Fear is our most primal, basic instincts; encouraging us to flee the unfamiliar or dangerous. In entertainment we call it horror. Fear is an emotion; horror is a genre, with clichés, conventions, and innovations.
Back in 1998, my friends introduced me to the survival horror genre in the form of Resident Evil 2. I remember the hallway, screaming when the horde of bats breaks the glass. I remember the first encounter with the Licker on the ceiling, his sightless face locking onto yours, drool slavering from his jaws. I screamed, panicked, and was promptly eviscerated. These encounters and others carved themselves into my memory, making them pinnacle horror game moments. I still remember pausing the game to wipe sweat from the controllers.
Why Dead Space and Other Tales of the Macabre Aren’t Scary
(or, Why They will Never Make a More Terrifying Game than System Shock 2)
One year after the Resident Evil 2 incident, I endured SHODAN and her seductive torments in System Shock 2. Having not played the first game, I had no idea what to expect. I only knew that something had corrupted my crew members into abominations that pleaded for me to run even as they went for my throat. I only knew that I believed the Many when they warned in that hideous androgynous hive-voice, “Babies must sleep. Babies must rest. Wise is the one who does not waken them. Leave this place now, or we will wound you as you have us.” I cringed at the keyboard when I killed their young; I genuinely feared the Many’s retribution. As for SHODAN—well, more on that later.
In the closing months of 2008, I tried Dead Space. The first hour or two of play was fairly tense, but everything after that was, for lack of a better word, blah. The game’s one innovation—dismemberment—did not hide the derivative game play and poor writing. Though I enjoyed playing the game, I won’t be thinking about it in a decade. I will never re-install it on my machine, which unfortunately validates EA’s claim about SecuROM protection—that most users will never install a game more than the allowed five times. Perhaps they will persist in their strategy of making mediocre games to take the sting out of SecuROM, I don’t know.
But I wanted to love Dead Space. I wanted to recreate the feeling from classics like Aliens vs. Predator and the Shalebridge Cradle level from Thief: Deadly Shadows. Is the game truly so derivative, or is my life so much more complicated now than in 1998 that I am too distracted to immerse myself in its world?
Fear is one of our most primal, basic instincts. It’s designed to encourage us to flee the unfamiliar or the dangerous. Games, movies, and the like attempt the difficult task of creating artificial fear by immersion and suspension of disbelief. However, none of them identify themselves as “fear flicks” or “survival fear.” It’s horror. What was once probably a mere marketing choice now has significant meaning. Fear is just a basic emotional response; horror is a genre with clichés, conventions, and innovations. It’s evident the creators of Dead Space saw and appreciated a number of horror industry staples and duplicated the techniques in those movies without really asking why or how they work. This article is for them.
Effective horror has three elements working together to create a tense survival experience:
- Fear of the unknown
- Unsettling atmosphere
- Character development
Let’s examine all three and determine why games like Dead Space fall short, and games like Fatal Frame make Steerpike yell at me for leaving the room when he comes over and I make him play it. [it’s true – he had to read his daughter a story and left me alone in a darkened room with That Game. It was not a good time for me. Bastard. -S]
The Oldest and Strongest Emotion
The dark hides things, and we fear what we cannot see, or at least what we cannot see clearly. In video games, these are typically carnivorous things such as Grues, xenomorphs, or frog-spawn from the vile oceanfront town of Innsmouth. The less we see of these creatures, the more we tend to fear them; special effects and computer graphics are not and will never be capable of competing with imagination. It may be a cliché, but the power of imagination will always win, and smart horrorcrafters use this to their benefit.
Fans of “classic” movies like Alien, Jaws, and Forbidden Planet will repeatedly lecture about how these monsters were infinitely more scary because we rarely saw them in good lighting until the very end, and even these crescendo viewings were fleeting (the latter two aren’t technically horror movies, but they use elements of successful horror to achieve the desired effect). Ironically, these films chose to hide their monster due to the limitations of special effects and again relied on the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Silent Hill’s foggy environment was designed to make the game’s outdoor environments easier for the PlayStation to render; this technological limitation created one of the more memorable and eerie haunts in gaming history. Like modern movies, game developers perceive most game buyers as wanting graphical eye candy and so show us everything in its hibbity-jibbity billion pixel glory.
Although Dead Space borrows heavily from well known science-fiction convention, it manages to establish a reasonably eerie atmosphere before mucking it all up with chronically over-exposed flesh-eating horrors. The concept of “cracking” a planet open for mining purposes and instead finding only suffering and death and making the player an engineer rather than some Duke Nukem/The Rock variant had enormous potential. Indeed, this potential seemed realized during my first encounter with one of the creatures. After the initial attack, I was separated from my squad mates and ordered to flee. As I turned tail, one of the things crashed through the ceiling and lunged for me. Weaponless, I vaulted down the hallway and glanced back only long enough to glimpse a mass of rot and scythe-like bones scrambling after me. Eon-old instincts screamed “RUN, YOU FOOL!” and I barely escaped into an elevator with my innards intact. The scene worked because I couldn’t just blow the thing away and because I didn’t have the time to really look at the creature. For a few moments, this game recreated the alien in the air duct and the boogeyman in my closet.
But if Dead Space taught me anything, it’s that once I turn the lights on, the alien is just some midget in a suit and the closet boogeyman is a acne-ridden teenager wearing a bed sheet. These creatures are hideous enough at first, but EA Redwood sterilizes the fear by constantly putting the monsters in perfect lighting. It’s like playing a photo-negative of DOOM 3. Add their decision to include only about a dozen different creatures and I have no choice but to give their horrors cute names like “Tenticles” and “Chubbs.” I wish I didn’t feel compelled to mention their decision to include the standard MMORPG convention of reskinning enemies to save cost—“Oh…my…God, it’s…the same creature I’ve seen over and over except it’s BLACK AND RED AAAAAAAIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!”
