Augmented Horror Experience Night Terrors: The Beginning Now Free on iPhone
Ted Hentschke
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Way back in November, I reluctantly admitted that a 99¢ iPhone app was making me its bitch. Night Terrors: The Beginning is the kind of thing that makes living alone hell. I’m already the kind of jittery freak that thinks he sees figures lurking at the end of dark hallways or specters in the corners of my eyes. If my laundry machine starts acting up at 2 a.m., I’m liable to just lock the door to my room and go, “huh, isn’t it funny that outside just stopped existing?” And then here comes Night Terrors: The Beginning, an augmented reality experience that turns your house into a spookier version of your house.
My sentiments on the title are well documented in the aforementioned article, so I won’t get into too much detail as to what I think of it. As a basic recap, Night Terrors: The Beginning is an experimental “game” (I’m on the fence about what to really call it) that utilizes your iPhone camera to simulate a haunting. The goal is to explore your house while hunting down a moving “signal,” making it so you can’t just huddle on the couch and wait for it to all be over. Most of the scares come from the audio and some unexpected manipulation of your iPhone’s flashlight, and some sparse visuals keep you on your toes. The overall experience is way more effective than the sum of its parts, making you uneasy in even the most familiar settings.
Despite my high praise for Night Terrors: The Beginning, I wasn’t sure what would become of the experimental little app. Indie markets are notoriously hard to make money in nowadays, and the mobile market is predominantly pay-to-win microtransaction throwaway time sinks. The price point was only a dollar, so the amount of sales they would need to recoup their cost was quite high. It’s not that I don’t believe in the product, I’m just iffy on the market.
Well horror fans, if you didn’t want to drop the dollar on it before, worry no longer! Night Terrors: The Beginning is now free! Well, the intro is at least. After seeing decent success and reaching the #1 Entertainment App spot twice in the US market, the people at Novum Analytics have decided to switch to an IAP (in app purchase) model. This puts it more in line with other mobile titles, which tend to offer a “basic” version that you can then add pieces on for a few dollars at a time.
For people that bought the game back when it was a dollar, their experience is largely the same. All players will now start in the intro, which can be completed in under 10 minutes. You’ll do the same kind of frequency following, while spooky things make you regret doing this shit right before bed. It’s still a solid experience, and some tense moments like the time stopping and jumping around got me. After the finale’s jump scare, an impressive AR title sequence will bring you into the IAP menu.
From here, returning players can restore their purchase to play through a slightly expanded version of the original Night Terrors: The Beginning, and new players can purchase this “Chapter 1” for a dollar. So it’s all the same price it was before, but now with slightly more stuff and a free chunk at the beginning for new players. Some of the additional content is nifty (“Black Mirror” fans will enjoy the spider), but it’s more of the same. This update mostly impacts those of you who just don’t go in for paid apps, allowing you to test out the experience without having to relinquish your hard earned 99¢.
Don’t worry guys, the spoopy skeleton didn’t go anywhere
For me, the move to the IAP model signals what to expect from Night Terrors in the future. Night Terrors: The Beginning was initially just supposed to be a taste, the first part to the series. Changing to the IAP model restructures that so now the installments will all be done within this single app. It’s a smart move in the mobile market, where people are more likely to buy more parts of a single app then go in on a bunch of different ones. Even though financially the same cost, mobile gamers almost always spend the lion’s share on just one or maybe a few different titles. Maybe they just don’t like having all those extra icons.
I still have concerns about the future of Night Terrors, but I’m going to keep most of my negativity to myself until I see what they do with this new model. I mentioned in my previous article that a lot of the visuals promised in the early trailers never made it into the final product. It would have been a way bigger sticking point for me if the end product wasn’t good anyways. When I asked the people over at Novum Analytics about this, they admitted that their initial expectations were naive, and that they were now working under more realistic parameters. In terms of realistically responding to a market, this IAP change is sound.
So if you haven’t checked out Night Terrors: The Beginning, go ahead and do so now. It’s a great little experimental experience, and at the asking price of free you can’t really go wrong. I’m personally happy that there’s some movement on this game, as I really don’t want to see it die. It’s so common in the indie horror scene to watch great ideas fizzle out due to budget, time, and inexperience. Let’s hope the good people at Novum Analytics keep on trucking to make Night Terrors live up to its promise.
Categorized:Horror Gaming News
