At PAX West 2024, VGG spent some time hanging out with the folks at DreadXP, an indie publishing house focused on horror in all of its varied forms. Read on for news about some of their upcoming releases and a hands-on report on the Silent Hill-inspired Heartworm with insights directly from the developers.
DreadXP has very quickly stamped their presence on the indie horror market over the last few years by supporting the releases of some of the most buzz-worthy indie horror releases of the last few years, like The Mortuary Assistant, My Friendly Neighborhood, and Sucker for Love.
VGG had the opportunity to check out the publisher's booth at PAX this year, to chat with several amazing developers, and to go hands-on with an exciting PSX-inspired horror game that replaces guns with cameras.
Come with us as we shakily wander through the halls of DreadXP's booth, shining our dim flashlight on their amazing wares — and let out bloodcurdling screams when we realize our time with them is up.
A handful of horrifying releases
DreadXP had lots to talk about this year at PAX West, showcasing just how large their library has become in recent years. There's the newest member of the DreadXP family, as announced just weeks before PAX: The Lacerator, a schlocky indie horror release that sees Max, a 1980s porn star, trying to escape the clutches of a horrifying killer. Something about this one bordered on too scary for the VGG crew, so we kept a wide berth from this station.
Hot off the heels of Amanda The Adventurer 2's announcement, DreadXP brought a little bit of everything related to the children's TV-inspired horror series: mobile ports, console ports, and a demo for the incoming sequel. Amanda can torture Wooly in so many ways, and DreadXP wants you to try all of it!
The booth also brought the Definitive Edition of The Mortuary Assistant, a horror game that takes place in a mortuary and features a randomized set of scares that genuinely are so scary that I was put on edge just seeing it played from across the expo hall.
Dread Delusion, a weird and wonderful retro open world RPG that released in May — one I picked up and couldn't put down in the leadup to PAX — brought its demo, and we sat down for a chat with the game's creative director, James Wragg.
Lastly, DreadXP had their Grimoire of Games with small samplers from their entire library. Play one of these demos and you'd get to spin a wheel to "find out how you died" and grab an attachable ribbon to display it to the world. I apparently pulled a Ryan Reynolds and got buried alive, while Julie took after some juicy s'mores and burned to death.
Needless to say, horror fans feast wherever DreadXP pops up, and while we didn't spend time with everything they had on offer, we did spare some time to check out one of the publisher's upcoming games, Heartworm.
Hands-on with Heartworm
At PAX, Heartworm brought an updated demo, which included the option to dive straight into a first-time playable boss.
It takes only a moment with Heartworm to see the roots of its DNA — to see how Vincent Adinolfi, the lead developer on the project, is leveraging retro nostalgia to make something special with his first-ever game.
"It's a love letter to old-school survival horror games, like Resident Evil or Silent Hill," explained Adinolfi when we sat down with him after trying the demo, "with some modern upgrades and, hopefully, its own identity that pays homage to those games but also tries to get rid of some of their more frustrating elements."
"If you like those old games or you think you might have liked them, then you would like this."
That description from Adinolfi is apt, as in my brief 15-minute demo, I got to experience the paranoid fear of exploring an abandoned neighborhood that hearkened back to Silent Hill. I got to experience a retro-tinged boss fight with a giant spider that called to mind the likes of Resident Evil's many giant animal-based boss fights, with its multi-phased structure and fixed camera angles guiding you through the arena. But in all phases, it introduces some modernity to improve game feel.
There's just a layer of intention and care that you sometimes can miss in PSX-inspired indie horror that we feel makes this one particularly special.
Whether it's Sam's overall speedier feel on the sticks or the switch to over-the-shoulder shooting whenever you stop to aim your weapon — Sam uses a camera to dispatch her enemies instead of a traditional gun — Heartworm is unafraid to adopt modern sensibilities where it makes sense. And none of it ever feels contradictory to the vibe it's trying to establish of helpless horror and desperate survival.
Sure, Sam can move fast to zip past enemies, but the giant spider boss zips around just as quick, and the static-filled enemies that stalk Sam in the world have specific abilities to slow her down to a crawl before they deal their final blows. There's just a layer of intention and care in making these decisions that you sometimes can miss in PSX-inspired indie horror that we feel makes this one particularly special.
We were especially fans of Heartworm's design choices: offering pixelation filters and other retro toggles that make the game feel truly of that era; blending pre-rendered cutscenes with those traditional and nostalgic in-engine cutscenes that made storytelling from that era feel so unique. And the team sees those limitations as a gift, as tools to make their story all the better in the long run.
"This retro style, having it such low fidelity, it all lets us leave our imaginations open to getting scared, and I think that's our biggest draw to it," said Adinolfi.
Yves, the game's cinematic director who called out Silent Hill 2 as a major inspiration for the game's cutscenes, weighed in on the style's appeal in the modern age and what it means to keep it alive in this generation.
"There's a lot of suggestibility with low-res stuff and it introduces a whole new generation of people to the style," said Yves. "So when you do go back to those classics, you can see what stuck, what kind of came forward, and what still resonates."
Having played the game's demo and chatted with the team behind it, I can say that Heartworm itself is already resonating with us here at VGG. The game is set for release some time in 2025 and you can wishlist the game on Steam to keep up with its development. A more substantial version of the demo is planned to hit Steam in October, so keep an eye on the store page for updates!
Want to see more like this? Check out all of our PAX West 2024 coverage.
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