PAX East 2015 Preview: Albino Lullaby is a Rubik-esque Nightmare
Oh, look, another horror preview! I just can’t lay off of them, can I? When Albino Lullaby said they’d be at PAX East, I knew I had to give the demo a try. Ape Law’s adventure horror experience won the Epic Epic Award for Best World and Narrative from The Boston Festival of Indie games, and had a successful Kickstarter campaign in September of 2014. It’s easy to see the appeal, but does Albino Lullaby live up to the hype, thus far? I think it’s safe to say this game is going places.
Albino Lullaby was created to work with PC as well as VR devices, and the layout and level design hold up well in terms of distance of objects, layout of hallways and rooms, and the general principle of movement. The story is at once captivating, even if only out of terror – voices urge you from the start of the game, forcing you out into an unfamiliar and strange world full of wing-back chairs and notes with abnormally ordinary things written on them. Finding your way around is a matter of pressing buttons, but as you get further and further, the stakes are raised for you not moving quickly enough, amplifying the tension considerably. Environments move and shift constantly, and navigating them is only half the battle – keeping your wits when the room you’re in is falling or flipping is definitely a challenge.
The enemies are so odd that while I wanted to stare at them to get a closer look, the noises they made were so awful that I felt my heart racing (they look like fingers with faces, which somehow makes them worse). There are tasks to complete to get away from them, puzzles to solve, etc., and thus far, they’re very well-designed, from my view. With the aforementioned room movement (the entire house is a series of rooms that fit together), filled with this chorus of unearthly screams, Albino Lullaby becomes more than a little unsettling. There are no jumpscares, there is no gore – this game relies completely on atmosphere and dialogue to scare the pants off of players. I’m not sure what else needs to be done for release in terms of these categories, but so far it looks very promising (i.e. terrifying).
One place I feel improvement can be made is in the visuals – for VR, having a wider field of view is great, but on PC, it can cause dizziness and headache, and I experienced both. The settings for the game are limited, and it won’t go into windowed mode at the moment, even when that option is selected, but I hope that these changes can be implemented for final release, to allow Albino Lullaby to be accessible to more people. Since it was one of the first games ever designed in Unreal Engine 4, there’s a lot to live up to, but so far Ape Law seems to be on the right track.
Nooooope.
If you want to try a demo, you can download it from the Kickstarter. Follow Albino Lullaby on Twitter, or “like” them on Facebook to keep up with current events. If you’re at PAX East, you can find them at booth #10207, this year (catty-corner to Glitch Gaming, in the northwest corner of the PAX East Guidebook Map), where a demo will be available to play, as well. Let us know what you think of the demo in the comments section below!
