Amateur Professional

Don't plan on sleeping.

I absolutely love getting the ever-loving shit scared out of me.  Horror is one of my favorite genres, whether it be in the form of fiction, film, or television, and I’ve even been known to play a few of those survival horror games (though I did mention how the Silent Hill series broke me, if anyone’s keeping score), so when I stumbled upon a link detailing how a fan of one of my favorite collaborative horror websites was putting together a free survival horror game, I knew I had my blog post all worked out for today.  .

The Ark of the Covenant is in there somewhere I'll bet.

If you’re a horror fan and you’re not familiar with the SCP Foundation, I absolutely cannot recommend it strongly enough.  It’s collaborative horror writing at its finest; imagine the kind of internal database that a massive dangerous-creature-and-object containment facility would keep on its inmates and stored items, and the SCP website is just what you’d get.  It’s like a Warehouse 13 with 99% of the lighthearted and witty banter sucked out and replaced with the contents of the Cthulhu Mythos, and it’s pure concentrated awesome.

Don't blink.

There have been many nights I’ve spent jumping at shadows because I just chose an SCP entry at random and went right down the rabbit hole.  One of my favorites has to be SCP-173, this psychotically murderous concrete-and-rebar humanoid statue with graffiti traces on its face that can only move around if it’s unobserved (imagine the Weeping Angels episodes from Doctor Who).  173 loves to kill people, and while its enclosure is cleaned every two weeks, no less than three attendants have to quite literally take turns keeping an eye on it in order to stop it from escaping and going around snapping necks in the dark.

There’s a lot of excellent stuff like that on the SCP site.  There’s a lot of not-so-good stuff either, since submissions are open to the public, but the site is moderated and individual entries are subject to being voted either up or down, and the quality of the writing is above average overall.  It’s a fantastic project, and I only hope that it continues to grow.

Another great game for people who like to get the crap scared out of them.

In the spirit of that growth, an anonymous amateur game developer known only as “regalis11″ comes out and starts putting together a first person survival horror game that looks to give Amnesia: The Dark Descent a run for its money in filling gamers’ pants.  The game is still deep in development, but there is a playable alpha available for download, complete with a “blink meter” that runs down the longer you don’t blink.  You can trigger a blink manually by pressing the spacebar, but once the meter empties out, your character has no choice but to blink unconsciously – and if SCP-173 is too close to you when you do so… well, I hope you saved your game recently.

I’m totally going to keep my eyes on this guy.  And I’m only going to blink one eye at a time.