Original subtitles

So, indie horror. I'm terribly jealous of indie horror.

Because the horror games that I've worked on were kind of more, you know,

bigger budget with a bigger publisher. And it was kind of the traditional publisher developer model.

And what that does is that makes you take way less risks,

in when you do those types of games and you have those kind of budgets and team sizes,

"Just trying to be helpful son."

I once had a publisher tell me it's very important that a game has a 90 plus Metacritic, right?

That's how we judge success. And he said the way that you get a 90 plus Metacritic

is not by making the best game. He was like, you just have to make something that doesn't upset anybody.

So they were like, the way that this works and the way that like an Ubisoft

game works is we're going to have tons of stuff in it, so there's something for everyone,

and none of these individual mechanics or pieces need to be the best.

We just need to make sure that none of them offend someone, that there's not any design decisions made

that they're going to piss someone off or surprise people, or be confusing to people.

You only find the cool, weird shit at the indie level, you know,

because that's the kind of stuff that we can do because nobody's telling us what to do

and we could do what we want.

If it fails, shit. And if it succeeds, well, it wasn't going to succeed any other way.

And I think that's great personally, because there are so many cool projects

that never would have made it into the public eye if there were barriers in the way.

I think that the rise of indies happened because there were several indie successes

for people to look at and go, I can do that too, you know? Or I want to do that.

When you look at, say, early shareware, shareware games,

one person made that game, obviously, or a very small team made that game,

and it was almost like a, you know, David and Goliath situation

where Id Software with just four people.

You know, we're making games that made the industry respond to what we were doing,

and they had to adopt the practices that we were doing to basically stay relevant.

And in 2009, Minecraft, made by one person basically changes the world.

Everybody's playing it. Everyone's talking about it.

And it really showed, like what you could do. That game made billions of dollars.

You know like what indie doesn't, doesn't see that and go I need to do that.

"This will be my greatest test of faith yet."

It took a long time for people to realize they could make money with their little silly video games.

You know, back in the day, a lot of games that you see on Itch now that people

charge money for, they would have made for free on Newgrounds

The flash game scene was really defined by its short

and snappy interactive experiences that were just fun to play.

I wasn't as big into it as I think a lot of other people my age were,

but the one that I remember vividly is that stupid scary maze game.

So you're using your cursor to navigate through this maze,

and if you touch the edges, you lose.

The maze starts to get really, really tiny, so you're just inching your cursor along.

It's just such a cheeky way of setting that up.

We also had this really cool game called Found Lost. It was very much prototypical

of the genre at the time where, you know,

it's just a point and click adventure almost through this spooky house.

Found Lost, I think that it was emailed across to me from a friend of mine.

"Hey, check this game out!"

What really resonated with me was how it was based on a real world painting.

That was presumably haunted. It gave a sense of attachment to the real world.

I thought it was amazing.

With the flash scene, there was this huge community that was super invested in all of these games

that they're seeing come out online.

You know, you're living in an age of Netscape and GeoCities and, the dancing baby.

But to be able to interact and be able to play a game online,

that was a really, really big thing, and it opened my eyes up to a new way

of getting my content out there.

We could get these sponsorships, and that was huge at the time.

I mean, that was the first real available money, when people like Adult Swim came forward or Kongregate.

So that was absolutely huge for indies. That was the money that enabled

people like me to make our dream projects.

When I set out to build Exmortis,

I wanted to build it as a really big homage to the Evil Dead series.

Exmortis was really interesting because it was kind of this diversion from

what we were used to expecting from a flash game.

The graphics were a lot more gritty. The story was way darker,

and it was really impressive with how it dealt with ambience in terms of sound and music.

And it was a bit of a slow burn, you know, you go from room to room,

you discover clues, unfurl the story. But it was it was all a very slow pace.

"You have served us well up until this point."

And then if you choose to run, it was frantic.

And it really takes this sinister turn, and the game play really ramps up for a flash game.

I wanted this, this massive entity sort of trying to chase you through

the tunnels at the end. But then I thought, okay,

what if we looped this around? What if at the beginning of the game

you wake up, you don't know where you are.

You see a house in the distance, you decide to explore.

What if I bring the player back around to that?

To then raise the question. How long have I been doing this for?

Exmortis was so popular because it was unique. It was special.

And I think you weren't expecting to find something of that caliber

when you logged on to play some flash games online.

You know, you're used to seeing this campy, cartoony approach.

So finding Exmortis, it was like you'd found a goldmine.

