The area is silent apart from the occasional soft noise of a piano that sounds like a cat walking along the keys, and even that comes and goes. The quiet horror of the Ocean House kicks in the moment you enter the level. It’s just a hotel, right? You can’t be afraid of a building… But as you head down the sewer passage towards the hotel and the sounds of the city fade away, it’s replaced by the ominous feeling that something isn’t quite right. While just a fledgling, you’re still an immortal creature of the night, so when your current employers, the sociopathic Voerman sisters, tell you to go banish a ghost, even the character dialogue scoffs at such a simple fetch quest. Blackmailed into service by the ruling Camarilla government, the fledgling is sent out into the California night to clash with and run errands for a colorful cast of characters while simultaneously chasing down a mysterious artifact. With the sequel set to release sometime this year, it seemed like the right time to look back at the game’s signature setpiece and see just why it continues to haunt our collective nightmares.īloodlines is an “immersive sim” (a kind of first-person shooter/roleplaying game hybrid) that casts the player as a fledgling vampire, thrust into the world of the classic tabletop RPG Vampire: The Masquerade. But through its manipulation of the player, mastery of pacing, numerous well-placed scares, eerie atmosphere, and unnerving sound design, it turns a simple empty level full of environmental hazards and events into the most terrifying level of a game already brimming with nightmare fuel. Often cited as the standout segment of the cult-favorite PC action/adventure game Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines(and frequently an entry in “scariest levels in gaming” lists), the Ocean House is a rather unassuming level buried in the game’s first act of Santa Monica, a simple fetch-quest to retrieve a “personal item” and lay the ghost of a haunted hotel to rest. It’s often said it’s not the story, but how you tell it, and nowhere is that more true than with the Ocean House Hotel.
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