Schlagwort: those who remain

Those Who Remain is a psychological thriller that appeals to the primal fear of the dark.
It’s an emotional journey through a broken man’s mind and a town shrouded in darkness, that’ll have the player question his beliefs and hopefully achieve a good ending.

Talking about journeys, it’s been a long one for us, our three-man development team. We started this project more than three years ago, and one of our clear aims was to do something different, by creating a game that could bring something new to the horror genre. To say we are excited to have the game release today, on PlayStation 4, would be a massive understatement. 

When we set out, one of our important goals was to create a scary game without resorting to jump scares. I don’t have anything against jump scares per se, but I feel that it is an overused trick, both in videogames and movies.

A jump scare only lasts for a moment. A frightening experience cannot be built around isolated moments, especially when the player is expecting something to happen when he opens a door or turns around a corner. After a while, it gets predictive, loses its impact, and for me, it gets annoying.

With Those Who Remain, we set out to create an environment that would be tense and oppressive, that could be scary in itself. The main premise of the game is that the player cannot go into the dark. There are strange shadowy figures roaming in the darkness, who will kill whoever gets close. Light is the only thing that scares them away.

Everywhere that it is dark, the shadow figures are there. And with the action taking place in a town shrouded by darkness… there are a whole bunch of them around.

This means that the player is always surrounded by them, constantly being watched, their gaze always following.

And while light provides an apparent safety, one knows that all it takes is for a lightbulb to fail…

As the player gets used to this, we introduce new creatures and mechanics. Previous rules will be shattered, forcing the player to adapt and rethink their strategies.

We don’t need to show severed heads to enact fear. We just need to stimulate the right emotions. Gore can have more shock value, but we believe it is the  psychological that can have a longer effect.

Mix fear of the unknown, fear of the dark and fear our own human emotions (the character’s) and you’ll get Those Who Remain.

That is not to say that we do not have monsters or sequences where the player has to hide. We do, but that is not the basis of the game.

Oh, and did I mention unknown?

This town has a connection to the ‘other place’, an alternate reality that looks like a twisted version of our world. Just like a mirror, both realities are connected. What happens in one place affects the other.

The shadow figures do not exist in the ‘other place’, but there are other dangers there, and the rules are different when you cross over.

We didn’t just want to have a scary setting, though. We wanted to tell a meaningful story, in a way that we could address sensitive subjects that we feel that should be talked about more openly in society, like bullying and suicide.

The characters support the story. We do not have good and evil characters. We have people who made a few bad choices or actions. But something led them to that. No one in Dormont is evil just because the narrative needs that person to be evil. Even the villain is not completely evil. His actions are debatable too. We would love to hear your opinion after playing the game.

Even though this is an original story, you’ll probably get some familiar vibes while exploring Dormont.

The setting is heavily inspired by Twin Peaks and Stranger Things – while not exactly horror, both feature that kind of small American town with dark secrets that we wanted to have here.

We are huge horror geeks, and we placed a few references and Easter eggs throughout the game. We had a lot of fun placing them — we hope you will have fun finding them.

Most of all, we hope you enjoy your trip through Dormont.

Remember that some things are not what they seem, and that every action has a consequence.
It is up to you to decide if Edward has a good ending, or not.

We are incredibly excited to open the doors to Dormont and let you in.

Oh, don’t forget to leave a light on.

Website: LINK

Hello folks! I’m Ricardo Cesteiro, co-founder and producer at Camel 101. Some of you may recall hearing from me back in 2018 when I wrote my first blog post here, announcing Those Who Remain. Back then, our intention was to release the game later that year, but the complexity of the project grew and grew, as did our ambitions as we committed to making the game better, and better still.

Today, I bring much exciting news! as it is with great excitement that I can finally share with you all that the game will release on May 15 — what’s more, I can also reveal that there will be a retail-exclusive Deluxe Edition that will include a digital download of the beautifully illustrated comic prequel story, ‘Those Who Remain: Lights Out.’

So, to recap, what exactly is Those Who Remain?

We like to call it a first-person ‘psychological adventure-thriller.’ It’s tense, unnerving, and it certainly gets scary sometimes, but we wouldn’t necessarily consider it a typical horror game. That’s not what we set out to do.

The purpose is not to scare the player, per se — we don’t use formulaic jump scares as a driving design principle. We feel that a strong and foreboding atmosphere and an ominous environment can be more powerful — and much more fear-inducing — in the long run, than a random screaming person appearing in front of the screen suddenly, for example. We hope you get a sense of that from the trailer, which we’re showing you here today exclusively.

In the trailer we show Edward arriving in Dormont, as he contemplates his life and the mistakes he’s made. This is one of the major themes within the game: actions and consequences. The things that we do in life and how our decisions affect other people. Players will have to make their own choices in the game too — which have consequences.

The game has two key defining mechanics: one is that the player can’t go into the dark. There are mysterious shadow figures there that will attack and kill on sight, meaning you’ll need to manipulate light sources in order to clear a path and scare them away.

The other is that the player needs to travel through “the other place,” a mirror dimension that’s almost a twisted version of our own reality. What happens in one dimension affects the other, so the player might need to move through dimensions to solve a specific puzzle or situation to progress.

There are also several situations where the player needs to make moral choices that will affect the ending. This is a game about choices and consequences, and we want the player to feel the weight of their actions.

One of the things that we enjoyed the most about working on this game was creating the story, the characters, the town, and all its surrounding environments. We believe that we’ve crafted a rich universe, and that’s part of the reason we decided to expand it to other media via the comic, which explores events that happened in Dormont when everything went dark.

This is a very satisfying project to work on, as it has allowed us to explore human emotions and relationships as the game delves deep into the human psyche. We could have made a ghost story, or a haunted house story (many a fine game has been based on), but we set out to make something a little different, while addressing sensitive topics like bullying, infidelity and suicide. These things unfortunately happen and they’re a part of our lives, and videogames are a perfect vehicle to talk about them.

Being horror and “weirdness” junkies ourselves, we drew inspiration from many different sources and media when creating Those Who Remain, and especially from supernatural movies and TV shows.

For example, Dormont could easily be compared to Twin Peaks, a small beautiful town where everything seems calm and peaceful, while hiding deep dark secrets underneath.

The shadow figures that roam in the dark could have easily stepped out of a Stephen King novel, and the “other place” — the twisted reality that can be accessed by entering strange glowing portals… well, we’ll let you figure that one out on your own from May 15, when you’ll get to delve deep into the twisted reality of Dormont and discover its many underlying secrets…

Website: LINK