Content Warning is the new Lethal Company – or so it seems today. It’s come from nowhere, it’s a gorgeously scrappy co-op horror thing, and it’s really exceptional at creating moments that feel legitimately scary but, at the same time, deeply, genuinely funny. But there’s something else going on with Show and Tell, for that is the brainchild of which I speak. It’s astonishingly wholesome. Which is to say, my second game was anyway. My second game was perfect.
You find yourself in a kind of children’s TV house, surrounded by the blue sky and sun and green grass. There are three other people with you – friends, I think, though in my case total strangers – and you have one task: film something scary . To do this you grab a bunch of flashlights and Someone grabs a video camera, and off you all go into the garden where there’s a huge black diving bell laid out. Except it’s not a diving bell. Given the things you do in it, you have to say it’s something else. It’s a cinéplaediae, whatever that is. It’s a ballroom. Yes, at first I thought it was a ballroom. Or some funky slice of Sixties futurism sloping off to the side.
You get inside and someone closes the door, and then someone heaves a switch and it’s down. Is it down? You don’t know, but it feels down. It feels as down as you’ve ever felt down. . . . on both my games I’ve arrived in more or less the same place. Everywhere is this huge cavern, stretching out below the earth, filled with great twisted mounds of painted metal and fallen sections of architectural forts and towers. Everywhere is shadow and a faint wickedy sheen rubbing desultorii on the rotten surfaces , as if the walls were made out of pressed coal, but here and there are stairs leading downwards and then rooms – engine-houses and dark chambers, all a-hum with moving thing, and once with the soft pulse of a transfer gate .
All this can shuffle around a bit between visits. So yes, it is House of Leaves , the famous weird fiction about a small house with huge halls and legendary depths, but for four players and with emotes. Even in the first game, it was as oppressive as House of Leaves . I turned out to be driving with three Spanish players, with whom I could only communicate through punctuation. I wandered through the rooms, realized that I had left a flashlight somewhere behind me, right, and then I was killed by something I did not see, something that killed everyone else. But for the second time? Oh my God. I drove with another three, again in the House from the Children’s Discoveries and again back . But with three times the people! With the Americans, who, as expected, became the Dad, with the guys from Wales, who took the camera, and finally with the gorgeous guy who did not immediately begin to shoot? We met just now, but got along very warmly. These four players are my rail! They even forgave me for almost completely locking them out of the hatch , since I had time to close it broadly.
The three of us down in the coal-face murk were an absolute tonic for everyone. If Content Warning ‘s so charming, they must be the reason. You’re not just down there to carry things or rescue them or grab them: you’re down there to make a video . So, as you might expect, the camera guy angles it. But he also takes it as a producer, telling me to tell him when we’re about to fight a paradox of tape. The Welsh apron was a looker for things that might conceivably frighten us, and New York was a first-rate host. We went down a huge ramp and suddenly we were underground. We almost covered it when a termite spread its legs and stormed two of us out.
This termite: Content Warning ‘s not for everyone. – the beast that manifested to us in the dark was unimaginable: a kind of smoked ballpoint pen from which a spider was drawn, but with a flat, vented police officer’s face. I kept making a note of this as she attacked me in her ensignia, backed away and began to throb. But all in all, I was laughing, because everyone was laughing. We shot me getting eaten by a spider, and it was cool. This is the most horrific, cheerful movie I’ve ever seen. It’s the Happy House of Leaves .
I saw my team make it back to the surface — then looped, as I re-spawned along with the other poor sod who’d died. We wandered back down to the house, and initially were at something of a loss — wondering how we could cash in the film we’d taken before — but eventually worked out that we had to shove it into a machine which would of course give us a disk when we turned it on to retry. We did this, lurched back out into the forgotten home, slotted the disk in a downstairs telly, and watched our video. We stood, and I’m not being metaphorical, we actually stood there chatting, laughing, just fucking reminiscing about all the stupid shit we’d done — how we’d wasted half the battery just filming us fucking getting out of the diving bell, and then had about five million garbled, degenerate seconds of me being eaten by a spider. A lop-sided horror film. The critics will hopefully see some kind of skewed authorship in its prioritising of irrelevances.
Anyway, this is the loop, I think. You cash in the film in the hopes of going viral and then you spend your viral earnings on things that you can take back down into that other space. Second time around, I spawned in, and the American fella’d gone and bought a clapper. Of course he had. I close my eyes now, just sitting here waiting for something to happen, and I can see him larking about downstairs in the diving bell, clapping that clapper over and over again in sheer delight. The fucking brilliance of owning one of those things in a game.
That’s it, actually: through the congregation of four strangers, the need to make a video together, the ludicrous horrors in the dark, the silly little extras you can buy, the utter unseriousness of your mission, there is something really charming here, something that generates a feeling, amongst strangers, that they are briefly not strangers at all. You’re not looting something, you’re making something – and that is very, very different for the vibe of a game, I think. It’s wholesome, one of those buzzing words in the ether these days that I feel like should annoy me, because it gets applied to what feels like everything with pixelated witches and spells and recipes and frogs and is, somewhat tellingly, so imprecise. But this was genuinely wholesome! Maybe horror is a universal language. Maybe larking about is a universal language. Who knows? For now, I’m simply haunted by what a perfect experience that second game was, and how sad it is that I won’t see those people I played it with ever again.