WMDogma said:
It certainly starts off that way. Takes a good chunk of time before you actually reach Silent Hill itself.
Oddly enough, I like the sound of that. It gives the impression that Silent Hill is less of a trap-door spider that pulls you in when you get close enough and more of a Siren: it
lures, and the people that it draws don't need to be imprisoned. Most SH protagonists have a very understandable reason for remaining in the town, whether it's lost family or simple despair, though nothing physical is stopping them from leaving.
But, more to the point. This game...damnit, I had such high hopes. The last prison-based horror game I played was The Suffering, which was a whole lot better than its popularity indicated. It had a wide array of enemies, and each of them fit the setting. Most of them were manifestations of the cruelties that took place on the island where the prison was located, and they were just as much in conflict with one another as they were with the humans who were still alive.
That being said, it placed much greater emphasis on action than on horror when compared to a Silent Hill game with similar goals. With that in mind, I expected
Downpour to be a game where your background as a combat-hardened convict would be much less of an asset than you'd think. After all, Silent Hill has always been about tailoring its nightmares to each resident. Characters in the same room as one another won't always be seeing the same things. So for Murphy, I would've thought that the sort of nightmare Silent Hill would cook up would be one where his physical strength and combat prowess couldn't carry him like it did in prison. Enemies might be able to become tangible and intangible at will, creating very narrow windows in which you can attack them (and they can attack you), and this would rob him of the most basic element of combat: a reliable enemy. Punch someone and you expect the punch to hit him if it's on target, but what if it drifts right through? Pretty goddamn disconcerting.
But instead...corpses. Or at least corpse-looking things. I'm glad that they didn't bring back the nurses (finally), but Christ, the way most of these monsters look, you could pull off one of their 'faces' and reveal that it was just Old Man Jenkins trying to scare people away so he could sell the property for a massive profit.
It's a common enough trope, so why didn't Konami use it? A horror feature with a young woman or a child usually sets 'helpless protagonist' as par for the course, but compare that to 'Aliens' or 'Predator.' Assumed helplessness is never as effective as learned helplessness. In the former, you're weak from the getgo. In the latter, you're a stone-cold badass who gets hit with the realization that everything that makes you a stone-cold badass is completely useless in this situation. It's not that you're weak: it's that all your strengths can't help you.
Aphantas said:
I agree with you on most points. Its seems that they have forgotten that combat with a monster will make it less intimidating, especially when you can defeat it fairly easily. The scariest monsters tend to have a trait in common, you either cannot kill it, or it is extremely hard to do so.
Monsters are at their most frightening when you know that they are after you and you are powerless to stop them. That is why Pyramid Head was scary, why Amnesia's monsters, especially the water creature, was scary. And why Homecoming's were not (comparatively).
Horror games must go out of their way to make the player feel vulnerable. Making a player able to fight monsters effectively only empowers the player and works against making a player vulnerable.
This is pretty similar to what I was trying to put across: the ability to fight with a reasonable chance of triumph deflates a scary atmosphere like nothing else. Enemies that are effectively invulnerable in the way I mentioned not only make each encounter dangerous and nerve-wracking, but it robs the player of the initiative. You can't throw the first strike, and you have to
let it attack you if you want even a prayer of defeating it.
Therumancer said:
I tend to disagree because monsters that are totally invulnerable are kind of silly in most cases, they made more sense. Basically if something is solid enough to hit you, hitting it hard enough is going to hurt it. When you start forcing the player to react in an unrealistic fashion by say removing character options, the game ceases to be scary or immersive and instead turns into a very annoying forced stealth section.
Not to bang my own drum unnecessarily, but it seems like making them phantoms of some sort would solve that problem. Note the child Crusader in the
Jericho cinematic trailer. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqPSjh7py1s] Sure, it's gruesome and horrible like plenty of other monsters, but when it ceases its attack,
you can't do anything to it. It effectively turns the armory you've got on your back into a reminder of your enforced helplessness.
Therumancer said:
The thing is that horror games have to walk a fine line here, it is difficult to create scary monsters that can also be fought, and really that involves a lot of good atmosphere, writing and design. So few games have done it right, that it's hard to find examples... but the early Silent Hill games are a good example, there were numerous cases where combat didn't work at all, but they were exceptions rather than the rule. Rather they game managed to create an enviroment where combat was a viable approach, but it was actually more effective, and easier to run away and conserve your resources for where you really needed them.
Jericho, for all it's failings, also stands up in my mind for being one of the few cases where a game has managed to definatly be horror, but involve protaganists who are themselves very tough monster killing machines (a whole squad of them, loaded with weapons and freak powers) by creating an atmosphere, and scenario that was just... amazing... even if the delivery was lacking.
I didn't even read to this part when I was pulling up that Jericho vid. At the risk of sounding like I just want to compliment myself, "Great minds think alike," I guess.
