Survival horror is a pretty popular genre, but the games themselves have fairly limited replay value. Unless you spend a lot of time away from the game between playthroughs, you figure out pretty quickly how the levels are laid out, where the safest zones are and where the major jump scares happen. Grave, an upcoming survival horror title for the PlayStation 4, looks like it might change that by adding in procedural generation into the survival horror genre.
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Watching a video of Grave's gameplay, you can see where the title sticks fairly close to survival horror norms. The player stumbles around dark environments with limited light sources, trying to stay away from gruesome monsters that always seem to show up out of nowhere at the worst times. Two gameplay mechanics, though, try to make Grave a unique experience.
The first is the game's procedural generation. Item placement, enemy layout and the levels themselves will be unique to each playthrough. No two Grave games will be the same, adding a level to the fear factor as players will never really get a hold of their surroundings.
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The second mechanic is the day and night system, which looks like it takes a few cues from games like the indie title Don't Starve. During the day, players will navigate through a surreal, changing desert landscape. And as tempting as it would be to take this time to enjoy and explore the environment, day is also the only chance the player has to prepare for the enemy onslaught scheduled to appear every evening. Players can tackle this challenge how they want. They can build up defensive structures or stockpile weapons, anything to help them survive the night, where unnerving monsters will pursue the player until daybreak.
Another central element of Grave is the focus on surrealism in the narrative. Elements in the environment are not static. The game takes place in a dimension of the dead, where locations can phase in an out as you play. The result is a world that can be just as unnerving as the enemies that follow you in the night.
Grave will make its way to the PlayStation 4 sometime next year.
