Horror Games Special Feature – House of the Dead: Overkill

Posted on 29th October 201530th October 2015 by

With Halloween just around the corner, we felt it was time to delve into some of the horror classics of gaming!
In the nights leading up to All Hallows Eve, we’re going to do a short feature of some of the more notable horror games that have been released. This isn’t a list of the best or even our favourites.
Just some Horror games which have stood out to us, for one reason or another.

Have you ever wandered into a carnival, only to find it’s been overrun with zombies clowns?
Have you ever ridden on the back of a motorcycle with a leather-clad chick called Marla Guns at the handlebars?Have you ever had every dramatic statement you made punctuated by corny pipe organ music?
If you answered yes to any of these, it’s most likely you spent a fun evening or two blasting away at the undead in House of the Dead: Overkill.

Survival horror parodies shouldn’t really be that hard to make, and yet there are surprisingly few out there. Some, like Plants vs. Zombies aren’t really horror whereas others like Until Dawn are merely a little self-aware. Even Deadly Premonition falls into a weird category of its own because it at least plays by its own bizarre rules.
House of the Dead: Overkill doesn’t give a shit about rules. Not even its own. Especially not its own!

The old House of the Dead games are a mainstay in arcades everywhere. You have at least a 50/50 chance of spotting one of these cabinets whenever you walk down those neon walkways. They’re simple, mindless, and a jolly good romp so long as you have enough change to power through.
What it didn’t have, not that anyone cared, was good dialogue. After all, who’s really paying attention to subtleties in an arcade full of rowdy teenagers and kids vomiting up candy-floss?

Of course, once the second and third game got ported to the Nintendo Wii, the horrendous voice-acting became apparent to everyone. Very apparent.
“I’m fully aware of what I’m doing. Can’t you see?!?”
Now, the sensible option in releasing a sequel would be to improve on this dialogue, correct? To make a serious, gritty zombie shooter, with great atmosphere and gore effects…
Thank Lucifer they decided to go in the complete opposite direction….

Overkill took a gamble and decided to make a prequel that was also the most ridiculous Z-movie game you can possibly imagine. It has the vibe of film you would only see on TV after 3am. It was cheesy, badly shot, extremely rude and bloated with madcap energy.

And it was fan-fucking-tastic.

Overkill is a genuinely good on-rails shooter, a good game made great by its balls-to-the-wall weirdness. The two lead characters are what really make it shine though. On the one-hand, you have Agent G, a farcically bland heroic character, who is comically oblivious to how dull he is as a human being.

And then we have Isaac Washington, who is 50 years of Blaxploitation films crammed into a single persona. This is Samuel L. Jackson if he was let off his leash, a man who uses the word ‘fuck’ like the rest of us use commas, or intakes of breath. Together, they make beautiful, bone-chilling music (often with liberal use of chainsaws and screams of “die, bitch!”)

More than anything, House of the Dead: Overkill raises the question of why we don’t see more parody games like this.
Is it because, once a game is made and made well, they want to be taken seriously?
Is it because witty writing is so hard to come by?
Or is it because there simply isn’t as wide a market for the parody horror game as there is for hardcore survival horror?
Whatever the reason, here’s hoping this isn’t the last we see of G, Isaac and those undead candy asses.

Best Moment
Overkill might be an exercise in escalating madness, but the best moment comes in an early boss fight that manages to be both quite creepy and side-splittingly hilarious alike.

Where is the franchise now?
There hasn’t been another main entry in the series since Overkill, but an entertaining spin-off was released for PCs in 2013 called Typing of the Dead: Overkill.
Essentially the same game, you landed hits by quickly typing words that come on screen. Typing speeds have been known to increase dramatically, because nothing encourages hand-eye coordination like the threat of zombie cannibalism.