Effective Attempts at Horror: Why BioShock Isn't Actually Scary
After beating BioShock and dubbing it one of the best games of all time, I later began work on my second playthrough. If you've played the game, you'll remember being in a plane crash and swimming into a building, entering a bathysphere, and going down to Rapture. You're trapped in the bathysphere and can only look around. After you watch a short video and enter Rapture, you see a man being murdered by a spider splicer. The splicer then jumps on top of the bathysphere and starts cutting a hole in the top. This is when you are supposed to get nervous and you sit motionless and defenseless as you wait for your demise. The thing is, she doesn't finish cutting the hole. She never does. No matter how many times you play it, she never finishes cutting the hole in the roof, but for some reason, I got nervous. I was sure that she was going to jump in and murder me like she murdered the man before me. But she doesn't ever finish and she never kills you.
A similar instance later on is when you are walking through a tunnel and part of it breaks and it starts flooding with water. I started running faster and was afraid that I was going to drown in there. I've been fooled once again. You can stand in the tunnel and it will never fill up with water. Ever. You could stand there all you want but you won't die. After this, you fight off some splicers and enter a room where the lights shut off and the door is locked. A light turns on and Ryan appears on a screen and talks to you for a bit. When he is finished talking, several splicers run up to the window and start trying to break it down with wrenches. The cracks get bigger and Atlas tells you that he got the door open and to hurry inside. I was afraid that I was going to be killed by the splicers so I ran straight into the room. Until I realized two things. That even if they broke down the window, I could have taken them easily because there were only three or four of them, and also that they weren't ever going to break down that window. Once again, I have been tricked by this evil, evil game! I stood right next to the window and smacked it with my wrench with the splicers but it never broke and it never will.
Scenes like this appear all the time in the video game world, and I was only using BioShock as an example. This isn't real horror. It's a very intense scene, but it's all fake. You're never actually going to get hurt in the game or in real life. BioShock uses the atmosphere to create a creepy environment, but so does another game that does horror a lot better. That game is Dead Space.
Now, say what you want about Dead Space, but this game is the perfect example of a game that takes advantage of the creepy environment and also has actual hazards and threats. In BioShock, it may seem like you're in danger, but it's just the game tricking you. In Dead Space, the creepy spacecraft, flickering lights, and jump scares mesh perfectly together to create an actual horror experience that will always find ways to surprise you. For instance, I was scared the first couple of times a dead body jumped out but then I understood that sometimes it happens and you should always be ready. Well, I came to a scene where there was a dead body in a tight hallway so I aimed at it and slowly walked forward getting ready for it to jump up when all of the sudden a tentacle thing broke through the window and scared the living crap out of me. The game had me so concentrated on something completely innocent that I had not expected a huge tentacle to jump out at me. This is an example of a well excecuted jump scare that caught me completely off guard and just flat out worked.
While jump scares are probably the easiest way to make somthing scary, another way is to do something else that Dead Space did, which is give you absolutely no means of defense and have monsters chase after you. In the beginning of the game, you enter the ship with no weapons or any way to attack. You're placed in a room with nothing but your armor when the lights shut off and you are trapped in a room by yourself in the dark. Then an alien jumps into the room and tries to kill you. This is a lot like the scene where the splicer attacks you in the dark bathysphere from BioShock, but the reason why this is much scarier is because the monsters actually pose a threat. You can be killed by this guy and there's no way you can protect yourself. This is much more intense and scary than a pretend scare like most of BioShock's more frightening scenes. I also know that I'm not the only one who's heart rate went up at the beginning of Half Life 2 where you're running away from the police in the apartments with no weapons. Once again, not being able to defend yourself while things are chasing you is very intense and an easy way to make something scary.
Horror is rarely done well in games but when it's done right, it really works. I want to know what the escapist community thinks of horror in games, what the gaming industry should use more/less of, when horror is done right and examples of such, and your ideas of a perfect horror atmosphere/scenario.
Lastly, sorry for the blatant ripping off of the code from the news room, the wall of text, the silly rant on horror, and my biased opinions.