I did not hate Dead Space. It’s just forgettable. The choice to make me an engineer, so alarming at first because I didn’t know how I was going to dismember anything with a cutting torch, quickly became irrelevant when I was sporting an arsenal of “tools” capable of lopping multiple limbs with a single shot and of clearing entire rooms. I want to believe the conversation between the in-house development team and EA brass went something like this:
BOB THE HOPEFUL DESIGNER: I was thinking we’d like, you know, make the player an engineer…maybe give him semi-functional, improvised, and unreliable weapons with fewer but more deadly enemies. His weaponry could be one more big unknown.
GLEN THE SOULESS CORPORATE BASTARD: Are there breasts in this game?
BOB: Um…no…I mean {looking around nervously} there certainly could be…can we talk about the guns?
GLEN: {Pauses} You may speak.
BOB: Well, yeah…thanks…it’s just that this is survival horror, and we thought it might be more horrifying if the tools weren’t very good weapons.
GLEN: Your wish is granted. The player will have a cutting torch.
BOB: Yes! That’s exactly what we thought, and—
GLEN: And this torch will have unlimited range and shoot superheated plasma.
BOB: Ah—
GLEN: And two modes of fire. All tools will have two modes of fire.
BOB: Um…O…K…anything else? I was thinking of a saw, like one of those industrial–
GLEN: This saw of which you speak. It will launch blades at range. And we will require a sniping tool, some kind of beam, some kind of focused energy…
BOB: You mean a laser?
GLEN: No. A laser is not a tool. This…is a contact beam.
BOB: Contact beam.
GLEN: With two modes of fire.
I’m pretty sure they had a similar conversation about monster closets. EA and its developer showed they were not above innovation when they retextured them as air vents. Thankfully, I could count on pretty much every vent spewing forth a monster, thus saving me from any agonizing moments of actual tension. The designers did, however, tease me when I needed to traverse a hallway containing a half dozen monster closets without any monsters. Although the experience left me on edge and nervy, it was merely the exception in the ho-hum terror-by-numbers experience.
By contrast, Fatal Frame’s sporadic non-dread filled moments function to intensify all of its dread-filled ones. It succeeds because it forsakes the safe-but-exhausted formula in favor of unleashing a host of unique ghosts and giving the player only a camera for defense. A freaking camera! And it functions as a camera. It takes pictures, it has a flash, and its mystical nature exorcises ghosts. Sure, maybe that last bit requires some suspension of disbelief, but at least the game didn’t call it a “camera” to get the player’s “what the hell am I supposed to do with a camera” panic and then have the thing shoot shurikens and lightning.
I Can Feel It Calling in the Air
Sometimes horror is direct. A player sees something, gets scared, and either runs away or shoots it dead. Or both. The other type of horror is more subtle and frequently more effective at creating memorable moments of horror. It creates a general sense of confusion, unease, or revulsion—that “what…the…hell…is happening around here” feeling. This often includes some overlap with fear of the unknown because no image or plot can be haunting without also being alien.
When successful, this more cerebral horror coats every scene, moment, and every line of dialogue with raw tension. Tension. Without it, any horror flick will only be a series of loud noises and “jump scares” designed to startle the viewer into thinking he or she’s afraid. Starts do have their place in horror, but games and movies tend to over-rely on it. Other games like Dead Space try to achieve uneasiness by showing ridiculous levels of gore, which unfortunately achieves only a sense of numbness to dismembered corpses and viscera.
Monster closets are the extreme gaming example of a jump scare, but I’m growing weary of tearing down Dead Space. Instead, here are some of my favorite examples of effective atmosphere in gaming and movies:
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth – The chase through Innsmouth as the entire town decides I must die. Alone, unarmed, and utterly without friends, I had to block doors, climb out windows as bullets shattered them, run on rooftops, and cower in the cold dark.
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Thief: Deadly Shadows – I don’t know what depraved mind came up with Shalebridge Cradle, and I don’t want to know. They turned an orphanage into an insane asylum, moved the children upstairs, then there was a fire…flaming insane ghosts of children and inmates equals me forgetting to breathe for about two hours.
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F.E.A.R. – Sure, it borrows liberally from Japanese little girl horror, but when I climbed up a ladder and turned around to see that vile little thing right in my face , I yelped and uselessly sprayed a burst of rounds into her incorporeal head. What? That’s a start, not cerebral horror or atmosphere? As I said, starts have their place with discriminate and moderate use.
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System Shock 2 – SHODAN’s betrayal crushed my spirit and yet the game found new ways to elevate so it could crush it again. The bizarre mother-son relationship between SHODAN and the Many was just creepy and had never been done before. In addition, the maps were just open world enough to make me ask myself ask tough questions like, “Do I really want to go back up to Medical for that research chemical” and “Do I really need to search the room filled with Many-maggot eggs?”
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Bioshock – The juxtaposition of Rapture’s beautiful construction and idealistic concept against its violent and tyrannical end left me uneasy and jittery through most of the game. Even if it was not technically a horror game, it certainly used tension to good effect, even if it dropped the ball in other areas I will explore shortly.
