Outcry or Outcry: Mysterious Machine is an Adventure Game with strong horror elements, developed in 2007 by a Russian company Phantomery Interactive and distributed by The Adventure Company. In Russia, it was originally known as Sublustrum.
You play as a middle-aged writer, who was invited by his brother to witness an astonishing scientific breakthrough. When you do arrive, you find that he’s vanished and everything is suddenly rusty and dilapidated. He’s left a lot of the obscure machinery behind, and as you dig through his notes and photos, you discover that he might have had opened a portal to a different dimension…
Outcry provides examples of the following tropes:
- Bizarrchitecture: The Shimmering World features plenty of it.
- Flashback: In the Shimmering World, player will often need to bypass obstacles in the present by going into his brother’s earlier memories and altering things to change the outcome.
- Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The Shimmering World certainly fits the bill when you get there, although it’s implied that this is only due to your brother’s damaged psyche, and that it could’ve been different for others.
- Interface Screw: Near the end of the game, everything’s getting surreal, to the point that loading screens will get blurry and begin to swim before your eyes.
- Moon Logic Puzzle: Invoked on purpose in the latter half of the game. Since everything, including the obstacles, are drawn from your brother’s subconscious, the logical connections soon become inherently obscure, connected to the theories about ancient monoliths, psychotropic drugs, and more.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: Once you finally activate your brother’s machine and make it into the “Shimmering World” dimension, its landscapes are surreal and seem to be drawn entirely from your brother’s psyche.
