What would you like to see from Frictional next?

[Petike]

I still like that idea about a survival horror involving a defenceless everyman set against the backdrop of an alternate World War One, where a sudden invasion of bizarre and mysterious aliens occured in the autumn of 1915 (or 1916). And by bizarre and creepy, I mean downright bizarre and creepy : Things that have a much longer history of evolution, can assimilate living beings on the fly and conquer even advanced civilizations with absolute ease. Basically, think "xenomorphs crossed with bugs crossed with the Borg". They can fool and toy with humans easily, prey on them virtually everywhere, impersonate other humans or living beings, disrupt human infrastructure and sanity anytime, be nearly invincible even to the best military technology of the era, etc. And you'd be absolutely helpless against the creatures. One good gag would be you finding a pillbox with dead soldiers in a town recently attacked and depopulated by the creatures. You'd be given an option to search the dead bodies and pick up a rifle from one of the soldiers for the first - and only - time in the entire game. The catch ? You'd find that there are no bullets left for any of the weapons, since the soldiers fought a last stand against the monsters. And so on... And one of the castes of these alien monsters would have the power to go invisible and try to hunt you down with a combination of telepathy and mild telekinesis : In other words, f*** with your mind and body, make you feel more hopeless, injured, etc. than you really are. Feed you with despair in order to catch you more easily. You'd have to genuinely figure out a cunning and non-violent way on how to evade these monstrosities. And so on and so on... I sort of imagine them as a much darker and sinister version of the alien creatures from this book series.

I liked how in the original War of the Worlds novel Wells kept gradually increasing the subtle horror atmosphere of the dilapidated and destroyed parts of various towns and cities (including London itself), even though the Martians and their military equipment weren't particularly scary in appearance (and wouldn't be at all to a seen-it-all modern day reader). They also appeared pretty frequently, so they weren't as horrific...

But in this survival horror about "intelligent and ruthless alien borg-bugs", you'd be an average Joe, who only heard about the invasion in passing, from various mixed and contradictory news from the local yet still distant frontlines (where the aliens purposefuly landed, right smack-dab between the armies of petty human empires). So, in essence, you wouldn't really understand what's going on once they'd attack your village or hometown in the middle of the night, in the early morning or even during noon. You'd sleep over the catastrophe by accident in a more secure place and then start uncovering what happened and what you have to do to survive in this new mysterious world overrun by a completely unknown and malevolent species, with a completely different morality to humanity and Earth life in general.