The Blackout Club is a cooperative crouching game that saw as many as four players playing the role of sly American teenagers who formed a backward society dedicated to figuring out what went wrong with neighborhood relationships. Why do they keep waking up where their clothes are stained with blood? Why do their parents sleepwalk in the street at night? What is that weird music coming from under the house? A lazy person might describe it as "a thief meets Left4Dead". A lazy person is also a right person.
Every night, your junior team will base their headquarters on an abandoned rail transport truck and see your junior team begin their missions into nearby areas to learn more about the mysterious entities that invaded your dreams. These missions are usually a combination of two randomly selected goals, and may involve anything from posting a Blackout Club recruiting poster to tracking blood and understanding its direction. You started scouting near the community, but you almost always ventured into the underside of your house and into the white-walled tunnels Warren, which are called "mazes".
Developer issues have a long tradition in immersive SIM design and have received praise including Bioshock, Neon Struct, and Thief: Deadly Shadows. This legacy is evident in the style and system of the "Blackout Club". The endless nights of the neighbors are painted in a colorful, saturated palette, reminiscent of Rapture's blooming buildings, where the sky is deep blue, and each lamp is dazzlingly bright, emphasizing it by them Visibility when lit.
But the whitewashed wooden houses are also full of (generally literal) Gothic undertones, bringing people back to the blood of Question. The maze and its shuffled inhabitants have an unfamiliar place that reminds of more natural moments in the thief series, especially levels like Haunted Cathedral and Jordan Thomas' own Shalebridge cradle. On the night of the sleepwalker, DNA is evident in the small tremolos and st sounds of bouncing sounds, sounds and ambient sounds.
But most importantly, The Blackout Club is a stealth game once you have at least adapted to a slightly slippery movement, and it is a fairly sophisticated game. In the early games, your main opponent was Sleepwalkers, the adults of the town, who wandered the streets in a permanent state of play. They may not be visible, but they listen keenly, and they will follow you if you walk or run past them, or even if you walk on certain surfaces such as concrete or stone. Speaking of which, "Blackout Club" is your first stealth game for a long time. The surface you are going to step on is very important, which makes this elderly Thief fan have a bright smile on his face.
As the game progresses, you will need to avoid safety cameras with a traffic light warning stage, seat belts that vibrate while driving fast and faceless Lucidus with a flashlight to chase you, they feel you The presence. You can counter-attack to a certain degree, temporarily fix the enemy on the ground, deploy dispersive items such as firecrackers or flash sticks, and even use powerful calm darts to knock down one or two enemies completely. But these always delay tactics. Dodge is the most important, because every time your enemy is alerted, you increase the possibility of calling Shape.
"Shape" is a nuclear option for "Blackout Club", an invisible creature that can only be perceived by closing your eyes during the game. If Shape appears, it will chase a player relentlessly. If they are caught, Shape will control their minds, forcing them to hover on the map, and if there is a juvenile companion, they will run away. If you can catch "shape" companions, you can bring them back to life, but if everyone is shaped, your teenage glove box will return to the menu screen.
These factors combine to produce some exciting procedural horror. Whenever the "walkerwalker" shakes in his direction, the new player sucks his breath through his teeth. As you become more adept at sneaking, instead, your fear comes from increasing the likelihood of a Shape appearing every time you slip. When it does, even the best players will have to deal with panic as they distance themselves from their stealth attackers.
It's true that blackout clubs are at their best when something goes wrong, but you have enough money to deal with it … mainly. In one game, I led Shape to a happy chase nearby, but ended up being trapped in the garage by sleepwalkers. All I can do is repeat "I'm trapped, I'm trapped" underneath the microphone, where Shape appears faintly behind my eyelids.
I like both the atmosphere and the mechanics of The Blackout Club. I don't like the surrounding structure very much. On the surface, the problem is that level improvement is very slow, and level improvement can unlock new task types and areas to explore. As a result, you will end up replaying the same goals over and over again, with no change at all or not fun enough to withstand so many repetitions. You can speed up your leveling by enriching it with supplements and discovering "reward evidence", but you still want to complete three to four tasks at each level, assuming you've always succeeded.
As I also mentioned, there are some nasty bugs lurking near the suburbs of The Blackout Club. My main playmates and I often encounter desktop crashes, which has cost us hours of gameplay. It also took a lot of time XP.
Both problems can be solved. But I also feel that the "blackout club" lacks a sense of occasion. Questions here create a fascinating world, a world full of atmosphere and stories. However, the fragmented nature of the world and simple and repetitive goals undermine the construction of the world. I find myself thinking back to the time of Left4Dead-in my book, it is still the best collaborative game ever-and how it blends a programmatic zombie tribe with a set of unforgettable tasks. Each one is exquisitely crafted, can I send a text message to my friend "Expert Broadcasting"? As they scramble to enter the server, you hear the expectations in their voices.
I don't know if the Blackout Club will not benefit from a similar approach, for example, by providing ten fixed tasks to attract your collective attention, instead of placing its eye-catching stealth mechanic in a rushed hamster wheel and The edge of storytelling. To give another example, although it is distracting to smash some signs on the ground for the first time, it is definitely not as tempting as stealing Sir Barford's scepter or even robbing the cradle.
Of course, telling developers how to make games is not my job. If I do this I will get more pay. All I know is that I will end my tense mission at the "Blackout Club", holding the "shape" tightly, nervously shaking like my own huge underground instrument in the game. Then I would see the frustrating number increase, launching a new game with almost identical (and sometimes identical) goals, which would kill my desire to play the game again. I'll be back tomorrow, maybe the next day, but other than that, it's hard to see The Blackout Club reappear in my nightmare.
