- It's a beautiful day to play!
Pylons is a Retraux Survival Horror Video Game by T.W. Burgess.
The game has you play as a small boy, and is framed as an Edutainment game about pylons
. The boy initially starts dishing out facts about pylons while interacting with other people, be it police officers, people who work on pylons, or other kids who need to learn proper pylon safety.
Then dark things start going down.
The game was released on October 23rd, 2020.
Pylons contains examples of:
- Adults Are Useless: The Officer of the Law is too lenient in dealing with the Pylon crisis, simply warning children away and resolving to wait until the Pylon Company arrives to fully investigate the deaths, and is quickly killed off by the Pylons and their servants when the invasion begins. One of the only other adult characters in the game, the Pylon Man, turns out to be in on the conspiracy, being one of the brainwashed Cultists who make Human Sacrifices to the Pylons, while the third, the Hooded Stranger, succumbs to the Hum just after telling you how to stop them.
- Ancient Conspiracy: It is implied that there is a cult of humans that has worshipped the Pylons for a very long time as the player character stumbles upon an ancient sacrificial stone not far from their house, and it's possible that the Pylon Company has been involved in this conspiracy as well.
- Black Bead Eyes: Due to the graphical limitations of the game, most of the characters' eyes are little black dots on their faces.
- Body Horror: The children who were killed by the Pylons rise as their servants, and are noted by the protagonist to be ash-gray, as a result of being horribly charred by the electrical current. Also, anyone overtaken by the Hum has their face hideously distort into an exaggerated smile, while their joints twist to an unnatural angle, shaping them into horrific human facsimiles of the Milk Walker-like Pylon Mascot from the PSA segments. If one pays attention, it can be noticed that the Pylon Man has already began to turn on day 2, with his facial features subtly altered since his appearance the day before.
- Cruel Twist Ending: You made it to the top of the radio tower and put the frequency scrambler in place. It activates... and the Mettel Mother awakens.
- In the Hood: One character in the game is a mysterious hood-wearing individual warning you to stay away from the pylons.
- Mechanical Abomination: The true nature of the Pylons, being ancient, man-eating metal beasts that brainwash the population into forming a cult and offering human sacrifices to them. It’s implied that this has been going on for a very long time.
- No Mouth: None of the kids have mouths.
- The Noseless: None of the kids have noses.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Zigzagged. If you get touched by possessed workers or hooded people, then it's Game Over. However, the pylon monsters will simply stun you.
- One-Word Title: Pylons, naturally.
- The Paralyzer: Pylon monsters. They'll temporarily stun you if they touch you.
- Retraux: The game is presented to look like an old MS-DOS game, with 8-bit graphics and sounds.
- Slasher Smile: The Pylon Man sports a disconcerting grin whenever you speak to him. This later spreads to the charred, reanimated corpses of the Pylons’ victims.
- X-Ray Sparks: The messages from the pylon man contain such an image of children resulting from touching a pylon.
