A shortcut for long-gone mech shooter Hawken sits on my desktop. It’s not the true deal, in fact. Hawken went offline early final 12 months. What I’ve, stitched collectively from salvaged code and networking wizardry, is an abomination. A corpse of a game pressured again into life by gamers who can’t let it go. It’ll by no means be alive, however that’s not going to cease us from attempting.
No Players Online, a pay-what-you-want horror game on Itch from builders Adam Pype and Viktor Kraus, wonders if there’s one thing deeply incorrect with conserving a lifeless game working.
A cassette drops in entrance of you, touchdown in your desktop. Clicking on it, you’re whisked via an odd hybrid of discovered footage movie and early 00s server browser – all working the identical match of CTF on the identical map. It’s a jarring combine. It’s additionally speedy punch again to the times of late nights in entrance of the Halo PC server record, searching for the least janky Blood Gulch to hop into.
All the classics are right here: “[Mods] Free skins CTF”, “[US]Best CTF Server”, premium servers with no bots, official hubs. Half of them are offline, and so they’re all fairly empty.
They received’t keep that method.
I’m not likely grabbed by No Players Online as a flat horror expertise. A number of it’s fairly acquainted for avid followers of first-person spookers. Ooooh, there’s a flickering determine within the periphery. Aaaaah, was that jukebox there earlier than? The framing loses a bit of its edge, too, going for the very creepypasta-esque “I found a cursed old tape” angle, slightly than totally shopping for into being a long-dead multiplayer staple.
Spooked, possibly not. But enthralled? Absolutely.
But even because the extra specific horror fumbles, I’m enthralled by means of the medium. Questions like “hold on, what’s a 90s Quake-like doing on a VHS from 1986” shortly fade. The stage geometry is acquainted to people who’ve dabbled in early 3D shooters – summary and alien, much more so behind the crunch of a movie strip. The game builds a lot of its rigidity for the technical fragility of these earliest shooters. Did I neglect to reload, or is the game only a bit janky? Am I dropping frames, or is one thing taking them from me?
No Players Online looks like a much-needed kick within the face in the direction of individuals like me. I received’t spoil what occurs ultimately, however on rebooting the game to seize a canopy picture, I discovered I not had entry to those empty servers. The game, as soon as figuratively lifeless, now completely ceased to be.
No Players Online sees me, booting up previous games, searching for that candy nostalgia kick, and means that possibly I let lifeless issues keep buried.