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Silent Hill – The original game worked by making me feel more utterly alone than any game I had previously played. It shoved me back and forth between two dimensions, both of which were nightmarish but one of which turned the world into a rusty tetanus-filled cesspool. The aforementioned fog made certain I always heard the abominations before I saw them, giving me ample time to panic while struggling to determine their location. Oh, and the weapons (clubs, guns, etc.) were only marginally effective and I rarely had enough ammo—something Dead Space fails to accomplish more than a decade later. The movie struck a chord with a few terrifying moments, but it tried to tie everything up too neatly in the end and suffered from Expository Narrative Syndrome (ENS).–
Silent Hill 2 – At the
risk of sounding incredibly cool, this is the only game that has ever made me cry. True, the tears were of the manly “shimmering eyes” sort, but this game’s final twist left me desolate and drained. Perhaps good horror is as simple as solid writing. The twist? James Sunderland is called to Silent Hill via a letter from his dead wife, Mary. After fighting his way through countless horrors and witnessing terrible things, James finally finds Mary, only to discover that he had actually repressed his memory of euthanizing her by suffocating her with a pillow. Depressed yet? The game ends with a scroll of Mary’s heart rending letter of forgiveness while we hear James Sunderland drive his car into Lake Toluca to drown. Everything monster and image in the game—Pyramidhead, the murderous and sexy nurses, the implements of torture—are manifestations of James’ subconscious guilt over murdering his wife.–
The Thing – Although featuring never-before-seen levels of gore, John Carpenter paces it well and features the gore between tense character-driven moments. The real tension derived from the conflict between the crew’s need to trust each other vs. their paranoia, and the movie thrives on it. Sadly, the FPS by the same name fell short with an imperfect paranoia mechanic and the lack of significant character development.
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Seven – The “lust” murder typifies the strategy of showing the viewer just enough to send his imagination into dark places best left unspoken. The movie uses the unwilling murderer’s reaction and the photos of the clean murder weapon to stir up unspeakable images of mutilation and torture. They never show the victim or the gore the weapon surely produced, and the omission haunts me to this day.
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Each one of the above movies and games has one element in common: they avoided formula. They did such a good job of avoiding formula that their methods soon became the favored equation of numerous successors.
By its very definition, a formula will always fail to create tension. We will know its beginning, middle, and end, and will even resent it because of its familiarity. Dead Space starts strong, but then settles for stealing and rehashing all of its plot points from established and overtrodden paths: in a gloomy industrial mining vessel (Alien), haunting images plague the crew (Event Horizon, Solaris) before they release morphing carnivorous plague-beasts (The Thing, Doom, Alien, Hellraiser) that corrupt their fellow crewmembers (The Thing, System Shock 2) into more of said beasts. And, SURPRISE, the military is in on the whole operation and conspires with some of your rescue crew to use them as bio-weapons (DOOM, Alien, Aliens, almost every Sci-Fi channel original movie). I would continue, but I’ve bored myself into stupefaction.
To their credit, EA Redwood did in fact try to innovate with their dismemberment showpiece. As one would expect, oodles of body parts necessitates maimed corpses. Oh, the corpses! Decapitated bodies, bodies missing limbs, limbs missing bodies, corpses that aren’t corpses after all, BDSM corpses with bags over their heads…it’s as if the developers charged on a per-corpse basis. By the time I’ve seen the how-manyieth corpse, it’s no longer unknown; it’s a given.
When the History of My Glory is Written…
It’s a simple concept: the game must make us care about the characters or we won’t easily immerse ourselves into their (our) horrific situation. Slasher flicks forego character development (or use stereotypes) because it’s difficult to write and it would take time away from the bloodletting of horny teenagers and the fools that always go looking for them alone (“John? Is that you? Quit screwing around…GRK!” Blood splatters on the wall).
At the risk of sounding like the hate-mongering bitter old man that I am, Dead Space tries and fails oh-so-miserably to create interesting people. I can forgive the lesser crime of using the “mute everyman” archetype for the player character, Isaac. I was actually planning to spear the game for this choice, but when Bioshock, Half Life, and System Shock use the same idea to create masterpieces, I should probably just shut my filthy mouth.
The game’s list of archetypes reads like a chapter from Survival Sci-Fi Horror for Dummies. Hot, mouthy, and well-endowed female-in-distress disguised as a scientist—check. Commanding officer who knows more than he lets on at first but then repents—check. Insane zealot villain that taunts from afar—check. But the greatest flaw lays in Isaac’s relationship with his girlfriend, Nicole, or, more specifically, the utter absence of Isaac’s relationship with his girlfriend. I never understood the relationship beyond a vague “save pretty gurl” instinct and the game suffers for it. How long were they together? Was their relationship secure or troubled? How did they meet? Have they discussed marriage? Why aren’t they on the same ship? Did she laugh at his jokes? Did they see Event Horizon? To be fair, the game wasn’t really built on the relationship, but it could have been, and it would have made every moment between the opening scene and the final terrible revelation that much more tense. Instead, we must endure cast members with the personality of paramecia and a bad impersonation of a bad movie.
If System Shock 2 were a girl, I would marry it; knowing from the beginning of our short-lived betrothal that she would take me to the pinnacle of matrimonial ecstasy even as she plotted to murder me and eat my children. I love it that much, and most of this gushing sentiment stems from the writer’s treatment of the game’s arch-villian, the Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network… SHODAN.
SHODAN is a creature of dichotomy: maternal and murderous; sexy and vile; honest and duplicitous; arrogant and vulnerable. She is mother to the Many (and in a way, to the player) and yet kills her young and eventually tries to kill me. Her alluring voice seduces me into wanting to please her even as she repeatedly calls me an “insect” and threatens me with a painful death. She confesses to needing me even as she positions herself to betray me, much as a chess supercomputer coldly and mercilessly grinds a human chess player into oblivion. It didn’t even matter that I knew she would screw me over; she excelled at it and I indeed felt nearly powerless to resist her. Ultimately, however, her reliance on me proved her undoing, and as I committed this matricide, I felt, somehow, that I had betrayed her.
And bless Looking Glass Studios, they didn’t stop with their villain. They developed characters that I never met through the now status-quo method of conveniently-placed diaries. Although somewhat contrived, it worked. Through nothing more than email logs, they managed to develop a relationship between two crew members that had me praying for them to escape SHODAN and her terrible offspring. They accomplished more with a dozen emails in a tertiary storyline than Dead Space did in ten hours of gameplay.
Even as SHODAN was the arch-villian, the Many seemed to be more dangerous, if only because they were so alien and so convinced of their own benevolence:
“Your time is running out. This place is a womb, where we grow our future. Your weapons fail, your ammunition runs low, and you’ve yet to see our most beautiful creation. All you have is your hatred, and your… individuality. Now don’t you wish you joined us? Would you then feel so alone?”
