Oh, yeah. This is my shit.
Spoilers below, but the plot running through this one goes deep. Even with spoilers, you probably won’t understand much until after you’ve played it and discussed it with others. The store pages for this encourage you to join a Discord server if you have any aspirations of finding everything, and you’re seriously going to need the help.
Basilisk 2000 is one of few immensely cool titles that gets to carve out a niche for itself by taking a meta element of a game and expanding it into a full experience. See, the Basilisk 2000 that we play is really nothing more than another constructed layer above the Basilisk 2000 that exists within the game’s universe.
I told you this was gonna get complicated.
The actual game is a horror puzzler about digging through the files of Basilisk 2000. To be more specific, it’s done through the level editor; the entire game is experienced through developer tools and preview windows, with lists of objects and NPCs cascading down alongside music controls and command line prompts.
You can escape noclip and enter Walk Mode to play the game-within-a-game as intended, but Basilisk 2000 was never finished. A horrific tragedy struck the developers, and it’s one that keeps getting foreshadowed over and over again as you work your way through the levels. Someone — or something — has added extra content into Basilisk 2000.
There are levels that were clearly intended to be included in the in-universe release of the game, such as the starting town of HAVENWOOD, and the CROSSROADS, and OFFICE. Others, such as WITHINIT, OFFICE_2000, and one which I won’t dare to name here seem as though they’ve been shuffled in with the others, and were never actually meant to be found by anyone.
There’s something eldritch here; it’s in the act of poking through all of these hints, looking for knowledge that you shouldn’t know, sights you shouldn’t see. The dread will start building the second you find your first corpse hidden in an otherwise pleasant part of the world, and there’s virtually no catharsis to be found by reaching what might be the end. It might not. Who knows?
Your main means of progressing through the game is by entering a level and combing over every piece of geometry you can as meticulously as you can bear. NPCs will mostly offer flavor text, and doors and other transition points will either lead nowhere or send you back to the origin of the area you’re in.
It can be tempting to abuse the powers that are given to you, but this is only going to result in you getting stuck; the list of local entities isn’t actually as all-encompassing as its existence would imply, and there are many objects hidden out of bounds or in far off corners that are exempt from the list. These characters and objects also usually hold the keys to finding another piece of progression, making it a requirement to be thorough. The atmosphere is often thick enough that this isn’t a tedious act, and digging through the world in search of secrets is engaging and creepy in equal measure.
It’s not perfect. There’s one jumpscare that’s a lot more silly than it is frightening, and anachronistic FMV clips of David Lynch inexplicably make two separate appearances. That said, what’s good here vastly outweighs the bad. The entire aura of the game is heavy and oppressive, and it makes some of the payoffs really connect. The segment that I dared not name was genuinely so tense that I had to turn the game off on my first time through it, and I only managed to see the end by leaning way back in my chair and going as fast as I possibly could. It’s some really solid horror. KIRA’s a talented creator, and their work here is impressive and creative.
Making a hostile, oppressive bit of horror that shoots vaguely in the direction of “haunted game” without being embarrassing is a feat. Basilisk 2000 should be celebrated for that alone.
Spoilers below, but the plot running through this one goes deep. Even with spoilers, you probably won’t understand much until after you’ve played it and discussed it with others. The store pages for this encourage you to join a Discord server if you have any aspirations of finding everything, and you’re seriously going to need the help.
Basilisk 2000 is one of few immensely cool titles that gets to carve out a niche for itself by taking a meta element of a game and expanding it into a full experience. See, the Basilisk 2000 that we play is really nothing more than another constructed layer above the Basilisk 2000 that exists within the game’s universe.
I told you this was gonna get complicated.
The actual game is a horror puzzler about digging through the files of Basilisk 2000. To be more specific, it’s done through the level editor; the entire game is experienced through developer tools and preview windows, with lists of objects and NPCs cascading down alongside music controls and command line prompts.
You can escape noclip and enter Walk Mode to play the game-within-a-game as intended, but Basilisk 2000 was never finished. A horrific tragedy struck the developers, and it’s one that keeps getting foreshadowed over and over again as you work your way through the levels. Someone — or something — has added extra content into Basilisk 2000.
There are levels that were clearly intended to be included in the in-universe release of the game, such as the starting town of HAVENWOOD, and the CROSSROADS, and OFFICE. Others, such as WITHINIT, OFFICE_2000, and one which I won’t dare to name here seem as though they’ve been shuffled in with the others, and were never actually meant to be found by anyone.
There’s something eldritch here; it’s in the act of poking through all of these hints, looking for knowledge that you shouldn’t know, sights you shouldn’t see. The dread will start building the second you find your first corpse hidden in an otherwise pleasant part of the world, and there’s virtually no catharsis to be found by reaching what might be the end. It might not. Who knows?
Your main means of progressing through the game is by entering a level and combing over every piece of geometry you can as meticulously as you can bear. NPCs will mostly offer flavor text, and doors and other transition points will either lead nowhere or send you back to the origin of the area you’re in.
It can be tempting to abuse the powers that are given to you, but this is only going to result in you getting stuck; the list of local entities isn’t actually as all-encompassing as its existence would imply, and there are many objects hidden out of bounds or in far off corners that are exempt from the list. These characters and objects also usually hold the keys to finding another piece of progression, making it a requirement to be thorough. The atmosphere is often thick enough that this isn’t a tedious act, and digging through the world in search of secrets is engaging and creepy in equal measure.
It’s not perfect. There’s one jumpscare that’s a lot more silly than it is frightening, and anachronistic FMV clips of David Lynch inexplicably make two separate appearances. That said, what’s good here vastly outweighs the bad. The entire aura of the game is heavy and oppressive, and it makes some of the payoffs really connect. The segment that I dared not name was genuinely so tense that I had to turn the game off on my first time through it, and I only managed to see the end by leaning way back in my chair and going as fast as I possibly could. It’s some really solid horror. KIRA’s a talented creator, and their work here is impressive and creative.
Making a hostile, oppressive bit of horror that shoots vaguely in the direction of “haunted game” without being embarrassing is a feat. Basilisk 2000 should be celebrated for that alone.