The second game was a result of the hyper popularity

of how that first game hit.

I wanted to continue the story, but I wanted to put more of a sort of epic,

journey kind of vibe to it.

"I'm afraid mankind's fate rests on your next course of action"

But the difference here is that the storytelling ran so much deeper and was actually far more brutal.

In this one, we're told that, you know, children have been the victims of the Exmortis.

There's actually a scene where you walk into a bedroom

and you're confronted with the corpses of two children on the bed.

Going into the second game, I knew that I wanted to tell the tale

of the central protagonists, as well as all the lives of people

that they would have experienced during this apocalyptic event.

Around that time period, I was really big into the whole, ghost hunting

kind of shows that started sort of making their way onto cable television.

I ended up taking a few photos while I was out at the Manly quarantine station,

which has multiple ghosts, apparently,

"Get out."

I wanted to create that connection to the real world,

much like Found Lost ended up doing with that painting.

The thing that kicked off for indies, I think, was 3D engines.

When you have like a still image, it's not as effective.

There's something that happens when you can move around.

And one thing that I found out myself when doing Unbirth

was that the first person view is very cheap.

I can just stick a camera in the world and I can add some fog, add

some walls and add some spooky music and I have a horror game.

Oh. Amnesia was probably the first one that I'd say was like,

small budget, small team. Scary as hell.

"Don't forget. Some things mustn't be forgotten."

"The shadow hunting me. I must hurry."

That's a staple for anyone wanting to get into indie,

for wanting to understand. Kind of, the evolution of the craft, I suppose.

It started out as taking movies like Saw and Hostel,

using those in a sort of Mario-like game thing, which sounds insane, and was, it didn't work.

And then the publisher had to pull out of the contract, so we had no influx of money.

We had a lot of assets for it, but the game play didn't work.

That Super Mario meets horror game was not a good concept at all.

And, we were like, okay, what do we do? What do we do?

But then all of a sudden we got an influx of money,

there was actually a steam sale on Penumbra.

The Penumbra series is the first game we made as a studio,

and it takes place in an abandoned mine in Greenland, of all places.

And in there you use, various tools, solve puzzles, and encounter various monsters.

I think this was like the second or third steam sale that we were a part of, and I didn't know

there were a good thing at all, but it turns out we got a lot of money from that

it was like, oh, what do we do? And then the thing was, okay, let's make Penumbra. But better.

"I have tried everything, and there is no way to fight back."

"You need to escape it as long as you can."

The game was all about powerlessness and vulnerability, which I really appreciated.

This feeling of helplessness. This feeling of confronting something much bigger

and grander than you can perceive.

There was one point where I just, I went into a room, and one of those weird mouth

monster things was in there with its back toward me,

and it, like, turned around.

And I literally jumped up out of my seat

and, like, slammed the pause button

and was kind of done playing for a few days.

I know that the like, creatures in the game turned into like a meme after a while,

but when I first saw them, they were so disturbing to me.

You know, I had that, "Oh my God, what the hell is that" moment. You know?

Amnesia works very well because it is a very slow build.

You know, you don't see anything for a good portion of the game, but, you know,

you're reading things, you're learning about it.

You're building these little horror stories in your head.

And then when you do see it, you know, you get fleeting glances. And it does. It really teases you.

It kind of makes your your hair stand on end

and, like, oppressive is a great way to describe it because it's really,

you know, it's making you like this, a rat in a maze.

There's these key mechanics of hiding and avoiding the creatures,

and then the sanity meter.

The idea that the game actually morphs and changes depending on how much your character

is losing their mind.

The first thing that comes to mind is how do we gamify sanity?

How do we reward a player for doing this?

There was this movement called "The Not Games Movement",

and they were making these experimental games, and they were really going against the sort of tide

on, games shouldn't have a score, games shouldn't have a goal.

And you know all those things, so they were really against it.

And I was really taken in by this. This is, I found this very interesting.

And then the idea came, okay, what if

the whole idea behind the sanity system is just that it's, it's a magic trick?

There is nothing dangerous about it, but the game never says that it is okay.

We could put more and more focus on just being immersed.

There were less things to worry about, and when there's less things to worry

about for the player in the game, they worry more.

To me, Amnesia was actually, I would say, almost like a new genre.

I think it did birth a new genre, "escape horror"?

I mean, it, it has its roots in Glock Tower. I suppose ultimately it kind of rebirthed

that if you like but made it the modern version that we know.

You know, it's obviously spawned sequels.

