Steam Greenlight Spotlight: The Human Gallery

Today’s Greenlight spotlight is on The Human Gallery, a horror game that foregoes the jump scares and focuses entirely on messing with your head. Horror games are definitely not one of my favorite genres, as they often end up being poor recreations of each other with little substance and cheap jump scares. I’ve always felt like horror games were all about the atmosphere, meaning that the visuals and audio must combine to make a truly eerie experience, or else the game ends up falling flat and not being as unsettling as it could be. Fortunately, what I’ve seen from The Human Gallery indicates that the game will do a phenomenal job of providing a terrifying atmosphere that never lets you feel comfortable as long as you are in it.

The Human Gallery places you into the role of a painter, who decides that he needs to find a new source of inspiration with his work. In order to do so, he decides that he will enter the mind of a psychopath to procure some ideas for his next big work. However, once you enter you realize that there is no way to wake yourself up in order to exit the mind. The only way to get out is to go further in. The story basis for The Human Gallery intrigues me greatly because it sounds like we will be experiencing some truly terrifying moments in the game. The warped mind of a psychopath brings all sorts of terrible ideas to mind, and it will be very interesting to see what sort of horrors we can look forward to experiencing once inside.

Atmosphere is the main focus of The Human Gallery, which has been made clear to not be about fancy features or mechanics whatsoever. The only goal of the game is to cause the player to be frightened while experiencing a truly horrific and unsettling story. While the controls and gameplay are said to be smooth in order to ensure a solid experience, the feelings that The Human Gallery manages to incur upon the player are what is really important. The Human Gallery wants you to come away terrified and unsettled. It wants to pull you into a warped and twisted world that you couldn’t have imagined in your darkest nightmares.

In terms of perspective, we can expect a side-scrolling 2D experience featuring unique graphics. The visuals manage to be unsettling all by themselves, and I found the environments very eerie indeed. The Human Gallery features an extremely atmospheric soundtrack which aims to add to the already scary atmosphere, and sounds pretty good all by itself. One of the best features of The Human Gallery is the limited interface, which means that the game will feature some potential for serious immersion. Becoming immersed in a horror game is crucial to player enjoyment, as well as in order to cause the player to feel terror.

The Human Gallery is being developed by one person, who is doing all of the work from the code to the music. With this in mind, I am extremely impressed with the level of atmosphere that he has managed to put into his game. My only worry is that a lot of the areas in the game seem very similar, but I am hoping that this is just because only one area of gameplay was shown in the trailer. I am definitely looking forward to exploring the psychopath’s mind, and figuring out how to escape. If you feel the same, have a look at The Human Gallery on Greenlight, and leave a vote along with some constructive feedback.