Even the ship’s computer, XERXES, elevates the sense of dread as he progressively goes insane from the Many’s corruption. Hearing “Glory to the flesh. Glory to the mass,” and “Why do you persist in your loneliness?” in that hollow, detached voice always made me cower in the nearest dark corner, only to be found by another one of my zombie ex-crewmembers moaning, “They see you…run!” or “Euuurrghkiillllmeeee!” Ick. It still makes me shiver.
Another one of Ken Levine’s creations, Bioshock borrowed heavily from SS2’s misplaced logs and plot elements. The game gets away following an established formula because of its superb story, atmosphere, and character development; Dead Space also uses logs of a sort but has few if any of the same strengths. To be sure, Bioshock was a creepy and unsettling game, but would have been more so if every Little Sister didn’t look virtually identical, use the same pet name “Mr. Bubbles,” and spoke from a catalog of about six lines. Again, familiarity breeds comfort at best; at worst, it creates contempt. In either case, it bleeds tension away from the experience.
…Your Species Shall Only Be a Footnote to My Magnificence
I don’t know why I feel the compulsion to keep saying this: I did not hate Dead Space. It showed such promise and the “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” trailer tickled my expectations. I loved the first hour of game play, but then the terrible sameness of it all took over. I enjoyed playing the first-person medley of all my favorite science-fiction horror movies to some extent, but I simply cannot describe the experience as horrific, terrifying, or even “kind of creepy.”
I have taken the trouble to categorize good horror, but in the end, it arguably boils down to well-honed writing. I know little about computer game design, but I’m jaded enough to think that eye-catching graphics and proven gameplay development often take precedence. Perhaps it is more difficult to find a solid writer than a great programmer or level designer. Maybe, like Gears of War, the gameplay is frequently developed first and someone merely slaps some semblance of a story over it.
If I seem harsh on Dead Space and its ilk, it’s because I am a petty man with few friends and a stony heart. I also happen to love horror gaming and insist on playing them alone in a darkened house to help them achieve their desired effect. The truly great ones make me forget I’m playing a game in front of a monitor, mouse, and keyboard and draw me into their world.
And if anyone from EA is reading this, go ahead and make your Dead Space sequels and (someone shoot me) movie, but keep your filthy, tainted paws away from System Shock 3, you soulless corporate bastards.
Email the author of this article at Jasondobry@tap-repeatedly.com.
Everyone please welcome Jason to our staff. Professionally a writer and teacher; personally a dear friend of mine, he has patiently endured my relentless bullying to produce this article and (hopefully) many more upcoming.
—Steerpike
Great piece, Jay! I hope we hear a lot more from you soon.
You Know, me being the least literate guy in our group is really not that bad.
you are petty, but any review that gets the Thing into it is awesome, you left out Big Trouble in Little China.
haul ass Wang!
I enjoyed that. I do love scary games and agree that System Shock 2 tops them all. I liked Bioshock but never felt the fear like I did in SS2. I’ve played most of the others you mention, except for Dead Space. I really need to get my copy of Fatal Frame out and play it.
Yeah, okay… Dead Space isn’t scary to you. But it seems you were a bit ignorant of its pacing of scares (very well done) and weren’t interested in that kind of game in the first place, so I don’t know why you played through it. Let’s not forget this was developed by EA Redwood – their watered-down presentation is already apparent in their past games (LOTR: The Third Age, The Simpsons Game, The Godfather) and I doubt their publishers had meetings trouncing on (what you think are) their core fundamentals of scariness. It’s pretty obvious this game did not get wrangled by the corporate part of EA much; no developer dissatisfaction, a positive release date move, adjoining animated movie, talks of a sequel. You really think EA corporate had a bunch of ideas to insert to make this game a winning formula??? Because despite your harping, it was moderately successful.
EA corporate has a long and storied history of doing exactly that, Skye. This is the company that insisted on putting monkeys in System Shock 2.
Now as it happens, Redwood had almost total creative freedom with Dead Space, but to my mind it’s an example of a developer stumbling… they just did it without the help of a publisher. Things jumping out from air ducts is only scary the first few times. I think the point being made here is that dread – not shock – is the most effective tool of horrorcrafting, and that dread is best evoked through those three core fundamentals: fear of the unknown, unsettling imagery, and character development.
In Dead Space, fear of the unknown is limited because you KNOW that a monster’s going to jump out of the air duct. Dead Space depends almost entirely on gore for unsettling imagery, and masters of horror all agree that gore is the lowest common denominator when it comes to unsettling people. As for character development, you had a mute lead with no developed connection to his girlfriend, plus a bunch of stereotypical sci-fi horror supporting roles.
Understand that publishers are not interested in making “good” games. Units moved (and Dead Space, though it sold acceptably, did not come close to meeting EA’s expectations) are what matters to publishers. No offense to them; selling units is how you stay in business. But in the case of Dead Space, it was survival horror that we’d seen a million times before, with nothing innovative to be had. To EA’s credit, the company has made great strides in the past year or so to move away from blind franchisation and opposition to new IP. That it is supporting a Dead Space sequel is a sign that EA believes in the power of the franchise, and presumably Redwood, or whoever does the sequel, will improve based on lessons learned from this one.
I didn’t find Dead Space bad, I just didn’t think it was anything special. It made me jump a few times but rarely scared me. Shalebridge Cradle – that scared me. Fatal Frame I could only play for a few minutes I was so freaked out. System Shock 2 scared the bejeezus out of me, monkeys or no. Dead Space? Eh. It was scary the first 7 or 8 times a monster jumped out of the air duct, but after that it became a little routine.
Awesome article, great writing. Couldn’t agree more with you points. With the release of Resident Evil 5 the survival horror genre is dead.
