Mr Viral
The Pog decade continues to haunt us
Image credit: Cold Out Interactive
I don’t keep family photo albums to avoid the exact scenario described in Corporeal, a just-announced mystery horror game in which you piece together a haunted family photo album. Navigating “a series of immersive retro analog interfaces”, you will complete “tactile, minimalist puzzles” so as to combine eldritch snapshots and reveal new scenes. You know the kind of thing: that isn’t a freshly-baked muffin cooling on a second floor window ledge, it’s the Slender Man. That isn’t a dressing gown, it’s your great-uncle Percival, back from the beyond to haunt you for undercooking the fish during the great salmonella outbreak of Xmas 1993.
“As the sole survivor of unexplained events in the 1990s, search for answers in an archive of photos rescued from the ruins of your childhood home, manipulate the past, encounter specters & map your cursed family history,” explains the Steam page. I, too, am a survivor of unexplained events in the 1990s. In my case, though, I’m talking about the Pog “phenomenon” and wearing T-shirts over long-sleeved tops. Whereas Corporeal, I sense, is all about murders, specifically murders in New Zealand.
It looks pretty nifty – at once chilled and chilling. The pictures must be dragged and dropped into the album manually, with descriptive text appearing alongside. I don’t get the sense it’s this year’s Immortality – which many journos considered GOAT material, though our Alice B (RPS in peace) was a little steelier in her verdict – but I’ve always enjoyed the bits in horror films where somebody combs through archive footage and wait, that isn’t great-uncle Percival at all, it’s Aunt Maguire. You remember Aunt Maguire? She lived down Salem way, in that house behind the tarpits with all the ravens.
If you don’t like cursed family albums, may I recommend Pip’s (RPS in peace) old album of Proteus snapshots. If you do like cursed family albums, what would you put in yours?
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