Why, hello there! Perhaps you’re here for another helping of conveniently digestible reading material to peruse over your weekend cornflakes? In that case, pull up a chair and settle in as we head for darker corners. This week, Eurogamer has been celebrating the spooky season with an informal gathering of horrors, from 19th century detective yarns to truly shocking revelations (that’ll be Tom again).
But all is not lost for those of a more delicate disposition; away from Halloween, we reminisced about Command & Conquer, satisifed decades-old curiosity with Simon the Sorcerer Origins, had some chat with Final Fantasy 7 Remake director Naoki Hamaguchi, some shooty fun with Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6, plus a whole lot more. So to catch up on the highlights you might have missed over this busy week on Eurogamer, read on!
25 years ago Red Alert 2 serenaded us with the greatest opening movie of all time. We need that nonsense back
Sorry to start with something likely to bring a bit of extra creak to the bones of Eurogamer’s more mature readership, but Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 is officially 25 this year. That’s a quarter of a century since developer Westwood’s real-time strategy sequel launched to critical acclaim – “definitely the best game to date in the series” is what the mysterious “Ben” said about it when he reviewed it for us all the way back in 2000. And to celebrate Red Alert 2’s big anniversary, Eurogamer’s Alex Donaldson this week went on a journey of reminiscences, in particular raising a glass to what he called “greatest opening movie of all time”.
“A masterwork of pre-rendered full motion video storytelling,” Alex wrote, “it’s simultaneously strangely well-shot and unmistakably cheap. These were the days when C&C was proudly presented by Westwood, not EA, and so the big-splash play of getting people off Battlestar Galactica or WWE Wrestlers hadn’t emerged yet. You instead get jobbing actors, usually known for relatively thankless work on telly (RA2’s US president later played the Vice President in 24, for instance) instead undertaking equally thankless work in the realm of video games.”
Getting into the Halloween spirit? Here are the 21 best spooky, scary games to play right now
We might now officially be in November, barrelling ever more rapidly toward the dark heart of winter, but this week saw Eurogamer celebrating the final throes of October in traditionally spooky fashion. Yes, Halloween was looming, heralding an outpouring of discarded pumpkin guts and far too many sexy Pikachu costumes. And what better way to get into the spirit of things than with a good old fright or two? Eurogamer’s fairly relaxed Halloween festivities began on Monday in the time-honoured tradition of a nice long list, this one highlighting some of our very favourite horror games to play as the spirits prepared for revelry once more.
“Sure,” I wrote in my introduction, “you could switch on a movie or stick a pumpkin on your head, but neither’s quite the same as immersing yourself in a carefully crafted, deliciously malevolent digital world – lights off, sound cranked up, and a sallow face watching you unseen through the window. Which brings us to Eurogamer’s own pick for the season: 21 one of our favourite horror games; some properly scary, some just a little bit spooky, others completely different again, but all available to play on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch right now.”
As its original devs post conflicting takes on the controversial remake, I have to ask: who is Halo: Campaign Evolved for?
There was plenty of chatter following last week’s unveiling of Halo: Campaign Evolved – “a faithful yet modernised remake of Halo: Combat Evolved‘s campaign”, as Microsoft put it – not all of it positive. Campaign Evolved marks the first time Xbox’s flagship series will be available on PlayStation, but that fact took up remarkably little of the conversation. Instead, there’s been much talk of the changes it’ll bring, with some members of the original Combat Evolved team offering a thumbs-up, while others took a considerably less favourable view. Amid all this, Eurogamer’s Dom Peppiatt this week couldn’t help but wonder who Microsoft’s “ground up” remake is supposed to be for.
“Even the fathers of the series seem to be in disagreement about the need for such a remake,” Dom wrote, “and a Halo devout like myself balks at the idea of it. Are we here just for the PlayStation fans? If you ask Halo Studios community director, Brian Jarrard, he’d probably say yes: he appeared on-stage at the Halo World Championships wearing a “Halo is on PlayStation” T-shirt, after all… Maybe I’ve gotten more cynical with age, but I just cannot see a world in which this – the second remake of Halo: Combat Evolved – is going to do what Microsoft wants and reinvigorates the series that was once a standard-bearer for a whole console empire.”