I feel like Amnesia was probably like it opened doors

in some way because it told developers, you can make these smaller horror games.

Amnesia The Dark Descent really put me in a place that I'd never been before.

At the end, I was like, okay, those guys have something.

They're really good.

Okay, let's let's do it. Also, make it, because it really inspired

us trying to make Outlast that was something that they really

give me the guts to, to start, start my own game.

With Outlast, the fact that you couldn't fight back.

The fact that you're hiding, cowering under beds.

You know you're just, that, feeling that you know you, you are powerless.

It taps into that. You know, that sense where you wake up in the middle of the night,

you think the kind of thing hanging over the door is a figure, you know, it really taps into that.

You know, the first Half-Life was a big influence.

Being stuck somewhere and trying to, make your way out. We wanted something effective yet simple.

And that we could do with a very small team.

Creating that asylum was a solution to all that.

There is something about having the camera on you that enhances the experience.

And part of it is that the graphics gets worse, so it's harder to see.

But it's also something about the Ul and realism to found footage.

It has to be the similar thing why found footage horror movies are so popular.

Oh Outlast is Terrible! In all the good ways.

I mean, it's truly horiffic. I mean, they really took the horror game genre

genre and like, twisted the nipples of horror games.

Even with the necrophiliac,

The reason why he's there is because we're looking for something,

that would make the players say,

well, they're willing to do that in the game, then anything can happen.

So they just become a lot more stressed about the rest of the game.

I remember when we went to Pax East the first time,

and we started hearing the screams of the players and just seeing their faces

when they came out of the booth after playing the demo was so satisfactory.

People like jumping out and then smashing the walls of the of our booths.

It was like those moments where, we're like, okay, we're doing something good there.

So that's that's where we're like, "okay maybe that's too intense".

But, it never stopped us, It was like, "okay, that's what I want to do."

Something so frickin intense so that I can be like, "I did that."

With an indie company, we're not necessarily looking for to reach the widest audience possible.

We're okay with with having a niche and pleasing that niche.

"And the nominees for the Fans Choice Award are:"

So I think we prefer to have a game with a very strong identity than trying to dilute it,

"Outlast!"

To gain additional markets.

"And the winner of the Fans Choice Award for 2013, Outlast!"

"We like to thank, this is a great team. The best team of 12 people. Thank you."

When Outlast and Amnesia came out, that's when you really saw the explosion

of indie horror games. Lone Survivor, for example, is an incredible

indie horror game that I think people took a chance on

because they saw what a smaller team could do with, like Outlast and Amnesia

What's amazing with Lone Survivor is how with pixel art,

they can still create a very immersive experience and atmosphere, that really...

Sucks you right in.

One thing I really liked about the early Silent Hill

was their low-res texture, in that you couldn't really understand

what the monsters were in the fog. They just popped out pixel by pixel.

You have to use your imagination a lot, and Lone Survivor uses that with chunky pixels, but,

in a sort of platform, so you see some sort of shape moving in.

You're unsure what it is. So it's utilized that really, really well I think.

For the majority of the game, our survivor is

Just like walking left to right in these hallways in his apartment building.

And we're learning as we go, okay, maybe things aren't exactly as they seem.

I would say even more than the isolation element in Lone Survivor.

I think grief is probably one of the main themes. You know, it kind of comes through

through the character remembering this person

who they've lost sort of thing.

My dad had died of cancer at that time, so it was just processing that.

It was how that can, you know, or trauma or something can make you retire

into yourself more.

I think there's an element of hope there as well.

You're at your rock bottom at one point and you get to the basement and it's

a horrific part of the game.

But then there's this cut scene where you're whisked off to like a dreamy environment that's very calming.

It's a happy memory sort of thing of a character.

It's almost more frightening when you have hope, right?

In the game, both parts are made more effective by that, the contrast.

"Lone Survivor is only about 3 or 4 hours long,"

"but it's an emotional experience that leaves you with plenty of questions"

"to ponder once you've finished."

It's, it's still phenomenal to me that I'm living off it.

You know, 12 years later, and I haven't released another game yet.

But you know, that, and my music sort of keeps me going still. So...

I feel like, in a way, I lined up somehow with the zeitgeist

in with the first release, just by pure luck and, you know, you can't

you can't aim to catch the zeitgeist, you just do or you don't,

you know, it's just one of those things. It's, it's luck.

I remember when we released the very first trailer of Qulast one,

and we kept reading the the comments and kept seeing the name of PewDiePie.

