What if you could play as a writer in a ‘survival scare’?

Mikami had recently reread Stephen King’s ‘Misery’. And he wondered how he could do it, telling himself that the genre directed by his own series “Resident Evil”—and still starting with that genre at every new step in the aforementioned survival horror game—was stagnant. The video game that manages to introduce the reader/player to the fiction that he has created and makes them feel like the heroes of what they are reading/playing, that goes beyond reflex action and instills real terror, the genre of terror, stays with you when fear passes. “We should start experimenting with psychological terror,” Mikami said. I eat? For example, posing as Annie Wilkes or Paul Sheldon.

Annie Wilkes and Paul Sheldon are the protagonists of ‘Misery’. One is the writer who is considering giving up writing a successful series of romance novels. The other is her number one fan who doesn’t want to exist in a world where that romance novel series is dead. It was the kind of nightmare that tormented author Stephen King, having the two of them in the same house – Wilkes’ home – the author’s handicapped and completely at the mercy of what his most devoted reader wished for. Something extremely valuable to Mikami, and what the video game genre must desire in the future is a psychological terror in which the player himself is the beginning and the end, because wasn’t the part of Paul Sheldon that he feared most? Wasn’t it his work?

When Sam Lake and his production company Remedy Entertainment released ‘Alan Wake’ in 2010, they made an attempt that Mikami would consider good and, in my opinion, still the most valuable. Also from the work of King and Bret Easton Ellis—from “Lunar Park” rather than “American Psycho”—and from David Lynch—“Twin Peaks”—Neil Gaiman and The scariest novel ever written, ‘House of Leaf’ by Mark Z. Danielewskihave created a very famous writer who, tired of an endless blockade, takes refuge in an idyllic cottage in the middle of nowhere, a place meaningfully called Bright Falls, to forget everything. And can you? No, because as soon as he arrives, he begins to encounter pages from a manuscript he has never written.

The action in Alan Wake, a psychological thriller with a clear ‘survival horror’ and indeed famous and intriguing references, is tied to this manuscript, a manuscript by the author – a manuscript that you as an actor – have not written a single one of. line but strangely he has it in his head. When he comes across the title “Departure” -Departure-, he says that’s the title he’s thinking of putting on the novel he has in mind, then what? Then all of a sudden the novel you’ve been thinking about attacks you. Because the scenes that he has not written yet -perhaps he wrote without remembering- start to come to life before his eyes. In fact, he takes part in them. And of course these are scenes from a horror novel and then isn’t the creature he created trying to destroy it?

Mikami said that the density of Stephen King’s novels decreases when they are adapted to the movies because the main fear is to read them and we should try to get “something like this in a video game”.. Forget about monsters – “we don’t care about them anymore and they don’t surprise us no matter how scary they are,” said Mikami – and focus on yourself. Fear of the character, a character that needs to be built by the player, can be considered damage and undermine the action that depends above all on empathizing with the person representing you on the screen. joyful. Well, we’re about to see if Lake thinks about it as much as Mikami. There will be an Alan Wake II this year. It’s time to collect coffee pots again.