Okay none of you probably no what the hell I’m talking about but I’m here to tell you this. This is a codename for a new game coming out on the revo and will be exclusive. It is made by Clover(or the guys who created Viewtiful Joe) and will come out I believe in 2007, late. But yet you haven’t heard the half of it. This game will scare the shit out of you. Now this game is nothing but a rumor and should be held solely as a rumor but I got it from this dude who says he has inside info so take as you will but check out what he has said about the game.
( Oh when it says the dude from Clover is also working on a Resident Evil exclusive for the Revo remember Clover is in close ties with Capcom. Possibly Owned I’ll have to check it out)
Now here is him just introducing the game:
I’m saving my favorite for now simply because of how scared we got in the studio at this game. It comes from Clover of which Shinji Mikami is heading this game. He also is doing a separate Resident Evil exclusive for the Revolution releasing in 2008. After we played through this hour long demo all I have is one thing to say. This game is truly terrifying. I mean I am a grown man and I was turning on lights I usually don’t at night because of this game. Right now its just called “The Joy of Lights” and you will NEVER forget the horrors this game has in store for you. It has no supernatural demons or imps or monsters of any kinds. It all has to do with humans who are monsters at heart. This game seems to be heavily if not completely influenced by a movie I saw a couple years back called “Ravenous”. Which was just as weird as this game but not nearly as creepy and horrifying. The eerie and unnerving music from that movie is unsettlingly still in tact. It’s a mix of this hick banjo-twang violin-techno and is the most creepy music I have ever heard in my life. The game is set in the winter of a desolate remote part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains set in the year 1806. Yeah that’s right, when’s the last time you played a game set in the 1800’s. It starts of with this guy Captain John Boyd who is fighting in the American-Mexican war. Ultimately in one sequence you have to either die or hide underneath a huge pile of dead and dying bodies of American soldiers. To get close enough to take out the commanding officer and kill him so you can win the battle and allow your fellow soldiers to storm in. We got a hands-on play of the demo and I’m not going to spoil anything. But you will be very impressed if not deeply disturbed and terrified for the rest of your life.
And now here he describes a game demo of the game: Note this isn’t short:
I’m glad you asked to know more about “The Joy of Lights” game, exclusive to Nintendo Revolution. Here I will give you a hands-on in-depth rundown of the demo I played.
The Joy of Lights is probably still a codename but does fit the weird unsettling ambiance of this game. Its being directed by Shinji Mikami and as I said before it seems completely based around the movie “Ravenous”. The main character is this guy named Captain John Boyd who is stationed at a remote camp deep in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during a harsh winter. We got to play an hour-long demo which is only a SMALL taste of the finished product we were told in the introduction. Enjoy
The demo opens up with the scene of Boyd staring blankly at a piece of very rare bloody steak. Everyone around the huge table is in uniform including your character. The sounds of the eating, chewing and swallowing are heavily exaggerated to be stomach churning and very disturbing. You are able to turn Boyd’s head by moving the controller to look around. But that’s all you able to do in this sequence. At some point it fixates on the general who is looking at you with a very stern unhappy grimace. It then cuts to the sequence that I mentioned before where your fighting in the American-Mexican war. After you successfully play through that it cuts back to the table scene where the general is staring at you from the opposite end of the table. You are then asked to come a room after your meal to talk with the general. It then cuts to this scene. He tells you he knows the only reason you survived and were victorious was because you acted cowardly (playing dead and hiding under dying and dead bodies of fellow soldiers). So he tells you he will have to promote you but you are being stationed at Fort Spencer (in the Sierra Nevada Mountains) as a punishment.
The next scene opens up showing Boyd arriving at Fort Spencer and meeting the others uniforms and locals. They all are eerily strange and distant in how they approach and greet you. The snow effects are absolutely gorgeous in how each little flake is rendered and how the snow crushes under your feet. I’d also like to mention how the soundtrack is a quarter of what makes this demo and most likely the finished game so utterly terrifying. The sounds effects, the crunching of snow, the overture music…oh god that music is I will never forget.
I want to get off point here for a second and mention that I’ve only met Shinji Mikami once at a round table interview of developers. He is kind of out of his mind. The interviewer was asking him what the inspiration and goal of RE4 was (this was around 2001 when not much was shown or known concerning RE4, and the European Umbrella Headquarters infiltration idea had been scraped.) But he responded and said that he wanted Resident Evil 4 to allow people to feel good about killing other human beings. So he wanted to revamp the combat to be very methodical in pace but also very realistic. I got this demo from one of my friends who works at Clover who’s team helped us with development. His name is Atsushi Inaba. Then I heard that Mikami made the comment that if his masterpiece RE4 was ported he would chop his head off or something. Obviously he didn’t chop his head off but since it was ported he said he refused to direct Resident Evil 5. Hopefully he’ll do RE6 though.
