Throughout Red Dead Redemption players become acquainted with a man obsessed with reuniting his broken family and moving on from his violent past. Even better is Undead Nightmare‘s self-parody of the deadly serious John Marston. Even though Cole’s time as a vampire may not fit with his character as portrayed in Infamous 2, it’s a whole lot of fun to see his superhero story transformed into a mini-adventure filled with demons, ancient curses and blood vial collectables. Horror side stories like these offer a great opportunity for players and developers alike to explore worlds that wouldn’t make much sense framed any other way. All notion of canon is tossed aside for the sake of side stories that embrace the uniquely Halloween concept of reality and fantasy merging into one surreal whole. In both titles players must navigate worlds where the characters and settings they know from the original games have changed context dramatically. Undead Nightmare sees Red Dead Redemption‘s John Marston at the centre of a plague that has transformed his friends and family into zombies. In Festival of Blood, Infamous‘ protagonist Cole MacGrath is bitten by vampire queen Bloody Mary and is then turned into a bloodsucker himself. This isn’t the case for Infamous 2: Festival of Blood and Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, two pseudo-reality side story expansions crafted by, respectively, Sucker Punch and Rockstar. Regardless of the quality of the story at hand, it’s pretty rare to see developers playing around with - or making a bit of fun of - the central features of titles they’ve spent years working on. Now, the best example of this phenomenon is the Halloween side story - a tradition that provides the perfect opportunity to throw familiar characters and settings into strange new situations.īig budget videogames, for the most part, take themselves pretty seriously.
In the past this meant elaborate rituals designed to throw off the dead when they wandered around our plane of reality. This whole chunk of context is to serve as a reminder that Halloween is, historically, a holiday all about breaking down the barriers of everyday life. Ghosts, apparently, aren’t tremendously smart. To avoid being spooked out by their enemies Christians developed the (not just for Christians anymore!) tradition of dressing up in elaborate costumes. Of course, some of those souls were into trying to pay back their mortal enemies before leaving earth. The catch to this whole system was that the night before All Hallows Day (or All Hallows’ Eve - what would go on to become Hallowe’en) gave all those wandering souls one last chance at tying up loose ends. The Vatican and (because achieving European nationhood at the time pretty much meant playing ball with the Papacy) the continent’s population believed that the souls of the deceased stayed among the living until they were sent on their way on All Hallows Day. One of the key elements of the holiday is breaking the barrier between the living and the dead, or, to bring it into a videogame context, reality and fantasy.īy the end of the 12th century the Catholic church had made elaborate dogma out of the proper observance of All Saints’/All Hallows Day (November 1st) and All Souls’ Day (November 2nd). In the meantime, here’s a teaser trailer to get that blood rage going.Halloween has roots in all sorts of pagan and Christian rituals that have long since been transmuted into traditions barely resembling their original form, but that are still, surprisingly, very much the same. The DLC is scheduled to launch on PSN in October, and will be a standalone title, so you don’t need either of the inFAMOUS games to play it. So, just in time for Halloween, Sucker Punch has announced the all-new, all-undead inFAMOUS Festival of Blood single-player DLC, featuring “new missions, themed environment settings and new characters/enemies”, and exploring “the darker side of the inFAMOUS universe”. Seriously, none of this stuff was in the courier recruitment brochures. First there was that big explosion, then he started shooting lightning out of his arms, then there was all that nasty business in the Warrens and a bunch of mostly accidental civilian deaths, and then that evil twin thing, and now… he’s been turned into a vampire and the only way to save the world is to hunt down and kill this other vampire. Man, Cole MacGrath is just having the worst month ever.
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