F.E.A.R. demo released

Japanese horror is a scary thing. Example: a friend of ours went shopping on Sunday and found a three-foot-high little-girl doll with face-covering jet-black hair. Inevitably, said doll was then positioned at the top of a flight of stairs.

Not just "the flight of stairs", either. The house in question is one of those big student-type houses (though, for the sake of our as-yet untanned hides, we should stipulate that the present occupants are all gainfully employed) split over five floors. The doll was positioned second-from-top. Nobody else was informed.

That evening, a friend-of-a-friend returned home with a young lady. Bounding up the stairs, his focus split between her and the passage ahead of him, he lurched round the final banister and made it two steps up before he caught sight of the doll, screamed in mortal terror and fell backwards on his arse. "White as a sheet" would fit, but the pungent aroma suggested a word that shares the phonetic characteristics of "sheet", but generally involves a quite different colour.

Much embarrassment later, a little girl crawled out of the TV and sued them all for copyright infringement.

In other news: the Japanese horror-influenced F.E.A.R. is now available in single-player demo form. You'll need a hefty PC to run it, but it's worth the trouble, and soon we'll be explaining why in some detail.