Can a comic game scare you? Especially one which stays well away from the occult?
The real challenge is not crossing that line.
Up until now, the art of Carny has been relatively benign.
A comic graveyard called Crookwood.
Dead comic bodies belonging to dead comic characters.
Some skeletons to rattle.
I call it schlock horror.
I started to up the ante and spill some blood when Regi got his brains blown out and then the Villains (my term for game players) slaughter a patrol of Boners, stringing their intestines up like Christmas lights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl0QOEDVTm4
A fellow named Nad is one of the casualties, who’d we’d met only moments before.
What I’m trying to do here is build some association with the characters by giving them names; so their deaths will register feelings.
Feelings can be hurt.
Then came the curse of Cybil Munt.
And things started to get serious with the art.
Well. You can’t call it a horror game without some horror. And a horrid tale.
It turns out Munt was Uncle Shrift’s mother. And he hated her for the things she’d done to him as a child.
So much so that when this serial killer is shot by the cops, her body is returned to the next of kin. Shrift.
He hides her away deep in the basement, where he rips her organs out and flogs them on the red market – at Gweedos.
The end game is finding, buying and returning her heart to her corpse, which means going beyond the Gates Of Hell and traversing some dark tunnels, littered with ripped and torn corpses and body parts.
Her mangled corpse lies in a pauper’s casket; a common wooden crate. A pentagon of bones is on the ground. It is actually deliberately unfinished art beneath the casket. That’s how much I respect the line.
Still. This is where the art needs to get dark and I need to use a darkening sound track to up the fear factor.
At this point in time, I’m experimenting with a layer of black that I’m adjusting the intensity of.
I am also going to dive into some manic cross hatching and search for some disturbed sounds for the SFX.
Will it be enough to make the audience/players uneasy?