Gangstalk is a cat-and-mouse game in which you play both cat and mouse. It’s a stalking game in which you are the person stalking you and also, you are the person being stalked. By you. Yes, I too am wearing an expression of puppy-eyed dismay and confusion. But it sounds interesting, sufficiently interesting that I can disregard the very loud DYSTOPIAN WORLD framing in the trailer.
Devised by Kitten Burst developer Jam2go, Gangstalk is the tale of Cam, an urban explorer in a high-vis jacket with an emoji for a face. He’s being hounded by the evil megacorp PANDO, who appear to specialise in the manufacture of digital ghosts. Or at least, he thinks he is. According to Wikipedia, gangstalking refers to “a set of persecutory beliefs in which those affected believe they are being followed, stalked, and harassed by a large number of people.” So it’s possible that all this is happening in Cam’s poor befuddled noggin.
As the game begins, Cam has infiltrated a secret PANDO company town, Kudzu Vale, which reminds me of The Blackout Club’s ghoulish chunk of suburbia. There are hauntingly empty carparks, hauntingly empty shopping markets, and haunting pieces of high-concept scenery, like piles of smouldering TVs or gaggles of marionettes who definitely won’t move when you look away. Active threats include predatory phantasms called Datamoshers, who look like Slender Men made of VHS crackly bits. But the intriguing part, again, is the whole “you are your own stalker” conceit.
In lieu of a generic camera system you will watch Cam “through the fragmented perspectives of CCTV Cameras, Devices, Agents, and the enigmatic Datamoshers”. Sometimes, you’re peeking through a CCTV camera in the corner, with the view rotating jerkily to follow him/you across the room. Sometimes, you’re the horror chasing him/yourself, wobbling along as he/you disappear around corners, whereupon you’ll presumably have to wait for yourself to catch up in order to keep… escaping from yourself.
While showing a soon-to-be victim from the killer’s vantage is a familiar tactic, I feel like Gangstalk is trying to push beyond that clichéd cinematic device. It’s teaching you to fear your own gaze, which poses a fun practical dilemma. Presumably, you’ll have to walk the line throughout the game of being just visible enough to retain control.
The Steam page contains a note warning about “strong depictions of anxiety and paranoia”, and this is certainly one of the fancier takes on such things I’ve stumbled on in a video game. I can imagine some ways it won’t measure up to its potential, mind you. Perhaps the “stalker POV” stuff will just boil down to classic survival horror fixed vantage points, much of the time. Perhaps it’ll just be laughable in practice. Perhaps it being laughable is the point. We’ll find out sometime next year.