When I was 11 years old, my friend group and I would make weekly trips to our local Blockbuster Video (I know, really showing my age here) to pick up whatever horror movies our parents would allow us to rent. It was on one of these excursions that I would find myself drawn to Brainscan starring Eddie Furlong, which would ultimately end up becoming both one of my favorite ’90s horror films and a surprisingly prescient cautionary tale about addiction to technology and the potential dangers of virtual reality. Coinciding with our weekly horror film festivals was the release of a little game called Resident Evil, which ultimately helped seal the deal for an almost 30-year commitment to and enjoyment of horror games. So just when I thought I had seen everything the genre had to offer, along comes a game like AILA to bring it all full circle.
I mention Brainscan because, in many ways, AILA feels like a loving tribute to that film. Furlong’s character in Brainscan, Michael, is a lonely, horror-obsessed teen with a pretty sweet gaming and virtual reality setup that gradually begins to disassociate from reality thanks to the titular game, a sort of “murder simulator”. Similarly, AILA begins as a first-person horror game in which it feels like you cannot trust any sensory input you’re receiving, and proceedings slowly begin to peel back the curtain to reveal that you are, in fact, testing out a virtual reality program called “AILA” that is transporting your psyche into one of several different reality-bending horror experiences. And like Brainscan and other great works of the horror genre, the time spent with AILA offered up some legitimate scares that were effective at getting under my skin.
AILA’s Opening Minutes Are Genuinely Unnerving
©CheatCC
After booting up AILA for the first time and selecting to start the game, things escalate quickly as your player protagonist awakens to find themselves crucified in a sparse room that would feel at home in a SAW film. There’s an especially brutal and gory sequence in which the protagonist frees themselves from the cross, after which you can begin to search the room, eventually stumbling upon a remote control for the only object there other than yourself: a small, static-filled television conspicuously sitting on a table. With no other options available than to interact with the TV via the remote control, you change the channel, and that’s when AILA truly begins.
Each time you interact with the remote control to change the television’s channel, the room itself changes, complete with shifting the player’s position. There are other noticeable changes too, like each shift rearranging the small amount of furniture in the room, or adding in small elements that help to gradually build tension and unease. These include things like a strange mannequin appearing in the corner, or even arriving in a new version of the starting room that, for some reason, has roughly a foot of standing water in it.
Aside from being a great way to help immerse players in the horror that AILA is so clearly about to deliver, these opening moments of the demo do a great job of communicating to the player the game’s cardinal rule: never trust your senses. But no matter how prepared you think you are, my time with AILA proved that the game is always capable of finding new and novel ways to scare the daylights out of you.
Sound Design and Visuals in AILA Ratchet Up Tension
©CheatCC
The secret weapon in AILA is, without a doubt, its sound design. Between the very sparse, minimalistic soundtrack and some very effective use of sound effects and ambient noise, AILA has the tendency to keep you on edge and looking over your shoulder at even the slightest pin drop. Things start simply enough with a very odd-sounding, almost disorienting sound effect that plays when you change the channel on the television, teleporting yourself into various alternate-reality versions of the room you start in. The sound effect used in these instances seems like it’s meant to convey a sense of not being able to discern between reality and illusion, almost as if the game is using that sound as a sort of hint or cue to indicate that not all is as it seems.
Doors closing behind you, strange knocking on walls, the sounds of someone (or something) breathing; each of these is used to great effect to get under the player’s skin and have them constantly looking over their shoulder. When things do finally “get loud” — which, believe me, they do — it’s almost a relief from the slow and steady building of tension that occurs during AILA‘s quieter moments. That sort of ebb and flow of the game’s sound design is a nice touch that elevates the experience, and the visuals achieve something similar. Like Pulsatrix Studios’ Fobia – Saint Dinfna Hotel, AILA‘s visuals are clean and polished without being especially groundbreaking or diminishing from the experience, but they do have enough fidelity to make the whole thing seem plausible (and, by consequence, more immersive).
AILA Offers Genuine Scares, Regardless of How Hardened a Horror Game Fan You Are
In terms of its gameplay, AILA reminded me most of the infamous P.T. demo, which is about as high praise as a horror fan can give. Once the player has freed themselves from the initial room they start in, it becomes necessary to routinely switch between realities by changing the channel on the television, collecting items, and gradually progressing further and further before a climactic encounter and escape. In that sense, AILA will feel familiar to anyone who has played a first-person horror game where exploration, investigation, and atmosphere take precedence over combat.
Each room has various elements players can interact with, some of which will give way to items that can be collected. Borrowing heavily from the Resident Evil school of survival horror game design, AILA lets you examine these items, combine them with other items, or use them on parts of the environment to solve puzzles. There are your standard go-tos for the genre present in AILA (including a bright red valve handle used for one of the puzzles, barring progression to the end of the demo), but their familiarity is also a nifty trick that AILA pulls on the player.
Just when you think you can let your guard down and assume that AILA is like a game you’ve played before, the title will mess with your senses and distort reality in ways that are downright shocking, triggering fight or flight response in a way that I haven’t experienced since the first time I turned around in P.T. and came face-to-face with a corpse. A lot of horror games choose to emphasize either gore and jump scares or psychological horror, and AILA continually messes with you because it skillfully balances both.
The Anthology-Ready Premise of AILA Has a Ton of Promise
©CheatCC
After a brief combat sequence in which you desperately try to fend off an axe-wielding maniac using a pistol with a measly three bullets, the protagonist finally reaches the last room of the demo area to find a desk with a modern PC and a virtual reality headset. As it turns out, the entire thing was a simulation as part of an experimental virtual reality program. Or was it? The cliffhanger that AILA‘s demo ends on is classic stuff pulled straight from the sci-fi horror playbook, but it also sets up what is arguably AILA‘s strongest pull — its premise. Centering the game around excursions into virtual reality creates opportunity for AILA‘s devs to get wildly creative with the different kinds of horror scenarios the game places us into, and it’s that anthology horror setup that could help make it truly stand out among first-person horror titles.
The unceremonious cancellation of P.T. and its delisting from the PlayStation Network was a major blow to horror game fans. A first-person Silent Hill game — one that was a collaboration between Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, no less — could have done for that franchise what the switch to a first-person perspective did for Resident Evil. First-person horror games had been around long before P.T., and they’ve continued to proliferate since, but few have placed as much emphasis on their atmosphere as their definitive quality. Which is precisely what makes AILA so exciting. For the first time in many years, AILA was a game that managed to genuinely scare me. If this is what AILA is able to do just with a short demo, I can’t wait to see what Pulsatrix Studios is cooking up for the full release.
The image featured at the top of this post is ©A.I.L.A. key art.