story, told again and again with newer, finer details that sometimes feel tacked on, like the person telling the story thought it sounded scary. Each hallway is a new retelling. Playable Teaser is a playable urban legend.
P.T. is an exercise in claustrophobia. It asks, “how can I deliver a story in an unsettling, unnatural way in a small space?” To answer that question, it drops you right into the thick of it. You are forced to navigate the obscure clues for progression on your own from the moment you hear about P.T. The game goes beyond the screen— maybe in some way, it’s still going.
Indie horror games have a subgenre sometimes called “looping hallway games.” These are, to keep it plain, horror experiences in which you control a character walking through a looping hallway and get jumpscared. There was a period where “P.T. Clones” were their own genre of entertainment, something only egged on by the bloodthirst players felt when Konami canned the project. People really, really wanted P.T., and they were willing to do just about anything for it. This game is as much about it’s story as it is the hype that followed.
P.T. uses a style of gameplay that people sometimes call “walking simulator.” You know, in a mean way. Personally, however, I think that’s way too broad: P.T. is more like a digital Halloween attraction. You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there. The horrified scrawling of a mad man, alluding to a terrible, terrible thing happening in that very house, maybe just in that room you’re about to venture into. It’s only a suggestion. A possibility. You open the door.
You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there…
Progression in Playable Teaser is still an enigma. While P.T. has been dissected and even mined in the years following its release, it’s not actually known what triggers some in-game events. It seems almost completely random, and maybe it is. In horror games, there’s a veil of control between the player and the game— an agreement is made when you put one on, really. You can always shut the console off, or look up a guide. There's always some semblance of control, of linearity, in a horror game. By having a seemingly randomized progression system, P.T. wretches control out of the player’s hands. It breaks the agreement. This isn’t unique, really. Screwing with the player is a common thing in horror games, but P.T. 's execution of it is what made it so noteworthy. Even if it hadn’t been an announcement for a Silent Hill game by Hideo Kojima, Junji Ito and Guillermo del Toro starring Norman Reedus, it would have done surprisingly well for itself based on it's execution.
It isn’t that P.T. is scary, necessarily. It’s that it shows an adept hand at creating tension. There’s moments in the game that feel like a child’s desperate attempt at a jumpscare— the loop in which you wander down the hall and look up to see a shaking fridge while a child screams inside it comes to mind. Maybe that was the intention, though. Part of the long con by the devteam was that they were prepared for people to take up to a week to finish the demo, and they expected people to buy that they were an indie studio during that time. What happened, instead, was that it took one stream that finished shortly after the announcement. The boom was immediate, and heard across the internet.
I could write at length what the experience of P.T. 's release was like, but it’s documented well. The rise and fall of Kojima Productions’ Silent Hill reboot is something that most people interested in games already know. We were all there, and it is intrinsic to P.T. to know it. Playable Teaser is, after all, the announcement for Silent Hills.
A lot of P.T. relies on technology feeling out of your hands, out of your control. The radio pumps paranoia into the hallway by babbling about the tap water, reporting on crimes, numbers that seem random but aren’t, effectively injecting patterns where there aren’t any. The flashlight loses power, and to disorient you further, the game itself “glitches.” Even the technology in your hands cannot be relied upon. Even the trailer that advertised it as an indie game cannot be trusted.
In an interview, Kojima stated that people said they knew there was no way P.T. was made by a small, independent team upon seeing the Playstation Experience trailer. He expressed that he wished he had pushed harder for the game to resemble something by a smaller team, but the Fox Engine renders things in a way that looks distinctly AAA. When you know P.T. was made in the same engine as MGSV, it’s very easy to tell. We’re seven years past the release of the game, and it still looks great. Dust particles dress the game well, with details painted on in an excruciating fashion. The hallway looks lived in. It’s used. It’s a home full of ghosts, of stories, where madness reigns king. There’s a poison infecting the home. You can see it, from the lovingly rendered cockroaches to the revolting vomit coating Lisa’s face.
A lot of the scares are effective, but not because they’re necessarily good or unique. The tension building does most of the work, with foley doing the heavy lifting. Sound in P.T. cannot be underpraised, in my opinion. The steps of the protagonist echo heavily, making the game feel empty when it isn’t. Doors creak loudly, floorboards sigh with the weight of the character model. Lisa’s groans are haunting and filtered to sound unnatural, as if you’re listening to a radio play that’s gone off the rails. A fitting design choice since there’s a reference to War of the Worlds within P.T., likely shoehorned in as a nod to the UFO endings in Silent Hill.
