Blade Interactive – best known for various snooker sims – are turning their hands to something new: a survival cum adventure game, set on a luxury ten storey sinking ship being attacked by terrorists. Don’t worry about their ball-based heritage: they’ve been sneakily recruiting staff who have worked on the likes of Splinter Cell and Fable.
Hydrophobia – down for release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 – has a few twists, the most mention-worthy being gallons upon gallons of H20. It’s not just there to make the game look flashy: it’s an actual 3D liquid that behaves just like real wet stuff. It doesn’t appear from nowhere: it comes from a source, has a current and will flood rooms to create hazards and send objects flying. It can even conduct electricity.
One puzzle demoed to the press involved taping semtex to a rubber duck then sending it downstream. Another saw lead-character Kate flush out a room full of foes by remotely opening a locked door. Blade have apparently been working on their “HydroEngine technology†for years. Have a look at the video on their website.
The other twist is that Kate has a phobia of water, which will kick in unexpectedly. She’ll become harder to control (which doesn’t sound like a good idea, does it?), the screen will become distorted (and again) and the view will occasionally change to first person to give a view of what’s going on (sounds interesting). Sounds like the sanity effects in Eternal Darkness, which were actually patented (US patent number 6,935,954) by Nintendo.
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