Please tell me I’m not the only person who plays horror games on mute?
As Eurogamer’s informal Halloween celebrations continued this week, editor-in-chief Tom Orry made a shocking confession: his preferred method of playing horror games is to hit the mute button when things get too tough and ride an intermittent wave of silent tranquility all the way through to the end credits. Sacrilege in some quarters most certainly! But while the talented musicians and sound designers of this world continue to formulate their strongly worded rebuttals, why not see if you can find some sympathy for Tom’s predicament below?
“For, what I assume are in-built biological reasons,” he wrote, “when the soundtrack kicks in and the sound effects hit hard, the combined sensation is enough to make me lose all sense and reason. Turn off all sound and it’s like I’m not really involved any more, almost as if I’m watching myself play from outside my body. It’s a way to find some needed tranquility in the middle of a perfect storm. Cheating, yes. Do I care? No.”
30 years later, I’ve finally played a Simon the Sorcerer game – was it always this naff?
While Tom was finding creative ways to avoid flying out of his own skin this week, I was adventuring into the past. Ever since my family got its first PC back in 1993 (“It’ll be great for my schoolwork!”, I probably said) and a whole new world of gaming opened out in front of me, I’ve had a lingering – if mostly latent – fascination with cult-classic point-and-click adventure Simon the Sorcerer. But despite having vivid recollections of the series in the most abstract sense, I’ve never quite managed to give any of the games a go – until now, that is. The recent release of Simon the Sorcerer: Origins – a lavishly produced prequel – gave me the perfect excuse to right a former wrong, even if the end result wasn’t quite what teen me was expecting.
“Was Simon the Sorcerer, which enjoyed some decent acclaim back in the day, always like this?,” I pondered between the endless awkward gags and clumsy pop culture references. “Is Origins an authentic representation of the Simon the Sorcerer experience I’d have had in the 90s, if only I’d opened that box? I genuinely have no idea, and so it’s entirely possible Origins is brilliant at what it’s trying to do, and exactly the kind of thing fans have been hoping for all this time. Or maybe 30 years later with a different team at the helm, Origins just misses the mark.
The X-Files: Resist or Serve is a forgotten fright, and the type of tie-in gem we sadly don’t see anymore
Back to the spooky stuff, it was soon Connor’s turn to come over all nostalgic this week. In 2004, The X-Files was long-gone, a fading memory in the public conscience, but that didn’t stop the release of Black Ops Entertainment’s The X-Files: Resist or Serve on PlayStation 2. Not to be confused with 2008 FMV-fest The X-Files Game, Resist or Serve took the series into familiar survival horror territory, presenting players with two distinct campaigns: one telling the story from Mulder’s perspective and through Scully’s eyes. And so with the scene set, Connor began a gentle delve into a “pretty decent” corner of video gaming’s past.
“For all its flaws,” he wrote, “X-Files: Resist or Serve was a game created to both please fans and fit inside an increasingly beloved survival horror genre, before the giants of said genre decided to focus more on the action following the industry-shaking success of Resident Evil 4. Tie-in games like Resist or Serve would eventually morph into cheaper, less impactful endeavors. Goodbye The Thing and The Warriors. Hello, Man vs Wild on the Xbox 360. Hello suffering.”
After 40 hours and counting, Arc Raiders has me convinced: extraction shooters are brilliant
Brushing away the cobwebs of nostalgia and moving onto something brand-new, Connor also shared a few final thoughts on Embark Studio’s Arc Raiders, having successfully poured a good 40 hours into the third-person extraction shooter ahead of its full release this week. Connor was already pretty upbeat following some encouraging social interactions during Arc Raiders’ recent playtest, but a bunch of extra time elsewhere has more fully won him over – even if unease around its AI use lingers. Whether Arc Raiders can carry that wave of positivity through its chaotic launch and beyond remains to be seen, but for now things look good.
