With Halloween just upon us, it is a good time to talk about the terror games, and what they have to gets our hearts bumping out of our chests.

I will start remembering the first game that ever really truly scared me, in my case, the original Resident Evil; I had about 15 years, and I still have fond memories of playing this game downstairs on the big TV, in the dark and scaring the &$%@ out of myself. Although throughout the years different games have managed to scare me, still nothing can beat my first experience getting me into that terrifying mansion.

So just what have the horror games, which make them so successful? First of all I think you can break it down into the typical cinematic as you would experience in any movie, the combination of atmospheric music scores combined with suspense and scares is something that some games have managed to master and bring it to an interactive media. However, with computer games, there is an element that helps to add a fear factor, and it seems that to be slowly disappearing, which I will talk about later.

"This suspense is terrible. I hope it last."- Oscar Wilde

The fact is that we love being scared, we love to go into a dark corridor hoping to discover the next awful monster to jump out on you, whether that shock comes or even if you know for a fact that it is somewhere around the corner, and this is something that some games have mastered to perfection. Knowing a threat is nearby, but without knowing where exactly, it is something that games as Slenderman have taken much advantage, running around through the darkness with only a flashlight while you know that the monster is probably behind you (whether he is or he isn’t) makes you want to run a little faster... and that's where you begin to be afraid.

The same happens in Resident Evil, each door you open it fully expect that there monsters and zombies lurking on the other side, ready to attack you, and each time you check to see how many bullets you have going spare to get back out if needs be. The unseen threats are often the most frightening ones.

The scares gets the quick thrill, I still can remember vividly some of them; I remember one in particular when playing Resident Evil, when I was walking down a hallway, when two zombie dogs crashed through the window and appeared in front of me, and sending me to the edge of hysteria. Dead Space uses widely the element "jump out and shout!" in which a monster jumps out from somewhere shouting and catching you completely off guard, which ensures the scare, but goes in a different direction that in the scares mentioned thus far; the suspense of knowing that something is approaching, but don't know where it is and at each step you are more nervous vs. ambushes that you don't expect.

Combine these two elements is usually a recipe for success, but in my opinion the scary games these days are missing one key element and that is purely down to the design of games and them leaning more towards the casual player.

Not wanting to die.

Shock value, plus suspense plus the knowledge that if you die it means you lose everything you’ve earned just adds a massive panic factor on top of already being scared, a hysteria that makes the player jump up and down in their seat as they scream and shout trying to get away from whatever is suddenly chasing them. Truly terrifying.

With the arrival of a more casual stance on single player games, this key element is becoming a dying element, because actual the games allow you to save at any time, or check-point saves before tricky situations, which takes away the thrill (remember when in Resident Evil you have to take the difficult decision about whether go a little further or save spend one of your precious typewriter ink ribbons). Unless the likelihood of an imminent and possibly brutal death is a key feature (like for example in Slenderman or the Amnesia games) the fear of dying is almost non-existent, and I unfortunately feel that horror games are becoming a thing of the past and we shall be relying on the lesser known indie games to get our fright fix.

And that's really scary.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 31st, 2013 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.