I still remember my encounter with SS2. I got stuck first time through and actually chickened out and quit playing. A couple of years later I manned up and got through it but only by hiding in dark corners for minutes on end and whispering to myself “It’s only a game. It’s only a game.” I don’t think I’ve ever been so wrung out from a horror experience, movie or game.
Great article Jason and welcome to FFC. I too hope to see more good stuff like this.
Fabu article, Jason! I’m so glad there’s someone out there who appreciates the “old school” method of horror as opposed to the abomination that passes for horror today. My imagination is much better at conjuring up creepy crawlies than the movies or games that show me everything.
I couldn’t play Fatal Frame at night – too many creaking floorboards in my house; SS2 spanked me so hard I never got much further than seeing the monkeys with brains before I ran whimpering from the game; I never finished Thief 3 because Shalebridge Cradle almost made me wet my pants in fear and I still have nightmares about that damned head sprouting legs and skittering away in The Thing.
I would appear I’m in good company 😀
Thank you for the compliments and for the kind welcome. I will continue to
write for the site and I anticipate Matt to resume bullying me for my next
work sometime next week. I don’t resent him for it, I know it’s out of
love.
Skye–I do not think a meeting to decide formula every actually occurred.
The meeting in my article is meant for humor and to make a point–that
someone dropped the ball and chose deadly weaponry over desperate use of
tools as makeshift weapons.
Redwood did, in fact, follow a formula, though I doubt they ever had a
meeting to define it. They never hid their inspiration from Event Horizon
or The Thing and they succeeded at making a game that recreates those
experiences.
My point is that it’s nigh impossible to recreate a horrific experience in a
computer game–once we’ve experienced it, it cannot terrify us again.
I concede that the game avoided the pitfall of filling every room with
monsters and I applaud the choice. This solid pacing was completely negated
by the all-too-prevalent monster closets and laughably ridiculous levels of
gore. Even so, I enjoyed the game and its fast food version of horror.
Great article! I love that you put the Innsmouth chase on your list – Call of Cthulhu had some significant flaws, but that sequence was the most terrifying moment I’ve experienced in gaming, by far. Nothing else, including Shalebridge Cradle, has left me physically shaking and drenched in sweat by the time it’s over.
Fair enough. I don’t buy you and Steerpike’s explanation for a second, and think EA Redwood made very close to the game they wanted without heavy interdiction on behalf of corporate. So, you didn’t like it all of its elements. So? But you fault it for being what it is. I shudder to think how many people have faulted RE5 for what it is now – a rather far cry from its puzzle-hunting, zombie-dodging roots. (Ironically, I thought RE4 was the worst RE game out there, and this sequel takes the franchise clear into action game territory, complete with bulging biceps, MG/gatling turrets, and porcelain females). Monsters jumping out of airducts can absolutely be scary beyond the first few times.. If it’s presented with the right pacing, and if it doesn’t have disinterested players (hint hint) at the helm.
And what’s to say Dead Space didn’t have dread? I was sweating around those corridors – it was so powerful at times that, *even though I knew I’d probably win,* the mere thought was enough to make me not want to face the next encounter. This entire article seems very akin to “I’m not afraid of scary movies, here’s why…” and the like. I AM afraid! lol
I am an Ancient One. My computer is the tool of an Ancient One. I am a parasitic consumer, so have zero influence on the industry. However, if I actually bought a game that would run on this antique system, it would be a System Shock derivative. Absolutely, Jason, a perfect marriage of an unknown yet known evil. Pure Freudian pleasure. I suppose the morbid attractiveness of replay is counterproductive to the bottom line. An innovative story line with more dread and less dead is my cup of horror tea. Your sense of humor makes you writing stand out. Even though my appetite for violence is not in step with you and your colleagues’ generation, I do enjoy the banter. Langsley
I am SO afraid of some scary movies, the most recent of which was the claustrophobic and terrifying The Descent (2005). I should have mentioned in in the article, now that I think about it. The first 30 minutes of the movie was nothing but the CHARACTERS (as opposed to blood bags) relating to each other. Boring? Sure, if you want only a bodycount. Once the creatures finally arrived, the movie is that much more horrifying when we realize that these characters written as believable females are deadly, primal, and murderous when put into a Fight or Die scenario with cannibalistic cave dwellers. I also mention some classics like The Thing and Seven in my article.
Skye, I guess our definitions of “scary” are just different, and that’s perfectly fine. I am slightly confused by your dislike of RE4 when you passionately defend Dead Space even though it blatantly rips of RE4’s core gameplay (over the shoulder laser sight). I expect you will again cite DS’s pacing as an improvement over that of RE4, and I must agree with you in this specific case. DS had better pacing that RE4 (which I also enjoyed but I was rarely scared).
Langsley–
I agree with you. Gore is a cheap and easy gimmick and is, as Sakey states, the lowest common denominator of grindhouse horror. How many more Saw movies must we endure? How many more Hostels and Hostel rip-offs? These movies are not scary–they’re just gross at first and then taper off into Yawnville (though I admit Hostel made a fair shot at some character development).
I feel DS had much better design and aesthetics compared to RE4. Things like.. The holographic inventory (a great streamlining tool), the ship’s bridge, zero-g sections, and in rare cases, better puzzles than RE4. Leon was wandering through a bland, muted palette of browns; Isaac through an orange-rust combination of hues. I guess those corridor bends are more suspenseful?
Thank you, Jason, for a very fine and thoughtful article. I couldn’t agree more, not only with your premise, but also with your selection of games and films. Was it Hitchcock who said something like it’s the anticipation of what’s to come more that the act itself that makes a film frightening. The Psycho shower scene comes to mind.
Dave
You are wise to quote the master, Hitchcock, who gave us only glimpses of a knife and blood in a drain in the infamous Psycho scene. I just watched it fairly recently, and it still takes my breath away. My imagination always dates favorably.
