If video game royalty Hideo Kojima is to be believed, Kojima Productions' upcoming single-player horror game OD is going to scare you so much that you'll contemplate quitting, but the game is designed in such a way to help you persevere.
If that all sounds incredibly vague and confusing, don't blame me. Kojima tiptoed around the topic of OD in an interview with Entertainment Weekly for Xbox's 25th anniversary. He's been tightlipped about the project since its reveal back in 2023, and it doesn't help that he's previously described it as "a new form of media" that "explores the concept of testing your fear threshold, and what it means to OD on fear." What exactly that means still isn't clear, but Kojima says there's a whole new system that'll help you navigate the horror if OD happens to go beyond your threshold for fear.
"I wanted to go beyond the limit of the 'scariness' that other games had reached," he says. "It's a single-player game, and I wanted to make it as scary as possible.
"But for those that might stop playing when it gets too scary, I have thought of a system that will allow them to keep going. I can't say much more, because it'll give too much of a hint on the system, and I could get in trouble for saying too much!"
As a self-professed scaredy cat, who just happens to love horror games much to the detriment of my blood pressure, I'm cautiously reassured by this. Kojima is responsible for one of the scariest games I've ever played in PT, and if that "playable teaser" was any longer than an hour or so, there's no way I would've been able to beat it in one sitting. I'm relieved to hear Kojima and co. are considering wimps like me while developing OD, but it's hard to feel completely comfortable until we know the details of this new system.
Capcom tackled the issue of fear thresholds masterfully in Resident Evil Requiem, which frequently bounces between the unbearably tense Grace Ashcroft sections and the cathartic, action-packed Leon Kennedy sequences, offering much-needed breaks from the tension that you don't get in Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, which director Koshi Nakanishi has admitted was "possibly too scary." Hopefully we'll learn more soon about Kojima's plans to keep sissies like me from tapping out while playing OD.