The story of the home is delivered through babbling, through auditory clues and visual hints. It gets hamfistedly explained near the end, but even the closing scene feels mysterious, as if I’ve played a game of telephone with my friends regarding an urban legend. P.T. feels like an urban legend, taped together by people’s memories of retellings they’ve heard. It’s a ghost story, told again and again with newer, finer details that sometimes feel tacked on, like the person telling the story thought it sounded scary. Each hallway is a new retelling. Playable Teaser is a playable urban legend.
P.T. is an exercise in claustrophobia. It asks, “how can I deliver a story in an unsettling, unnatural way in a small space?” To answer that question, it drops you right into the thick of it. You are forced to navigate the obscure clues for progression on your own from the moment you hear about P.T. The game goes beyond the screen— maybe in some way, it’s still going.
2015
a game that bravely asks "what if we just made literal children deal with our problems for us?"
2015
life is strange feels distinctly like looking at your friend's photobucket account from 10+ years ago and smiling fondly through the cringe
this is the eighth game excluding the remakes. one has to wonder when the residents will get tired and stop being evil. where is resident nice
2017
i can confirm that you go into the woods when its night
This review contains spoilers
The aughts saw a sudden, loud burst of The Mall Goth come stumbling back into the public view, re-delivered to suburbia primarily by Hot Topic. Though it’s influence in pop culture is always in the background of media at large, goth mostly saw it’s re-emergence through teenagers buying band tees, striped tights, and tripp pants at the mall. This later trickled into the emo subculture (which is a whole other topic), but Hot Topic Goth was and still is a Thing, as far as I’m concerned. A great example of what I’d brand Hot Topic Goth (hereby referred to as HTG) is Emilie Autumn, who has made a career out of catering to young girls whose self-expression was given manifest in 2002 to 2005. Arguably her most popular and well received album, “Opheliac” dropped in 2006, at the very tail end of the Hot Topic Goth boom.
Madness Returns dropped four years after “Opheliac”, which marked the end of that chapter of goth’s history for me. As a result, the game felt dated. Perhaps it entered production during HTG’s initial boom in an attempt by ElectronicArts to capitalize on teenage girls’ renewed interest in ripped, striped stockings and poetry. Maybe it also ended up somehow releasing just when that particular subculture was getting to be less mainstream. Either way, because of HTG, the aesthetic of Madness Returns was of huge appeal to many of the outlets reporting on it. I remember carefully crafted layouts of deep dives on the game’s development that magazines indulged in, how interviews on G4TV would focus on the lusciously dark art style, and how every peek into the game’s development seemed hyper focused not on Alice and her journey as the heroine, but on the artwork within. Everyone wanted a piece of The Aesthetic™.
Make no mistake, Madness Returns is beautiful. Art Director Ken Wong was contacted by American McGee to join his development team Spicy Horse before production had started. Wong had drawn Alice for a fan zine called “Mercury Girl”' back in 2001, which caught McGee’s eye. It’s easy to see why he was so drawn to Wong’s work. The attention to detail his artwork houses leans morbid and visceral, a perfect complement to McGee’s roots as a level designer for 1993’s’ Doom.
Composer Jason Tai certainly had some big shoes to fill. Trent Reznor worked on the first game’s soundtrack, and while this is a completely different tone, it’s still just as catchy. Some of Madness Returns' music is iconic to me, defining the duology even more than Reznor’s soundtrack. Reznor shapes the mood and style, but Tai crafts the story with his compositions. They’re haunting, melodic, and just as likely to burrow into your brain’s crevices so that years down the line, you’ll immediately recognize the menu music.
Alice’s journey through Wonderland is narratively complex but straightforward. She is a fully realized character, fleshed out beyond the bones given to us and snappy one-liners, though I’m pleased to say they made a comeback. Her empathy for others is given center stage in Madness Returns, and it’s possibly the strongest point in the story. As Alice travels through her broken mind, she pieces together her past and discovers what the future holds for herself and the children at their sort of half-way home. It isn’t quite an asylum, but instead something like a rehabilitation center for unwell children— Alice, an adult, is there because of her extreme circumstances, to be clear.