And we were like, who the fuck is this guy? Why is everybody talking about PewDiePie?

You know, and that's when we started doing a bit of research and,

and saw that there was this trend of, people liking to watch others play

and then PewDiePie, played it, a few weeks later, and I think up until now,

that video has like 20 million views.

Not everyone has a computer, not everyone has a good computer,

and not everyone has access to a credit card,

or is brave enough to steal their parents credit card

to get horror games, you know? So...

"Hello everybody. My name is Markiplier and welcome to FAITH..."

I get a lot of FAITH fans who say,

I've never played the games, but I've watched Markiplier play them

and I'm okay with that because Markiplier was my first exposure

to the world of indie horror games, starting with Slenderman.

And I actually attribute a lot of my, I guess,

horror design acumen and my, like, my internal library of,

of horror games to watching his playthroughs.

But the secret is I also learned what scared these YouTubers, right?

So I observed

that Markiplier hates mannequins.

So there's a mannequin scare in FAITH.

And let me tell you, when Markiplier played FAITH,

he had such nice things to say about it. Like, I was like tearing up

listening to him say that because he's one of my heroes, right?

"That was very good. And it just goes to show, you don't need to have incredible graphics

to create a terrifying experience."

I think it were MatPat who played A Chair in a Room over like 2 or 3 sessions

and just watching the response to his response

to something you made is absolutely fantastic.

But I think it's through seeing those reactions, seeing those people

play the games that actually acted as the catalyst

for me to jump from doing a completely different job

and seeing being able to do games as a viable option.

Back then you had to go looking, you know, for these games.

So whether it was, you know, Kickstarter or,

you know, YouTubers or it all played a part

Itch has been huge in the rise of indie games.

Itch.io is just an amazing, well of creativity that I go

to all the time to find new indie, horror and other genres as well.

Itch.io showed up at some point in there, but it's never been a massive platform.

Steam instituting Steam Greenlight was like, that was when the floodgates opened.

And the walls came down.

There was a time when you had to know somebody at valve to get your game on steam.

Anybody could put up a green light page.

Anyone who found that page would be able to vote on it, and the top ones

would get released on steam.

And I think people sometimes forget this, but

it hasn't been that long

that indie developers have been able to actually make money making games.

And Steam Greenlight was in a way that was kind of the first time guys like me

could actually have a chance of making some sort of money.

I'm just going to be honest. Half of being, a solo indie developer is the artistic aspect,

the creativity. The other half is just being a business guy

and just being like, you know what? Sometimes you just gotta make money.

When a YouTuber or big creator plays

games and supports it and sends it out, it's like this

huge free advertising to the developer.

So then suddenly they can afford to support themselves

and make the games that they want as their full time job. And that's luckily what happened to me.

A lot of the indie horror games that do well

are these lo-fi horror games that have big, chunky pixels, because the lack of information

is actually very good for a horror game.

Once they get too nice, they sort of then lose some of the appeal.

So you either have to go to a certain level of realism,

or you have to cut back on it and be big, chunky pixels.

So in Paratopic, everything is garbled

You wake up in this space and you're like this guy

bootlegging, VHS's or something like that. Some weird story,

and then you're off and running on this mystery.

And then there's a bird watcher, and there's a scene in the forest, like, there's all these

sort of disconnected, disparate moments.

I think that's an incredibly designed game and very effective and scary.

Undertale, which I still consider to be, you know, one of the most,

if not the most important indie game of all time

is really, really good at leveraging like surreal and creepy vibes.

You go through this entire entire game and it's all these really simple.

And I think, like for a lot of them, quite beautifully done little pieces of pixel art,

just these little white pixels on a black background.

And it works really, really well.

And then right at the end you hit Flowey.

And Flowey has this monstrous transformation.

Where he is this collage of photos and videos

and all these horrible fucking things, and he is a break to everything else in that game.

"You finally arrived."

I thought Dusk was really cool as being one of these,

like trying to bring the essence of 90s shooters back again.

This is something that gets really lost now, first person shooters back in the early

or mid 90s were considered quite scary.

One of the first exposures I had to actually playing a first person

shooter was the demo for a game called Chasm: The Rift,

and it scared the crap out of me.

One of the main things was the atmosphere of like decay, darkness, grittiness.

There's all these chunky pixels and you can't make out things at a distance.

That was a big part of what I wanted to do in Dusk.

It's all about contrasts, you know, you need to contrast

the crazy action with the more atmospheric bits.

So the first level of Dusk is like just a big Texas Chainsaw Massacre homage.

