Kallio isn’t the only designer who has gotten that memo. “It makes the whole thing feel more unpredictable in a way that a $100 million, focus-tested product can never be.” “Mushy and weird graphics leave more blank space for the player to project their own ideas and fears on,” Kallio says in an interview with Vulture. Or he could take us back to the deliriousness of early 3-D when, with just a nudge of the cartridge, a console could turn evil. Sure, he could render out a precise speckle of blood and guts, spending years polishing pockmarks on rotten flesh. That’s where lead designer Ville Kallio thrives. As you venture through its queasy, minimalist, polygonal universe - rooms composed of pixelated jpeg-y viscera or blurry Funko Pop dolls - there is never a moment when the graphical fidelity convinces you you’re doing anything other than clicking things on a screen. But Cruelty Squad takes a different tack entirely. Horror games typically aim to transport the player from their computer Amnesia and Resident Evil succeed when you’re white-knuckling it right alongside the protagonist. A body sits in the driver’s seat with half its head missing as the name “Cruelty Squad,” filtered through sickly Microsoft WordArt, floats in a starless sky. A car - equally low res - looks as though it was brutally sculpted out of gummy brown 3-D-modeling presets. The title screen is bordered by gnarled pink flesh while the camera pans around a bland, untextured stretch of asphalt.
Released this year by Finnish studio Consumer Softproducts, the first-person shooter has an aesthetic that is almost impossible to describe. I had forgotten all about that formative chill until I started playing Cruelty Squad. It was as if a ghost had possessed the console, removing the guardrails that had until then pacified the AI.
But the idea of an unseen vindictive force preying on me at my most vulnerable - as I took pictures of Pokémon in a peaceful breeze - shook me to my core. I would proudly wander into media that aimed to scare me I had battled countless zombies, ghouls, and vampires in games like Castlevania and Doom throughout my youth. The derangement never happened again (as far as I know, Pokémon Snap doesn’t contain any buried terrors), but I spent the rest of the year traumatized, bracing for impact every time I returned to the N64.
PC 98 GAMES SCARY CODE
I simply didn’t attach the game to the console correctly, which corrupted the code and briefly gave the amiable Pikachu the voice of an eldritch divinity. Looking back, it’s clear what went wrong. The credits flickered onscreen, and suddenly a deep, demonic voice echoed from the forbidden pits of the sound card: “ Pikachu.” I ran out of the room, terrified of whatever hell I’d just unleashed. On one of those nights, I slapped the cartridge into the N64 and flipped on the power switch. But I didn’t know about any of those inefficiencies when I was 8 years old in 1999, deep into a summerlong love affair with Pokémon Snap. This was one of the primary reasons Nintendo lost ground to Sony’s PlayStation CD-roms were more flexible and could store more data than those fabled gray tapes.
Sound cues would go awry, characters would fold into abominable polygonal masses, and colors would bleed into one another, rendering the content totally unplayable.
PC 98 GAMES SCARY SOFTWARE
If you inserted one at the wrong angle - leaving it slightly tilted as it jutted out of the console - the software would boot up into a buggy, uncanny version of itself. The Nintendo 64 had a weird quirk with its game cartridges. Contra is Bay Route‘s legacy, and though Bay Route is ultimately overshadowed by its genuine forefather, it’s still a competent action game that does nothing special but is still a fun romp through a grim wasteland set twenty minutes into the future.Photo: Clockwise from top left: Steam, Puppet Combo, Haunted PS1, Steam Of course, if you derive from any structure, might as well make it a time-honored game with a long-standing legacy. Bay Route is perhaps a more obvious clone of Contra than Run Saber is of Strider. Oops, there I go again mentioning Contra. It’s nothing offensive but nothing as catchy as Contra‘s sound team.
PC 98 GAMES SCARY HOW TO
Sunsoft always knew how to make their late eighties releases look admirable if nothing else, but the sound design in contrast is decidedly forgettable. Its credit-feeding difficulty may not cater to everyone’s satisfaction, but it is at least a neat game to look at, with alternating bright hazy skies clashing with wasted landscapes and sterile mechanical bases. “Take Bay Route for what it is – a straightforward action-platformer where you shoot a lot of baddies – and you’ll likely have a good time.
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