Try to Survive Your Own Dreams in Comatose
The beauty of the nightmare is that, eventually, you wake up. It leaves you shaken when you sit up in your bed, but as the day progresses, it fades from your thoughts. It’s just a terrifying fabrication of your own mind. But what if you couldn’t wake up? The main character of Animal Kingdom’s Comatose has to endure this, being trapped in a coma where his nightmares have him fleeing for his life. Will he live? That depends on you.
Comatose is an interesting title because it’s working on replay value right from the start. Your character will experience different nightmares as he explores his unconsciousness during his coma, and the developers say they are working on creating over 100 possible dream and nightmare scenarios. You won’t see all of them during one playthrough, as the game will select a few randomly when you start it up, save for a few story-related ones that will be locked in place. This means that you can run into wildly different things on different plays, so many players will not see the same things. It’ll be interesting to read the comments about this game when it’s out, to see what sort of weird things show up for various people.
The game also looks like it will take the player to different places than other first-person horror games I’ve seen. Of particular note was the game’s trailer, which all took place in a dirty, wide open neighborhood complete with a semi-functional amusement park. It was interesting to see daylight poking in through the brown clouds surrounding the area. It’s risky to try having a horror game in even a partially well-lit area, but Animal Kingdom doesn’t seem afraid to try it. They still managed to load the trailer with enough menace that I was a little nervous of it anyway, daylight or not.
They’ve started looking for Kickstarter funding (and Greenlight votes!), and with an ambitious goal of 100 different nightmare scenarios, they’ll likely need all the funds they can get. With its chilling atmosphere and varied haunts, though, it looks like it will be keeping some horror fans busy for a long time once it’s finished.