“Weapon boxes hidden in high towers on Buried City,” he wrote, “the chaos of the central tower on Space Port, the massive subterranean roads and hallways on Blue Gate. Every map has locations big and small, obvious and hidden, that offer valuable rewards for those who brave them. Each is also dotted with interesting environmental storytelling. The water on the East side of Dam Battlegrounds is red. Why is it red? That’s iron in the water buddy, that’s Arc in the oceans. Here’s something interesting: Blue Gate’s most dangerous looting spot is littered with the bodies of humanoid robots. Maybe these robots were a bigger part of civilised life before everything went pearshaped. Arc Raiders is rich with this stuff.”
Escape from Duckov is not what I was expecting, and it’s another reminder we’re perhaps going about this whole making games business wrong
Escape from Duckov – a newly released PvE survival RPG from developer Team Soda – has been having a moment, rising seemingly out of nowhere to recently smash passed 300K concurrent players on Steam. Sure, it might ultimately prove to be a bit of a flash in the pan given the fickle whims of fate, but Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese found his curiosity sufficiently piqued. What, he wondered, was all the fuss was about? It couldn’t just be the ducks, surely? And while Duckov wasn’t what he was expecting, it did foster some larger thoughts about the recent indie hits shooting up the charts, leaving bigger publishers with bigger budgets in the dust.
“These are small projects that are trouncing, and perhaps embarrassing much larger ones,” Bertie wrote, “on an infinitesimally smaller budget. Games, really, they have no business stepping into the ring with. And yet they do, and yet they win. It’s remarkable. Successes like Duckov and Megabonk pierce this insistently gloomy cloud that hangs above us in this industry, lancing it like sunbeams, and demonstrate that incredible success is still out there, still possible.”
The big Final Fantasy 7 interview: How the Remake Trilogy director plans to iterate ahead of Part Three, despite having ‘almost no original documentation’
Final Fantasy 7 is pretty much video game royalty, for many a highpoint even among countless classics the medium has birthed before and since. Daring to remake such a beloved game might seem like folly, but – against all the odds – Square Enix veteran and remake director Naoki Hamaguchi appears to be succeeding. 2020’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake – the first part of a plan to expand the original game’s story into a trilogy – was well-received, as was last year’s follow up Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. But now comes the daunting task of wrapping things up, and Eurogamer’s Alex Donaldson this week spoke with Hamaguchi about the first two games, his work on the upcoming conclusion, and what might come next.
“After two games it’s fair to say that Square Enix has been remarkably successful in their approach to reinventing a classic,” Alex wrote. “The man at the tip of the spear of that remarkable operation is Naoki Hamaguchi. Hamaguchi is a Square Enix veteran, his first credit 2006’s Final Fantasy 12 – but at the same time his rise from programming roles to overseeing the direction of the entire Remake trilogy is as explosive as the success of the original FF7 itself… He’s clearly laser-focused on getting results – but not by necessarily taking the easy path, as evidenced in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth undertaking a structural overhaul compared to its predecessor – and with the final part, he intends to surprise again.”
“There’s no shortcut to making great games” – Embark Studios CCO responds to, and defends, AI use in Arc Raiders
Remember Connor’s lingering unease about Arc Raiders’ AI use? As the week went on, he decided to dig deeper, speaking with Embark Studios’ chief commercial officer Stefan Strandberg to understand things from the company’s perspective. While Strandberg is keen to stress Arc Raiders doesn’t make use of generative AI – which remains highly controversial – he’s bullish about the team’s continuing use of “emergent technologies” elsewhere, insisting the AI tools it does use are always deployed within the “context of creativity”.
