Gaming

NIN guitarist and ‘Spec Ops: The Line’ creative director team up for new gaming studio

Eyes Out, an "arthouse game development studio," is currently working on a “cosmic horror title.”

Nine Inch Nails guitarist, Robin Finck, has teamed with Spec Ops: The Line creative director, Corey Davis, to create Eyes Out, a new “arthouse game development studio” based out of Los Angeles. Finck and Davis are describing the new company as a “fusion of visionary exploration and musical collaboration” between the two, and are already working on Eyes Out’s first project, “a single-player immersive cosmic horror game with strong environmental storytelling elements.”

Which, frankly sounds pretty on-brand, especially from what we’re seeing in the studio’s announcement video:

Yeah, that definitely looks like what we assume would happen when a guitarist in the world’s most famous industrial band teams up with one of the people responsible for the most unsettling war video game of all time. Count us in.

As Pitchfork notes, “Finck and Davis each have experience scoring video games, with the guitarist previously contributing to the sci-fi adventure puzzle game Observation and Davis composing the music for his own game Here They Lie, a psychological horror title released in 2016.”

While there really isn’t much information available right now, we look forward to being thoroughly creeped out by whatever Finck and Davis have in store for us soon.

A good time for horror gaming — We assume Eyes Out’s upcoming releases will skew towards the more surreal, experimental side of video gaming, but fans of straightforward horror stories should soon be able to get the pants spooked off them, too. A couple of weeks back saw the surprise announcement of a next-gen remake of Visceral Games’ beloved 2011 sci-fi horror title, Dead Space.

Developed this time around by Motive, the studio behind Star Wars: Squadrons (Visceral has since closed up shop), the new Dead Space is being billed as a ground-up redesign of the original game, updated for modern tech and players. Unfortunately, players weren’t given a specific timeline or release date, but one assumes it shouldn’t be too long before you can blast away at Necromorphs as Isaac Clarke.

In the meantime, we suggest watching this old video of Nine Inch Nails practicing for a tour. It’s only tangentially related to the subject matters at hand, but it still rips really hard, and we feel people could do with more of these sorts of distractions right now.