Summary
- AILA trailer at Gamescom showcases unique blend of survival horror and technology through VR gameplay.
- AILA takes cues from Black Mirror, exploring impact of AI on humanity through dark and disturbing scenes.
- Players shape horror experience by choosing prompts, offering multiple genres of horror for replayability.
Aired as part of the preshow for Gamescom 2024’s Opening Night Live, the gameplay trailer for developer Pulsatrix Studios’ AILA showcased a frighteningly original spin on survival horror. While the brief and bloody trailer featured genre tropes like eerie enemies and crumbling castles, it’s the premise in which they’re presented that makes AILA look so unique. Placing players in the role of a game tester exploring these unsettling environments through the lenses of a VR headset, this indie title’s mix of terror and technology looks to be following in Black Mirror’ s surreal, sci-fi footsteps .
Although the grisly gameplay on display in its Gamescom trailer was decidedly more macabre than the cerebral horror at the heart of many Black Mirror episodes, AILA is clearly taking some cues from the hit show. Just as Black Mirror often highlights the unexpected terrors unleashed by rapidly advancing technology, AILA hopes to show the horrors that can happen when virtual reality becomes far too real. If Pulsatrix can deliver on this pulse-pounding premise and deliver a game that embraces both its sci-fi and horror influences, it could make AILA one of the scariest survival horror titles in years.
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AILA Offers a Dark Take on Black Mirror’s Familiar Formula
Whereas even Black Mirror’s most unsettling episodes tend to rely more on building up tension than body counts, AILA appears to be taking a much darker approach to sci-fi horror. From a character painfully pulling themselves off a cross to corridors filled with corpses, the Gamescom trailer featured a deluge of dark and disturbing scenes. This emphasis on violence and viscera doesn’t mean AILA won’t offer up some Black Mirror-esque critiques of technology, though.
According to an overview provided on AILA’s website, developer Pulsatrix wants to use its upcoming survival horror game to examine the impact that increased interactions with AI could have on humanity. Although forcing players to fight through hordes of horrifying enemies might seem like an odd way to approach such a heady concept, one of AILA’s core gameplay mechanics offers an intriguing way to explore its central theme.
Players Shape Their Own Horror Experience in AILA
Rather than subjecting gamers to only one sort of scare throughout its runtime, AILA appears to be aiming to deliver a more wide-ranging horror experience. To this end, AILA’s Steam page states that players will experience multiple different genres of horror as they progress through the game’s various virtual worlds. What makes this genre-hopping approach especially interesting is that players will play a role in deciding the sorts of scary scenarios they experience, which could provide AILA with a high level of replayability compared to some other horror titles.
Sticking with AILA’s premise of beta testing AI-generated games, players will select from a series of prompts before each stage that help determine how the level plays out. From psychological horror to the sorts of action-oriented fare popularized by games like Resident Evil 4, the overview provided on AILA’s official website suggests that players will have numerous options when it comes to shaping their horror experience. How and if these choices will affect the ways in which the game’s virtual worlds bleed into the “real” one as hinted at in the trailer’s closing moments, though, remains to be seen.
If Pulsatrix can successfully blend the same sort of suspense and horror it delivered with its previous game, 2022’s creepy FOBIA St. Dinfna Hotel, with the sci-fi stylings of Black Mirror, gamers may be in for a treat. While plenty of questions remain about its overall structure and the extent to which players’ choices will actually influence their gameplay experience, AILA’s attempt to intertwine technology and terror could make it a truly unique and unsettling survival horror experience.
- Release Date
- December 4, 2011
- Network
- Channel 4, Netflix
- Showrunner
- Charlie Brooker
- Directors
- Owen Harris, Toby Haynes, James Hawes, David Slade, Carl Tibbetts, Ally Pankiw, Bryn Higgins, Dan Trachtenberg, Euros Lyn, Jodie Foster, Joe Wright, John Hillcoat, Sam Miller, Tim Van Patten, Uta Briesewitz, Colm McCarthy, Jakob Verbruggen, James Watkins, John Crowley, Otto Bathurst, Anne Sewitsky, Brian Welsh
- Writers
- Jesse Armstrong
Cast
-
Cristin MiliotiNanette Cole -
Jimmi SimpsonWalton