Therumancer said:
Of course again part of the design problem was making it so the monsters were hard to avoid so they basically had "you have to kill me" signs on themselves. If I'm caught in a really confined area with a couple of nurses there that I can't get around, and a bunch of weapons, of course I'm going to fight them, if it was more practical to run past them or otherwise avoid them I would, but I don't generally have the option. All of the games had their claustrophobic enviroments and tricky bits with monsters, but the last few suffered due to making combat the only viable choice turning the games into pseudo-brawlers. The combat shouldn't be removed, or made less effective and fun to use, just not be put in the forefront with so many situations where you pretty much have to fight.
Yeah. Because when you force a player into combat, it almost inevitably ruins the horror of the situation. A game trying to be almost pure horror should never,
ever put a player in a fight-or-flight situation and seal off the exits to force combat.
What did players do in Amnesia when they encountered the monsters? They ran the hell away, that's what. The monsters remained scary and felt unstoppable because players had absolutely no reason to stop and see if they could actually be stopped. It helped that there were no combat mechanics, but if you've got multiple terrors from your deepest nightmares bearing down on you, and all you have is a knife or, hell, even if you have a gun, your first instinct is to flee. Why should a horror game say otherwise? "Facing your fears" is probably the most quoted method of overcoming fears, and horror games that force combat are effectively
destroying the scary elements of your foes while trying to make them scary.
The easiest way to make someone afraid of something is to let them keep running from it.
Therumancer said:
I'll also say another game that had combat and managed to be totally freaky just the same was the "Fatal Frame" series which on a lot of levels I consider the best survival horror game series of all time... as goofy as a game about a cute Japanese Girl fighting ghosts with a Camera could be, the games managed to be anything but.
And a big part of that is the weapons, or lack thereof: the Camera Obscura isn't a gun or a sword. It's...just a camera. Alan Wake (which you brought up) does something similar with the flashlight and possessed objects, and it worked really well then, too.
Hand someone a gun and tell them to fight monsters, and they'll probably do it. But hand them something that isn't a weapon and tell them that it's the only thing that can defeat the monsters? Goddamn, that's scary. As animals with thumbs, we're practically hardwired not to consider things that aren't weapons to...um...not be weapons. We're really,
really slow to trust something that isn't normally a weapon to be the object we rely on for defense.
Therumancer said:
I do not consider "Dead Space" to be much of a horror game, it's atmospheric, and the bad guys are gross, but even with the mind trippy stuff it still basically comes down to an Aliens clone to me. See, I believe fighting monsters belongs in horror, but Issac is so bloody good for it, walking around in a truely awesome looking soot of armor, with a collection of "tools" that are better than the military grade weapons in most games (and let's be honest, if a plasma cutter can do all that, why do the soldiers even bother with regular guns?) it gets really iffy really quick.
I'll address your main points in a sec, but I might as well pause to address the plasma cutter > assault rifle issue, because it's a common (and valid) one.
Basically, the reason why a trained Marine couldn't beat what Issac could breeze through in a few seconds was training, and lackthereof, respectively. A trained soldier almost always shoots for the center of mass, which is next to useless against a necromorph. And since a lot of training is based around making that sort of thing second-nature, in a combat situation it's very, very hard to do things that basic differently. Similarly, guns are designed to kill people. Emphasis there is on 'people' and 'kill.' Trying to dismember someone with an assault rifle is marginally easier than trying to decapitate them with a laptop.
Issac, meanwhile, is armed with a wide array of devices that
aren't designed to kill people, but if they're not working with safety protocols in place, can sure as hell take off limbs. A military armed with plasma cutters and rippers would be A) not a very efficient military and B) a walking war crime.
Therumancer said:
I mean beating some nasty thing to death in a game can still be part of horror, but when you walk into a room with an Arc Gun that like rips 6 monsters apart per shot, and you have 3 other equally nasty weapons at most times, plus "tools" that can freeze time on things locally (statis) or allow you to perform feats of telekinesis on part with most Jedi Knights/Biotics/Psychics including the abillity to kill most monsters by throwing pieces of their buddies at them... and really all pretensions of horror are kind of gone. I suppose with brilliant writing it could have still pulled it off sort of like Jericho (where you had a dude with a pet Fire Elemental in his arm for example) but they never really achieved that. I basically went through the usual "aliensesque" interior space enviroments, following some very basic tactics for checking the enviroment and systematically wasted everything I ran into. Writing aside, I felt like I was on a search and destroy mission for them than I was their prey... excepting when I ran from the hunter in certain scenes, and that was less scary than annoying because it was less about running like a bunny than mastery of game mechanics to slow it down... and really I kind of just kept freezing it and/or blowing it's legs off when you get down to it.
But yeah, I understand your point: Dead Space wasn't the only horror story to give its protagonist a heavy arsenal, but it failed to give an environment and enemies that remained scary in spite of that arsenal. Dead Space might be horror, but it's sure not
survival-horror.