Madness Returns is a game with a story to tell, and it sets the stage up beautifully to do so. The design, music, and style of the game seem to be perfectly held together, like seeing a play and admiring all the fixings. I do feel this is largely in part thanks to Susie Brann’s performance as Alice. While the material is engaging, it’s so easy to perform it as doldrum, hokey and uninspired. Brann indulges, adopting a snarky curiosity that is both unconventional and relatable.
At its heart, this is a game about exploitation and grooming, the abuse women and children are forced to endure, and what it does to our minds as we grow old. It is about the responsibility we, as survivors, feel towards those who are abused in the same ways we were. Themes of abuse have been a constant throughout Alice’s journey. In the first game, we see whispers of it in the ways she interacts with NPCs, in the menu screens, and in one-off comments she makes. McGee and the team he’s selected are aware of the brutalities suffered by the mentally ill then and even now by the system. While American McGee’s Alice had only painted a sheer image of it, Madness Returns is comparatively eager to join the conversation with a megaphone.
Towards the end of the game, Alice wanders into a procession in which she is derided for never speaking up about the abuse her older sister lived through, and the ultimate cause of her family’s deaths. Lizzie’s trauma became Alice’s, handed down to her through a violent loss of childhood. Now an adult, here she walks from metaphorical pew to pew on what's dubbed the Infernal Train, where she searches for forgiveness in echoes of parts of herself she's lost or buried, in the damned and forgotten. It's somber, it's heavy, and terrifyingly human. Alice, too, is a victim in this atrocity. Accountability is just as consistent a theme in this version of Wonderland. It isn’t enough that “how” is explained. The “why” must be answered for, and for every flap of a butterfly’s wing is a loss. Madness Returns is not just content with discussing the aftereffects of abuse, but it delves into discussing how we can move forward in a way that protects those of us who deserve and need that protection. It is not a shock Alice holds such contempt for herself, for her actions— as the sole survivor of the fire, she is forced to live with the memory of her family and the knowledge she will always be the sole survivor. Empathy is the blood-pulse of McGee's Alice. Her family's pain is her own, is the children's pain, is her sister's pain. There, she finds her strength and personhood, reclaiming it from those that would see her as property and little else.
Madness Returns could easily feel exploitative, but never veers into the dehumanization of the mentally ill. It is, after all, about a mentally ill woman fighting to protect the vulnerable. It’s a game about empowering Alice through exploration of herself. An exploration of her trauma, a coming of age story for The Hot Topic Goth. The game does take a long time to get towards this narrative turn, and the journey to it might not seem worth it, though.
It isn’t hard to tell this is an incomplete game that wasn’t given all the time it needed in the oven. Repetitive gameplay could be a symptom of this, and maybe the (in my opinion, merciful) lack of boss fights is, too. McGee’s own admission to EA not allowing them enough time with the game is hardly surprising; while Alice’s story will stay with me forever, I can’t say I’ll miss the combat.
I can’t deny this is my favorite game, a comfort food I come back to when I feel I need to remember that it’s possible to see media that reflects your experiences. I can’t score it well, but I can recommend it if you, too, were called a precocious child by nosy, cruel adults, and found yourself darkly inclined in your teens afterwards. It’s a game for us Hot Topic Goths.
Madness Returns dropped four years after “Opheliac”, which marked the end of that chapter of goth’s history for me. As a result, the game felt dated. Perhaps it entered production during HTG’s initial boom in an attempt by ElectronicArts to capitalize on teenage girls’ renewed interest in ripped, striped stockings and poetry. Maybe it also ended up somehow releasing just when that particular subculture was getting to be less mainstream. Either way, because of HTG, the aesthetic of Madness Returns was of huge appeal to many of the outlets reporting on it. I remember carefully crafted layouts of deep dives on the game’s development that magazines indulged in, how interviews on G4TV would focus on the lusciously dark art style, and how every peek into the game’s development seemed hyper focused not on Alice and her journey as the heroine, but on the artwork within. Everyone wanted a piece of The Aesthetic™.
Make no mistake, Madness Returns is beautiful. Art Director Ken Wong was contacted by American McGee to join his development team Spicy Horse before production had started. Wong had drawn Alice for a fan zine called “Mercury Girl”' back in 2001, which caught McGee’s eye. It’s easy to see why he was so drawn to Wong’s work. The attention to detail his artwork houses leans morbid and visceral, a perfect complement to McGee’s roots as a level designer for 1993’s’ Doom.