Anyway, the demo then goes on a fast forward thing stopping at certain parts to convey the story in the demo. All these parts will probably be playable from what I can tell in the finished game. One part it stopped at was they were sitting around a fire and some Irish or Scottish guy named Calhoun stumbled in about dead and had frostbite or something. After they fed him and gave him warm blankets he started telling the story that he and other people had been lost in the mountains. They took refuge in a cave and one of them killed the others and ate them. Then Calhoun convinced the soldiers to go look for any survivors and bring the killer to justice. The camera then zoomed in on the right side of Boyd’s face who looked skeptical but decided to go along. During this sequence you could look around with the analog stick nun-chuk attachment, and would be prompted to put wood on the fire or help dress Calhoun’s wounds with the remote. It then fast forwarded again to them journeying out on the mountain looking for the cave Calhoun described and shows one guy fall and cut his lower leg pretty badly. It then stopped again showing Boyd and the others pitching camp for the night on a series of rocky mountain cliffs. When you take control of Boyd he is practicing with his rifle with another guy. At this point it shows you the dynamics of how the gunplay or at least some of it is done in this game. Tells you what to do and how to shoot with the controller.
At this point it is dusk and you can really see the extraordinary attention to detail here. When the people breath you can see their breath from the cold mountain air and hear the sounds of nature everywhere. We have a 7.1 surround sound system here so it was amazing to hear all that with the sounds of the crackling fire. The control dynamics of the shooting are amazing. You point the controller where you want to shoot and press the A button to fire…using the analog stick to make Boyd walk around. You can press and hold down the Z2 button so it clicks down and it will make Boyd look down the sights of the barrel. The cool part is when he does this his eyes squint and kind of blur out everything except what’s directly in your line of fire. You are shooting at birds flying around the mountain cliffs and you and the other guy will converse naturally as you do your sort of gun-training. The whole process is very fluid with the story and animations are just as fluid.
After about ten or fifteen minutes you will hear a guy who’s sleeping in his tent a little ways away screaming. This was brilliantly directed because just as you are focusing intently on making the shot and Boyd and the other guy are joking around and whatnot. All of a sudden there is this extremely alarming horrible scream. It almost sends you for a jolt because of how you are trying to focus and it literally comes out of nowhere. That scream echoed so loud and with such true clarity of a real scream I really sends you out you’re your chair. All of a sudden your gun comes down and Boyd looks at the other guy and that guy goes running down the rocks to find out what just happened. You then follow the guy down with the analog stick jumping over cracks and crevices in the rocks by moving the remote upwards and pressing forward on the analog stick. By the time you get to the tent everyone else is there also and the guy in the is still making that shrill scream. It then reveals the guy who was screaming was the one who injured his leg. Then he starts screaming “He was licking me!!!”. That’s when I remembered this was from that movie I had seen a while ago. But you use the controller to look down and you see Calhoun laying next to him cowering with blood all over his face and mouth. The others then get angry and pull Calhoun aggressively out of the tent and Calhoun is pleading he did not know what he was doing. The guy with the injured leg the starts to settle down.
You are then told by the others and prompted to tie Calhoun’s hands behind his back while someone holds a rifle to his head and watches your back. This is done by moving the remote around his hands and holding his wrists with the Z2 and Z1 triggers. By this point the games shows that everyone including Boyd is very shaken up and confused. The others tell you (Boyd) that since you are the new guy that you must keep watch over Calhoun while everyone sleeps. This is where the game gets really terrifying and tense. You are in this tent with Calhoun but you have your rifle and at first you have this lantern going. Which provides some small source of light. Then you can hear the wind outside really begin to pick up and it is really beautiful because you see the sides of the tents fabric blowing in because of the wind. But after a minute the lantern goes out and all you can see it a vague outline of Calhoun’s body. What makes it worse is that the entire time he’s pleading with you to let him go and that nobody will care too much if you do. But then the tent spikes that hold it down begin to come up and you have to use the remote to push them down again to keep the tent up. All the while making sure Calhoun doesn’t get away or do something while your back is turned. One time while I was turned around replanting the tent spike when I turned back around to keep watch on Calhoun he was turned all the way around facing me. I drew my gun quickly and Boyd told him to turn around and he again pleaded with me to let him go and why was I pointing a gun at him. Pleading that he never hurt me and I should be kind to him. On some occasions it would be so dark that I couldn’t see which was he was turned and when the fabric on the tent would blow it would let a little moonlight in. Showing Calhoun glaring at me with a weird smile on his face. After the wind calmed down it switched to a first-person perspective and showed that Boyd could hardly keep his eyes open. You are then prompted the either keep jiggling the controller when your vision blanks out from being tired to stay awake. Or to hit Calhoun in the back of his head with the but of the rifle. I choose the latter. You take the remote and draw back then forward in a striking motion to knock him unconscious so you can sleep. It then fast forwarded again.
