NOCLIP Pocket E67 - The Heretic Pages - Games by David Szymanski

The whole podcast is made of a single piece of iron. Welcome to the
spoooookiest month of the year! To kick things off, we’re going to
be playing four very short games by the same developer. David
Szymanski is probably more well known now for developing “DUSK,” a
horror FPS game that specifically harks back to the early days of
Id shooters like Doom and Hexen, but his solo efforts, which
stretch as far back as 2014 are more appropriate for our purposes
here. They tend toward walking simulators in terms of genre, but
have a focus that feels demonstrably different than most other
horror games. Specifically, they focus on narrative and tension
building in a low fidelity setting. These are games that do not go
out of their way to wow you with impressive graphics or intricate
systems. They are simple, and rely on your understanding of the
story, as well as setting and sound to unnerve the player, rather
than make them feel in imminent danger. This is true for all four
games, though the way they go about it is different, whether
through an eerie and oppressive atmosphere (a desolate island in a
storm, or a place where the rain hurts you) or a crushing sense of
claustrophobia (submarine, underground tunnels). Each game manages
to get that creeping dread into the player, assuming you meet them
at face value, and all within an hour and a half or less. We’re
going to be talking about the difference in production value
between each game as time goes on, the use of text and sound to do
the heavy lifting in an atmosphere-reliant genre, and for the
longtime fans, we touch on another video game character who is
ambiguously a motor vehicle. Thank you for joining us again this
week, and for another month of horror titles! We always look
forward to this time of year because we collect ideas for October
over the course of time and finally get to do all of them at once.
It’s very exciting. Were you also sucked into the Szymanski-verse
through finding Fingerbones for free or playing Dusk and wondering
“what else has this guy done?” or is this the first you’ve heard
the name? We do recommend trying these games out due to the
extremely low barrier to entry both in cost and time investment, so
let us know in the comments or over in our Discord server what you
think of them. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Bendy and
the Ink Machine, similarly in the adventure genre, but with a much
higher emphasis placed on visuals to sell its world, so we hope
you’ll join us again for that.