sisslethecat
Hard not to think that a story that puts a lot of weight on the words The Horror isn’t well suited to a horror game.
Apocalypse Now is a crowning achievement in Francis Ford Coppola’s already long list of crowning achievements (The Godfather trilogy, Rumble Fish, and even produced Koyaanisqatsi, a favorite of mine). Set in the heart of the Vietnam War, it was a dark and twisted view of insanity, featuring chilling imagery, tremendous performances from Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando, and kick started a whole way of thinking about the horrors of war. It (and the novel it was inspired by, Heart of Darkness) were already the inspiration for an excellent psychological horror game, Spec Ops: The Line, but now it looks like we’re going to get a taste of the real deal.
Having just hit Kickstarter, a new video game based on Apocalypse Now is being helmed by designers and team members who’ve worked on Fallout: New Vegas, Far Cry, and a bunch of other RPGs, and with the full blessing of Coppola himself. Describing itself as a first-person RPG with psychological horror elements, it’s “like Fallout: New Vegas on acid in the middle of the Vietnam War”. Yikes. The plot seems to follow the film’s more or less, as we join a band of American soldiers sent into the heart of the Vietnamese jungles to take out Kurtz, a rogue US officer who has begun to form his own private army outside of the war itself. How exactly one delivers on a game based around these events I’m not sure, seeing as the film is very slow paced with the majority of the really groundbreaking stuff simply being dialogue and mood. But, if the game gets Kickstarted, I’m sure we’ll at least get a good game.
Video games based on movies tend to be terrible, sure, but mostly due to the fact that they’re rushed out in order to meet deadlines. This game can take all the time it needs to get it right, and since the film was independently produced, it isn’t tied to studio pressure to get this game out for some arbitrary release date (so it probably will be better than say, the Rambo video game from a few years ago). At the moment, despite all the press it’s getting, it’s only reached a little over a tenth of the budget it needs ($900,000) to be successfully Kickstarted. Fingers crossed, I’d really love to get a chance to try this, whatever it ends up being. You can check it out on it’s Kickstarter page here.
In the meantime, if you haven’t gotten the chance to see the original film, it’s available at Target in the US for like $5 on BluRay. Check it out, I can’t recommend it enough to horror fans, or fans of film alike. Of course, there’s also always PorkLips Now as well.
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