The Chinese know better how to frighten the Chinese.
This article is the second in a series of special topics “Talking about Dreaded Games” – in this special topic, we will focus on some horror games that sell “horror” but not necessarily “scaring”, and take a look at the new generation of horror games. Play some new tricks to make players “pain and be happy”.
During this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, the domestic horror game “Paper Wedding Dress” released the fourth work of the series, which topped the list of hot searches on Weibo that night.
On the short video platform, the “Paper Wedding Dress” series can be regarded as a phenomenon-level game work in recent years – the related video playback volume is in units of 100 million, and it has long become one of the representatives of “Chinese horror” games among the new generation of players. .
At the beginning of 2021, the first “Paper Wedding Dress”, which was soon on the shelves, once topped the AppStore free list. At that time, the game was often complained. The simple and cheap UI interface combined with the pure point-and-click gameplay made it ridiculed as “one PPT will send people away”, and many players who came to try it out said: “That’s it? “.
Without the shocking sound effect, who can scare such a special effect?
But the “Paper Wedding Dress” series still has the advantage of making people fall in love at a glance – at least, the “wife”‘s vertical painting is beautiful enough.
The exquisite character portraits have motivated many people to try the game, and after further experiencing the game content, more and more people feel that the game is not as shoddy as it seems at first glance.
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“Marriage” is the core theme of the “Paper Wedding Dress” series, and it is also an enduring strange topic on the Chinese Internet.
Most of you have seen some bizarre pictures in the name of “ghost marriage” on the Internet. The publishers often hint that there are some unreasonable things hidden in the photos, and give some ambiguous hints to guide the audience to make up a spontaneous brain. Terrifying stories that never reveal the truth.
*I won’t post the picture late at night, you can make up your own mind
After a long time, everyone has seen that most of these photos are P pictures, and there is no real story behind them at all, only some unfinished riddles. But such a routine can last for a long time, which proves that this theme is quite marketable.
“Paper Wedding Dress” satisfies exactly this need.
Even among players who are keen on this game, there is little consensus on whether “Paper Wedding Dress” is scary or not.
Some people think that there are very few really scary bridges in the game, and instead it is a series of small puzzles, which is not so much a “horror game” as a “puzzle game”; The scene of “Clothing” is full of strange elements that are both familiar and unfamiliar. Even when solving a puzzle, knowing that nothing scary will pop up, I always feel depressed and uneasy.
Although the scene map of “Paper Wedding Dress” is not exquisite, it contains quite a lot of elements, which can remind people of the dilapidated rural temples that they did not dare to approach at night when they were young, or the rural empty space that was infiltrated in their memory. Guan Mansion is a strange place that can only be experienced by people who have lived in China.
Temples enshrining black and white impermanence belong to the kind of scene where “Chinese people can see the strange contradictions at a glance”
Most of the horror in the game comes from Chinese folk etiquette: for example, paper tie is mostly used for funerals, but it always appears at the wedding scene in the game. In the whole depressed atmosphere of etiquette, it was even more bizarre.
Folklore content like this is also the most touted part of “Paper Wedding Dress” later on.
The game is also interspersed with a lot of content related to opera, music theory, chess, and temple fairs, which are used as wedges in puzzles or metaphors in the plot. For example, the surnames of the protagonists of each generation correspond to well-known lovers in folklore. For example, the first-generation hero and heroine Ning Nie corresponds to the hero and heroine of “A Chinese Ghost Story”, the second-generation former protagonist Liang Zhu is “Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai”, and the third-generation Wang Shen corresponds to The tragedy “The Story of Jiaohong” in the Ming Dynasty and “The Story of the West Chamber” by Zhang Cui of the fourth generation have become popular topics of discussion among players.
There are also Taoist talismans that frequently appear in the game. According to some netizens’ research, it is not a scribble.
Most of the talismans that appear in the game are from Taoist classics, so they can be a little particular.
According to the developers, it will take 2 to 3 months just to examine the folk culture before the game is made. Not to mention how professional it is, the production team at least showed its sincerity to domestic folk culture through limited pictures. Some of the content is still a little obtrusive even when used in puzzles, but it’s far better than a light-hearted number puzzle.
The uncommon words that game anchors often cannot read also provide more topicality to the game
Just like the talisman mentioned above, in addition to “Chinese horror”, “Paper Wedding Dress” also has a corresponding “Chinese exorcism”, which interprets the “sufficient firepower” that gamers often say in another form. It can overwhelm all fears”, which also became an opportunity for the game to go out of the circle.
“Chinese Destroyer”
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The contrast between players’ expectations and the producer’s intentions helped “Paper Wedding Dress” gain its initial reputation, but the game was further popular, in addition to the packaging of “Chinese horror”, it is also inseparable from the business model of this game series.
“Solving puzzles” constitutes the core gameplay content of the “Paper Wedding Dress” series. These puzzles are difficult and easy, with rich forms. With the launch of subsequent new works, there are more and more tricks to play. The group put their minds in it.
By burning paper props to pass real props to the protagonist from the perspective of the ghost, this form of puzzle solving can be described as exquisite
But this is also where the game is often criticized.
