Friendslop games may come and go, but the (for all intents and purposes) progenitor of them all, Lethal Company is still the one I think of most. It’s scary, it’s funny, it’s otherworldly, literally, there’s so much mystery to it that you just want to spend time in its world. But while it will likely go down as solo dev Zeekerss’ most notable work, he did just release a brand new horror game 10 years in the making. And in a recent interview, he spoke of how he got his start in horror, and the roots that make up his latest work.
Speaking to GamesRadar, Zeekerss noted that he “didn’t start by making horror games, but I found my home in this genre. I don’t know why, but it feels like fear has been my primary emotion ever since I was a kid. But it’s a deeper thing; the emotional spectrum of fear and courage, hope and despair, is my way of interpreting the world. As an artist, it’s my first language. I can branch out to other genres, but they’ll always find their context in that.”
You can really feel that even within Lethal Company. It’s a horror game, sure, but through play it becomes a comedy, a drama, a tragedy, it’s capable of a lot more than just scares. When it comes to his latest game, Welcome To The Dark Place, Zeekerss speaks of a pretty broad influence too, citing games like Kentucky Route Zero and its magical realism. “That game does this thing where it dives into dizzying, text-based ‘rabbit holes’ in which you tell yourself the story,” he said.
Stories Untold from No Code (now Screen Burn, currently working on Silent Hill: Townfall) served as inspiration too, but the big one is the classic text-based adventure game Zork. “When I was a kid, maybe 10 years old, somebody loaded up Zork on the family computer and let me loose. I remember feeling like it was the most realistic and mysterious game I had ever played,” Zeekerss explained.
I’m sure a burning question you might have is “how the hell did a text-based game take 10 years to make?” Well, the answer is good old fashioned scope creep. With text being infinitely easier to implement than 3D models or environments, as Zeekerss puts it, “As soon as I think of something, it can be playable.” But because of that, it kind of got out of control, something he described as, at times, “maddening.”
In the years since starting it, games like Lethal Company and his other works like It Steals and Dead Seater obviously got in the way too. But Zeekerss continues to be an interesting developer because of the fact he doesn’t pin himself down to one type of game, even if horror is something he’ll always come back to.
Oh, and, if you didn’t know, Welcome To The Dark Place is free on Steam, so even if we’re a few days past Halloween now, you’ve not got many excuses not to try it out.
