Things developers keep forgetting about horror games.

[Doclector]

I was watching this:

And it got me thinking about all the details that developers keep forgetting about horror. What do you think are the main points that are often ignored?

Spoiler

For me, it's power. The player must never feel too powerful, like they can reasonably take on whatever dark threat opposes them. Ideally, the player should feel almost completely powerless, not to the point where even trying to succeed at the game seems pointless, though. Even Minecraft is sometimes scary for this very reason, because for a long time, your character is useless against the monsters. Your character only really becomes good at combat when you have full diamond or iron armour, a bow and decent amount of arrows, and an iron sword if not diamond. That takes quite some time to gather the materials for when you're just starting out, and even then, wondering around at night far from any shelter is ill advised at best. This game with cube-shaped monsters that could probably be from the N64 era becomes scary simply because these monsters pose a real threat to your character, and your character poses little real threat to them. Even atari's ancient "Haunted house" arcade game, with it's sprites of spiders and ghosts managed to be tense simply because you have no defense at all against them.

Sometimes it's about giving you something you percieve to be power, and then show just how little that power means to your enemies. In the original resident evil, getting the shotgun felt ike you were going to be on easy street. You'd have to take care of the ammo, but now you had a shotgun, when something big and bad popped up, you were just going to blow it apart. Then you tried to use it, possibly on some of the spiders or the reptillian hunters. You found yourself using many shots to take down one of the monsters, or being killed altogether, sometimes instantly by the hunters via decapitation. It gave you a supposedly powerful weapon, and then gave you even more powerful enemies. I call this the "aliens" effect. In the titular film, the colonial marines were built up to be ultra badasses equipped with devastating weaponry. Then the film showed how quickly their numbers were thinned by the aliens. Power built up, then bought smashing back down.

 

[MortifiedPenguin]

Developers are all too eager to show off their wacky monster designs that are made to freak you out with jump scares. Amnesia: The dark descent handled the use of monsters really well. The thing that splashed around in water, you never saw it, you knew it was coming for you and you were still terrified. Same with the other monsters within the game, you only really caught passing glimpses of them in the darkness, walking about and moaning.

 

[GiantRaven]

Developers are all too eager to show off their wacky monster designs that are made to freak you out with jump scares. Amnesia: The dark descent handled the use of monsters really well. The thing that splashed around in water, you never saw it, you knew it was coming for you and you were still terrified. Same with the other monsters within the game, you only really caught passing glimpses of them in the darkness, walking about and moaning.

This. It's what you don't show that makes something scary. I was playing Dear Esther for the first time earlier and I was practically freaking the fuck out simply because there was nothing happening beyond a creaking sound when I was in one of the buildings.

I'm still not convinced there isn't something out to get me in that game.

 

[Pink Gregory]

Horror is subjective, shock is easier to achieve than tension, and far more profitable.
Bingo.

 

[oplinger]

Honestly, power is a big part of it, like you said. Mystery is a close second.

The things that make Silent Hill so scary isn't really the mystery that there are monsters in the fog, you find them pretty quick, they stop being an unknown. However your controls are clunky and awkward, and there is absolutely not finesse in the melee combat. You're weak, you have many glaring disadvantages, it makes every encounter very tense.

Penumbra and Amnesia both do the mystery very well though. In penumbra you aren't useless against enemies, you're given power. Quite a bit of power too, I mean you can pretty much win with just a hammer, and it's pretty easy. In amnesia...you don't have much power at all. Both games, however, use the mystery of what lies in the dark to scare the ever loving hell out of you.

From a developer stand point, I don't think it is that they don't know these things. It's that they have to keep making sequels. If you have to make a sequel to a horror game, the mystery is gone. So you have to go with power, but you know the threat already...you've dealt with it, you're experienced. You've got nth times more experience now than in the first game.

What the hell do we have to be scared of in RE3,4 or 5? Dead Space 2? 3? Silent Hill 2 or 3? Even the second episode of Penumbra, we already know you can just run by everything. There is no feeling of helplessness really, there is no mystery. There is no fear, or even tension.