Like, try to make everywhere feel as gross and decayed

and like nightmarish as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre house.

There's a lot of games now that use like the retro PSI aesthetic.

Low poly games are becoming this huge thing and I think that's awesome. I love that.

Puppet Combo to me is just like making on purpose the B-movie horror bargain bin VHS games.

Puppet Combo was like the master of literally

getting the drill and putting it up to the microphone and just like...

There's a very strong, very personal vision behind all of those games.

I wouldn't have in previous years called myself a big 80s horror person,

and I didn't grow up playing PlayStation games.

But the enthusiasm for those things is communicated so effectively in Puppet Combo's stuff.

It's like you play it and you feel this sense of nostalgia

for something that you aren't actually nostalgic for.

Where it's like delving into someone else's brain

and getting to experience the things they love through their eyes.

I can't tell you what a great horror game is, because I think horror is very personal.

I'm not so much scared by zombies or werewolves or serial killers.

I mean, I would be scared of a serial Killer in real life,

but what scares me really are things like the supernatural.

Like ghosts and demons. Things from beyond the veil.

They seem to be very personal to us. They know our weaknesses. They know our fears.

And they play with that.

FAITH especially, is a direct reference to what I'm actually scared about.

FAITH is incredibly creepy. Specifically the animations.

The minute to minute game play is very much like a Commodore 64 kind of game.

But it's when you get these weird cut scenes of incredibly

beautiful, pixelated horror art.

I think it really comes across that he knows what he's doing.

Old seasons of SpongeBob have these, like, really uncanny close ups that they do.

And they're really, like, creepy.

"I don't need it. I don't need it."

So I wanted these moments in FAITH that were just really, like, jarring and uncanny looking.

So I thought to myself, well, I have some animation training.

Why don't I experiment with kind of this rotoscoped scene?

One of the first ones you can encounter is you're lying in bed

and you're looking at the foot of the bed, and, you know, these hands come up and grab the bed.

And then this long haired girl just stands up and starts looking at you.

When I first saw that. I was like, man, this is cool.

"That bridges the generation gap quite nicely."

It reminded me of some of the FMV games that came out around,

like in the 90s, like Harvester and stuff,

but it was kind of like, physically

this shouldn't be possible because of the restrictions of the technology.

And so that's kind of this uncanny, kind of, this shouldn't be here moment.

And it really draws players in.

To toot my own horn.

It is rooted in like supernatural elements and things like that.

It doesn't necessarily have to have an explanation.

I'm a devout Christian. I have my beliefs and my practices, but

I would never want my games to be preachy, right?

So there are multiple endings in FAITH depending on your decisions.

John Ward, the main protagonist of FAITH, there's endings that imply that he's

not even a real ordained priest, that he's just kind of some psycho that is impersonating one.

There's endings that imply that he was doing the right thing the whole time.

There's endings that imply that he went a little crazy and went on a killing spree,

thinking that he was saving people from demons.

You see a lot of that in the actual satanic scare, where there is this weird blurred line between

are we saving the youth or are we harming them with this rigidity

that we're kind of imposing on them?

"This man says he joined an underground satanic cult

after a lifetime of having religion shoved down his throat."

So I think it was a good decision for me to make. A lot of not necessarily canonical endings.

There's like weird endings. There's like an ending where, like, a deer Kills you out of revenge.

I had fun with the idea of players discovering different aspects and sides of the game.

This is a weird story, so I've known Airdorf for a long time.

Like before. Either of us were game developers. We met playing Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000,

back when I was in college, but some years later they're like,

by the way, I made this little game called FAITH, and I was like, "oh, that's really cool."

And then I forgot to play it. And then the next thing I know, it like blows up on YouTube.

"Top of the morning to you laddies. My name is Jack septic eye. And welcome to a game called FAITH."

I had heard of FAITH because we knew "mortis" was, you know, it was a thing.

It was a meme, people knew it was one of the big indie horror games, right? FAITH: Chapter One.

I think Dave was looking for a horror game and I'm like, "so there's FAITH".

And so Dave went and played it and he fell in love with it.

By the end of my first session, I was like, looking for Amy Martin

at the end of the bed when I went to sleep and I was like,

how is this game so lo-fi and yet so fucking terrifying?

But when it really clicked for me as I had gotten to Chapter Two,

when you get to a part where John picks up a note and he starts reading the note,

but then as he's reading the note, the text starts to change

and next thing you know, the notes talking to you and next thing you know,

it's just crosses and it's 666 and next thing you know,

and he only does this once in the whole fucking game. Your controller starts to vibrate.

