A number of games, particularly indie titles, have taken inspiration from the experience P.T. (AKA “Playable Teaser”) first offered on PS4 back in 2014 before publisher Konami cancelled the project back in 2015. Developer, Caustic Reality, recently launched a demo for their upcoming horror game, Infliction, that continues this now three-year long wake for Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro’s aborted take on the Silent Hill series. The demo is a short jaunt through a gloomy haunted house that can be finished in about 10-20 minutes.
The demo puts the player in control of an unknown man who wakes up in a pool of blood on a bedroom floor. Throughout the house are scattered horror movies, boxes for prescription painkillers and sleep aids, and scraps of photos and notes that suggest at the tragic death of the homeowners’ child and the rift in their marriage that formed afterwards. It’s likely that the husband, Gary, is the character being controlled in the demo, but there’s enough ambiguity to entertain other possibilities. An ominous series of chains and padlocks bars the door to the basement, but what might lurk inside is for you to discover on your own.
The atmosphere created by the visual design and sound work is solid for an indie game. The voice acting is a little more mixed in quality, though, as the emotions are occasionally too flat and don’t match the content of the dialogue. The lighting and shadows blend nicely, and most of the audio effects are subtle or used sparingly to heighten suspenseful moments. Most of the supernatural gameplay moments are handled with admirable restraint, foregoing loud jump scares or spooky faces popping up on the screen. That’s not to say the demo doesn’t eventually submit to the cliches of its genre and go for the cheap scare, but the overall experience avoids cashing in on lazy tricks.
In the spirit of P.T., Infliction’s demo features an environment that changes subtly or dramatically at times depending on how much the player investigates certain areas or ends up backtracking. It also has a lesser degree of P.T.’s obscurity. You can end up walking around the small section of the house featured in the demo for several minutes without much clue as to what you need to do to proceed. In such a case, the solution will end up being that you didn’t stand in just the right spot and/or look closely enough at something to trigger the solution to the puzzle you didn’t know you were trying to solve.
P.T. was built around this obfuscated approach to exploration and puzzles, but also offered several transitions and changing elements for intrigued players to interact with. There was enough going on to distract from the periods of uncertainty and confusion until the player had a moment of insight. Infliction’s demo features far fewer of these transitions, but shares the risk of players eventually dismissing the game out of annoyance or boredom at a lack of progress. The best puzzles make players feel clever and rewarded for solving them, but even good puzzles can be dissatisfying if the answers are concealed in unintended ways that mislead the player.
It’s difficult to say how Infliction will play out as a full game this October. Caustic Reality advertises that the final game features an AI enemy that stalks the player, perhaps similarly to the enemies found in Alien: Isolation or Monstrum. Some suggestion of this exists in the demo, but what is demonstrated doesn’t represent an AI actively hunting the player so much as showing up for a scripted encounter. There’s also the promise of two difficulties: one that will “occasionally point you in the right direction” and a “hardcore mode” that leaves players to figure things out alone. It’s unclear if the demo is considered hardcore or not, but if Caustic Reality can keep building on the stronger elements featured in their demo, Infliction may turn out to be a surprise hit this October.
Here is the Infliction Trailer:
You can help support Infliction on Kickstarter as well as play the demo on Steam.
I've been gaming for 22 years, ever since my mom picked up a secondhand NES, and I've played on just about every gaming platform out there since. I think video games are one of most innovative and artistic mediums in the world today, and I'm always curious how developers will surprise me next.
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