Thursday, January 27, 2011

Divis Mortis and the Zombie Apocalypse

Divis Mortis: an interactive survival game is, quite surprisingly, an interactive survival game that gives players a slim chance at surviving the zombie apocalypse. What's more, this being a particularly well written piece of interactive fiction (a text adventure, if you prefer) it actually manages to feel realistic and tense. Divis Mortis is a game without a graphics and thus a game that doesn't favor guns. You will not be shooting zombies in the head. You will instead be frantically searching for makeshift weapons, food, water and a safe place to take a nap in a beautifully crafted and at times humorous world.

You can happily play Divis Mortis in your web-browser and -as nature intrended- for free via this link. Oh, and if you've never played such a game before, I strongly suggest you start by typing help. Enjoy! I know I did.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness is one of the rare, yet always magnificent, novellas by H.P. Lovecraft. It was written back in 1931 and is rightly considered among Lovecraft's greatest oeuvres. Set in the Antarctic, the Mountains of Madness is a brilliant tale of cosmic horror, that casts a wild view at archaeology, provides with more than a few ancient horrors and still manages to terrify on a wholly different level than your average bogeyman story. Then again, reading is believing, and by following this link you'll be able to, yes,  read the whole story in all its literary glory. For free of course. 

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

A way to say we are sorry...

Holidays are finally over. So it’s time we all went back to our lives as before. I know that there was a big promise breaking from our part so this is me trying to make up for it.

We had promised a top ten list about scary Christmas stories that were never posted. Our sincere apologies for that, I just hope that the following piece can make up for it. Since the post was promised to satisfy readers and not watchers I thought that a classic gothic tale by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would do the trick. It can of course be no other than “The Hound of the Baskervilles”.

When one listens to the name Sir Arthur Conan Doyle one usually thinks about Sherlock Holmes and detective stories. That is actually true so what is a detective story doing in this kind of a blog?

Well, when the supernatural and old tales of curses and hellhounds are incorporated to the story how can we not be tempted to write about it?

The story takes place in the English country; at “Baskerville Hall”. A vast estate surrounded by moors swamps and the aura of mysterious ghostly presence. Found dead with a horrified look on his face somewhere in the haunted woods of his land Sir Charles Baskerville, terrifies his heirs reminding them of an old curse.

Sherlock Holmes is called upon to investigate the circumstances of his demise and is made aware of a tale long forgotten. One of Baskerville’s ancestors enslaved by lust and madness sells his soul to have what he cannot. His life ended hunting what he desired and one of his hounds was the collector of the price paid. And so the curse begins for all male heirs of the Baskerville estate.

Footprints found at the crime scene suggested that Sir Charles was desperately running away from something that could only be described as a ‘gigantic hound’, while Holmes receives threatening letters telling him to avoid the moors...

Has the Hellhound been unleashed once again claiming the souls of the Baskervilles?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s impeccable writing takes the reader to a place filled with fear and agony. Highly recommended “The Hound of the Baskervilles” can and will satisfy even the most demanding of readers. You can read it -for free- right here.

And for those who prefer watching to reading there are at least two dozen attempts to capture the feeling of the story in film, but if you ask me the ones that actually do are the black and white ones. There is something unearthly about the absence of color that makes those films even darker…
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