My surprise for Halloween, if you like is that I’ve two games for you today, this one and its prequel AOOFAD. And this one is even more of a hair standing up on end complete and total bloodbath!
Au Sable (9.2Mb)
This is a spiritual follow-up or sequel if you like to ‘All of Our Friends are Dead’. It takes place with you playing as a young woman lost deep in the ruins of a forgotten city, buried deep within some distant and menacing woods. This 2D platform horror game is again very unsuitable for children due to the graphic violence and blood and gore depicted. It has a disturbing and thoroughly unnerving theme throughout. So much so it can very seriously mess with your head. It’s a chilling game of the macabre, disturbed and disturbingly intermingled with a terrifying sense of utter nerve-jarring primeval fear and complete terror. It hits your senses and your sensibility supremely hard, right square on.
Au Sable is a definite improvement on AOOFAD. Where All Of Our Friends Are Dead was spooky, Au Sable cranks it up to another level altogether, and it’s the sort of game you might give up playing out of sheer creepiness or being totally numbifyingly terrified, not because it isn’t a good game. It is, to the extent that spooking the pants off you might make you wish to recover your wits and your sanity before resuming playing, and you’d be well excused over doing this! For dreams read nightmares, and for nightmares, read Au Sable! In the darkness of the mind lurks the imagination of all that is horrifying! And terrifying . . . !
To give you an idea, though this is by no means all you can expect, you walk up to a bridge that suddenly turns into a bloody water fall with you plummeting down the side, before snapping back to a bridge with you walking ‘harmlessly’ across it. Or how about walking up to a tree that turns into a huge shadowy creature, with a girl's lifeless body hanging off one of the branches... then suddenly you see that there is no tree, and that it is just your shadow from standing on some ledge. And this surrealness is within a few moments of starting the game. And so it progresses!
A town called Harmonia has disappeared from the world, and you must find this lost town by travelling through the surreal, the dangerous, and the most terrifying locales. As it happens, similarly to AOOFAD, the storyline has little to do with actual gameplay which just heightens the anxiety and tension which this game creates in large mega-doses. The nightmarish, and pixelated graphics are there as before, but if anything, Au Sable creates an even more intense and vivid atmosphere of despair and gloom. The extra details and better animations make this game look much better and have even greater effect and affect than its predecessor. Terrifying and gruesome grisly creatures have captured the town, and some of them make the most tremendous foes, that linger very hauntingly in your path. . .
There’s a quite basic tutorial, though you will need to look at the readme file to see all of the controls used, which are similar to AOOFAD. Gameplay starts off very differently than in AOOFAD, as you are gunless to begin with and have to dodge and avoid enemies until you find the gun. Once you have a gun, you’ll find that unlike the long-range version in AOOFAD, this one has to be used close up, right in the face of enemies, which is most incredibly dangerous. Later on there’s a machine gun, which is by no means long-range, but’s still a little more comfortable to use, as you won’t have to get quite so close, to point-blank range as it were, like you have to when armed initially. Following behind you are two disembodied floating red eyes, the ‘eyes of memory’, which trigger certain blocks to open doors and perform other actions. They also for some reason fit into the eye sockets of certain dismembered heads, although there is no explanation in the game for this, nor any apparent usefulness in so doing this with them. At least none that I have found to date!
Where AOOFAD was disconcerting, Au Sable is compellingly terrifying, and it can quickly put your nerves so very ill at ease to the point of having to take a break to recover. The art-focused style of AOOFAD has been turned in Au Sable into a perfect blend of startlingly horrifying gameplay and a compelling yet bizarre and surreal, eerie atmosphere of very complete nervous tension. It really exudes unsettling-ness and a feeling of great dismay and gloom combining with tortuous palm-sweating discomfort and fear.
As with AOOFAD, you’ll need to save manually using F5 and F8 to quick save and quick reload the game.
Au Sable also being made with GM6, will run as is in XP, but will again need using the converter program from Yo-Yo games to get it to run in Vista and Win 7 found at http://wiki.yoyogames.com/index.php/Making_games_work_under_Windows_Vista
Au Sable is a great and very unnerving horror platform game that is very well worthy of your attention! I feel shivers down my spine thinking about it and writing about it! It will spook you, creep you out and disturb you like no other game, freeware or retail can ever do! Savour this one late-on in the half-light with the sound turned right up, on Halloween, if you’ve nerves of steel and an iron constitution, and - if you should dare!
Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDO1tm9yZAw
There are video walkthroughs/playthroughs on YouTube if the tension all gets too much for you!
Download HERE ------ (Au Sable 1.2 is the first download link) -----
