Can’t stop thinking about the ramifications of the game White Knuckle as a story.
The climber was given this terrible job in a mine. It’s thankless, terribly paid and hazardous, but it’s better than being unemployed and in debt to the company.
Maybe they made friends. Maybe they even had a family, children. We know from the lore that people did have children in Hab Yellow. They certainly had neighbours, colleagues.
Then the Incident. Everyone that they ever knew and/or loved died screaming, every familiar face dissolved into a writhing, agonised mass that wants to get them too. They have no choice but to run for their life, climbing through the silos.
Maybe they hope that there will be someone left in Hab Yellow. But they get up there, and it’s a ghost town. Somewhere that once seemed so familiar is now foreign and eerie. Nothing but towering abandoned machines that stretch into smoke and howling wind. No one left, save for blood stains and skeletons.
How would someone cope with that kind of loss? The sheer desolation of millions of deaths in one fell swoop? Everything you’ve ever known, gone?
That’s what makes it a horror game. It isn’t just scary, it’s deeply tragic. Because on a human level, we all fear losing everything that is familiar.
