It is often said that the fear of the unknown is the strongest fear, and it’s something that is particularly true in horror games. In Slender, looking at the titular monstrosity, studying it in even the most primitive way, will kill you. You are forced to into a state of ignorance because the developers know it’s scarier for the player to not know exactly what is pursuing them. A sense of understanding can ruin the fragile atmosphere of horror. Hellsign, an Early Access game on Steam, is on a mission to balance that sense of fear while also letting you play as a investigative, paranormal hunter.
In Hellsign, your mission is to explore haunted locations, finding clues to the source of the supernatural presence before tooling up and eradicating the entity. Rather than keeping the players in the dark, Hellsign has them fighting with knowledge. Knowing what you are up against gives you all kinds of bonuses, including knowing what weapons and equipment they are particularly weak to and how they behave.
Pete Skyking, the game’s technical director, explained that Hellsign is first and foremost “an action RPG, rather than a pure horror game,” but that doesn’t make Hellsign any less scary.
Hellsign Preview – Something Wicked This Way Comes
The gameplay is divided into two sections: the investigation and the hunt. Players have to explore the location, thoroughly searching abandoned buildings and murder scenes. And Hellsign keeps its unnerving tone is during these moments. Skyking described a bit of how these situations can create tension.
“During the investigation, the poltergeist can mess with your gadgets and sight, often at the most awkward of times,” he said.
These aspects make the game incredibly uneasy, which I saw during my demo. Hellsign is already claustrophobic and dark, with deep secretive shadows painting every corner. The only light source is whatever you’re holding at the time, which is normally a directional torch. A blacklight is another tool used during the investigation, which can flicker or shut off, leaving you alone in a dark and unwelcoming environment.
Hellsign Preview – Who Turned Out the Lights?
Using any tool also means you aren’t holding your weapon too. Because it’s more than just the ghost you have to worry about. Hellsign‘s supernatural Australia also has deadly critters to fend off as well, such as giant spiders and centipedes.
Randomly generated levels also ensure that the layout of the buildings will always be different. You’ll have to learn your way while you’re on your investigation because there’s no map to help you. This, along with the different levels, makes the game feel alien. Corridors stretch just a little too long too, meaning rooms that shouldn’t fit together sit side by side. It’s a tiny bit unnerving, but when you’re already wandering through the darkness, it adds a little bit more to your unease.
Hellsign Preview – Pick a Door, Any Door
This also means that the maps are more open. On one hand, it means that the players can explore the building in whatever order they want. On the other hand, it means that the players don’t know exactly where and when they will encounter anything. Linear horror games can also be filled with frights, but these encounters can sometimes be telegraphed by eagle-eyed players.
The sound design might be the most important aspect of the game for creating its atmosphere. Skyking says that they don’t have “warning crescendos,” but it is extremely effective. Hellsign has no real music. But for the most part, the game sounds are seemingly mundane: the slightly unnerving noise of a house settling, the patter of rain like fingertips on the windows, or maybe even a wayward dog barking out in the darkness.
Other times it’ll hit you like a car crash as a discordant shriek of violins as some critter or another crawls from the dark corner of the strange house. But the silence can be unbroken too. Ghostly apparitions manifest behind you, only to fade away the second you turn around. But the game doesn’t acknowledge the sudden appearance, which puts you even more on edge. It can almost feel like that thing you’re hunting is acting outside of it programming, which truly starts to haunt you.
Hellsign walks a strange path. Inspired by shows like Supernatural, you would expect to be a slayer of monsters, with your foes more scared of you than you are of them. But that’s far from the game’s goal. Hellsign uses a thousand tiny pieces working in tandem to unnerve you over the course of its runtime, which I felt during my demo. It draws upon little aspects of fear to create a situation in which you are never truly safe or in control. Even if you know what you’re facing, there’s still so much in Hellsign that you can never fully grasp and that makes it terrifying. And hopefully those scares will be even better once the game fully releases.
