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The only other audio for most of the game is the swishing of your character’s dress, maybe a footstep here and there. If you’re sensitive to audio, it’s a maddening sound. Most of the time the main background track is simply a droning hum. The sound design in Blackwell’s Asylum will quite literally set your teeth on edge. The audio is what draws all these elements together though. It’s a simple mechanic but further serves to heighten the tension. If you mess up the outer edges of the screen iris off, cutting your field of view. If you hide while the warden’s around you have to manage your breathing by pressing the spacebar at regular intervals. The game also has a clever system for when you’re in hiding. I felt extremely vulnerable throughout the entire game, to the point where I almost gave into my tension and quit playing. It’s the same system as Amnesia, and it works just as well here. There’s no combat, so if you’re spotted be prepared to run and hide. It’s an arresting visual style, allowing you to inhabit the drug-addled mind of the character (though it also made me, a video game veteran, extremely motion sick after a while, so be careful).Īnd as if the visuals weren’t already enough to creep you out, you’ve got the terrifying wardens to contend with as you try to stealthily navigate the asylum. Layered over the top of all this crazed geometry is an additional visual effect, almost like a fisheye, that causes the world’s appearance to further distort when the camera moves. Rather than a tall, straight-lined cabinet you get a leaning, collapsing mess. Instead, sections of the walls fold inwards or outwards, zigzagging. There’s not a single straight hallway in the asylum. The hallways themselves (and indeed, every object in the game) are modeled in the best surrealist fashion. You weave down the hallway, desperately trying to reach the next door. You don’t walk down the hallway in this game. The drugging aspect at the beginning of the game really plays deep into the overall feel of Blackwell’s Asylum. You don’t ever really know where you’re going, and the game’s seemingly-straightforward hallways are anything but. When you awake, you wander out of your cell and start navigating the winding, twisted hallways of Blackwell’s Asylum. You’re being held down by an orderly as a doctor preps a syringe, inserting it into your arm and drugging you. Right from the start, things are pretty unsettling. You play as Nellie in Blackwell’s Asylum. The resulting article, Ten Days in a Mad-House, revealed the widespread maltreatment of the asylum’s patients. The game grew out of the real-life story of Nellie Bly, a journalist who in 1887 got herself checked into the famous Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum in order to do undercover research for an expose. Like Amnesia, Blackwell’s Asylum is a game made for playing alone, sitting in the dark with headphones in.īlackwell’s Asylum takes place in-you guessed it-an asylum.
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I was so inclined, and made a note to download the game when I got home, away from the crowds and the fluorescent lights of the Moscone Center. It’s free, if you’re inclined to check it out. The design aesthetic alone-dim hallways, cast in sickly green-was enough to convince me to give the game a shot. Like Pulse, one of the other games I saw at GDC, Blackwell’s Asylum was a finalist in this year’s IGF Student Showcase. It’s an even loftier claim once I tell you it started life as a student project. Written by Hayden Dingman, going to make a lofty claim here: Blackwell’s Asylum is the most unsettled I’ve felt while playing a game since Amnesia.
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If you missed the first two articles, you can find them here and here. This article is the third and final regarding games I first saw at GDC and went home to play.