It then cut to them coming up to a cave next to a small river that Calhoun was pointing to. It then stops and you take control again. Your character Boyd is walking with the group with one guy with a rifle leading Calhoun. His hands still tied behind his back. You approach the cave and Calhoun says that this is where they found shelter and the man killed and ate all the men, women and children. He also says there’s a strong possibility the man is still inside. So out of the five people two of them and yourself go into the cave. The detail inside the cave is literally amazing. Everything is rendered in lifelike detail from the water in the cave, the dirt, the rocks…everything is beautiful. Although not nearly on par with our game this game’s graphics are surely head and shoulders above anything else that has been shown to the public for next-generation thus far. The cave is a series of winding small narrow tunnels causing Boyd and the other two to duck down and squeeze through the narrow passages. You of course move him throughout the game with the analog stick but he does the squeezing through and ducking down all on his own. But you and another guy take one route and the other guy goes another. After a little walking you will come to a small dead end and will find the room. Now throughout this sequence you will be holding a lantern which you will use to see certain things and move it with the remote. Once you get to the dead end the guy with the rifle (the person you’re with) will tell you to shine the lantern at the ground and back walls. Which will reveal about 17-20 skeletons and partially decaying people. They are all women, men and children and a lot of the bones that the other guy picks up have teeth marks in them. You can quickly tell that every bite mark has a signature missing tooth mark in it. Then you a given another huge jolt when the third guy comes in and says the other route leads to nowhere. Then he makes the observation that Calhoun has a missing tooth that matches the bones. All at once you realize that Calhoun himself is the cannibal and then you hear a gunshot and screams coming from outside. At this point you begin to feel a soft heartbeat like vibration in both the remote and nun-chuk.
It then cuts to show Calhoun break the rope that tied his wrists and quietly walk over and gouge both of one of the soldiers eyes out and take his knife. The other man fires the shot that you heard and accidentally hit’s the man who just lost his eyes. Calhoun then rushes over and slit’s the man’s throat who has the gun and stabs him in the chest three times as he screams. Calhoun then takes the rifle from him and throws it down river.
It then cuts back to Boyd and the other two. At this point the guy with the rifle signals for them to return outside and all three of you start running. You run in this game by pushing any direction on the analog stick and holding down Y to run. You move the remote to keep the lantern lighting the way to the surface. Once you get back to the hole to reach the surface you will be prompted to give the other two a boost with an A button “action scene”. He will then put down the lantern and it will then trigger an interactive cut-scene where you will use the remote to pull yourself out of the hole. You will need to move the controller up in a fast motion to pull yourself onto the ledge then tap the A button continuously to climb out.
Once out you discover the other two have disappeared apparently trying to find Calhoun. You see one guy laying there dead, stabbed in his upper chest many times and his throat cut. The other person is laying a little bit away holding his gut and his eye’s have been gouged out. You can tell he is still fighting for air and is bleeding profusely. A little arrow comes on the bottom part of the screen pointing towards the thick forest leading to another high cliff on the mountain. So I followed the where the arrow told me to go and was lost in this forest soon after . So you just have to keep following the arrows.
You continue on for about fifteen seconds and then you spot Calhoun down below. He is standing over top of one of the guys who were with you in the cave. The guy’s stomach skin has been pulled back to reveal his intestines and other organs. His cheek is also torn open, his rifle still in hand. Then the crazy part really cranks up. I will never forget what happens next. Calhoun looks at you with this weird little smirk and his body starts twitching and he starts making gurgling noises. His hands start twitching and moving sporadically in strange ways too. That creepy overture of that hick-banjo twang techno music starts going as well. Then a menacing voice say’s “RUN” and the text also appears on the bottom of the screen. So your character turns around and another arrow tells you where to go. You see Calhoun is now running full speed after you.
