The Fairview Horror




Click this icon to play the Fairview Horror






Download the Flash file for the Fairview Horror here (right click and then select save as) !





The Fairview Horror is very much a game in the same general lineage as Racing Comrade! I finished it up in summer of 2010.

I transitioned to making the Fairview Horror after completing Racing Comrade!, based on the same code, so the similarities in general art style and game design should be pretty obvious. It has the same general setup - the player controls a fleeing character, but they don't control the actual motion of fleeing. Instead, they have a number of actions and weapons, each of which have resources and timers attached to them.

The Fairview Horror has multiple win conditions, a feature I tend to find really interesting. It's something I want to give more thought to, and to experiment more with, further down the road.

In general, I have somewhat less to say about the Fairview Horror than some of my other games. It's similar to Racing Comrade!, but much more straightforward in a lot of ways. It was actually inspired by the fact that, in Racing Comrade!, by the end of the game, you start gaining the ability to end the race for other racers through rather shady means. The tactics involved with this, and the trade offs too, seemed pretty interesting, so I tried to really play that stuff up in the Fairview Horror. In particular, I like the balance between having mildly effective group actions that help manage crowd control and get you back to the base more quickly, versus attacks that target individual foes, are more offensive in nature, but generally put the player at a disadvantage relative to all the other foes.

Both Racing Comrade! and the Fairview Horror use a between level shop (and Incarius does, too). I have some mixed feelings about it. It's really sticky; it does a great job of keeping you in the game even when you lose. Which is, of course, the point. It's also a really trivial way to let players set long term goals and stay invested when they lose, to make losing still feel like a kind of progress. It's a perfectly fine mechanic. Nevertheless, there is almost nothing more overused in the entirety of Flash games, I think, and that makes me uneasy. Not uneasy enough to eschew it, mind you.

This is, of course, a video of me playing the Fairview Horror.



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