By that time, the player knows that if they pick up a note that the game will pause.

So I thought, what if the note itself was haunted and starts playing with John's mind?

I was like, "what the fuck?" And I threw the controller down

and I stood up from the TV and I looked around and I was like, what is, what's going on?

There's a games researcher. I forget what his name is, but he wrote in a paper,

"The most profound game design possibilities

come from the point where the game designer ceases to become an advocate for the player."

And I took that to mean, "gain the players trust and then shatter it".

I was like, this guy can do so much with just some text on a screen and some colors,

and this is somehow scarier than anything I've played in the last ten, 20 years.

And I knew right then and there that I had to work with him and the rest is history.

When you look at an online board and they talk about horror games,

and the first question everyone asks is, "are there any jump scares?"

A lot of a jump scare is a good, cheap way of evoking a certain emotional state within,

within your user, within your player.

If you do it too early, it has the opposite effect.

It forces people away, but you have to earn it.

You have to basically build up a tension.

I think the secret to a good jump scare is not the jump scare itself it's what, comes before

to put the players in the right mood, the right set of mind.

Stretch that tension just the right amount so that when you do the jump scare, the,

the reaction is is the strongest.

To me, they're something that you use as punctuation marks,

and you have to be very choosy about when you use them and how you use them,

because as soon as you scare someone with something...

They've been a little bit desensitized to that thing, and some of the air has been let out of the balloon,

and it's going to be harder to scare them next time.

Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion, I use it as a perfect example

of pacing in indie horror games.

It conditions you to expect a certain game loop.

"Can you, humble player, make it through a thousand rooms?"

"Can you find what lies at the end?"

And then after so many rooms...

Something's escaped and now is after you.

So my original idea was just make a game that's just hallways and jump scares.

But the jump scares wouldn't be creatures, they would just be these cute little cutouts.

And it would show how silly it actually is, if you strip away all the aesthetics of the horror.

And as I kept developing it, then I made it slowly, an homage to the good horror

that I enjoyed, as well as parodying the horror that I didn't enjoy.

Now the rooms that were like, kind of frustrating to get through

are really horrifying to get through because now something's chasing you, you know?

So there is this mascot genre now coming up,

which is interesting because that's basically horror targeted for kids.

My best friend is a third grade teacher, and she says that her third graders

will come in with Huggy Wuggy backpacks.

And I'm like, isn't that a character from a horror video game? Isn't he kind of terrifying looking?

And she's like, yeah, absolutely, but they love him.

You have this division, right? Where you have the mood horror

and you have the thrill seeking horror.

Mascot horror is like thrill seeking. You don't care about mood, like mood,

mood gets out the window, who cares about immersive environments?

We want jump scares goddamn it!

I see Five Nights at Freddy's all over the place,

"So just be aware the characters do tend to wander a bit, if they happen to see you after hours,

they probably won't recognize you as a person."

You're in one room, you've got a bunch of cameras, and you have a certain level of power

that you can do to open up doors and look at cameras, and then you're like,

what door do I open? What door do I close? Like you're just in this panic.

Before you can even get a chance to figure out what the fuck is happening,

the thing is in your face and it's like, has this horrible screeching noise.

I down voted it, actually. I down voted Five Nights at Freddy's on Steam Greenlight.

And it turned out to be like the biggest indie horror franchise of all time.

"Tell me how to stop them."

"You don't. It's too late."

I think it's the combination of memorable characters,

an extremely unsettling atmosphere and game play loop,

and the YouTuber reactionary freak out culture I guess that kind of sprouted from that.

It created such a cultural phenomenon.

There are a lot of horror games that will go all over the place

and have different locales, but I think to really solidify it

as a unique experience, it needs to kind of take place in an area,

or areas that at least kind of look similar or have a have a similar feel.

You always want to set a horror movie in a self-contained environment

that is small enough that the audience becomes familiar with it,

that no escape seems possible.

SOMA was able to do it underwater.

Even though you didn't have necessarily walls to, make you feel, stuck,

you definitely felt the pressure of, at least I felt the pressure of the water.

It's a very oppressive atmosphere. There's constantly something going on,

and you have no idea what it is because you just woke up here.

It really captures the feeling of being absolutely out of your depths in a place

where you don't know what's going on, but whatever it is, it's deeply unsettling

and it has left many corpses in its wake.

"All right, let me just get this out of the way."

