Receiver was created for the 7-day FPS challenge to explore gun handling mechanics, randomized levels, and unordered storytelling. Armed only with a handgun and an audio cassette player, you must uncover the secrets of the Mindkill in a building complex infested with automated turrets and hovering shock drones.

Click to expand...

kick51 said:

oh that reminds me of the one early access game I bought

*goes to check Overgrowth page*


oh still in alpha, sweet

Click to expand...

Anyway, the point is that this game is 10 times scarier than Slender and no one has told me that because everyone was busy talking about gun fetishism. You have to retrieve—as in Slender—a number of McGuffins before dying. It is scary:

• because the enemy design divorces the player’s knowledge from capability. The two enemy types, a rotating turret and a buzzing drone with taser, are constantly scanning for you, but both have discrete structural weaknesses. You know where those weaknesses are, but the hum of their turning, their blue scanning lights, and—yes—the controls, make you unsure about your own ability to leverage that knowledge. That is a new type of scary
• because the enemies are material, not transcendent, but they only care about you. Slenderman only cares about you, but is never hampered by the environment (actually, per Robert Yang, to really say this, you’d have to look at the code and see exactly how Slenderman moves in Slender, but this is absolutely how it feels.) In Receiver, they respect the same walls you have to. The drones care only about you, so they fly right at you, but you take a corner a little quicker than they can, and you hear a hard metallic slam. It is right behind you and you know this because its scurrying—as much as a thing with a motor can scurry—back into the air, off a wall, it bounces up the stairs, it is behind you and now you are convulsing and there in front of you as you die is the ammo you needed.
• because unlike in Amnesia, Slender, and their kin you have a way of defending yourself but it’s clumsy and awkward and you always forget one little step and even when you don’t forget a step you worry that you will or that you have and so now you try to reload to soon. And then zzzzzzz you fall over and your real body shudders, or you are shot and then—the best thing—you take a step in game, then another, and then you fall as if you’d only just realized the blood finding its way out of your gut and onto the carpet.
• because the spaces are a mix of blank rooms, abstract art installations, and slightly askew renditions of the everyday. Each of these is unsettling, but the last is what unhinged me. Living room, bathroom, kitchen. Empty bookshelves. A flashlight in a sink. These spaces are unalive. They are gestures towards human life from some alien sentience, all the parts and none of the whole. Model houses, not homes. One apartment layout popped up a dozen times—a two floor thing, very nice. Except once, the last time, a thing that looked a bit like a glacier, if a glacier could flower, had sprung up in the living room, sprouting into the upstairs bedroom. But they’re buzzing in the hallway, their lights against the wall through the open door, and to examine this thing is to stay here and that is not an option.
• because these spaces hang together in procedurally arranged tiles that always exert the uncanny. A catwalk missing the stairs you know it should have. A window, once a door. Red lights in a hall. One of these arrangements has a long, wide pipe down the hall that separates you from something on this playthrough and on the next you are on the other side of the same tile and you can’t help but think the other side is the same as before. But it can’t be. But it must be.
• because to leap over obstacles (like that pipe) you have to run, and to run you have to hammer the W key. There is no double tap the W to sprint. Every step in your sprint requires a press. A sprint requires frantic tapping. And it’s buzzing behind you and tap tap tap taptaptaptap hurry taptaptap space taptaptap and you see the stairs and you try to turn and fire and you miss and you try to sidestep over that last step but you have a body and bodies move forward better than they move side to side and so you die again and you remind yourself never to look back unless you know you’ll hit the damn thing.

Click to expand...

Messofanego said:

Chris Remo did a song for it lol

http://music.chrisremo.com/track/this-is-the-time-we-have-prepared-for

Click to expand...

Arc Christelle said:

Man what the fuck am I playing?!

Click to expand...

Arc Christelle said:

No seriously, the fuck is this? How y'all gonna promote this nonsense then disappear?

Click to expand...

Arc Christelle said:

Man what the fuck am I playing?!

Click to expand...

Arc Christelle said:

No seriously, the fuck is this? How y'all gonna promote this nonsense then disappear?

Click to expand...

LurkerPrime said:

The Humble CAPTCHA is a real piece of work. It's on the level of Star Trek TNG's "there are four lights" scenario.

Click to expand...

Piccoro said:

6 hours left, people!

Click to expand...