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.