The idea in SOMA was to explore the idea of consciousness

from a first person perspective.

We wanted it to be up close and personal and very visceral for the player to be there,

be the person that goes through these things.

You the person who you were when you close your eyes.

Still existed and lived out an entire life somewhere.

But that is not you here. You are the you who is downloaded

and woken up all of these years later and forced to continue on.

You are leaving behind cursed versions of yourself to be doomed.

It's just an exceptional narrative device, and I think that they did a really good job

executing on that right up until the end, where it did exactly what you knew it was going to do,

and yet it still hurt so bad.

"No one told us this could happen."

The best test that I can give is, is your game so scary that I have to stop playing?

I have to stop playing it and, like, drive down to the pizza place and go eat therapy pizza for like,

two hours before I come back to your game. That's a good, that's a good indicator

that you know your game scared the shit out of me, you know?

The first ten minutes of Lost in Viva, I couldn't handle.

I actually had to go get therapy pizza and then come back several years later and finish the game.

That's how much it affected me.

I was walking my Boston terrier one time, and it was really late at night,

and we lived in the woods basically.

But I was thinking that night that if she had ran into the woods

saw a bear or something, I'd have to run after her. I couldn't abandon her,

and I thought that would be a great excuse for a horror protagonist to be in a horrible environment.

Animal violence is a little trigger for me, but to wrap that around crawling

through these old sewer tunnels that seem like they're closing in around you as you walk down.

It was an incredible experience.

So one of the ways I tried to gamify the claustrophobia was the ghost

in the beginning subway section, because I'm trying

to make the player feel claustrophobic. I have to make them fear tight spaces.

So they're lost in the sewer tunnels, and there's like, a crazy hobo with a knife who is after you.

So heartbreaking as a dog owner to start the game like that.

Overall, it is supposed to replicate in vivo exposure therapy,

so it's supposed to be the protagonist facing their fears and eventually overcoming them.

I've learned a lot from playing Kira's games.

Just finding creative ways to scare the player.

How they use light, audio, the music.

A lot of the sound in especially Lost in Viva was just me screaming.

Me hurting my vocal cords or me smashing something together.

There's supposedly something in our primordial lizard

brain that we're supposed to fear deep growling

because it reminds us of a predator, but then we also will fear shrieking

and just sounds we can't identify.

Sound is really important in making Iron Lung scary.

Because that's basically all there was. There's the sound and the still images.

"Beginning your descent."

"Cruising depth in roughly 40 seconds, stand-by."

It was very important to me to establish the idea that you aren't

just in this tiny little room, and the game is showing you pictures. It,

I wanted you to really feel that you are in this place

that is in a bigger place.

"Closing porthole shielding."

It's the kind of thing that David'sreally good at.

Again, he's a master of atmosphere,

a game where you're stuck in one room and you barely move and you can't see.

You're only, you know, you're moving by coordinates

and it feels so, it's so real and so affecting and that's a credit to the way his mind works.

Having that sort of like overarching idea of outside of this tiny situation

you're in, it's bleak and desolate and kind of hopeless, was to me,

an important part of grounding you in that feeling.

I was in a Loch Ness museum in Scotland,

and that put this idea in my head of like getting these pictures

of some unseen monster outside a submarine. In my head, they looked almost like, ultrasounds,

where it was like you could just barely get this picture of a shape.

I love the scene that he set, you know, an ocean of blood.

A prisoner who, you know, has to go down to that like it was just, It was just weird and cool.

The reason that it's in an ocean of blood? Sometimes impulse control, is a bad thing.

I don't know, it's just like, "ah fuck it ocean of blood."

And instead of throwing that idea in the garbage can, I was like, you know what?

Why don't I just do that? Like, might as well go big or go home. You just make it ridiculous.

So much of good horror is about exploring the spaces

where we feel powerless.

What is a more powerless feeling than being alone?

Or it's like even if there are other human bodies

with human souls in them next to you...

Still feeling alone in that room.

Another game that you would not think qualifies as a horror game, but I'd say it does,

is What Remains of Edith Finch.

"A lot of this isn't going to make sense to you."

"And I'm sorry."

"I'm just going to start at the beginning."

It's a game about death. It's this fear of a curse of death, which feels very

horror genre.

You come upon this, this house

you're you're approaching from the outside, and then you're going to explore the house

for the rest of the game.

"| was afraid of the house."

A lot of different parts of that game were creepy and beautiful, but also terrifying.

"I held my breath for a long time."

