[Glam Grimfire]

Hey f o r u m


It's time for another Grim Adventures thread. This is not glam at all. 100% grim. Lately I've been on a horror kick. Maybe this is because THE EVIL WITHIN is set to come out soon, but I've been revising the genre's roots in my head. Oops, the genre I've been revisiting is Survival Horror

I thought about some things, and I even want to write about some of them!
What stuck out to me most is the concept of "what" the player is afraid of.

It can sometimes be pretty meta. In the original Resident Evil, I decided I was most afraid of the unknown: not knowing what was around the next corner. But deep within that, I was also afraid of being set back in progress, even if it meant knowing what was coming up.

So my question for you guys is: What scares you in horror games, and is it different from game to game? (it should be!)
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##SKELETON PARTY (new article as of 04/26/14)Grim

[Talbain]

Recently, I played FEAR 2 for a while, and though the game is a pretty boring FPS, the recurring girl in the background of everything really got my attention, and at least once, scared the shit out of me. Ultimately it happened at a moment when I was losing interest in the game, so that spurred me to play it for a bit longer, and I eventually quit because the moment seemed to just be a one-off, which was really disappointing. I think it was the fact that the character was there and entirely harmless that made react that way. You get to a point where everything that looks like it could harm you is something you should shoot, so instinctively shot at the girl when she suddenly appeared behind me, but she never did anything to elicit that reaction. She wasn't shooting at me, wasn't attacking me... she was just there, and it wasn't what I was expecting. Definitely a stranger moment for me, simply because the character does appear threatening, but thus far I've never really got the impression that she's actually dangerous (except in the sense of the narrative making her out to be dangerous).

Silent Hill 1 & 2's psychological horror remain the only games I really consider good horror games. Their use of impossible spaces, dream worlds, and general existential characterization of the world and the characters calls into question pretty much anything and everything you do and it creates a really troubling sense of performance anxiety. They are outside the realm of being more traditional horror games, but don't really swing into the region of the FEAR series where the character feels very empowered and thus to actually affect the audience you have to completely strip that power away. Meanwhile when referring to traditional horror games I typically mean those where you are much weaker than your opponents/pursuers/whatever. Silent Hill 1 & 2 fall somewhere in the middle of those where you have a moderate, awkward amount of power that's called into question but never outright stripped away. It feels more like you're being blamed for decisions you make, good or bad (or in some cases, indecisiveness).
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[Levi]

If we're speaking in terms of Survival Horror specifically, the big thing for me is the odd, lifeless, laminated quality of the cg backdrops and the way it jars against the quivery, unstable texturing on the "live" polygons. The ornate deadness of pickled worlds. It's interesting to me that the Gamecube renovations of Resident Evil and Zero don't dispel this impression so much as foreground it -- the lovingly rendered background animations loop with GIF regularity and project the impression that perhaps you've become trapped in a creaky, old film.




Silent Hill and 2 produce a similar feeling through it's sort of strange, disconnected camera-work. Occasionally (more often in the first) it falls back on dutch angles and other ostentation, but more often it's simply a video-game camera that's subtly wrong. Something to do with the speed of it's tracking, or the predominance of high angles that don't grant a normal three-quarter overview?

[boojiboy7]

In SH 1 and 2, part of it might be that the sizing of the environment actually is not to scale with the player character. Everything is there, but the sizes are very slightly off in some weird ways, and as I recall, the size difference is different for each thing. it's not a consistent scalar difference.

For exmaple, look at the slanted doors to pet world that the character in this screenshot could never fit through.

[Talbain]

I think another thing particularly interesting and haunting about SH 1&2 is how the fog seems to be alive (as well as other elements in the town), indicating that in some way the world itself is reacting to you, like you've been swallowed up a sadistic dream. That much is obvious I think but the fog really accentuates change because of its ubiquity. It seems more effective than a character or dialogue telling the player things have changed and the player simply being aware of change, no telling necessary. And that despite this, the character is still spurred on by characters, not worry about the world.
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[jodeaux]

I was recently playing Fragile Dreams and found myself really appreciating the interior areas of the game. Everything you pass through in that game is haunting, and it all feels so lived in and mysterious. With that being said, it wasn't necessarily the atmosphere that scared me, or the creepy Lynch-anime vibe, but rather my item management. I'm absolutely terrified of mishandling my items and getting to a point in a game where I'm no longer able to continue. There's a strange finality to that scenario that's a bigger failure than death in a game. Obviously, the older you get, you understand if you fuck up your "item management" in life you'll face severe consequences as well. Regret can last a life time, and you'll de a thousand deaths before they ever put you in the ground.

[Raziel]

I'd like to pitch in with a comment on Hellnight, an old survival horror game for PSX. While we're all familiar with live polygon heaps traversing the pre-rendered backgrounds, this particular game actually had it reverse: the main environments itself are "live" 3D while the characters are portrayed as pre-rendered stills. This means that while you're being hunted by the monstrosity or whenever in the 3D dungeon, you can freely call your partner or intercept other characters, and the game environment freezes for that moment as you interact or chat with the character. The interesting effect of this is that despite the underground area being inhabited by plenty humans, albeit of the suspicious and seedy kind, they offer little comfort since they're presence is barely felt. They don't interact with the monster who so relentlessly pursues you, so the atmosphere retains its sense of loneliness. I'd contrast that with Resident Evil remake that I recently passed, or Silent Hill 2, where having a friendly character tagging along does an excellent job of intermitting the more oppressive parts of the game with some relief.

Here's a screenshot from the game for reference.



Not to mention a fascinating game in its own right. Years before the likes of Amnesia and Slender, Hellnight nailed the first person run-away horror, even if the budget couldn't have probably been larger than a month worth of ramen.

[jodeaux]

That's interesting, having other characters who you'd rather not have around in the environment if i'm understanding this correctly. That's pretty unique given the developers are Japanese and their games typically highlight loneliness through characterization. Using the environments to convey that sounds like an idea that hasn't been explored to its potential quite like you're describing. I'll have to check this game out some time.

[DaleNixon]

It might be cliché, but I'm really afraid of having a very useful item or mechanic taken away from me after coming to rely on it.

Silent Hill 4 did it when the room started to become the place you dreaded going to the most towards the end.

ZombiU did it by crippling the scanner pad in certain areas after teaching you to rely so much on it. I haven't felt horror in a game recently as strongly as I feel when navigating a new area in ZombiU with my scanner pad rendered useless.

[Tuxedo]

There's still nothing more terrifying than the original Clock Tower for me. It has the usual scary elements:
- Helpless protagonist (15 or so year old girl named Jennifer, no weapon)
- One-hit-kill enemy running around everywhere and appearing at random. Seemingly no safe areas
- Super-scary music
- Long stretch of gameplay with nothing happening
- Sluggish controls (Point & Click with a controller or keyboard. And Jennifer is always extremely slow, way slower than she should be)

There are a few other neat unconventional elements though.
The spritework is SMTish. Good guys look thin, limp, weak, slightly lifeless. Bad guys look unpredicable, menacing. I was afraid of entering new rooms and seeing new animations or new sprites, and just sat there doing nothing at times.

At the lower left of the screen there's Jennifer's portrait, constantly looking worried. When there's a level 1 scare going on she's slightly taken aback and her hair looks... aliased, which creates a weird, unnerving disconnect from her usually realistic portrait.
When there's a level 2 scare going the game zooms on her terrified unblinking eye for a while, and I swear this is always as bad as whatever terrible things happening on screen.