Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' Creepiest Quest Feels Like The Ancestor Of Modern Horror Games
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has spawned its share of spin-offs and one long-awaited sequel. But the game's most significant descendant might be the first-person indie horror games that dominated the genre, and spawned countless scream-soundtracked YouTube Let's Plays, in the 2010s. Specifically, many of the tricks that combat-less horror games like Layers of Fear and Amnesia: The Dark Descent use to scare players are present, years earlier, in the VTMB quest "The Ghost Haunts At Midnight."
The quest begins when, at the request of The Asylum nightclub owner Therese Voerman, your vampire heads to the Ocean House Hotel to retrieve an object belonging to the ghost that haunts the hotel. In the level that follows, much of the playbook of modern horror is on display. When you arrive, your weapons are rendered useless by the area's lack of conventional enemies. The chandelier hanging above the lobby shakes as you approach and, eventually, drops to the floor and shatters. Lamp lights burst if you get too close. A childlike apparition appears and runs into one of the rooms. All the while, an oppressive wind blows outside the hotel's decrepit walls and thunderclaps signal that a deadly storm is nearby.
RELATED: From Resident Evil To Dead Space: The History Of Survival Horror
As in 2010's Amnesia: The Dark Descent, navigating the Ocean House Hotel is an exercise in finding the right objects and keys to progress further. In a move that walking simulators would also employ, the Ocean House Hotel is littered with documents that you can pick up and read for flavor and background — like a yellowed newspaper whose headline heralds the hotel's grand opening. Attempt to climb one of the staircases that leads to the balconies that
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