LogFAQs > #946064286

57. Spookys Jump Scare Mansion (Video Game) (17.5 points)
Nominated by: Inviso (2/5 remaining)
FREE TO PLAY: https://store.steampowered.com/app/356670/Spookys_Jump_Scare_Mansion/

Importance: 4
Fear: 6
Snake: 7.5

Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion, formerly known as Spooky's House of Jumpscares, is an interesting meta-commentary on the state of modern day horror games, while still being a fun game and creepy game in its own right. Back in 2010, the state of survival horror was weird to say the least. The industry still reeled from the influence RE4 had, and classic survival horror with fixed camera angles was deader than disco, instead a new hybrid of shooter-horrors like Dead Space & Alan Wake dominated the landscape. Many decried this advancement in gaming, but there were alternatives. Penumbra: Overture, made by Frictional Games, helped influence a new breed of horror games, one where combat was completely taken away from you, truly emphasizing enemy avoidance. Frictional's own Amnesia: The Dark Descent would follow-up and refine this style to diamond perfection, and that game's explosion in popularity would bring with it a whole decade of horror that would explore, expand, and exploit the genre to its limits with games like Outlast, Slender, Observer, Soma, countless others, and of course Spooky's. Spooky's central idea was the satire of this gameplay evolution (or devolution to some), a response to how these games were often built around one central method of fear delivery, that being, you guessed it, the jump scare. In particular, I feel like the game was aimed at Youtubers like Markiplier or PewDiePie who occasionally seemed to have forced overreactions to these horror games, but was nonetheless an ouroboros cycle that fed into the popularity of both parties.

I love the structure and tone of Spooky's; great satire is after all always built first on the respect for the original works. There's a reason films like Shaun of the Dead, Cabin in the Woods, & Scream have endured for as long as they have. Spooky's gets its hucks out of its system quickly, peppering the player with cute, smiling cardboard cut-outs almost daring you to scream in terror, but quickly launches at you what the game calls "specimens", genuinely horrifying monsters that chase you through the many rooms of the maze-like mansion. Despite the drastic shift in tone, Spooky's undercurrent of comedy remains, with your host Spooky wishing to be feared and trolling the player with certain "gifts", arcade minigames, cartoony vibe, and files commentating on a character's wish, nay hope, he is the main protagonist (he's not). All of this adds up to be a pretty unique experience even if it does get a little repetitive as it goes on, and on, and on, and on. People who are averse to horror games will still find this pants-soiling, but for those more in the know, it really becomes a way to meditate on the tropes that make horror games function the way they do, poke fun of overused cliches, and have an atmospheric, scary-good time on top of it all too.

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And it's gonna be a long October, and I don't have reasons to believe, in much of anything, alright
https://imgur.com/1e1e70S