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Bendy and the Ink Machine
Bendy and the Ink Machine
2017 | Action/Adventure, Puzzle & Cards, Strategy
Set in the long abandoned Joey Drew Studios, Bendy and the Ink Machine (“BatIM”) is a survival horror game with an aesthetic of classic cartoons of yesteryear. As Henry, you set about to revisit your old workshop after receiving a mysterious letter from your past employer. When Henry arrives at the shop, he finds duhn duhn duhn the Ink Machine. The Ink Machine is a rather large device that gushes out black ink and has mystical qualities. Henry then becomes trapped in the maze-like studio, though he soon finds that he is not alone. Like a creep in the shadows, Bendy, the Mickey Mouse of the Joey Drew Studios universe, is lurking. BatIM blends puzzle solving with first-person gameplay as you adventure through a studio brimming with horrors. The art style is reminiscent of Steamboat Willie, with a macabre twist. Instead of happy go-lucky little animals, we are bombarded with the sinister grin of Bendy as he emerges from the shadows.

Similar to other games with an episodic structure (e.g.: Alan Wake and Life is Strange), BatIM uses short levels to advance the story line in some intriguing ways. Love of Exploration will be your saving grace in this game, as each area requires some in order to advance to the next. The game is not fast-paced. On the contrary, it’s meant to be a slow experience for the player with sparse combat scenarios present only to add a brief moment of action. Your actions as Henry are very limited, as is his speed. With 5 chapters, the gameplay time is at just about hours, and the game uses every minute to pull you deeper into the dark world it has created.

I reviewed BatIM for the Nintendo Switch and found that the game was somewhat held back by the platform’s technical limitations. The biggest drawback I found was that textures would often blur and have jagged edges, with the shaky 30FPS frame rate just feeding fuel to this fire. This is a detriment to gaming’s purpose in keeping the players immersed in the environment. BatIM is meant to be tense, but I often found myself dispelled of the illusion due to blurry visuals and dropped frames. With a game designed so well, how unfortunate that this be its biggest flaw. Maybe this can be patched out, but we can only hope at this point.

BatIM developer, theMeatly Games, may have taken inspiration from Five Nights at Freddy’s as the gameplay and overall genre of the games are quite similar. The world is conceptualized using objects such as books and tapes found within the game instead of long cut scenes that can tend to take you out of the moment rather than add to it in games like these. As you delve deeper into the oubliette of a workshop, you’ll find that the gameplay is perfectly paired with the game’s sick and twisted visuals, proving that BatIM delivers on every level.

Bendy and the Ink Machine is available now on all major platforms.
  
    Coco Fashion

    Coco Fashion

    Games and Entertainment

    2.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

    App

    ~~> Welcome to the Coco Fashion Show! The trendiest 3D fashion show game on the app store! ~~> Be...

The Dark Net
The Dark Net
Benjamin Percy | 2017 | Fiction & Poetry, Horror, Thriller
7
7.7 (3 Ratings)
Book Rating
The Dark Net by Benjamin Percy is a complex story in which the horror is the realisation that it could happen to all of us, and we’d be unable to stop it!

There’s a large cast of characters at the beginning, which I have to admit you could easily lose track of, and it’s not everyone’s preferred writing style, but you just know there’s a reason these people are mentioned straight up and that they are all going to meet somewhere along the storyline to make sense of it all. As I read this it was like I had a movie playing out in my mind. We see shots of a dodgy run server group in one scene. Next we meet Hannah with a high-tech prosthetic that restores her sight, but can’t understand why she can now see shadows surrounding certain people. Then there’s Lala a technophobic journalist, (Hannah’s auntie ), Mike the gun hoarder who sees things that can’t possibly be there, Derek a genius hacker and, to top it all, a virus spreading through the net that had a very old-school, Shaun Hutson, evil, demonic force feel to it. Who can stop this evil presence from getting out of control and fight back?

Dark, creepy, urban-techno horror with an old-school, supernatural feel that I particularly enjoyed. What would we all do if the devil got inside our homes, schools, offices through our computers? Who’d save us? Not our anti-virus protection, that’s for sure!
  
Alien: Out Of The Shadows
Alien: Out Of The Shadows
Tim Lebbon | 2014 | Science Fiction/Fantasy
7
8.3 (3 Ratings)
Book Rating
So, Alien: Out of the Shadows.

Or, more precisely, the audiobook version of it, since that's the one I read (listened to?), picking it up as part of an audible trial where it was presented as, essentially, a series of podcasts.

Set between the events of the original Alien and it's sequel Aliens (the one with a 'S' at the end) and starring Ellen Ripley (or her sound-alike), you might wonder how Ripley never once mentioned the events of this at all in any of the later films.

You might wonder it, but it is explained away towards the end of this.

The story starts with her escape pod being picked up by the mining vessel Marion, a mining vessel orbiting the planet LV178 but which - just prior to picking Ripley up - has been knocked out of its orbit and had its communications array damaged by a shuttle coming up from the planet: a shuttle crewed by miners from that planet, and that has picked up some unwelcome guests.

What follows is a series of events and encounters, with the surviving members of the crew being picked off one by one as they attempt to find a way out of their predicament.

And, I have to say, the actress voicing Ripley sound amazingly like her, while Rutger Hauer is also suitably menacing in his role, while the background beeps and whirrs and hisses etc all add to the atmosphere.

It's also no surprise that this won an 'Audie award for excellence in production' in 2017.