Composer Jason Tai certainly had some big shoes to fill. Trent Reznor worked on the first game’s soundtrack, and while this is a completely different tone, it’s still just as catchy. Some of Madness Returns' music is iconic to me, defining the duology even more than Reznor’s soundtrack. Reznor shapes the mood and style, but Tai crafts the story with his compositions. They’re haunting, melodic, and just as likely to burrow into your brain’s crevices so that years down the line, you’ll immediately recognize the menu music.
Alice’s journey through Wonderland is narratively complex but straightforward. She is a fully realized character, fleshed out beyond the bones given to us and snappy one-liners, though I’m pleased to say they made a comeback. Her empathy for others is given center stage in Madness Returns, and it’s possibly the strongest point in the story. As Alice travels through her broken mind, she pieces together her past and discovers what the future holds for herself and the children at their sort of half-way home. It isn’t quite an asylum, but instead something like a rehabilitation center for unwell children— Alice, an adult, is there because of her extreme circumstances, to be clear.
Madness Returns is a game with a story to tell, and it sets the stage up beautifully to do so. The design, music, and style of the game seem to be perfectly held together, like seeing a play and admiring all the fixings. I do feel this is largely in part thanks to Susie Brann’s performance as Alice. While the material is engaging, it’s so easy to perform it as doldrum, hokey and uninspired. Brann indulges, adopting a snarky curiosity that is both unconventional and relatable.
At its heart, this is a game about exploitation and grooming, the abuse women and children are forced to endure, and what it does to our minds as we grow old. It is about the responsibility we, as survivors, feel towards those who are abused in the same ways we were. Themes of abuse have been a constant throughout Alice’s journey. In the first game, we see whispers of it in the ways she interacts with NPCs, in the menu screens, and in one-off comments she makes. McGee and the team he’s selected are aware of the brutalities suffered by the mentally ill then and even now by the system. While American McGee’s Alice had only painted a sheer image of it, Madness Returns is comparatively eager to join the conversation with a megaphone.
Towards the end of the game, Alice wanders into a procession in which she is derided for never speaking up about the abuse her older sister lived through, and the ultimate cause of her family’s deaths. Lizzie’s trauma became Alice’s, handed down to her through a violent loss of childhood. Now an adult, here she walks from metaphorical pew to pew on what's dubbed the Infernal Train, where she searches for forgiveness in echoes of parts of herself she's lost or buried, in the damned and forgotten. It's somber, it's heavy, and terrifyingly human. Alice, too, is a victim in this atrocity. Accountability is just as consistent a theme in this version of Wonderland. It isn’t enough that “how” is explained. The “why” must be answered for, and for every flap of a butterfly’s wing is a loss. Madness Returns is not just content with discussing the aftereffects of abuse, but it delves into discussing how we can move forward in a way that protects those of us who deserve and need that protection. It is not a shock Alice holds such contempt for herself, for her actions— as the sole survivor of the fire, she is forced to live with the memory of her family and the knowledge she will always be the sole survivor. Empathy is the blood-pulse of McGee's Alice. Her family's pain is her own, is the children's pain, is her sister's pain. There, she finds her strength and personhood, reclaiming it from those that would see her as property and little else.
Madness Returns could easily feel exploitative, but never veers into the dehumanization of the mentally ill. It is, after all, about a mentally ill woman fighting to protect the vulnerable. It’s a game about empowering Alice through exploration of herself. An exploration of her trauma, a coming of age story for The Hot Topic Goth. The game does take a long time to get towards this narrative turn, and the journey to it might not seem worth it, though.
It isn’t hard to tell this is an incomplete game that wasn’t given all the time it needed in the oven. Repetitive gameplay could be a symptom of this, and maybe the (in my opinion, merciful) lack of boss fights is, too. McGee’s own admission to EA not allowing them enough time with the game is hardly surprising; while Alice’s story will stay with me forever, I can’t say I’ll miss the combat.
I can’t deny this is my favorite game, a comfort food I come back to when I feel I need to remember that it’s possible to see media that reflects your experiences. I can’t score it well, but I can recommend it if you, too, were called a precocious child by nosy, cruel adults, and found yourself darkly inclined in your teens afterwards. It’s a game for us Hot Topic Goths.