Tobe Hooper’s stomach-churning 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a slasher masterpiece of incomparable dazzling beauty. None of that Prosaic sequels quite managed to reproduce its magnetic horror: burning the spectators with an orange sun and throwing them into the orange smoker where the grill is placed, as in the original. But developer Gun Interactive will certainly try to capture that in its upcoming asymmetrical horror game The Texas Chainsaw Massacretells me Art and Audio Director and CEO Wes Keltner.
“We could have just taken some ingredients that some people find creepy and slapped them [cadaver-wearing antagonist] “Leatherface is in, but that’s not how we work,” Keltner says via email about the game. due August 18. “This unique blend of […] Discomfort, absolute terror, and beauty all had to find their way into the game for us to earn the right to name it The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Recreate the Texas of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
In search of that right, Gun Interactive worked under the film’s looming, skull-shaped shadow, poring over the film and its details like an obscure Bible verse.
“We spent weeks in rural Texas towns and took over 10,000 photos referenced by artists,” says Keltner of determining the locations for the game. “We studied the sounds, insects, flowers, and animals in the exact month our game takes place.” They even checked the migration patterns of the Texas songbirds to ensure that if a player heard occasional ambient chirps, it was accurate.
“Obsessed? Yes,” says Keltner when he hears your thoughts. But “if something is just a little bit off, it could nudge you towards reality, thus shattering the illusion we’ve created over the last three years of our lives.”
“We want the fan to be fully immersed in the world of Texas chainsaw,” he continued. “Every sound, every plant, every drop of blood.”
The original film enjoys – in close-ups and tense, lingering shots – a group of friends being crushed by a cannibalistic family who make mass murder look as easy as plucking chicken feathers. But there is clearly a lack of blood.
You only ever get quick, unexpected glimpses of it, smearing it like lotion over the rough skin of an armadillo roadkill, collecting it in the palm of a cannibal after cutting himself, or when touching a wet pearl of the protagonist Sally’s fingertip just before the desiccated grandpa sucks it clean. Its rare appearance makes it even more significant, primarily because it collects and dries on Sally’s body, rewarding her unwavering, exhausting screams with red. It also makes it so, as Keltner notes, that “perceived blood is far more relevant.” your full body terror.
Much of the film’s horror stems from the viewer’s wild imagination. The camera never shows the character Pam’s wound as Leatherface hangs her from a waiting meat hook, but you can see her tormented, unable to move or breathe, and one could imagine the wound to be worse than it is.
weapons Texas aims for similar suggestiveness. “Compared to the film, the game might be a little gorier, but it’s still not the backbone or focus of the visual tone or gameplay,” says Keltner. “We didn’t want to look at other films that might have more emotional gore and try to incorporate that into this game. That would not be very Texas.”
Asymmetric horror done differently
To keep things Texasthe game keeps the film’s ensemble cast format – a bunch of friends being gutted by a bunch of twisted butchers – and slightly translates it into an asymmetric survival horror, so to speak Dead by daylightAlso inspired through the 1974 film, prepares his game.
But not how DbDor other one vs many horror games like Evil Dead: The Game or Friday the 13th: The gamealso published by Gun, Texas will be 3v4with five family members And five victimsall with unique abilities for players to choose from.
“What makes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre So unique is that we find a family of killers […]. They protect their way of life, their property and themselves – at least that’s what they tell themselves,” says Keltner. “When players take control of these killers, they’re not playing monsters or absolute killing machines — they’re playing corrupted humans. Just like with the victims, these characters talk to each other, they have relationships that we portray with great care.”
Single player or bot matches won’t be possible, but Keltner hopes the games’ carefully crafted, but not written, format will fuel real, spontaneous fear in players.
“Assassin patrols will be unpredictable, their actions will be spontaneous and based on what the team is thinking, communicating and reacting to at any given moment,” he says. “If you’re a victim hiding behind a couch in the shade and a few family members walk into a room, you don’t know if they’re going to check exactly where you are or if they’re just passing through.” The tension and fear you feel is even greater compared to an AI whose path you have memorized.”
In this sense, Texas strives to provide all the typical asymmetric multiplayer highlights that depend on spirited players to keep the gameplay fun. Conveniently, this more turbulent fear also fits well with the 1974 film’s soul, which Keltner keeps returning to.
Not a remake, but a prequel
But the game’s story deviates a bit from Gun’s quest for cinematic accuracy and serves somewhat as a prequel to the first film, with recognizable family members and victims who are new to the franchise.
“In our game, these teenagers put themselves in this situation on purpose,” says Keltner. “Ana, one of the characters you can play as, put this group together to look for her sister Maria, who went missing in this part of Texas.”
Due to the unpredictability of an asymmetric multiplayer Texas also eschews the film’s concept of the “last girl,” though the term’s originator, Carol J. Clover, credits the film with making the prelude to the subject in her seminal essay Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Movie. (“For almost thirty minutes – a third of the film – we watch the film [Sally] screaming, running, twitching, jumping through windows, sustaining injuries and mutilations. Your will to survive is amazing; She ends up finding the highway bloody and harrowing,” Clover writes.
“The combinations of endings are too extensive” to grapple with the loaded term or even predict any sort of single victim, says Keltner. Instead, the game individualizes victims in a different way.
“We wanted to be sure […] that every player feels like they’ve just gone through their own personal version of it The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘ says Keltner. “The characters engage in dialogue with each other, they have reactions, conversations and emotions that we really wanted to convey so that as players play, they really hold onto the narrative they are creating – whether they survive this ordeal or not.”
This may or may not work for you. Keltner knows that for some people, a great horror game is defined by “jump scares galore.” For others, they wish for slowly increasing tension and anxiety. Still others just want body horror and blood everywhere,” he says. But Texasthe game, is driven by an awe-inspiring dedication to the film, not typical asymmetric multiplayer conventions and audiences screaming for slaughteror Saturn retrograde.
“For us,” he tells me, “we’re going to look at the original object and say, ‘This is what we’re doing.'”
