Casual Update I - Campfire Legends 2

I know I’ve been writing about computer games a lot the last few weeks. Well, there have been a lot of interesting games to write about, so I did it. This post is about one of the two new and scary HOG games I’ve been playing: “Campfire Legends - The Babysitter”.

The first “Campfire Legends” has been out for some time now (not sure how long, it has been out for quite some time before I found it). “The Hookman” was, of course, the retelling of an urban legend (and so is “The Babysitter”) as well. So the games are held together by a story frame of a group of girls sitting around the fire and listening to one of them telling them the story.

The second game connects neatly to the first one: the first story is over, another girl tries to start telling a story and the one who has told the first one says “Wait, it’s not over yet.” and starts with the second one. This one is set some decades afterwards (the first one is set in the Fifties, judging from the clothes and other things around, the second one in the late Eighties) and tells a different story, but there’s a common story beneath it. A young college student is arriving at a scary house outside the city. It’s where her dean lives and she’s there to babysit the children. But there are more people in the house than just the two girls and her. Someone is walking around, breaking things. Then the girls disappear and she will find out about a dark secret that lurks in the depth of the basement.

None of the “Campfire Legends” is a classic HOG game. You are quite often looking for things, but it’s never the ‘search 10, gain 1’ kind of scene you’d expect from a HOG game. You look things you need to get on, stuff from your purse, marbles that have fallen down the stairs and might trip you over, parts of a VCR (Eighties - no DVD around) and so on. This was true for the first game as well.

The second one relies on ‘scare moments’ far more than the first, though. There are only a couple of scary things that suddenly pop up in “The Hookman” (the cat in the shed probably being the most distinct one). The amount has gone up a lot in the second game.

I like such scary games a lot and have waited for a long time to see the second instalment of the “Campfire Legends”. I also have to admit that I’m now waiting for the next one as the underlying story still isn’t over.