There has rarely been a better time in recent memory to be a survival horror fan than now. From recent releases like those from Motive Studio Empty space remake and Capcom’s own remake of Resident Evil 4 to highly anticipated games like Amnesia: The Bunker And Alan Wake 2there’s a veritable embarrassment of riches to choose from for players who prefer their regular diet of action-packed thrills with an accompanying side of chills.
On Friday, Bristol-based UK developer Headware Games (aka Nathan Hamley) released a five-minute gameplay trailer for the upcoming survival horror title Empty body, and from the looks of it, it’s definitely going to be a game worth looking forward to. Described as a “tech-noir homage to classic survival horror”, Empty body puts players in the role of Mica, an unlicensed shipper (i.e. courier) who works for a black market syndicate in dystopian Bristol in the near future.
The trailer opens with a scene where Mica has crash-landed in a long-abandoned neighborhood on the edge of the city’s habitable zone. Blade Runner 2049. With limited resources, no way to contact her employers, and no other options, Mica must brave the desolate ruins of this quarantined area in search of a way to repair her vehicle or find another way to safety. to come.
Image: Headware Games
However, solving environmental puzzles and rummaging through the trash of abandoned apartment buildings will be the least of her problems. As we see in the trailer, Mica isn’t alone, and to survive she’ll have to wade through an onslaught of shoddy post-human nightmares, supposedly driven insane by invasive black market technology.
The gameplay clearly seems indebted to that of predecessors such as the one from 2001 silent hill 2 and that of 1999 Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, with fixed camera angles and brief loading screen cutscenes interspersed with resource cleanups and scripted events. There are also some cool modern visual quirks, such as fading wall animations and on-screen item descriptions presented as diegetic augmented reality displays. It’s a contemporary tribute to the Silent Hill series, similar to last year’s Signalalbeit with a stronger clear emphasis on scripted fears and battles.
What’s also interesting is the game’s sources of inspiration apart from Silent Hill. It is based on contemporary issues such as class conflict and wealth inequality in industrialized countries. “There are many narrative reasons why I wanted to frame this game in a near future,” Hamley told NME last year. “But to come home with the horror elements, I wanted to be able to base it on something familiar. So I modeled the environments after different buildings and locations in my home city of Bristol. You can call it a metaphor for post-Brexit Britain, if you like. It wouldn’t be far off.”
Empty body is scheduled for early 2024 on Windows PC.