The game begins when the hero (or heroine – yes, you can pick) rides into a deserted town where things appear to have gone terribly, terribly awry. In other words, Ecstatica is a game of contrasts, and it works brilliantly. Why? Because, despite how odd the characters look, despite the fact that they look, fight, and move like wired puppets, despite the fact that it could be a kid’s game at first glance… it is remarkably violent and disturbing. It’s definitely a wacky experiment – Accolade did the same thing with their (terrible) “fighting” game Ballz – but the bizarre style works completely in the game’s favor. It may look a little bit silly when compared to Origin’s Bioforge, a similarly styled game released just a year later, which used higher quality textured polygonal models, similar (and arguably superior) to Resident Evil. The game came roughly around the time when 3D graphics were becoming more prevalent, but before 3D accelerators. They’re also gouraud shaded, which helps them from looking too bizarre. If you want to look cool around the math nerds, the technical term is “ellipsoids,” because they’re oblong, whereas circles are not. (This hasn’t stopped dozens of permutations of the same horror flicks either, but that’s neither here nor there.) Even the progenitor of the genre, Alone in the Dark, draws heavily from Lovecraft, if not ripping it off completely.Įcstatica, developed by a British development team helmed by Andrew Spencer, and published by Psygnosis, is a PC survival horror game that doesn’t seem to be directly inspired by much of anything, except perhaps pure craziness.Įcstatica is usually referred to as “that game where everyone is made out of circles for whatever reason”. The argument should be that, once you see something the first time, it shouldn’t be nearly scary the second (or third or fourth) time around. Horror games tend to be rather formulaic, drawing from popular works like Day of the Dead, Jacob’s Ladder or numerous Japanese horror film.

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