Highlights
- Content Warning brings Teletubbies meets horror vibe, with jaw-dropping Old World monsters and eerie sketchbook visuals.
- Babadook could be perfect for a chilling video game adaptation, drawing inspiration from its eerie book illustrations and psychological horror.
- Hand-penciled horrors reign supreme in creating chilling ambience, showcasing power of artistic medium in indie game development.
Content Warning harnesses the co-op scaries, in the same vein as Dead by Daylight and Phasmaphobia, and combines the hilarious design of the Teletubbies protagonists with the surprisingly bone-chilling style of the haunted Old World. Switching from the colored-pencil outside world to the black-and-white, sketchbook domain, featuring the Factory and The Cruise Ship, is a simple but effective contrast, and the deformed, mutated, and nightmarish monsters that lurk in The Old World even give Outlast and Resident Evil a tamer perspective.
Paying particular attention to the cross-hatching shading used to bring The Old World to life in games/”>found footage, this style subconsciously adds a childlike aesthetic to the design, especially when there are creatures similar to Little Nightmares 2’s Mono and a spikey version of Monsters, Inc.’s Mikey running around. Of course, there’s also a sea of Slender Man-esque abominations and too many shadow-eyed foes to count, which got me thinking that The Old World would make a fantastic playground for The Babadook to hunt.
Content Warning: All Items & What They Do
Content Warning needs you to use items to gain views. Here’s all the items, what they do, and how much they cost.
The Babadook Is Waiting In The Wings
Directed by Australia’s Jennifer Kent, the 2014 psychological horror, The Babadook, was a subtly terrifying study of a widowed mother, Amelia, and her troubled six-year-old son, Samuel, who encounter a long-fingered phantom with a top hat in their home. The feature won several awards and gained a cult following after the humanoid monster became an internet meme. Still, the overbearing essence of this unescapable boogeyman was the fundamental takeaway that continued to haunt the psyche of horror fans, and this antagonist is ripe and ready to be turned into a video game prowler.
A key prop featured in The Babadook is the pop-up children’s book, Mister Babadook, bound in a chilling red cover and containing a poem about the creature. “If it’s in a word, or if it’s in a book, you can’t get rid of the Babadook” is the opening of said rhyme and also the tagline for the movie, but the book also depicts black and white illustrations of a child encountering the grinning, dead-eyed figment. Instead of using cross-hatching shading in the sketches, the drawings use smudge shading with a charcoal base, and the pop-up features include an open wardrobe with “dook dook” whispers coming from inside and a lunging instance of the Babadook swooping down towards the child in bed screaming “Let me in!”
Even though the Mister Babadook book and Content Warning’s Old World use different styles of shading, the black and white sketch effect in both emphasizes the archaic nature of the monsters on offer, but the latter’s environmental layout leaves something to be desired for a Babadook game.
Even though the Mister Babadook book and Content Warning’s Old World use different styles of shading, the black and white sketch effect in both emphasizes the archaic nature of the monsters on offer, but the latter’s environmental layout leaves something to be desired for a Babadook game. Instead of submerging into The Old World to record Spööktube videos, a Babadook game could see the player – likely manning a child – being sucked into the pages of the Babadook pop-up, either literally or through lucid dreaming. Descending into The Old World-inspired realm of the Babadook, playing as the infant would involve stealth, puzzles and riddles to solve, and one hair-raising animation seeing the Babadook floating around with its talons outstretched.
Hand-Penciled Horrors Are King
Of course, there are amateur games out there based on The Babadook, featured on the likes of RPGMaker and Scratch and including Babashook: The Game and Escape The Babadook. One Redditor even put a request within the Dead by Daylight subreddit five years ago, stating the obvious of how great an addition the Babadook would be to the Killers roster – unfortunately, we’re still waiting for its arrival in the asymmetric multiplayer. There’s certainly a demand for the gentlemanly specter to become the next feared gaming villain to outrun or hide from, adding to the likes of Silent Hill 2’s Pyramid Head, the Five Nights At Freddy’s gang, and even the Thomas the Tank Engine and Michael Jackson mods in Nextbot Chasing.
Romansh first-person horror, Mundaun, was released in 2021 and demonstrated the power hand-penciled titles have in projecting a chilling ambiance. This medium also allows talented artists to flex their skills and produce a project that feels like a discovered relic, and the same quality is needed for an indie Babadook game to give it authenticity and make the pop-up book come to life. Content Warning is one of the few games I’ve seen that utilizes this artistic medium, which only adds to the player’s fear factor. Instead of taking the comical route like Landfall’s co-op, a Babadook games-ranked/”>survival horror would be memorable tenfold if it leaned into the sinister side and created something truly disturbing like its masterful movie counterpart.
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