This is also like the rest of the game beautifully directed. You will trip over things like rocks and branches while your running and he will realistically pick himself up and keep going. The game also has no health bar, no nothing. Everything is fully immersive. You will see that he is breathing hard and both the analog nun-chuk and remote are heavily vibrating to simulate his rapid heartbeat. Occasionally you will run out of breath and have to hide behind a tree. Or lay or duck down behind something long enough to catch your breath. You should keep running again after you regain your breath and Boyd will look behind him from time to time to see Calhoun stumbling toward you. With those crazed animal like twitching motions. He will turn around one last time before you trip and notice you are looking off the ledge of a cliff. At this time in the sequence you see Calhoun is stumbling up slowly and has cornered you at this rocky cliff. You have two choices: fight him to try and get away or take your chances and jump. When you choose to fight him you use the analog nun-chuk and the remote as your fists to punch, Y to kick and X to grapple. But I never fought him for too long. I always ended up jumping off the cliff.
When you choose to jump off the cliff you will hit a downward slope and begin to tumble down the mountain with great speed. Boyd will hit the slope with an enormous impact that you will feel jolting through both parts of the controller. Then begin his decent down the slope slamming into trees, shrubs and rocks all the way down. The object here is use the remote to try and guide his body away from a few of the bigger obstacles he might slam into. While it seems impossible to dodge everything if not most things you have to guide him away from a few or else he will die from impact. Then you will be treated to many of the absolutely fantastic death scenes. You can also use the A button to grab onto a rock or tree to slow your fall for a minute and give you time to avoid obstacles. But this has to be done when prompted for the A button “action scenes”. The graphics for this part of the sequence were astounding and the rumble felt perfect in both controllers as he smacked into different things and would continue to roll downhill. It also lent itself to show how they are using their physics to great effect. He would crash and collide with things and roll downhill very realistically. But the trees and rocks and other things also reacted physically correct. Certain things and trees and rocks would break or begin to fall as he would hit them and try to grab hold of them. Everything had its own particles and the dirt and snow effects were as great as ever. It also looked great how he realistically took damage and got dirty and his clothes would tear.
But after a while of rolling down the steep almost completely vertical slope. He hits another rocky outcrop and falls downs another incline. As you guide him with the controller he will eventually fall into a deadfall covered with broken branches and things, and impale his upper thigh on a sharp stick. He lets out an echoing cry of pain as it pierces his thigh. The rumble in the two controller parts really kicks up a whole new notch right here to simulate the intense pain. All of a sudden you hear footsteps above you and a gurgling that could only be Calhoun above you. The object in this part as you will be told on-screen. Is to hold down the Z2 trigger and place his hand on the top of the wound to apply pressure. Then press and hold the B trigger and apply pressure to the bottom of the wound with his other hand. You will see the blood spurting from the wound and everything. The trick to it is to keep the hands as still as possible or else less pressure and his breathing gets heavier and alerts Calhoun to where you are. It is somewhat challenging because you have to be very still to keep the sound of his breathing low. Also the more still you are the more pressure is applied. You have to really hold those triggers too as the rumble is apparently designed to make it difficult to hold the triggers and be still.
If your not still and Boyd starts breathing hard, Calhoun will hear you and tear through the branches to find you in the deadfall. He will then pull you out and Boyd will yell from the stick being pulled back through his leg. But instead of just giving you the game over screen like other games. You will get to witness him devour you alive and you can try to get away. To get away you have to be very good with pushing him away with the remote and being quick with the prompts for A button “action scenes”. I could never get away and plus I wanted to see what happened if I didn’t. Anyway, Calhoun will hold you down and begin to take bites out of you. When I played he bit Boyd’s ear off and took several chunks out of the love handles with his teeth. He then somehow ripped Boyd’s lower abdomen open and began to pull out the intestines and bite pieces off. The rumble as in the rest of the game immerses you perfectly here. It has a medium rumble and as he bites into you or tears into your body the rumble get more aggressive. The sick part about it is that Boyd will continuously shove him off automatically to no avail even when you doing nothing. The closer Boyd gets to death the weaker your shoves and the automatic shoves will get. The closer Boyd gets to death he will also begin to fade out and you will see it in his face. When he’s very close to death (almost dead) it switches to a first-person perspective and his vision will begin to blank and fade out. The end being his vision totally goes white. The weirdest part was that during the whole thing this upbeat bluegrass tune was playing.
