Rantings: Genre Ranting #1

This blog starts a new mini-theme within the whole ranting theme. In this section, I'll be discussing a specific genre of video game and what I like and dislike about it. I'll start with a genre that I like, but that isn't one of my favorites, to give me a more balanced look at how this theme will work.

This time, the topic will be survival horror games, and to a lesser degree horror games in general. Now, I may not know everything about this genre, but I have played many of the most important games of the genre. I have played all four of the regular Resident Evil games, though not the semi-side story Code Veronica, the prequel Resident Evil 0, and the other assorted spin-offs. I much prefer the Silent Hill games, including all four regular games of THAT series. But my collection ends with Eternal Darkness; I never played Alone in the Dark, Clock Tower, Siren, that recent zombie game I forgot the name of, and so on. No, take that back. I also played half of the first Fatal Frame game.

Still, I understand how the genre works. It's a tricky series to get right. The problem with the survival horror is that the series serves two masters. Horror requires that the player be scared of the situation, which means a sense of danger and loss. Often, this means that the character is in much worse circumstances than the normal hero. Enemies are numerous and more powerful than the hero, resources to fight them are limited, save points and healing are usually few and far between, and death is often instantaneous. On the other hand, games require some sense of balance and "fun." Constantly replaying the same cut scenes, dealing with limited inventories and shifting items into and out of boxes, and avoiding enemies to even survive, gets frustrating. It's that sense of balance that makes things difficult.

I think the trick is to determine how much of survival is "survival" and "horror." The trick is finding ways to scare the player in other ways. Here are the ways that I see the genre works.

1) The Survival element. Resident Evil, save for maybe 4, are based on this element. Save points are limited to a number of typewriter ribbons and can only be used in said typewriters. The only weapon most of the time are guns with minimal ammo. Every time you venture into unknown territory, you know it will cost you part of your precious resources, and safe territories don't exist. You likely had to dodge some of the monsters instead of killing them to get that far, and even if you did kill them all, the game loves respawning old enemies or tossing in new ones. This creates an ongoing sense of dread, though as I warned before it also can be frustrating and tedious. Often, tricks, even ones that kill the mood, are used to kill monsters without using as much ammunition, like letting enemies get as close as possible before aiming straight up with a shotgun, killing a zombie with one blast.

2) The shock value. The Resident Evil games are famous for that, as well, to the point where they coined the "Monster jump out of windows," syndrome. The scare comes from dangerous, or at least scary-looking, events that seemingly come out of nowhere. Rarely is this sudden appearance a major threat, but they break players out of their status quo and sphere of comfort. Overuse of this gimmick can lead to derision and boredom, but when done right, like a certain unforgettable scene about a quarter into Eternal Darkness, it sticks to gamers' minds for years.

3) The seen and known. In other words, this means the aesthetics are scary. While Resident Evil does a bit of this, both because of the inherent Uncanny Valley related fears of zombies and the more exotic monsters, this is the bread and butter of Silent Hill. The monsters tend to be pseudo-Freudian abominations so unnatural that one can't even be certain what they are even when seeing them directly. How they move and act is as scary as the attacks themselves. But the setting itself is designed to be as disturbing as the monsters. A small town is transformed into a hell of torture implements, infernal machinery, and rickety gratings over oblivion.

4) Narrative fears. Eternal Darkness relies on this sort of scare. It's not the gameplay that matters in this fear, it's the meaning of the game. For example, in Eternal Darkness, the fear comes from the nigh omnipotent horrors that will inevitably conquer the planet, and the only point of victory is to delay that destruction by a brief amount of time. Even with the relatively easy gameplay with nigh-infinite abilities to heal and enemies you can decapitate in one attack, the constant presence of doom and a story that does horrible things to your sympathetic protagonists constantly keeps the player on edge.

5) Fear of the unknown. This is often considered the most "sophisticated" of fears, because it lets the player's imaginations create the fear for them. Silent Hill uses a lot of these as well, in the areas where the previously mentioned "town from hell" areas are not present. In these cases, the town is shrouded in fog, making it impossible to see what's even a few feet away. However, the threats are still there even when not seen, and the series' use of the radio which plays static whenever a monster is near uses it. This tells the player that something nearby wants to kill them, but there's no way of knowing what or where. The strange monsters again take advantage of that. Since they look so strange, it often takes a long time to even understand the enemy and know exactly what they are. Eternal Darkness uses this as well. Some of the insanity effects are shock values, and others are aesthetic changes when the player's sanity is low. But the fact that these effects are completely random and numerous enough that a player may never see them all adds that fear of the unknown, as does the fact that every location can change as sanity gets lower. A mansion might be normal when you first explore it, but you know that if you revisit when your sanity gets lower, it will be much different and much worse.

If you add up all five, you can have a game that offers a wide variety of scares, often without sacrificing a game that's fun, or at least not annoying. Some games don't get it exactly right (Silent Hill 4 is notoriously irritating for its invincible foes, much more limited resources than earlier Silent Hill games, a constant escort mission in the game's second half, and a limited inventory box,) but those that do get it right are exceptional and terrifying. In an era where horror movies are flood of sub-par remakes, unambitious adaptations of Japanese movies, and torture porn, a survival horror game is a welcome scare indeed.