The fish chapter in particular. It takes place in a factory

where it's like a son of the family, has a miserable job, and then imagines himself

kind of as this ruler of this fish kingdom.

"I worried about him then."

"Day dreaming at the cannery."

And then by the end of it, it doesn't end well.

And it was just very sad to see this person build up a life in their head.

Because the life that they lived was so miserable.

It's kind of the ghosts of our pasts and dreams abandoned.

And there's just this kind of quiet desolation.

"Maybe we believed so much in a family curse. We made it real."

There's a line that I think about a lot

with work on Scarlet Hollow and the song The River.

"Is a dream, a lie, if it don't come true or is it something worse?"

And I think that's sort of a weight that a lot of the characters in Scarlet Hollow

in particular, carry with them, where it's like they've all had dreams,

not even of bigger lives necessarily, but different lives, their lives

and the circumstances of their upbringing and the circumstances of the town they live in,

keep pulling them back to a place that they'll never really be able to escape the shadow of.

Trapped by things such as just purely social obligations, family obligations,

the obligation to keep talking to this guy just because he's there

and he won't stop talking to you and you're on a bus and you can't get off

and no one else is there, and no one's going to help you.

So it's these little ways that you can trap yourself in your own life.

I think with stories such as this, horror stories in particular,

you can really communicate the helplessness that you might feel based

on, like any kind of aspect of your life, just being able to share

how helpless it feels to be othered, to be treated poorly,

to just feel like no one is there for you.

"Oh! Emily!"

Gore is something I take very seriously,

and I really want to think through what I put into the gore that I make.

I want to think through what is happening

versus having it just be a big spray of blood, which like, you can kind of tune out, you know,

it feels like a cartoon. I think you have to remember

the humanity of what's going on.

I mean, I think that's something that's really at the core of Slay The Princess for me,

which is you can't fully know someone.

You only know someone based on the ways that you have interacted with them.

The game at its heart is its exploration of relationships

with other people, and the way that our perceptions of them

change who they are.

Your very first interaction with her, when you enter the cabin, there's a knife on the table.

Your pristine blade.

And if you go down with the blade...

She's sharp. She's a little threatening. She's a little mean.

And if you go down without it...

She's soft, she's meek. She's what you might expect from a damsel in distress.

"Do you actually believe this was enough to kill me?"

And from there you have all these different dialog options that you can do.

You can set her free, you could murder her.

And there's about a thousand different things that can happen in between.

And some of them are genuinely so horrifying.

"...her teeth tearing through her limb with the determination of a trapped wolf."

What's so brilliant about it is that after you do the run a few times,

you are going back into that basement, not having a fucking clue what is waiting for you.

And like the tension is so brilliant, like it's one of the best, like,

narrative horror games in the longest time.

Weird stuff can exist in the indie scene, basically, because there's nothing to stop it.

There's no filter of, like, I have to pitch this to a publisher

and they have to want to put money into it,

No ideas too weird, no ideas too crazy.

David made a game about stapling squirrels to the wall for your dead wife.

Okay, nothing is going to be weirder than...

...that.

We're getting into this era where, it's more viable

to make not underground, but like an indie film about an indie horror game.

So, like Iron Lung, the movie is being made

with Markiplier!

"This is not an expedition. It's an execution."

He's like a, border collie that's ready to run the agility course

where they're like just raring to go. He's like, "hey, so... I like your games."

"Thanks. I like your videos. I've been watching you for years."

He's like "so... want me to make an Iron Lung movie?."

So that's basically how it went.

I think horror games are made mostly

by people who are really passionate about making horror.

"...birthing is never easy."

I think you have to be because you're creating all this edgy content and stuff.

You know, it's, not everybody's comfortable starting the week with the conversation,

"So are we making this character circumcised or not?"

And the financial scale is such that, you know, I mean, Her Story was a micro-budget.

Like, you know, it was very much that kind of Blair Witch idea.

So I knew that it didn't have to find a huge audience for it to be financially successful.

So I purely allowed myself to make something that delighted myself.

Indie horror games, kind of, they're kind of the underground scene as far as like game experiences.

The fact that there's no producer telling you what you can and can't put in your game.

Really foments kind of an artistic, you know, struggle and endeavor

and you really kind of get to see the artistic mind a little bit more.

So there'll always be interest in the little guy.

So I think as long as that exists, indie horror games, you know, will, will flourish.

"It sure is dark in here."

"Yes. And there's a good reason for it. But you can light the lamp now if you wish."