After working on a game for six years, you start to forget why you even started it...
The hardest part is watching other games blow up and thinking: Why are we spending years on a narrative game when we could pivot to a smaller, mechanics-driven design and gain traction a lot faster?
Yet, we always come back to the same conclusion.
Why did we stick with it?
Because our core inspiration has never been following gaming trends. We've always been determined to expand and contribute to the history of horror itself.
It was our passion for the ancient, weird, and obscure side of the horror genre that kept us determined to finish this project.
We did a deep dive into the history of dark psychological literature - reading books dating back as far as 1794, and found that popular horror titles like Silent Hill 2 and Amnesia the Dark Descent often borrow from a genre of literature called The Gothic. The experience of reading gothic novels has been deeply moving. They've inspired us to invoke psychological terror in a way that has yet to be fully expressed in games.
What is "The Gothic"?
The Gothic: storytelling defined by psychological tension and the exploration of the uncanny or forbidden. It often deals with decaying settings, inner turmoil, and the supernatural. It also explores extreme mental states like paranoia, guilt, obsession and hallucination. Among our favorites are the novels listed above like The Devil's Elixir and Mysteries of Udolpho which strike a resemblance to the worlds of Silent Hill and Haunting Ground.
Most horror games are influenced by the works of Guillermo del Toro and Stanley Kubrick. We went further back—straight to the overlooked literature that inspired these filmmakers—and have created an exciting new vision of what horror can look like in video game form.
Language Update
We're happy to announce that Traditional Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Polish, Italian have been added to the demo.
In researching localization options, we were excited to find Taiwanese, Indonesian, and Vietnamese audiences are enjoying horror game content that has strong overlap with the themes and tone of Alter Evo. We love games like Suffocating and Junji Ito Maniac: An Infinite Gaol coming out of Taiwan, and found an amazing Taiwanese translator who was genuinely thrilled to join the project. We're so excited to bring our game to these like-minded audiences.
Game Update
Lastly, our levels have received optimization and baked lighting improvements which can be seen in our new level fly through video:
In the next post - we'll be writing a bit about the Sci-Fi side of Alter Evo, and the various books that helped inspire it. Please follow our Steam page and checkout the demo:
If you are curious what the demo is like, here is a video showing the first 3 minutes of game play - gun + melee combat and some narrative:
Sincerely,
Technical Fiction