It’s that time of year. Foliage begins to crackle and turn orange, the weather gets just a little cooler, and the days grow a little shorter. But in all honesty if you live in Florida like me and the rest of the PALS crew you’re coming out of your eighth straight month of summer and staring at the armpit stains of your shirts like they’re some kind of twisted Rorschach test. But—indeed—fall is here and it seems to bring out the giddiness from everyone in their early to mid twenties. Maybe it’s the excuse to wear this year’s best slutty-themed (insert something not slutty) outfit or all of the pumpkin-flavored…everything!
Whatever the case may be, Halloween has a hold on people. It’s the one time of year where—well—it’s okay to be scared. Fear is natural it’s something that we all feel. And there is a video game genre that lets us—nay!—beckons us to take one deep dark look down the dimly lit halls of our psyches.
Horror games are, in my opinion, a tough genre to actually nail down; particularly because it’s the only genre that bases itself on the player’s emotions. Here me out: First Person Shooters, Platformers, Racing, Role Playing Games—they all describe actions taken by the players themselves. It’s easy to say that in a First Person Shooter, like any one of the Call of Duty games, I expect to be shooting. But is it as easy to say that by playing a horror game, I expect to be scared?
Story Matters
Fear, like I said, is an emotion. It’s personal—it speaks to our identity. The common tropes of horror: masked maniacs, ghosts, monsters—they don’t all scare everyone. Often times when we play horror games we are left with a by-the-book representation of what the horror genre is: blood-stained walls, the echoed screams of an unfortunate soul from another room, you name it. Hell, my metaphor above about the human psyche is a perfect example! When our minds are force fed the underdeveloped ideas of what fear should be, we tend to balk at the idea that any and every scary game that gets released won’t live up to the horrifying things our mind conjures up late at night. But the opposite can also be true. When too much emphasis is placed on the horror aspect of a game, the gameplay itself gets left on the cutting room floor and the game becomes an on-the-rails haunted house ride instead something more sinister and complex.
A game should build around atmosphere and player development; especially in a horror game. Take Resident Evil 6 for example, the most recent game in the numbered series (excluding the subtitled releases) that originally built itself up from a humble Playstation game to an all-out genre-defining series. The first Resident Evil, now a classic rife with dialogue that could be categorized as “so bad its good” basically created the genre we know as Survival Horror, building upon suspense, mystery and gore. But since its inception the series has all but limped across the finish line, trading its trademark survival horror aspects—limited saves and ammunition and genuine scares—for cheesy melodrama, that no longer feels like a well placed tongue-in-cheek joke for the audience to enjoy. Capcom has been noted as calling Resident Evil 6 “dramatic horror”—something of a redundant statement if you ask me. Isn’t all horror dramatic? Take Telltale Games’ Walking Dead series, it offers up the utmost when it comes to story driven affairs, asking us to partake in tough thought-provoking choices with context and contact sensitive controls. Or take the Slenderman games: simple in design but sweat-inducing gameplay that builds slowly with high tension and atmosphere.
The Fourth Wall
Another crucial component of gaming that the horror genre must rely on is control and artificial intelligence built into the mechanics of the game. Take it from any gamer’s experience: nothing pulls you out of a game faster than flawed A.I. and cumbersome button mashing. I mean, they are the bread and butter of any great game worth playing, and once you strip those elements away you’re left with an isolated experience that makes you second guess every in-game decision because of painfully apparent and unintentional fourth-wall breaks in the design.
A good example of this is the recently released Alien Isolation, an atmospheric, clam-hand inducing experience developed by The Creative Assembly and published by Sega—a company with a very checkered past with the Alien franchise. From the standpoint of storytelling and atmosphere, this game nails the deep seeded dread one would feel if left alone on a space station with a bloodthirsty xenomorph.
But along the way the game falls short of wrapping the player in the atmosphere it attempts to create due to the xenomorph’s artificial intelligence. From moment to moment the game exudes fear, but given long enough, the random encounters created by the slick and slippery alien’s A.I. could cause it to descend upon you just as quickly as it left minutes before, leaving you not cowering in fear and a pool of your own urine, but puzzled as to why the game would allow such an immensely important and fearful sequence to play out over and over again, giving the player no room to catch their breath and plan for the next encounter. It’s a balance that must be met from both ends of the spectrum and any great horror game—matter of fact—any good game in general has a great balance of elements.
Final Thoughts
So what am I trying to say here? Well, the horror genre is a funny thing. Like I said, it plays on emotion—an innate fear of something at our core. Scary movies are one thing: two-dimensional representations of a 3D experience meant to frighten us for a short amount of time. But horror games are a completely different beast—they are in fact interactive and only persist as long as the player is willing to take part. The field is filled with different layers of fear-based gameplay. Genre defining games like the Dead Space series and The Last of Us (more loosely) ask us to dig into the morality of their worlds, at a deeper level than movies, to surround ourselves in places we wouldn’t normally want to interact with. Coupled with great gameplay mechanics and these two franchises have garnered lofty praise from the gaming community. As for me, I’m still waiting for a choose-your-own-scare, genre bending type of game akin to the R.L. Stein books from my childhood. But hey, those are just my thoughts on a genre.
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