A horror strategy game is therefore tantamount to a submarine on wheels.
But that very incompatibility is a great setup for a scare.
For instance, I will always be unnerved by “fog of war”.
A classic videogame wrinkle - and an enduring source of dread.
As a rule, the fog of war blocks out everything.
Can we derive a similar unease from fantasy strategy games?
Here, the fog of war is a forest swathed in toxic mist.
By night, hordes of pale, scuttling boglins emerge from the depths to gnaw on your barricades.
It breaks the game up into cycles of mounting suspense.
This forest can be hard to read, even from an elevated viewpoint.
I frequently lost my bearings while guiding troops through the woodlands in the demo’s first half.
Some horror-themed strategy or tactics games make a point of this in their stories.
Other strategy games handle the balefulness of strategy as a play practice more abstractly.
But what makes it a horror game is how it makes you feel about yourself as commander.
The Machine of the title is one of those godawful animatronic fortune-tellers from antique fairgrounds.
Each map is a 2D expanse of clean, comicbook hues and fonts, breezy and almost shadowless.
But there’s something in the mixture that revolts.
The colour combinations are wrong somehow, like toilet cleaner slopped over custard.
Their brightness is appalling - it suggests sleeplessness and paranoia and insatiability.
This is a world that doesn’t blink.
The faces of your various secret agents gaze without expression.
