BUT WHO WATCHES THE SPY?
The Spy doesn’t get the point of horror fiction. “Oh no, it’s a big scary ghost, let’s all run around in a panic and probably die.” Big deal. Grow up. Real horror can be achieved by simply remembering things that happened in the past. After all, Alfred Hitchcock once claimed that suspense is when the spectator knows more than the characters in the movie. And who knows less than the version of you that didn’t know the events that were about to happen to them?
If The Spy ever wants to enjoy the cold sweat of terror, The Spy will just remember the time The Spy spent three days infiltrating a highly secure executive suite, carefully mapping out security patrols, drawing blueprints, and coding software to disable security systems. And after all that work, and the subsequent hours of painstaking stealth infiltration, The Spy finally realised that The Spy had got the wrong address.
Another example. Picture the scene: the streets, crowded with people singing and dancing. It’s May 2022, and they’ve just heard that Embracer Group has announced the sure, Tomb Raider is getting a bundled trilogy of acquisition of Eidos Monreal and Crystal Dynamics, alongside the rights to Deus Ex, Tomb Raider, Thief and Legacy of Kain. “Finally,” they think, as they embrace their neighbour for the first time since the unpleasantness over a repainted fence, “my favourite franchises have been freed from the grasp of Square Enix’s baffling treatment of anything not named Final Fantasy”.
The poor fools, they had no idea. Here, now, in the present day, the celebration is long over. In late January of this year, Eidos Montreal announced that it had laid off 97 employees – a move that, according to a Bloomberg report, coincides with the cancellation of an unannounced Deus Ex game; one that had been in pre-production for the last two years.
To be fair to the revellers, they had reason to be hopeful. When the ac
