Bloody Mary: Forgotten Curse - Survival Horror
Hi all, it's certainly been a while since posting here. Hope everyone is well.
Over the past 4 years I've been working on an open-world survival horror game based on the old folklore of Bloody Mary. FINALLY, after loads of patience, hard work and persistence, the release date is nearing.
The legend goes that if someone stands in a dark bathroom in front of a mirror with a candle and chants her name repeatedly then Mary will be summoned with the intent of taking the life of the person that summoned her.
Below is a brief intro about the game.
Description: Bloody Mary is a open-world survival horror with stealth, narrative and adaptive elements that the player can take advantage of to survive. It is the player’s role to escape from Mary, who is never far and stalking the player as they try to figure out how to escape from the realm.
Trailer: Bloody Mary: Forgotten Curse
Release Date: 30th November 2018
You can stay up to date with the game online via Steam or Facebook
Screenshots:
Pretty please let me know what you think so far? All feedback is highly appreciated.
Over the past 4 years I've been working on an open-world survival horror game based on the old folklore of Bloody Mary. FINALLY, after loads of patience, hard work and persistence, the release date is nearing.
The legend goes that if someone stands in a dark bathroom in front of a mirror with a candle and chants her name repeatedly then Mary will be summoned with the intent of taking the life of the person that summoned her.
Below is a brief intro about the game.
Description: Bloody Mary is a open-world survival horror with stealth, narrative and adaptive elements that the player can take advantage of to survive. It is the player’s role to escape from Mary, who is never far and stalking the player as they try to figure out how to escape from the realm.
Trailer: Bloody Mary: Forgotten Curse
Release Date: 30th November 2018
You can stay up to date with the game online via Steam or Facebook
Screenshots:
Pretty please let me know what you think so far? All feedback is highly appreciated.
Thanked by 1Kulu
Comments
It looks great. I love the flashlight looking into the depths, cerebral fear.
I kind of wish there was some foley in the trailer, clinking of the flashlight, breathing, that kind of thing. I don't know what your sound design is like in the game, the audio in the trailer is strong besides for lacking foley. I think horror games are best served with sounds recorded very close up to the sources, to give them a lot of presence, kind of like the nearly ASMR sounds in the Book of The Dead Unity demo. Have a listen to the sounds from 30 seconds in.
The team based in Cape Town at Sound Foundry do excellent sound work if Bloody Mary is needs some audio help. I think having expensive sounding foley work in the trailer could be another way of differentiating the game from a stock standard indie horror game. If the sound effects sound good/detailed/expensive people are going to be more ready to purchase the game, as good audio design has a massive effect in the horror genre (and as such it's worth convincing people you have good audio design within the trailer).
Let me know if you need some help/budget with the audio design. I honestly think audio design in a horror game is the best value for money spending you could make... but I realize you might have no spare budget at this point.
The scary character that appears to the antagonist feels (from the trailer) likely to act a bit like Slenderman. I'm not sure how indie horror fans respond to Slenderman in 2018, I imagine there's a lot of Slenderman-like games out there now, so anything you can show to differentiate yourself I guess.
The environments are pretty cool, and I think it's a strong choice to constrain the vision in every scene to that of the flash-light. Is the game always dark with just a flash-light to guide you? If so, that's definitely going to feel claustrophobic.
I really like the scene with the hanging corpses and the mine shaft (with the ropes in the foreground giving the scene a sense of depth).
The poster looks to me a bit too clean. The typography has perfectly hard/crisp edges, I think the logo and poster are weaker than the trailer. Even a little glow and vignetting on the logo could help a lot. Have a look at the Stranger Things treatment of typography:
I think the character in the middle of the poster also looks a bit too clean cut, and it looks a little cheap, I think you'd be served trying to improve that because if the title art is what potential players are first presented with, then having great title art will have a significant effect on sales.
Maybe there's an artist here on the forums who can help you with a poster? Maybe you could work with the concept of a flash light vignette on the poster (if everything in the game is lit by the flashlight).
What I'm suggesting is the poster could be rendered in a style that looks a little more detailed/expensive, but I don't think it's a bad thing that the imagery is dark and vague.
This scene from the actual game in some ways looks better to me than the poster. It feels closer and stranger and has a stronger sense of place. The colours are even a bit weirder, although it's too dark of course to be presented on a screen with other much brighter things around it (it only works at that darkness in the game because it is full screen is what I mean).
Thank you for providing such concise feedback! :)
Just to give you a bit of an update on what's been happening with Bloody Mary: Forgotten Curse.
We had roughly 20 testers while the game was in beta. There was quite a bit of feedback and I'm proud to say that all reported issues have been fixed. There's no doubt that there will be more issues (no game is bug free).
We've successfully built/tested Linux and Mac versions of Bloody Mary.
So now even more people can explore the dark realms of Bloody Mary: Forgotten Curse.
In the next update we'll be adding:
- Gamepad support
- minor AI bug fixes
- More dynamic environment to keep the pace of the game consistent
- Start development on VR support.
If you'd like to join us in discussions and find out what other games are in development, you can find us on discord: https://discord.gg/r6wN94q