The Horrors of Next Fest - Gore
Gore Steam PageA 90’s camcorder walking simulator where our character is out on a hike and stumbles on to a mysterious flesh entity covering the landscape. At least that’s what the full game is going to be. This is a demo that sadly works against selling the game, but not because it’s a bad game, but because it stops short of showing the player any of the intriguing elements of the trailers and screenshots.
I’m somewhat of a sucker for weird fleshy creatures, which is a weakness I attribute to watching Akira far too young and the G-Virus’ penchant for giant eyes as an aesthetic. Gore’s trailers and screenshots presented a mixture of photorealistic environments and exaggerated, slightly cartoony, waves of flesh, eyes and skulls. Immediately that got my attention and some SSD space.
Unfortunately this is the experience of the demo:
- Move down a very long forest path seeing small blobs of flesh and hearing inhuman noises, until you reach a meadow and a big rock blocking the path. Some character commentary appears at the bottom as text some times.
- Turn around and look for a second path. If you’re lucky you’ll spot it quickly, if not you’ll wander up and down the main path a while.
- When found, move to the second path and start walking down it.
- After a minute you’ll see a flesh lump with an eye in the far distance.
- Demo immediately cuts to black, back to the title screen.
The developer has stated on the steam discussions page that they didn’t plan on releasing a demo but wanted to be a part of Next Fest, so made this teaser. I personally think it would have been better to skip the festival because this doesn’t tantalize, it simply frustrates.
I timed it and from the start to the rock, if you run without stopping to look at anything, it takes just over three and a half minutes. It feels like this takes inspiration from the forest path at the opening of Silent Hill 2, something I saw in a few demos, giving the player a gradual decent into the upcoming madness. This would be fine in a full game, it’s only a small part and giving the player some time in the beautiful environment first before corrupting it sets the scene, however in this demo it turns that time into a plodding waste because you aren’t rewarded for it.
This sucks because I think there is potential here! I still like the screenshots and trailers, I think the dev approaches the camcorder/VHS aesthetic well (though it needs an option to turn off the laggy smoothing of the camera movement and head bob) and the environments look genuinely pretty. If it turns out to have a good story and pacing, it could be a solid little weird horror experience. We’ll have to see when the full game drops at the end of the month.