I was channel surfing last night and had the luck and pleasure to find Kubrick’s version of The Shining. I’m convinced the child pretty much makes the movie, particularly the scene in which Kubrick shows repeated quick cuts to the child’s horrified reaction to violent images. I don’t even remember the images or if they exist, but I DEFINITELY remember his reaction and that kid deserved an award. What is he, like 40 now? It’s not too late.
Great article, and I know this is 4FC, but maybe could have been trimmed just a little?! 😉
Looking forward to more of your writing Jason.
I think the problem is, you’ve played too much stuff. If you were starting out now, Dead Space would be scary, but Silent Hill would be shit.
And Bioshock was the LEAST tension-filled FPS I may have ever played. You feel like Superman halfway through.
Yes, perhaps I am too old and jaded to be impressed by the efforts of “those kids today” and their gore and fancy special effects. Back in my day, if they wanted to scare us, they had only sock puppets and some rocks to throw at us, so we had to use our imagination…
I feel old. And experienced. But old just the same…
Very honest article.
A normally not-so-great game that pulls off the feeling of fear very effectively is Clock Tower for PlayStation 1. You play as a normal human being menaced by this deranged-looking guy with a large pair of garden sheers, and you can really only hide or run away. You can pick up brooms, pipes, and various other tools to fend him off, but nothing to ever really kill him with. Overall its not a very great game, mostly thanks to a retarded plot and terrible dialogue, but they certainly succeeded in the fear aspect. As you’ve mentioned in the article, if the player were equipped with a backpack full of weapons or exoskeleton armor we’d just routinely blow him away, but because we are limited to a few blunt objects the feeling of danger is much more real.
Another way to induce fear in games (or literature and film) which I feel is too often overlooked is to make most of the world seem very normal. Make people and places very familiar and believable. That way, when you introduce something abnormal, it seems all the more wrong and terrifying. If you manage to create a believable, realistic world, then something as simple as a door that is impossibly bent can be far more horrifying because of what it suggests, than blowing away waves of aliens with lasers and shit.
What Ceremony describes resonates with me in the sense that some of the most frightening imagery I recall from gaming deals with fairly “normal” visuals that are somehow presented in such a way that you interpret them as fearful. The innocuous objects like chairs and notes in Shalebridge Cradle, much of the design in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, the half-mannequins in Bioshock’s notorious Spider Splicers-covered-in-flour section of Fort Frolic.
I never played Clock Tower, but I remember many gamers had reactions similar to yours, Ceremony, remarking that it had an uncanny ability to make very normal things seem quite frightening.
A little late to the party, but still not too late to bring two thumbs up for Jason’s debut (although, with a surname that means ‘good’, you can hardly expect anything else, eh?)
Clock Tower is a fascinating game because it defines survival horror so well. Unlike Dead Spaces and BioShocks of today, it doesn’t have specular lighting and volumetric shadows and whatnot. It’s a simple little 2D SNES adventure (that I have been playing recently via my PSP) and what it does have is excellent writing, beautiful pacing and a sense of dread throughout that you can LICK. And it has all the things you need to be scary: tension, things unseen (but heard or just imagined) and when it explodes with blood, this is a cathartic punchline to you making a mistake, rather than an on-cue scripted event. Check out this scene from the game that shows the player THINKING they made it to safety, when…: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xoCSdJ5paM
Yes, and “Jason” means “healer.” I’m pretty sure this was meant to be ironic.
Watched the scene. I love the game’s use of sound–that “tick tick” sound whenever the killer closes his shears/scissors. It even fades away as we run away. A great example of an old game using solid design to be memorable
Jason, I am with you on Silent Hill 2, the most maturely scary game, if there is such a thing. SH2 is definitely written by an adult, for adults. It’s a bummer when a game like Dead Space has so much potential, but is so poorly written; I think the writers just cut and pasted from the dead wife bit from Event Horizon! I also love Fatal Frame 2 and it’s bummer ending, also got me choked up a bit. I think first person games have a tendency to have zero antagonist personality so you “bond” with them, while third person games develop the main character while you watch them go through their story. The only times this works for a FPS is when the main story-line is very intriguing, like Thief: Deadly Shadows. Looking forward to reading more from you, Jay.
Great article, Dobes! Terrific points. I especially like your contention that one of the things makes a horror experience effective is that it does something nothing else had done–which then becomes the formula for lesser works that fail to scare.
I will not see The Descent. My recurring nightmare for like, 15 years, is crawling down a steadily narrowing tunnel until I am trapped.
And god, the joy of SS2. Matt had told me to play it, told me it was scary, and I figured, yeah, whatever. I started playing late at night, alone, and as it happened, shirtless. Ten minutes in, at the exact moment my first crew member lurched forward brandishing a pipe and begging my forgiveness, the air conditioning kicked on, loud cold air pouring down my back.
I’ll admit it. I screamed.
My favourite scare in Dead Space was actually upon returning to medical to find that anatomical model placed on a stack of boxes. The reminder that there was something intelligent in what I assumed was a sea of madness was deeply unsettling.
I also liked the chase with the regenerating creature. The thought of it breaking through the walls at any moment was pretty terrifying.
But otherwise, I agree. The game had a lot going for it, but there’s a lot to be said for “less is more,” especially in horror.
You’re really missing out on The Descent, Marquez. I consider it to be one of the most terrifying movies to emerge from the 2000s, though I shouldn’t say so because labeling movies as the “best” or “most” of anything tends to over-inflate expectations.
Cola–Dead Space had scary moments, but it simply lacked the pervasive sense of dread that I crave in my horror gaming. I do recall my first encounter with the Tentacle, or more accurately, the Tentacle’s hole in the wall. The Tentacle didn’t even come out of the tunnel in my first encounter with the thing, but it looked evil enough for me to dread passing by it. Sure enough, I was unhappy to see it again when I knew something would try to eat me. Thank goodness I had my welder with unlimited range and two modes of fire handy.
Peter–it’s good to hear from you. Drop me a line a coriandjay@comcast.net so we can catch up in a more appropriate forum.