“Proud Strandberg may be,” Connor wrote, “but a large question remains. Where does the human element of Embark end and AI-assisted development begin? Is this a line fixed in place, or will it shift further towards automation in the future? What can be said to those concerned about a steady displacement of human talent? To this, Strandberg emphasises that despite Embark’s desire to embrace new technologies, such tools are not a replacement for developers.”
Battlefield 6’s Redsec battle royale makes me miss peak PUBG
Following its hugely successful launch earlier this month, Battlefield 6 (re-)joined the battle royale party this week with Redsec, a perfectly cromulent – as Eurogamer’s Chris Tapsell put it – but somewhat safe and self-defeating entry into the scene. Battle royales are inherently thrilling things, but Battlefield 6’s Redsec makes the same mistake as many of its modern peers: it adds and adds to the formula, Chris reckoned, “without thinking to stop and occasionally take away.”
“The modern battle royale,” he wrote, “a lot like the modern video game at large, is over-cluttered, overencumbered with activities, incentives, mechanics, systems, rewards. Part of that is down to its nature as one of the original ‘hangout’ games, where players spent ever longer hours together simply chatting, catching up after school. But that also means its magpie nature has overwhelmed it in a way; we’ve kept adding and adding, without thinking to stop and occasionally take away. What you lose, from all that addition, is the purity of a genre that was originally, and I feel should always be, about the extraordinary tension of survival against the odds, the shift from prey to predator and prey again, the genius simplicity of its design. This genre is about life or death, after all. You can’t make that more exciting.”
Final Sentence is proof that there’s no greater horror than typing under pressure
Now back to the spooky stuff. Eurogamer’s Kelsey Ryanor continued our delve into the spookier side of gaming this week by braving the demo for developer Button Mash’s still-in–the-works Final Sentence. Typing and horror aren’t exactly strange bedfellows at this point – you can thank House of the Dead’s dexterity-testing spin-off The Typing of the Dead for that – but Final Sentence flings in some added dread with a battle royale mechanic (and a bit of Russian roulette) that creates surprising tension out of the familiar act of hitting the right keys. But don’t take my word for it; here’s Kelsey to explain more.
“Final Sentence is a competitive typing game with a twist,” Kelsey wrote, “there’s a guard holding an empty gun to your head… The solution is simple, right? Just don’t make any errors when typing and you’ll quickly win, destining other players to a gory ending. Should be no problem for a typist such as myself! Well, I installed Final Sentence thinking it would be a ten-minute romp with my friend. I’d beat him – as I’ve done before in other typing games – and we’d then continue with our evenings, but that didn’t quite happen.”
The Séance of Blake Manor is shaping up to be one of my favourite games this year, and a brilliant Halloween treat for detective fans
Me again with our last bit of spookiness for this year’s unofficial Eurogamer Halloween celebrations. It’s a good ‘un, though! The Séance of Blake Manor, from the brilliantly named Spooky Doorway, transports players to a remote, rain-lashed corner of Connemara, west Ireland, in 1879. A young woman has gone missing in the titular hotel and you, as private investigator Declan Ward, have been hired to find her. Only, the hotel is packed with unusual guests – spiritualists, mentalists, naysayers, and more – awaiting the All Hallows’ Eve Grand Seance in three days’ time, each of them harbouring their own secrets. So begins an enormously satisfying supernatural detective adventure – and if you read on, I’ll tell you more.
“Before long,” I wrote, “your notes are a thrilling tangle of possibilities. Who owns the bible wishing death upon practitioners of the supernatural? Why does a guest have enough poison in their room to kill a person and then some? Mysteries beget mysteries beget mysteries, branching outward in countless compelling new directions, and often leading to startling revelations. You’ll explore, you’ll converse, you’ll unearth yet more avenues for investigation in the library, all in pursuit of the truth. And if the petty grudges and murderous schemes of the mundane world aren’t enough to be getting on with, the supernatural realm seems increasingly keen to assert itself, filling your restless nights with visions of dark histories and ancient runes.”