But if you manage to keep quite, Calhoun will eventually move on and Boyd will let out and big sign to prompt you that you can release pressure on the leg. As you do that a geyser of blood will shoot out and you will be given two choices of how to remove the stick from your thigh. You can pull the stick up through the leg. Or pull your leg off of the stick. I choose the first choice. Both require you to grab the leg or the stick with the analog nun-chuk while holding down Z2. Then grabbing the stick or the leg with the remote and perform an upward pulling motion. You have to move the remote up steadily and slowly or else it will slip and Boyd will collapse from shock and your game will be over.
Sequences like this would be annoying if the two parts weren’t as ergonomical and shaped so well. But the nun-chuk attachment fits so well in your hand and the placement of the triggers and analog stick are perfect. The same goes for the primary remote part, all of the buttons are perfectly placed and spaced correctly and the form factor is just as good.
After you either pull the stick up through the leg or leg off the stick the rumble will still be throbbing a bit. Now this scene is very gory and bloody. The blood will spurt realistically and wound will also react realistically while you perform this. Again its not nearly as gory or realistic as Guts N’ Glory is where everything is absolutely anatomically gory but it is still is very nasty. Anyway, the next part is getting out of the deadfall.
To do this you will have to perform another very well-done interactive cut scene. When prompted you will need to snap the controller upwards in a fast motion for him to jump and grab hold of the edge. Then you will be prompted to again continuously tap the A button to pull yourself up. He is weaker and it shows from his exhaustion. Once you get out you will need to follow the bottom-screen arrows. To find your way back through the dense forest and back to the mountain cliffs to return to Fort Spencer. Before you can proceed you will need to tie a piece of your pants leg around the wound with the another remote action to slow the bleeding. After that you can tell by the way he walks and runs he is tired and weak and lacking energy. Every step he takes he drips blood and leaves a trail as he walks (this can’t be avoided). The audio here is also downright amazing. You can hear all kinds of animals, sticks and snow crushing beneath your feet, his heavy breathing. You can see birds flying overhead and being alert to your presence and the forest is meticulously detailed.
You will eventually come to a rocky wall of the mountainside and have to scale it. At this point there is Prince of Persia inspiration here as well as you scale this plat forming section of the mountain. The scenery around you in the distance is jawdroppingly beautiful as well as the mountainside itself. It doesn’t even look like a plat forming sequence, it just look like a very high jaggy mountainside. The blood that smears on every rock your injured leg touches is also a nice touch to detail. Once you get back to the camp the others will ask you where the other soldiers are. It then cuts to him telling about what happened and about Calhoun. Some lady says he is a Wendigo. A monster who is immensely powerful that keeps himself sustained by eating humans. Then they agree to send someone to contact the authorities and tell Boyd to get some sleep. But you get the feeling they don’t completely trust Boyd or something. It then cuts to a shot of his eyes and upper forehead…the lantern goes out and the demo ends.
After I got back to the title screen it had the option “One more time”. So I choose the option, it loaded up my save. Then it cuts to Boyd sitting on the bed apparently from just waking. Then you hear that old familiar sound of gurgling on the other side of the room. As soon as your move the remote to look in that direction and spot Calhoun that fucking creepy ass hick twang violin music starts going and the remote starts vibrating softly. Calhoun’s standing there in that animalistic crazed form. With that smile and his arms and hands twitching and jerking around, and legs shaking. Calhoun then thrusts himself toward you and then the demo ends completely leaving you hanging. Wondering what the hell happened.
This was without a doubt the craziest and most horrifying game I’ve ever played. Just the transformation of the normal Calhoun into some playful twitching animal-like cannibal. Its almost like he’s playing with you and stalking you. It is truly unsettling. This might just be the first great game you might not want to finish. The theme from what I can tell is of isolation. In a place where there no way to escape these horrors because there’s literally nowhere to run. But you really can’t imagine what I have told you unless you actually play this yourself. It is tense, not like the unprecedented level of intensity in RE4. But just the feeling of tenseness throughout the whole thing. Not the anxiety or anxiousness or what will happen next. But the tenseness and utter fear and what happens next. Also what kind of creepy music are they going to play next that makes it that much worse. This game is slated for release sometime in 2007 so be watching and waiting for this. Remember The Joy of Lights is still a codename so it may or may not change. If so I will try and let you know. Take care. I hope you understand a little more of what I mean.
Well what you guys think. But after looking at this I’ve made a great revelation to the truth of this game but I’ll get into that another time.
But hands up just from reading that may be the scariest game since Eternal Darkness. Well tell me what you think.
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