[…] storytellers and designers in the games universe. Surely you’ve heard of his games. Bioshock. System Shock 2. Freedom Force. Stuff like […]
Hmm. I’m late, by about a year.
Brilliant, brilliant article Mr Dobry. I can’t say I’ve played all of the horror classics over the years, the Silent Hill games being the most notable omissions, but I can honestly say that generally speaking horror films simply don’t scare me in the same way anymore mainly because they are passively consumed. Okay so maybe that’s an exaggeration, there have been a handful of horrors that I’ve seen over the last decade which have unsettled me but that fear/dread doesn’t compare favourably to the sort elicited by a great horror game. There’s something hopelessly crushing about being in a horrible situation that requires YOU put one foot in front of the other, knowing full well that it’s going to get worse before it gets any better, if at all.
I share your sentiments throughout this article and “I know little about computer game design” does a massive disservice to your obviously astute observations. Good call on a lot of them. I’m a big horror fan and it pains me to see how developers generally just don’t Get It. Have you visited the ‘In the Games of Madness‘ blog? It’s by the Frictional Games folk who created the Penumbra games and the upcoming Amnesia. You should check it out, there are loads of great insights into the difficulties behind crafting good interactive horror. Just watch out, it can be quite addictive reading through the various posts.
Anyway, that feature widget at the top is definitely doing the trick 😉 This article would have escaped me otherwise, which would have been a travesty.
Thank you, Gregg, for your praise. The last movie to successfully horrify me was The Descent, and of course they had no choice but to bludgeon us with a sequel (haven’t seen it, I’m awaiting the DVD release with low expectations).
I like the Madness blog, especially since I suffer from a weakness to Lovecraftian horror. I started Penumbra but did not finish it, but don’t take my inability to finish the game as meaning I did not like it. The story was disturbing and terrifying–the man with the spider diet gave me jitters–I think some other game must have distracted me.
Thank you for reading!
Jason
I enjoyed The Descent but I’ve got to say the characters really annoyed me, at least from what I remember. Nevertheless it delivered some great moments. What I really liked was some of the early ‘scares’ where if you looked closely you could see things that the characters couldn’t. That sort of horror is really subtle and effective to those looking for it.
The last great horror film I saw that stayed with me after watching it, and to some extent kept me awake at night, was Paranormal Activity. I know a lot of people didn’t enjoy it but it used a lot of horror devices very effectively and threw a few new ones in there at the same time. Also one of the characters’ actions reflected the sort of things I’d probably do so it only made the experience seem more realistic and tangible. I think before that was the ending to [rec] which totally caught me off guard after a decidedly run of the mill zombie outbreak flick. I highly recommend A Tale of Two Sisters if you haven’t seen that as well. Pretty damn horrible.
Penumbra: Overture has some terrifying moments later on that, much like the ones mentioned above, stay with you. It is very much a case of what one commenter said above with Hitchcock “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” Overture possesses such a sense of impending terror that it renders you immovable in the greatest way a horror game can. System Shock 2 was the last to do that to me.
[…] Been a while since someone’s done something like this: Tap Repeatedly do a big ol’ article on Fear. […]
I would dispute that they’ll never make a scarier game than System Shock 2. I believe they already have. It’s called Korsakovia. I think you might like it.
I really hated Korsakovia because of the lack of direction and above all the awful platforming sections. I wasn’t a fan of the crowbar being able to kill the smog-creatures either: it neutered them, making them far less scary. It got to the point where I simply stopped playing it as a result which was disappointing because what I’d witnessed of the story was intriguing.
Have you played the Penumbra games Andrew? I’ve only played the first episode, Overture, but I’d put it up there with System Shock 2 as one of the most terrifying games I’ve ever played.
Korsakovia was a very scary game – at least, I thought so, but I’m a coward – but I recall Dobry lecturing me at length about why he didn’t like it. Something about moving crates around, if I recall.
It’s more of an experimental project than a true game; the designer was experimenting with how players react to environments when anthropomorphic cues are removed. That and smog monsters, and eyeball eating.
Korsakovia succeeded at unnerving me and making me feel uneasy–it certainly used an unsettling atmosphere and fear of the unknown to great effect as in the article. I lost interest, however, when I spent nearly an hour struggling through some absurd immersion-killing crate stacking/jumping puzzle.
I don’t recall any character development, though it’s unfair to criticize a game when it hardly claims to be more than anything other than an experiment.
I also experienced some nausea from the game–some people laud Korsakovia’s well-documented physiological effects and I suppose it made it a success from an experimental stand point. I prefer emotional discomfort its physical counterpart, at least from my games. Nausea isn’t fun and kills the immersion. Still, I tip my hat to a bold experiment, even if I didn’t care for the gameplay.
To those who haven’t heard of it, do yourself a favor and check out the Penumbra series. A small indie game that puts nearly everything by major studios to shame. I still shudder at the terrible mixture of sadness and horror the ending provoked. There are only a handful of enemies, none of them anywhere near as grotesque as one of Dead Space’s creatures. However, combat is so ineffective that you are absolutely terrified when one finds you. Hiding in the shadows is made even worse by the fact that your character freaks out upon seeing a monster approaching, so you look away instead. I would never have thought it possible to be so afraid while looking at a wall texture.
For those of you that have played it already, Overture (the 2nd one) is even better. Also, there’s a preorder discount for their next game, Amnesia: Dark Descent. From the looks of the development blog, it’s going to be amazing.
Excellent article!
I do agree with Dead Space. I loved it and really enjoyed my time with it, but it was not scary.
One game you really must play is Clive Barker’s Undying (PC). Even when it ventures outside into the sunshine it still manages to have an oppressive and threatening atmosphere, and the ‘Scrye’ power that lets you see things as they really are is a great tool for terror. Clive Barker didn’t help make the game, but he did advise them on how to do horror well – and it shows.
