Horror can be distilled into two pivotal questions: “What are we afraid of?” and “Who are we afraid for?” The upcoming stealth-horror game 2Dark, developed by Gloomywood, unites both concerns in a single answer.

Children. We’re afraid for our children, what they do to us, and what might be done to them.

The biological impetus to safeguard our species’ continuation, while profound and something easily empathised with, is often treated as anathema in regards to its value as a narrative device. By and large, media avoids jeopardising our progeny in pursuit of the story, an entirely understandable stance given the kind of atrocities that exist in the real world. Even with older forms of entertainment such as movies and books, we rarely see children being injured on-screen, their suffering implied rather than exhibited.

In light of that knowledge, 2Dark’s approach to the topic is somewhat controversial. You can hurt children in the game. In fact, you can even kill them. This wasn’t a decision that came easy to the Gloomywood team, which is helmed by Alone in the Dark designer Frederick Raynal.

“We had a prototype in San Francisco that we showed to many publishers including Nintendo,” recounted Gloomywood’s production director Thierry Platon, a grey-haired man with a professor’s bearing and an impish smile. “The answer was immediate: no children.”

The team went back to the drawing board, unnerved by the response they’d received. Were they doing the right thing? They decided then to remove the ability to shoot children. A bullet fired into the darkness would only harm monsters, never the kids you were meant to save. But that catalysed another problem since by removing that risk, they also changed the dynamics of the game itself.

“You have to be afraid to shoot,” Platon told me with an apologetic look. “So, we decided to reintroduce that feature.”

2Dark puts you into the shoes of a man named Mr. Smith, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Vertigo Comics’ Constantine. Haunted by tragedy, he’s made it his job—and yours, subsequently—to rescue kidnapped children from a multitude of serial killers. It's a grim premise and possibly one that tethers on the edge of being too much, a fact the team seems very conscious of.

“The subject is touchy,” said Raynal. “We spent a lot of time going ‘Oh no, this is too monstrous. Let’s make something lighter.’”

To make 2Dark more palatable, Gloomywood did multiple things. Chiefly, they chose to adhere to the old edict: “show but don’t tell,” allowing the player’s mind to fill in the missing pixels. It’s one of the reasons behind the game’s unsettling, cartoony visuals. The team wanted to create a distance between the subject material and the reality it draws from.

“We are between the grotesque and a kind of dark humour,” said Raynal.

A similar logic propelled the design of 2Dark’s antagonists, who Raynal describes as caricatures derived from pop-culture’s repository of serial killer clichés. They’re a motley bunch if the promotional images are any indication of things. There are mad scientists, corpulent men with pig masks and cleavers, and an obese blonde with a handful of unwilling “toys.” They're intentionally nothing like real serial killers, who are often paragons of normalcy, men and women with lives not unlike our own.

“We don’t want to glorify serial killers. It’s not the goal. We have fancy, colourful-looking serial killers but it’s not our intention to make them look great,” Raynal explained.

Nothing about 2Dark extols the virtue of violence. If anything, it is the reverse that is prized. To achieve the highest possible scores in the Replay mode, for example, players will need to save all the children and avoid harming anyone but the main antagonist in each level. Even then, 2Dark will punish you for those deaths. Platon doesn’t explain exactly what will occur as you rack up the body count, but he alludes to “brain damage.”

“We want to make people think about the consequences of their actions even when you look like the good guy,” Platon said. “When you kill serial killers, you’re still a killer yourself.”

Being human

At the root of it, 2Dark is a game about being human. And what is more human than that marrow-deep compulsion to protect your children?

“I always wanted to make another survival horror game,” Raynal confided. Having already helped create Alone in the Dark, however, he wanted to do something different, something unique. Raynal then began researching existing works and searching for an answer. That two-year quest led to an interesting epiphany.

“In all survival horror games, usually all you have to do is save yourself. I wanted to go further than that. I ended up asking myself: what’s more important in your life than yourself? Your children, of course. If you have children, you can do anything for them.”

Platon is in full agreement. “When you become a parent, you have this new thing in your head that says, ‘I have to take care of this little person.’ I see parents walking around Paris Games Week. They could be doing something else, but instead I see them looking about, always checking to see where the little ones are.

“Maybe it’s a game for parents. Maybe not. But parents never try to kill children in this game. Only children try to kill children."

He recounts anecdotes about how a 40-year-old man played through 2Dark and did everything possible to keep those under his charge safe. In contrast, teenagers seemed to delight in the mayhem. “When we were in Birmingham with this demo, a lady asked to let her child play. I warned her against it, but they weren’t to be dissuaded. So I made the level very easy and let them loose.

“The kid played. He killed the rats, the dogs, got the children. At one point, he stopped, turned around, and shot them all. The mother cried out, ‘Oh, you can kill children!’ and I replied, ‘I told you! Don’t let your children play!’ and she said, ‘OK, OK. I will take care. He will never play this game again.’”

While Raynal stresses that 2Dark isn’t really intended to be a vehicle for a message, there is something intrinsically political about its basic nature. The children you’re tasked with rescuing vary in amenability. In early levels, Platon explains, they’re easy to work with, even eager to escape. As the game progresses, however, the difficulty ramps up and players will find themselves confronted with children who’d rather remain with their captors.

“Sometimes, when you are sold by your father and mother to be a sexual slave, you don’t want to come home, “ Platon remarked, his face growing sombre. “You don’t want to be saved.”

It’s difficult to tell how 2Dark will be received by the gaming public. When Dead Island released its 2011 trailer, the Internet exploded. The three-minute clip depicted a young girl being transformed into a zombie and then flung from a building. Many regarded the video as exploitative, a cheap and cynical attempt to cultivate attention. (It should also be noted that no child zombies were featured in the actual game.)

In contrast, the upcoming DLC for This War of Mine, 11 bit Studios’ absolutely harrowing exploration of civilian life during military conflict, has inspired less outrage despite putting children front and centre of the chaos. Why? Perhaps because the core game has always been deeply respectful of its central conceit, a compassion that seems likely to carry into the expansion.

Where 2Dark will fall on that spectrum is impossible to say at the moment, but it’s hard to imagine it not ruffling a few feathers. 2Dark looks like it’d be an ugly, disconcerting experience—but then again, that is perhaps to be expected when you're chasing killers alone in the dark.

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Finally, a non sequitur. I couldn't talk to Raynal about 2Dark and not ask about the Alone in the Dark franchise. His response: “Shame! Forget that. And two, three, four, five? I reject them.” As for Uwe Boll’s horrific Hollywood adaptation, he said. “It’s even worse. So ashamed. So ashamed.”

2Dark should be released in 2016. No word on which platforms it will support, but it'll probably start off on Windows PCs.