 

[Diddy_Mao]

I think one of the things sorely missing is developing a general atmosphere of dread. Where Silent Hill succeeds is by presenting scenes of horrific atrocity and letting your imagination fill in the blanks as to what happened. They compound that by using ambient noises to remind you that there are horrible things stalking the world and that if you aren't careful you might be the next one skinned and strung up with barbed wire. This is where games like Dead Space fail. Within seconds of starting the game it springs a bunch of monsters on you and shows them tearing people apart. That contextualizes the whole thing for the player from the start and doesn't give them time to get scared. (Dead Space fails as a horror game for a number of other reasons but I'll try to stay on topic.)

 

[Doclector]

Honestly, power is a big part of it, like you said. Mystery is a close second.

The things that make Silent Hill so scary isn't really the mystery that there are monsters in the fog, you find them pretty quick, they stop being an unknown. However your controls are clunky and awkward, and there is absolutely not finesse in the melee combat. You're weak, you have many glaring disadvantages, it makes every encounter very tense.

Penumbra and Amnesia both do the mystery very well though. In penumbra you aren't useless against enemies, you're given power. Quite a bit of power too, I mean you can pretty much win with just a hammer, and it's pretty easy. In amnesia...you don't have much power at all. Both games, however, use the mystery of what lies in the dark to scare the ever loving hell out of you.

From a developer stand point, I don't think it is that they don't know these things. It's that they have to keep making sequels. If you have to make a sequel to a horror game, the mystery is gone. So you have to go with power, but you know the threat already...you've dealt with it, you're experienced. You've got nth times more experience now than in the first game.

What the hell do we have to be scared of in RE3,4 or 5? Dead Space 2? 3? Silent Hill 2 or 3? Even the second episode of Penumbra, we already know you can just run by everything. There is no feeling of helplessness really, there is no mystery. There is no fear, or even tension.

Horror sequels are tough. If the first game was good, people likely want more, even with the modern cynicism that sequels are generally inferior to their origins.

Problem is that, as you stated, the player is more used to the subject matter of that series. They know how to kill certain bio-terrors, they know the warning signs of ye olde eldritch creature, and they know how the fiction's version of ghostly prescences works. Not only this, but the main character would, logically, be more used to it, encouraging us to engage in this "monster hunter" role. This is actually why I'm kinda okay with the fact that Alan wake's american nightmare did away with a lot of the eerie atmosphere of the original. Alan is now a full on warrior of light, he's fought the dark prescence and survived in their world long enough that it's become an accepted fact for him. It wouldn't make sense for him to revert to the same scared, confused writer that came to bright falls years ago.

All this essentially means that the series has to change, but how? If you change the main character, you have the main character whimpering at a relatively weak monster while the player says "You think that's bad? Just you wait until it's mother shows up". You change the scenario, but unless the main character actually is some kind of monster hunter (which would probably result in far too much of a sense of power in the player unless handled very carefully) it stops being believable that a different, unrelated occurance would happen to this same character. Die hard can joke about that coincidence because it's not a horror, a horror game (or film) can't without the entire situation becoming absurd. This means that by the time you've made this sequel suitable to go ahead, you may as well just start an entirely new, unrelated continuity.

So it's all very tricky, but it could be entirely avoided by not planning do sequels at any point. Unfortunately, like I said, if it's good, people will want more, and no doubt, modern publishers will demand more and more until the franchise stops being profitable. The entire situation is incredibly difficult ground.

 

[FalloutJack]

Ah, see, this is probably where the thinking for Extermination being decent for horror comes in. It's early PS2 era and a survival horror game with shitty dialogue. But you know what it DOES have? Pretty good everything else. Let's see...

Spoiler: I dunno if anyone needs me to protect their eyes from spoilers (doubt it), but here goes.

{1} The primary issue about the game is that there's an infection going 'round, one that infects other lifeforms, the water, the walls and floor, and so you're probably staving off mutating into a monster because a parasite spat at you a fair few times.

{2} Right, so remember when I mentioned an infection by some weird parasites? Therein lies the second thing: People succumbing to the infection have had their cells blast outwward into a freakish monstrosity that carries a semblance of humanity on its outer skin and nothing else. And what do they like for breakfast? Why, YOU, of course! Good thing you're armed.

{3} Yup, you're armed with an assault rifle that has interchangeable parts, so these monsters shouldn't be prob- WHY is the water attacking me?! You find later that the infection gets so bad that the organisms in the water actually make it move to increase your infection. It also strengthens the monsters, so watch as that deformed creature suddenly gets BIGGER before your very eyes.

