Don’t Go Into the Rainy Woods!

Rainy Woods is a new IP and survival-horror game headed for both the PS3 and Xbox360 from Marvelous Entertainment. The game has a Twin Peaks-David Lynch type of vibe, being set in small town USA and involving FBI agent David Young Henning’s efforts to solve the mystery of a young woman named Anna Graham by a serial murderer known as The Raincoat Killer. Of course, it’s not at all cut and dried, and there are traces of cultish rituals, supernatural creatures and other not-so-ordinary goings-on happening all around the case. Good thing David isn’t alone- at least, not in a Killer 7 type of way. He’s got a multiple personality disorder, and his other self, Jeter, seems to know quite a bit more than he does. Oh, and there are midgets. Twin midgets. Twin Peaks it is.
Instead of the usual linear path these kinds of games usually take, Rainy Woods will supposedly be a more sandbox-type of game- you’ll be able to move freely within the town of Rainy Woods and interact with various characters in the course of your investigation. You’ll also have to take care of Sims-like needs like rest and hunger. Oh, and there will be combat involving guns and apparently swords! Whoa. What kind of case has Young gotten himself into?

Trying to steal Silent Hill’s thunder? The psycho-thriller genre isn’t exactly crowded, so as long as this has quality, I’ll give it a look over. Anyway, no word yet on when, so we’ll keep an eye on this one.

Return to Silent Hill

Yet another foray into the quaint American town that just happens to be a portal to Hell is in the making with Silent Hill 5. The game is now in the hands of a US game production house, The Collective, most known for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game for Xbox (well, at least they’re experienced with scary games). Hopes are high that this latest incarnation will just be as scary and visceral as the best of the series, owing mostly to the fact that the gamemakers are big fans of the series and are taking great pains to stay true to the known themes instead of going off into totally alien directions.

The story is set still in the same SH universe, but this time starring new characters. The player will wear the boots of Alex Shepherd, a 22-year old war vet who gets a premonition that his brother, Joshua, is in danger. The game deals with Alex’s attempts to find and rescue his sibling from the clutches of Silent Hill. According to the producers in a feature in 1Up, Alex’s background as a former soldier will come into play, allowing for more interactive, deeper combat. There has been some alarm that making the hero too formidable may take away from the scares, but The Collective maintain that the previous combat systems in SH were simply awkward and unwieldy. They don’t intend to make SH5 an action game, such as Resident Evil 4. Even if your hero is a bad-ass, the game will still be all about the scares and chills rather than gross-out thrills.

Graphics of course will take advantage of the Next-Gen systems, allowing for real-time transformations of the surroundings as the ‘real’ Silent Hill transforms into the Hellish version… something pretty creepy and fascinating to see. Enemies so far revealed include the Nurses, as well as some Marionette-like attackers.

Silent Hill 5 is set to haunt PS3 and Xbox360.

Dead Air

I just saw the first teaser trailer for the upcoming survival horror game Dead Island (debuted at the GC07 in Liepzig), and I have to say I’m not impressed. The short spot first starts with text saying that all the stuff seen in the trailer is in-game, and then goes to show several nice-looking tropical island scenes. It all looks like something out of DOAX, when suddenly we cut to someone’s point of view as he/she is being attacked by a feral, zombie-like attacker.

Okay. Nothing much aside from that. Tell me that you get to control a hot bikini babe in this game who spends all her time in a swimsuit while fighting zombies, and I’m in. Otherwise, this looks so much the Resident Evil 5 wannabee, down to the native zombies. Give us more to work with, and maybe we’ll bite.

You can see the trailer here.