The punk rock horror game is here! We take a walk through the first missions with the game's creator and its legendary audio designer. Plus, new screenshots!
Of course, this was always going to be madness. Just look at the culprits. Suda51 is the charismatic director of self-proclaimed punk rock games studio Grasshopper Manufacture; Shinji Mikami is the creator of Resident Evil, Vanquish and Viewtiful Joe. The first time these two design mavericks worked together they created Killer 7, a bizarre, visually arresting sci-fi adventure about warring assassins and multiple personality disorder. It was Metal Gear Solid on powerful hallucinogens.
Now they are back with Shadows of the Damned, a third-person horror romp described by Suda51 as, "a road trip to hell". Taking the journey is Garcia Hotspur, a tattoo-covered battler of the supernatural, who must travel into the underworld to rescue his girlfriend, Paula, from the king of the demons, Flemming. This, frankly, is the standard fare of gothic horror gaming, but from our brief hands-on demo, it's clear Grasshopper wants to take the phantasmagorical slaughter-'em-up to new heights of lurid excess. It also wants to have a bloody good laugh on the way.
The grim humour is there from the outset, characterised by Johnson, Garcia's sidekick demon ? effectively a mouthy flaming skull on a stick. He'll offer hints and wisecracks en route but he's also handy in a fight. All the demonic enemies you encounter are protected by a black energy, which must be dismissed with light before they can be killed (yes, it does sound like Alan Wake ? I can only assume it's a coincidence). Hitting the circle button swipes Johnson at your foe, lighting them up and readying them for a more powerful attack. This can be delivered with one of three weapons, the 'boner', which blasts out bone fragments, the machine gun-like 'teether', and the skull-firing monocussioner.
When the game begins, Garcia must enter the City of the Damned, a bloody adventure playground of gothic towers and Clive Barker-esque gore. Eviscerated corpses hang from walls, gurgling rivers of blood flow through fetid sewers, everything is caked in unidentifiable putrescence. It's nasty, but it is also a functioning society ? on the walls are gruesome adverts for nightmarish products and stage shows. "I wanted to create something completely new," explains Suda51. "Originally, we thought of taking images from Eastern Europe, from Romania, the Czech Republic, and we're also influenced by Dante and some traditional Japanese ideas of hell. But I wanted to create a hell where culture and life exists."
There are also several propaganda posters for Flemming hanging around the place. Although we don't see him in the demo, he is presented as part-showman, part slick politician, rather than simply a vacuous force of terror. As Suda51 explains, "I wanted the king of demons to be a sophisticated guy, not a rough, course monster."
As I explore, a giant hand erupts from the floor and sends gallons of the dark force into our area, followed by slick, tar-covered ghouls, who climb over walls to get at me through the blackness. When a zone is submerged in gloom like this, demons are invulnerable. The only way out is to shoot one of the grotesque goat-like gargoyles looming from the stone walls. Blasting the correct one with light will open a new area, so you can escape. It seems you'll also have to find certain objects to unlock specific doorways. In one puzzle section we need to find a brain and an eyeball ? one of these has to be taken to a gate which has a baby's head for a lock; shove the gloopy item into its mouth and the infant chews repulsively. Gate open.
It's only one of the weird discordant images in the game. It also turns out that, for some reason, the demons love strawberries ? except in hell, they're made of mashed human tongues. On one wall there is an advert for an appetising delicacy named Strawberry Shitcake. "The game's director, Massimo Guarini, came up with that," laughs Suda51. "He really understands our style, he us a fan. And we loved it! Some people at EA were confused at the beginning, but they've been really great ? they said, 'that's fun, let's do it.'"
In a nod (well, more of a grimace) to Resident Evil, the controls are tricky to get the hang of and require patience and skill to master. The left bumper aims your current weapon and right trigger fires, which is fine, but then each weapon can also shoot a bolt of light accessible on the right bumper. Then you've got the X button which makes Garcia spin round, which is ostensibly useful for attacking enemies who try to sneak up from behind, but there are also moments where the circle icon flashes on screen, allowing you to quickly shove Johnson in the face of any enemy attempting a rear attack. It is, in short a complex and unfamiliar array, swapping effectively between light shots and damaging bullet shots is a hellish juggling act ? especially when multiple demon men come at you. But then, this is has all the claustrophobic, button-fumbling panic of the Resi games. This is Mikami all over.
Another typical Mikami element is the boss battle. Garcia wonders into a courtyard where he finds a beautiful woman in skin tight bondage gear (very Bayonetta), performing some kind of highly gyratory dance. Turns out, she's summoning a monster, a huge blackened beast with swiping claws. It also turns out that there's a weakspot on its back, a bulging sac filled with human blood; a vital demonic power source. Pop that and it's all over.
From here, Garcia lumbers into a marketplace where he finally meets his lover, Paula ? except as she talks to him, she starts to fracture and collapse, her head exploding from her body ? ah, it's a demon in disguise, of course. As the figure reaches for the head and jams it back on to the bloody neck, Garica quips, "well, there goes my stiffy." Yep, that'll be the Grasshopper Influence coming through. When the occupying monster finally bursts out of its human trappings, Johnson, dryly notes, "demons are like men, they all want to get inside the prettiest girls." Subtle, it isn't.
Finally, we're pursued by another boss, a hulking brute with a harmonica seemingly sown into his mouth. Apparently, that has something to do with how the character died as a human. "I always try to image how the player will react, and I want them to be excited," says Suda51. "I think about what will shock them and I try to make that happen. I don't want the boss just to be a character to beat, I want a story behind the person."
There is another key influence behind the game's style ? sound designer Akira Yamaoka, famed for his terrifying work on the Silent Hill series (remember the radio crackle? That was him). And again, he has filled this game with disturbing screams, and ambient clanging effects to unsettle players. "I started thinking, why do certain audio effects have to be there?" he explains. "How necessary are the sounds when you walk, or when you enter a room? In real life you don't hear those sounds, so the first thing I did was eliminate them. Next, I asked myself, well, what is a scary sound? It could just be an uncomfortable sound. When you're waking down the street and you hear construction work going on, it's really uncomfortable and that can make you scared, especially in the dark. So I started looking for all the uncomfortable noises that surround us and then putting them together. When you do that, real-world sounds can make you very scared."
Shadows of the Damned, then, appears to be this big Grand Guignol mash-up of grandstanding design concepts. It's stylish, it's silly, but it has what appears to be a rock hard take on Resident Evil 4 at its weird heart. This is perhaps, gaming's answer to a Tarantino/Rodriguez grindcore-referencing side-project ? but a lot more entertaining and less self-indulgent. And any game that features a gateway made out of 'demon pubes' (I'm not making this up) has to be seen to be appreciated.
While I was talking to Yamaoka about the sound design of horror, I asked him about the humour aspect of this game ? did he find that it jarred with the atmosphere he set out to create with the audio? "The idea of adding humour was in there from the beginning," he smiles. "It actually makes the game more scary, used in the right way.
"There's a saying at Grasshopper: if you write on black paper with a black pen you can't see anything, but when you use a white pen everything becomes clear?"
Shadows of the Damned is out on PS3 (version played) and Xbox 360 this summer.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/apr/21/shadows-of-the-damed-preview
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