Published by Puppet Combo’s Torture Star Video, Jordan King and Henry Hoare’s post-apocalyptic video game Night at the Gates of Hell embodies a zealous homage to zombie cinema and survival horror games of the past. Like Bloodwash, Torture Star video’s preceding game, Night at the Gates of Hell pays tribute to Italian horror cinema – this time to the gore-drenched work of Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei. Unlike its predecessor, though, Night at the Gates of Hell is combat-heavy, longer in duration, and, above all else, full of flesh-eating monstrosities!
Players of Night at the Gates of Hell take control of David, a widowed man fighting for survival in a world overrun by the undead. Throughout his journey, David meets a variety of bizarre characters, including a small child (who may in fact be an adult masquerading as a child) and a perpetually naked prisoner. Characters from Bloodwash also appear in Night at the Gates of Hell, such as the loveable nice-guy Stan and the Creepy Guy, who cameos as a zombie in the game’s second level. Adding to the game’s range of characters is a plethora of enemies, with Night at the Gates of Hell boasting eighty-five unique zombie character models: that’s more than the number of zombie character models used in Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil 2 (2019), and Resident Evil 3 (2020) combined.
Figure 1: Illuminated by torchlight, a zombie shambles toward David. Screenshots used in this review were taken while playing Night at the Gates of Hell with the PSX camera effect selected and the game’s CRT filter disabled.
Regarding Resident Evil, early games in this seminal survival horror series served as inspiration for Night at the Gates of Hell. However, Jordan King also acknowledges departures from Capcom’s PS1 classics in his video game. On the Steam page for Night at the Gates of Hell, King states the following:
“I […] wanted to challenge myself to make [my game] feel like a first person styled early RE title. What I mean by that is to require headshots on the zombies to kill them (which can be difficult to do without any fixed aiming!), and to keep the zombies slow and menacing. Most games seem to go with fast zombies in hordes but I wanted to keep this a tense, deliberate combat experience.”
By including zombies that move slowly and can only be killed via the destruction of their brain, Night at the Gates of Hell is a prime example of what Weise calls procedural adaptation – the process through which video games “codify the conventions of horror texts” (2009: 239). Furthermore, unlike other zombie-based games that take creative liberties when it comes to simulating zombie outbreaks, Night at the Gates of Hell follows the rules of modern zombie cinema relatively faithfully.[1] For instance, the playable protagonists of Left 4 Dead (Valve, 2008) can be maimed by the undead ad nauseam. Yet, they will continue fighting for survival until their health bars are fully drained (health bars that can be miraculously restored using first aid kits). On the contrary, Night at the Gates of Hell is less forgiving, with a single bite from a zombie resulting in certain death for the game’s playable protagonist. Consequently, players must be vigilant while exploring Night at the Gates of Hell’s varied environments, which include a dilapidated apartment complex, a devastated village, and a deadly prison.
Figure 2: David is grabbed by a zombie. Luckily, he manages to use a knife to avoid being eaten.
Night at the Gates of Hell comes bundled with additional content in the form of The Booty Creek Cheek Freak (2022) and Evil in the House of Dr. Fleshenstein (2022). The former is a comedic slasher game involving a supernatural killer who is fixated on mutilating the derrieres of his victims. The latter can be likened to a “horde mode” style of game, wherein players must survive for as long as possible in increasingly difficult conditions; here, players find themselves trapped inside a house that is being invaded by masses of zombies. Each self-contained game expands on some aspect of Night at the Gates of Hell, with The Booty Creek Cheek Freak offering more crude humour and Evil in the House of Dr. Fleshenstein providing additional conflict with a diverse set of undead enemies.
Figure 3: Extra content featured in Night at the Gates of Hell.
With its graphic depictions of dismemberment, campy cast of characters, and eye gouging scene à la Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979), Night at the Gates of Hell plays like a rumbustious romp through old school horror media; the game is a bricolage of American-inspired Italian horror cinema and Japanese video games. Yet, despite its multifaceted mix of influences, Night at the Gates of Hell maintains its own identity as a B-movie-esque zombie flick and a firm entry in the ever-expanding collection of horror video games adopting a PSX aesthetic. Adding to this, the additional content bundled with the game certainly makes Night at the Gates of Hell feel like a worthwhile purchase.
Notes
[1] Modern zombie cinema describes post-1968 zombie cinema; that is, zombie films that released after George A. Romero’s seminal zombie film, Night of the Living Dead (1968). Regarding the Western popular cultural imagination, Romero’s film popularised the image of the zombie as an autonomous creature that hungers for human flesh, displacing its image as a non-cannibalistic, enslaved victim (as it is depicted in Haitian folklore).
Works Cited
Night at the Gates of Hell. 2022. Torture Star Video: Black Eyed Priest, Henry Hoare.
Weise, Matthew. 2009. The Rules of Horror: Procedural Adaptation in Clock Tower, Resident Evil, and Dead Rising. In: Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. Bernard Perron (ed.). Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. pp. 238-266.
Steam. 2022. Night at the Gates of Hell. Steam [online]. Available from: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2026870/Night_At_the_Gates_of_Hell/ [Accessed 04 October 2022].
Connor Jackson is a PhD graduate from Edge Hill University whose thesis examines the ways in which video games express satire. His work can be found in Romancing the Zombie: Essays on the Undead as Significant “Other” (part of McFarland’s ongoing Contributions to Zombie Studies publication series) and the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) Review journal. He has previously reviewed the games Bloodwash and Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pause for Horror Homeroom. You can follow him on Twitter here and keep up with his video game related photography on Instagram here.