{4} Remember how I said the walls were getting infected? And the ceiling? And the floors? Yeah...throughout the game, this gets progressively worse and uhh...they eat people. This facility is being slowly devoured, and the monsters keep getting worse. Eventually, this place looks like you're in an alien stomach.

Boogie nights.

 

[Savo]

I think a lot of it has to do with horror games becoming predicable.

For example, Amnesia started out as soul-scarring scary for me. I've watched horror movies since I was a kid and had to get my courage up to turn out the lights and put my headphones on. However, as the game wore on and I got used to the patterns of the monsters and scares, the terror factor disappeared. By the end, I was like "Meh" whenever I saw one of those twisted beasties.

However, as you said, it also has to do with the amount of power given to the player. I found RE4 to be scary in it's early levels because I had to conserve ammo and be careful. That sense of fright went up in a poof of smoke as soon as I got better weapons.

Ideally, a game would keep changing and evolving to keep you on your toes. I fully agree with Amnesia's philosophy of keeping monster encounters to a minimum and letting the suspense build on it's own. The best horror game would be one where you literally have no idea what will happen next at any given point in the game. You could turn a corner and something would jump out of a closet. Hallucinations and the real world would overlap without the player immediately noticing. That sort of thing.

 

[sanquin]

The amount of power you have combined with how 'unseen' the monsters in it are are two huge factors in a good horror game for me. Though purely horror isn't my thing. (like Amnesia) Which is why I liked FEAR 1 so much. It had first person shooter action, combined with an 'unseen' monster enemy that you couldn't really fight. It would keep returning, or disappear before you could attack, or would just not be harmed by your bullets. You're so powerful against the normal soldiers in that game, yet when the real monster shows itself, every single time, you can't do shit about it. Well...only until the very last part, and only partially even then.

 

[Bad Jim]

I disagree on the power thing. Power basically translates to having the ability to win. It's true that horror games need some difficulty for this reason, but it's not enough on its own. Super Meat Boy is hard, and doesn't give you much beyond being able to run and jump, but it isn't scary.

I also disagree that Minecraft takes a long time before you can defend yourself. You can get by on a stone sword. What makes it scary is that enemies can show up at any time, you don't really know what you are going to find, and one or two slip ups can easily kill you regardless of what you are carrying. Also, creepers deserve special mention because they can ruin your hard work and potentially destroy your way out of a cave.

What makes games scary, IMO, is lack of information. Games which makes you guess the right course of action will be scary while games which show you as much as possible and let you plan will not be scary. Monsters always become less scary first when you locate them, then when you see them, then when you know their patterns. You can defeat any monster that isn't stupidly difficult once you know those things, so there is no longer any reason to fear them.

Frequent savepoints kill tension. The common wisdom these days seems to be that you shouldn't lose more than about twenty seconds progress to death. But a savepoint also represents safety, something the monsters cannot destroy, which goes against the spirit of horror. Unless you make a savegame eating monster of course.

I'd say you can arm the player and still make a game scary. What's important is that the player should be easily killed if he is not paranoid.

 

[Padwolf]

A lot of points I would have said have been said, so I'll just add that they need an atmosphere of complete dread. Also less weapons. But that does come to opinion. To me, FEAR, Dead Space and other games like them are just not scary to me. If I have a reliable weapon with good controls, I don't feel any dread, I don't feel scared by the monsters. Eventually the jump scares just wear off and become boring and predictable. But Silent Hill and Amnesia scare me, Silent Hill more so because the controls are clunky and it makes me scared for the next fight and also because the lack of many save points and just lack of weapons and ammo. They give the air that everything truly is against you, the environments themselves are out to get you.

 

[Tanis]

They keep forgetting that giving me enough ammo to fight off the 3rd Reich KILLS any part of that whole 'survival in the horror'.

Say what you will about 'Run Like Hell', but at least the 'HOLY CRAP i GOTTA RUN LIKE HELL FROM SPACE HULK' bit was actually kind of...engaging and I never really felt like I had enough ammo.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

Actually being horrifying. That's a good thing to nail down I think. Nevermind the whole balance of power, giving you too much ammo shit. Never mind shoving monster designs in your face and crap. Those designs just aren't terrifying at all, fullstop. Over-design I think is a lot of what makes it - horror deserves to be understated. Mechanics may play a huge part of not making the games scary, but I actually think, even if Dead Space played like Amnesia, it still wouldn't be terrifying in the slightest.