Lovecraftian? Eternal Darkness (GameCube) then. Heavily inspired by Lovecraft, terrifying, and utterly brilliant.
Another Thief level I’d like to sound out is Thief II’s Trail of Blood. A village full of the ghosts of their cruelly slaughtered inhabitants, strange creatures, and finally ending up in an oppressive and claustrophobic wood where – did that tree just move? Nah, must be my imagination…
As for The Descent, for god’s sake don’t watch either a) the sequel or b) the butchered American version with its tacked-on studio-friendly happy ending.
Special thanks for telling me what SHODAN stood for, I’d always wondered that!
This is much of the reason why the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of games are possibly the most disturbing and frightening I’ve ever played. Since S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is open world, virtually none of the encounters you face are scripted; the designers didn’t place the monsters at a specific spawn point and tell them to pop out and go “BOO!” the second you turned the appropriate corner, so much as they placed them in general areas and let them wander about in search of food (you in most cases). Since there’s no way of knowing if you’ll run into an enemy at any given location, and just about every enemy in the game can kill you in half a second, it forces you to play through the entire game as if you’re about to die.
There is a tremendous difference between strolling down a hallway and playing a guessing game of whether or not a monster will spawn, and creeping down the same hallway an inch at a time because God help you if something is around that corner and it hears your footsteps….
Also, since it’s actually possible to sneak past some of the horrible things you come across, it adds significantly to the tension in that if you keep your flashlight on, they’re sure to spot you from a mile away, but if you turn it off, you’re wandering utterly blind through an abandoned underground Soviet weapons bunker with nothing more than the sound of wheezing and shuffling feet to tell you how close you are to disembowelment.
That’s why I believe that every copy of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. should come packaged with an adult diaper, though clearly this would create significant issues with digital distribution platforms.
Agreed, Ghaz, the first STALKER left me feeling moments of terror that no other game, not even SS2, could reach. SS2 was a more overall-scary-from-beginning-to-end game, but that moment down in the Agroprom tunnels, when you first encounter a Bloodsucker… *shiver*
I finished Undying quite some time ago on PC, I believe. I remember enjoying it and I don’t recall feeling all that afraid. It’s been a while, though. I’m not saying it’s a bad game–it just didn’t scare/disturb/horrify me much.
That first bloodsucker encounter was terrifying. I remember hearing the thing and creeping about in the cold dark, trying to catch a glimpse of it before it saw me. It did, and it ate my face while I yelped in my chair. As Matt has discussed at great length, STALKER aced the creepy environment and did reasonably well at cultivating a fear of the unknown. The confusing plot kept the game from approaching SS2’s horror-level, but GSC made the most depressing gaming world in my experience and the game will remain in my top 20 list for quite some time because of it.
Maybe I should go back and revisit Penumbra since it’s getting mad respect in this thread.
I must add Jason, that Alex is indeed a real person and not me in disguise doling out some more Penumbra love.
@Alex:
Too true!
@The Tingler: The last bit in Trail of Blood was immense. The first time I played it I actually didn’t notice a thing apart from all those horrible creaking noises and went on to finish the level. Shortly afterwards I loaded the save up to have a poke about in those woods and when one of the tree beasts bolted at me I squealed like a little girl.
@Ghaz: I totally agree, what I also liked was the eerie desolation and quietness in certain places. That was when your mind started playing games with you. Inside the Brain Scorcher ruined me and there were only a few enemies lurking in that facility.
[…] What Not to Fear […]
Congratulations for your article, Mr. Dobry. It is a nice piece of game criticism and I have read it more than once. By the way, I loved Dead Space and I was scared all the way through. But the game suffers from excessive linearity (and so lack of exploration) and the Nicole affair is totally underdeveloped. Maybe next year we will see some improvements in plot and characterization in Dead Space 2. I have also just played “The Cradle” level in Thief Deadly Shadows and it really is a classic. I am sure it is studied in game design classes nowadays. For those interested, PC Gamer published a 10-page article on the Cradle level, with an interview with the lead designer. Finally, have you ever played The Suffering (PC)? It is an old game but some people think it is very scary. I would like to read your opinion about it.
Thank you for your praise, Fabricio! Sadly, I don’t have high hopes for Dead Space 2…maybe I’m too jaded, but I expect more gore, more dismemberment, and more monster closets. It will be fun, to be sure, but I’m currently enjoying more dread-filled moments in my current play-through of Silent Hill Homecoming than Dead Space.
Thank you for the fascinating link to The Cradle article–Thomas’s description of his research was nearly as haunting as the level. The story of the man committed as a toddler who, when asked his name, drew a picture of the hospital will probably give me a nightmare or two.
I did, in fact, play The Suffering a few years ago and I finished the game. The haunted prison setting certainly made for some horrific moments, but I recall many specifics. I also played the Ties that Bind sequel but I don’t recall completing the game.
We read your piece.
We are not happy.
Heck they ALREADY made a more terrifying game than SS2. It was called Realms of the Haunting.
Jason, great article! I just read it for the first time, and pretty much agree point for point.
Interestingly, I wrote an article a few weeks ago for Comment magazine on one of the main strengths of video games: creating and sustaining atmosphere. It’s not a long article, but the two games I use as examples are STALKER and System Shock 2 (my favorite of all time, of course).
Glad to see there are like-minded people out there.
Oh, also, even though I consider them more action games than horror, I do really like the Left 4 Dead series for the atmosphere and world-building. They did a good job with many of the campaigns, and I seem to enjoy the ones that Joe Gamer doesn’t like (“Swamp Fever” or “Hard Rain,” for instance) because of that atmosphere.
[…] example is the much acclaimed Dead Space: this one is fresh in my mind, I just finished it. For the first time, yes. I started playing it on […]
[…] First, I’d just really like to talk about the game that was Dead Space. Second, it has been dissected thoroughly here at Tap-Repeatedly and I think there are many good reasons for that, several of which I intend […]