PAX West 2018: I Can’t Wait To Abandon My Friends In ‘The Blackout Club’

PAX West was filled with so many incredible, unforgettable games, coming from giant AAA developers with singular booths that were visible from across the show floor, to a dude and his wife showing off their wacky, unique cooperative game from a single corner table.

I played so many titles, and wrote down so many more that I simply cannot wait to check out (I’m allergic to cats, but Meow Wars looked hilarious, for one), but one of the most memorable, unique experiences that I had this year was playing (and observing) the co-operative magic that was The Blackout Club, from Question Games.

Question Games is a tiny developer with some not-so-tiny talent. The company was founded a few years back by Bioshock series veterans Stephen Alexander and Jordan Thomas and has since grown to six developers. The company released their first game, The Magic Circle, a hilarious-sounding dark comedy about game development, back in 2015, and earlier this year announced the multiplayer, tense, atmospheric The Blackout Club.

Mikaela and I had an opportunity to chat with company cofounder Stephen Alexander, which will be released in audio form on the Geekscape Games feed in the coming days (I also gushed about the game during our Day 3 coverage of PAX here), but I simply couldn’t wait to share how excited I am for this game.

Here’s the synopsis to get you started:

 You are a teenager from a small, modern town. Each morning, you awaken covered in mud or scratches, with no memory of the night before. You’ve heard of sleepwalking – but this is different. Sometimes you lose entire days.

There are others like you. Your new group of friends bonded over this shared secret, forming a club to investigate the cause of these BLACKOUTS. Together, you discovered a network of bizarre underground tunnels, hidden just beneath the surface of your quiet community. An uncanny, disorienting music beckoned from below.

You hesitated. But last night, your best friend vanished – and now, a mysterious group of adults wants to eliminate you. You must strike back, capture their activities on camera and expose them to the world.

The game feels realistic in that the kids (you and your group play as 14-17 year olds) are observant, know that something seriously wrong is happening in town, and the adults just don’t believe them. For some reason the town is an internet dead zone, so the kids make a plan to capture undeniable evidence, commandeer a vehicle, and bring it somewhere they can share it with the world.

Prior to jumping into the game’s multiplayer, I had an opportunity to play through a short single player introduction / tutorial that introduced you to the world, and the unseen, horrific creature that lives within it. The game launches in 2019 and is currently testing in beta, but artistically the game already looks and feels extremely stylized and impressive. The introduction had my character at home awaiting their parents return, and as I explored the house, the game’s impressive lighting system, and the detail put into often throwaway objects like furniture or even the texture of the spackling on the wall became immediately obvious.

In the introduction, the sun begins to set and then things begin to get weird. Objects flash and words show up where they weren’t before, and shortly thereafter it’s time to find a place to hide from ‘The Shape’, a physical creature that you can only see when your eyes are closed. Yep, the controller has a dedicated, easy to reach button that exists only to close your character’s eyes, because The Shape is a huge (and hugely unsettling) part of The Blackout Club. More on that later.

Once introduced to the world and some basic mechanics, I spent some time observing multiplayer matches before joining one of my own. In the world of The Blackout Club, the adults not only don’t believe you that something is wrong with the town, they also literally become your enemy after the sun sets. Once they go to sleep, the adults become ‘Sleepers’, enemies that can’t see (except in certain cases), but can hear very well (be conscious of where you’re walking, as different ground materials make different amounts of sounds), and basically exist to try to take you down, and once weak enough, drag you to where The Shape can get you.

This mechanic is super interesting to me, and almost gives certain elements of the game an I Am Legend feel. Some of these enemies are literally your parents, or your neighbours – people that you wave to as you walk by, people whose BBQ’s you’d attend in the Summertime. You don’t want to hurt them, and you absolutely can’t kill them. Stealth and avoidance are your best weapons, but you’ll also don items meant to distract, like firecrackers, which when thrown will attract Sleepers to wherever they land, or tranquilizer darts (which I’m not sure how these kids are finding) which will put a sleeper to… sleep, meaning one less enemy to worry about. A friend can also pin a Sleeper down in order to allow others to escape, but that same Sleeper will get up just a few seconds after being let go. Before rolling out on a mission, each player can also choose a ‘hero’ item, like a grappling hook to make climbing easier, a crossbow to shoot tranquilizer darts from afar, or a taser to easily incapacitate a Sleeper who may grab them.

In the PAX demo, players saw one section of the neighbourhood (where the missions happen), which is a set locale that has procedurally generated elements like enemy or consumables, or even open gates, garages, or windows. The demo gave two objectives, which were also procedurally generated, but from what I saw/played consisted of either collecting evidence or cleaning up after a previous botched mission, and then heading into the spooky underground mazes (think the sewers in Derry from IT) to find a missing member of the club.

In the matches that I saw, things seemed to go decently well. Most of the people in the room didn’t know each other, and started off a little uncomfortable, but it became pretty clear pretty early that things would be rough unless they communicated. People snuck around, revealing positions of Sleepers or which house the group needed to enter, or keeping watch while someone closed their eyes to locate The Shape, which is attracted to mischief or sin, or the player who was causing the most ruckus. If the shape gets you, you become an AI controlled Sleeper yourself. Other players can go up to you to snap you out of it, but if you’re put under three times, it’s game over for you, and the mission is failed if all players are put under at the same time. You also probably don’t want to stray too far from your group for a couple of reasons – if something finds you, you’re pretty much screwed if you’re alone, and if the group stays together you get a ‘circle of friendship’ buff which makes your stamina regenerate faster. Stamina, which is used for things like sprinting and climbing, is pretty important, so the more of it you can retain, the easier a time you’ll have. Both groups I watched mostly stayed together, and one group even made it through the missions with all of its members still awake.

The game gets very tense very quickly, and one thing that was hilarious and terrifying is just how much teamwork goes out the window when the players are surprised by The Shape, or overrun with Sleepers. In both missions that I watched, The Shape didn’t seem to pop up until about halfway through – during one session, nobody knew until one player screamed out “HOLY SHIT THE SHAPE IS FUCKING RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME EVERYBODY RUN.” As instructed, everyone ran, loudly and in different directions, and in a Live together, Die alone moment, once everyone was split up The Shape made fairly easy work picking players off. It seemed to disappear for a time before popping up at another opportune moment, and because teamwork had been all but abandoned by that point, it wasn’t too long before each player had been put to sleep.

Both missions that I observed were about 20-30 minutes long, and when I finally sat down to try the multiplayer mode (as opposed to the single player introduction that I’d played earlier) things went much, much worse. My team did not accept my attempts to communicate, was totally silent the entire match, and things ended about seven minutes after we’d started as The Shape already had us all (and probably caused each of us to nearly jump out of our seats more than once). It was an embarrassing attempt, and I’m pretty sure I saw the employee explaining the demo chuckling at our deserved misfortune.

Of course, through multiplayer you’ll be able to customize your kid (there were a bunch of clothing and colour options, even in this early demo), and missions will give you experience that you’ll be able to use to make your kid better at stuff like cardio and technology (a certain perk tree gives you access to things like drones, meaning you can scope out an area from afar), among other things. Perks are in the form of a card system, and you can swap out your load before attempting each mission.

I was so, so into The Blackout Club. The game looks beautiful, and the world feels as though there are so many interesting stories that could be told here. It feels like a crazy mix of Left 4 Dead and Stranger Things and IT and I Am Legend (novella) all in one, and I simply can’t wait to learn more about The Shape and the mythos of the world, while probably failing miserably and having fun (and being terrified) doing it.

The Blackout Club is one to watch, and it releases in 2019 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.