 

[Some_weirdGuy]

All this essentially means that the series has to change, but how? If you change the main character, you have the main character whimpering at a relatively weak monster while the player says "You think that's bad? Just you wait until it's mother shows up". You change the scenario, but unless the main character actually is some kind of monster hunter (which would probably result in far too much of a sense of power in the player unless handled very carefully) it stops being believable that a different, unrelated occurance would happen to this same character.

You know, i think an excellent way to handle a sequel to a horror game would be to have the first game be 'real', but then the big reveal of the second game would be that you're not actually conveniently back in the same place/being chased down by the same horrific entities, but rather the protagonist of game 1 has been so traumatised that they're now hallucinating/in the mental home/been driven to insanity/having nightmares/whatever.

It would also make for a good excuse to further 'ramp things up'(which games invariably have to do since things don't have as much impact the second time round, as you said people know what to expect already), in that they were scary in real life, but now that they're all a figment of the terrified protagonists imagination that can be even more surreal and terrifying than before.

 

[Diddy_Mao]

A lot of discussion about combat and power.

Okay.

You'll forgive me for getting a bit wordy and revisiting my Silent Hill vs Dead Space thing but I do have a point to make.

In the early Silent Hill games combat was not really a major part of the game and the series got provably worse as the focus became more and more about combat.

In Silent Hill 1 & 2 you were rarely in any real danger from the majority of enemies. The hero may not have been much of a powerhouse, but neither were the sickly, limping enemies he was fighting. The horror of the game was enforced in combat by having your character clumsily beat the life out of something vaguely humanoid. It's actually a little disturbing to watch what is clearly not a physically active man savagely beat something to death.

Also, both of these games were smart enough to start giving you guns right about the same time that the aforementioned shock of violent melee combat started to wear off.

If you'll forgive me for a bit of navel gazing, this also helps enforce the loosening grip on humanity that the protagonist might have. Just like the player, he's no longer terribly effected by violent killing so the physical disconnect of a firearm dovetails quite nicely with the emotional disconnect of combat.


Once the games started increasing the focus on combat it became more about dodging and counter attacking, the clearly lethal enemies being thrown at you. Sure it's a fight for survival against a horrible growling monster, but who cares when your player character is a combat trained soldier or a violent prison escapee?
Add this to the fact that fight controls in these games suck. Speaking for myself I was rarely afraid that the monster was going to kill me in so much as I was annoyed that the game is going to kill me.

There's nothing worse for a horror game than to be constantly disconnected from the atmosphere like that.

So. Simple and effective combat can enforce the themes of the game while action packed but flawed combat can completely disconnect you from it.

So how does this fit into my "Dead Space is terrible" motif? Well because Dead Space actually has very tight and effective combat controls. The problem is that one of the main combat techniques of the game lies in crippling your enemies by cutting off limbs.

The reason that this is a problem is that crippling your enemies has an air of catharsis to it. If a big snarling monster is charging at me from across the room and I lop it's legs off with a chainsaw gun, causing it to topple to the floor and slowly wriggle closer in a pathetic attempt to nibble me in the ankles...that's not scary at all. That's actually kinda funny.

 

[darlarosa]

Horror is subjective, shock is easier to achieve than tension, and far more profitable.
Bingo.

This could SO be applied to horror movies

Personally I'm a person who doesn't like gore fests or jump scares so some people won't agree with this.

One of the scariest things about a game is when they are like choose your own adventure stories. By that I mean any choice, any answer, could potentially be wonderfully right or horribly wrong. There's nothing like giving the player a sense of security and taking it away. To remove certainty about anything is traumatizing...you are sure you should have picked up the hatchet instead of the hand gun, but then you are killed by a man who absorbs bullets like sunscreen.

My favorite kinds of horror games are more psychological. Survival horror tends to become redundant to me. A game that pulls you into the main characters head space, that makes you think you are on the right path and then suddenly throws you in a new and morally ambiguous direction is a bit more fun. If you are about to die, your only choice is to hide, and have to protect someone who is screaming with fear, do you kill them to give you time to escape or try to calm them down or find something to shut them up with? Questions that blur the lines of morality make horror games more fun. Survival horror is focused so much on survival that we forget about mystery and excitement. That and games that screw with your head in an unobtrusive way. remember a game a few years ago that had the gameplay reflect the characters insanity level, and also messed with the player by making the screen do odd things.

