You Fort You Knew Fortnite…
(Prefer video? Watch this on Youtube here)
It’s common knowledge that the games industry is pure evil. It’s such a corrupt swamp that our lord and saviour, smartest man alive and possible second coming of Christ, Donald Trump, has had to step in to reign them in a bit. For far too long videogames have been selling violence to unsuspecting kids in boxes with huge age ratings on them that no one could ever notice.
But it’s not just violence that the industry is sneaking in to your games. There are literally LOADS (three) games that seem innocent and harmless but are actually terrifying. That’s not enough for a full Buzzfeed-style list, so let’s just focus on the main offender; biggest game in the world and Drake’s downtime, Fortnite, which is in fact the Walking Dead game we all deserve.
I refer specifically to the Battle Royale mode, of course. The original game mode Fortnite launched with, Save The World mode, is quite explicitly a zombie-survival game but look, no one’s playing that bit so it doesn’t count. This is my video, okay.
Some people will tell you that Telltale’s franchise The Walking Dead are groundbreaking story-telling games. They’re not, they’re boring and nothing you do has any effect on the world. A much better representation of that grim, walker-infested world is Fortnite.
Squads of armed warriors roam a land devoid of any innocent bystanders, because everyone in this hostile world has had to take up a weapon. But that’s not it; you also get the best execution of the classic horror trope of approaching footsteps in any game. One second you’re happily looting a deserted house, bemoaning the discovery of yet another grey assault rifle and no shield potion, when suddenly… footsteps. Somewhere INSIDE THE HOUSE. But from where? Do you stay put and create some makeshift defences, or rush out all guns blazing? It’s fight or flight, and it’s the Walking Dead game we should have had all along. Sorry, TellTale, hashtag not sorry.
This is all great, but no one ever tells you that Fortnite is a survival horror game. It’s colourful, there’s no blood and it’s available on phones now. Kids like it. It’s the Fisher Price version of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. But answer me these questions one: why exactly is the Fortnite island abandoned? There are houses but they’re all deserted and boarded-up. Something terrible must have happened here to have people fleeing their homes. Something unspeakable. There’s no bodies either, so we’re clearly looking at either some sort of rapture event or zombies, more evidence that this is in fact a Walking Dead game if it were needed.
For anyone interested, the other two secret survival horror games are Minecraft and, by far the creepiest, Farming Simulator 17. Farming Simulator doesn’t even feature other players, meaning you are entirely alone in your post-outbreak world, visiting deserted garden centres and growing crops for when humanity finally returns to the face of the planet. I assume there’s minigames where you go at walkers with a pitchfork.
So, there you go. What other games are secretly terrifying? Let us know in the comments, or don’t because you’re all playing Fortnite and are too scared. Whichever.