The difficulty of solving the puzzles of each game is usually progressive, and the difficulty of the first few chapters is still suitable, but in the final stage, the more the plot is appetizing, the more tormenting the difficulty of the puzzles. Even though these puzzles seem to be well-designed, the actual solution is either cumbersome clues and a test of patience, or the logic is abrupt and confusing.
In the first part, the alternation of the five elements that gave players a headache
At this time, players have another solution besides checking the strategy online – watching the built-in advertisements in the game.
This naturally raises the question of “the designer deliberately created problems to force players to watch advertisements”, but at the same time, players who watch advertisements in “Paper Wedding Dress” are not only getting tips or trying opportunities, but skipping directly. Not stuck.
In other words, a player has an upper limit on the opportunity to watch advertisements in the game. As far as the results are concerned, the production team has generously provided a way to easily experience the full game for free.
This “moderate” business model makes “seeing advertisements to solve problems” not only did not affect the game’s reputation too much, but instead became a meme – those players who only watched the plot and had no intention of solving puzzles called “Paper Wedding Dress” As an “advertising simulator”, it will also communicate what advertisements you encounter during the game.
Players have become accustomed to advertisements, and can even comment on one or two calmly
All of the above have allowed the audience of “Paper Wedding Dress” to break through the original player group and reach more people who don’t usually touch the game. This is why the art style and gameplay content of this game are not very trendy and brilliant in the eyes of traditional players, but they are extremely popular in the emerging short video field.
Once “Paper Wedding Dress” was launched, it quickly formed its own audience and community, and the production team launched the sequel at the same speed. In a year and a half, “Paper Wedding Dress” has been released to the fourth volume, and when the new work is on the shelves, the official team also made no secret that “the fifth folder has been built”.
The frequency of such new works is obviously much higher than the norm in the game industry, but fans are very happy with this, and expect the series of games to achieve “seasonal updates” or even “monthly updates”.
Compared with the game, the distribution model of “Paper Wedding Dress” is more like filling the vacancy left by the once popular “weird magazine”.
3
Like most domestic horror-themed works, the story of “Paper Wedding Dress” is unavoidable in the way of “going into science”. No matter how much thought and how many classics the production team spent to make scene puzzles, all the strange stories will end in the end. There is no answer to pollen hallucinations or the “Mandela effect.”
The “Paper Wedding Dress”, which has been criticized as “a horror game that is not scary” and a “puzzle game that no one can solve puzzles”, can become popular all the way, and it also depends on the character building and story plot.
To a certain extent, the script of “Paper Wedding Dress” has achieved the empathy of “I hope all this is false”, and will expect “the persecution of ghost marriage” to be false and “love that spans life and death” to be true Yes, hopefully no character in the story is really oppressed and tortured after death.
The producers also brought players’ emotions into the game. For example, Tao Mengyan, the second-generation protagonist, did not give any face to ghosts, gods, and Buddhas. He was irritable and demolished cults. He burned evil scriptures.
As a nominal horror game, the “Paper Wedding Dress” series follows the creative concept of “real life is hard enough, and fictional works still have to be stuffed with sugar” to a certain extent. Not only will it give the male and female protagonists a happy ending, but even the villain BOSS Nie Moli in the series, as the ruthless behind the scenes, is also shaped to always retain a trace of humanity.
Nie Moli is very popular in fan works
Compared with some extremely appetizing things, but finally an unacceptable “reversal”, the suspenseful stories of the “Paper Wedding Dress” series are often clichés, but they can often be achieved smoothly, which is more in line with The expectations of the public have also attracted a lot of second-generation content to further enrich the entire world view.
The tonality of the game’s ending is also evident from the official promotional video
With a stereotyped script and high-frequency distribution, “Paper Wedding Dress” has reached a wider audience, but it has also attracted more criticism for the game’s “change of soup instead of medicine”. The production team seems to have formed a path dependence after the game exploded, and did not dare to try too much to change the game’s plot routine, and spent more attention on improving the design and performance of the puzzles. On the other hand, players complained “Do you really think I’m here to play with your puzzle solving?”
No one knows which will come first, the innovation of the game series itself, or the aesthetic fatigue of players.
Epilogue
Before “Paper Wedding Dress”, the production team had previously produced a game called “Hospital No. 13”.
Although the production team claims that the two works are in the same world view, it is not difficult to feel from the cover that the art styles of the two works are very different, and “Hospital No. 13” is closer to Japanese horror.
Compared with the later “Paper Wedding Dress”, “Hospital No. 13” lags far behind in terms of downloads and word of mouth. This aspect can be attributed to the immature business model of “Hospital No. 13” – it is also watching advertisements. In “Paper Wedding Dress”, you can skip the level directly, but in “Hospital No. 13”, you can only add some more. number of attempts.
On the other hand, even in Japan, “Paper Wedding Dress” is also more popular than “Hospital No. 13”, and now it is often used by Japanese anchors for live broadcast, and is evaluated as “a highly completed Chinese folklore thriller and pure love” Story”, which can be said to be highly similar to the advantages of games considered by domestic players.
It can be seen that it is not only the Chinese who can feel the taste of “Chinese horror”.
This article is reproduced from: https://www.yystv.cn/p/9920
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