On a side note...we need new kinds of protagonists and play styles. So often do our protagonists have the same kind of reaction, and for me that deadens the experience. Sometimes the limitation on player actions are so not sensible. I loved Rule of Rose, but I just could not understand why Jennifer could not pick up certain things(that said she had a useful arsenal). It could be interesting to constantly change what objects are real or fake...character tries to pick up a chair like they did before and it turns out to not even be there.

 

[Alssadar]

I nearly pissed myself while watching the SCP part, so allow me my frightened perspective.
Horror is all pertained from the player's perspective, thriving off what they fear. Two common things are the dark, and the unknown.
As we have such vast imaginations, hearing and simply not being able to see things, while in a situation that presents no let-up (comedy, relief, or breather) allows this to perpetuate. Give a player something they fear--something that can kill them easily and make them run upon seeing.
Now give the fear a sound. Something they can sense without seeing--that they know lurks around them, yet have no idea of its location. As imaginative creatures, given scary circumstance, we'll create these ghosts everywhere, as we no longer want the fear of the unknown permeating around us. As much as we hate the fear, having it in front of us and knowing where it is is a lot less scary then not knowing its location.
Another way is to kill the player's power. They strength they once had is gone, and no longer useful. Even so, it is scarce, meaning whatever little relief of having a gun is, you can't have it for long.

Spoiler: Example

Good job, you killed a bunch of nazis in this facility. Now, there's a bunch of them dead around this test vat. Now the door closes--somewhere, you hear the sound of shuffling feet. You mind thinks of some beast, whatever had killed the people. Now the lights shut off, minus the one under which you stand.
Now a roar, and the glass shatters above you. There's a shadow, and you fire your MP40. The shadow shakes, and then disappears. Suddenly, from behind you, a roar--the creature from before. Turning around, the other glass watch chamber above you shatters. More shadows, at least two. They look human, and raise their arms. You fire at them, and the shadows stand still.
Once more, another roar, and the sound of a bulkhead smashing. Turning to face the door, one of the shadows walks towards you, arms outstretched. It has no eyes, nor face, and you can see the semi-realistic shape of the human. You fire a full clip, but nothing happens. Suddenly, the lights above you flicker out.
The sound of footsteps around you, a roar, and smashing objects. Suddenly, a moaning. You screen flashes the same red as when you were shot by a nazi. You run through the dark, colliding with walls. More moaning, and the lights flicker for a shadow-man to be following you.
The wall collapses with a brief lightbulb on the other side. You try shooting the man, but nothing happens. You flee through the chambers, and he is ever coming. His moaning follows you behind every corner, up every starcase, and his fellows are not afraid to meet you in the rooms, slowly turning and starting after you...

Now, I gotta think happy thoughts for a while...

 

[Sean Hollyman]

I think recently horror games (with a few obvious exceptions of course) have been focusing too much on the more in-your-face-horror style, by just throwing monsters at you that sure they look grotesque yeah, and sure you wouldn't want to face it yourself, but it's becoming less psychological and panic-y.

 

[MortifiedPenguin]

Developers are all too eager to show off their wacky monster designs that are made to freak you out with jump scares. Amnesia: The dark descent handled the use of monsters really well. The thing that splashed around in water, you never saw it, you knew it was coming for you and you were still terrified. Same with the other monsters within the game, you only really caught passing glimpses of them in the darkness, walking about and moaning.

This. It's what you don't show that makes something scary. I was playing Dear Esther for the first time earlier and I was practically freaking the fuck out simply because there was nothing happening beyond a creaking sound when I was in one of the buildings.

I'm still not convinced there isn't something out to get me in that game.

True, there is something inherently creepy about that game, I think it's how empty the place is that gets to you. You don't really see any wildlife and you can see signs of inhabitance yet there's no trace of whoever might of lived there. You can't help but imagine that someone's waiting to sneak up on you.

I can't help but think that it's because of this generation pretty giant leap in graphical fidelity that we've got this issue. Just look at the PS2 and the influx of horrors games then, where you were pretty much forced to fill in the gaps with your imagination because of the poor graphics. Whereas now devs want to make visually stunning games and it's hard to do that well and infer a sense a atmosphere with horror games.