Any good horror writer will tell you that pacing is important; you can’t just scare the viewer for 90 straight minutes. There has to be some downtime to let the person’s nerves calm down before you escalate again. So, to take a break I want to talk about some problems with recent horror game design. And to do that, I’m going to talk about one of the most non scary games I’ve played recently.
Since I know that by now you must be trembling in terror at my past horror entries, let’s leave the blood, disembowelment and danger behind for a few minutes. Amnesia: The Dark Decent is a critically acclaimed game from Frictional Games: maker of the Penumbra series. Now before I begin I just want to say that I have nothing against them and thought Amnesia was ok. With that said however, Amnesia in my crazy eyes completely failed as a horror experience.
I’m going to sound like a real dick here but here goes, every time I read that someone couldn’t finish or play Amnesia because they thought it was too scary. I mutter “lightweight” under my breath and laugh evilly for a few seconds. The problems that I have with Amnesia are part of the issue with horror games these days: the game design and the other half being tone which we’ll talk about in the next entry.
While Amnesia isn’t the first game to remove combat as an option in horror design, it currently is the poster child as the game that garnered the most success from it. In the past I’ve written extensively on the subject of horror game design on my blog and one part that I feel is a necessary element is the concept of “fight or flight.”
Fight or flight is the decision we make whenever there is a danger and have to decide what option we take. In horror titles like Amnesia, removing the option to fight, removes the basic choice hardcoded in our DNA. Instead of fight or flight, it becomes flight or die. When I played Amnesia, I wasn’t scared dealing with the enemies as I knew that my response if they saw me was always the same.
Good horror should force the player to make tough decisions like: “should I go on or turn back?” or “can I even fight this?” Rogue-like fans or fans of challenging games such as Demon’s Souls should be familiar with those questions as they had to constantly ask themselves that during play. This is why I feel the original Resident Evil was such a hit and redefined the genre, as it was the closest a horror game came at being a rogue-like.
The other decision that killed the horror for me in Amnesia was making the player immortal. That right there removed all the tension, as I knew that no matter what happened I would be fine. I actually stopped caring about the monsters and whenever I was caught, I let them killed me as it would take less time to get back to normal then just running away.
Going back to the start, horror is about good pacing, making the player tense and nervous is good, but there must be a tipping point. All that tension and terror must reach a point where it explodes in the form of some kind of danger or conflict. If there is no breaking point, then the player will eventually realize that, and the game will lose its atmosphere. As another example, the same thing happened in FEAR, by removing the danger during the horror segments, there was no breaking point and eventually the horror aspect failed to deliver.
Another detractor of horror is repetition: having enemies or situations happen the same way each time. This is why horror games are known for having the lowest replay value and can only be really enjoyed once. Amnesia is even worse in this regard, as there is only one and only one way to get through the game. Not helping matters is that there is no conflict or any meaningful choices for the player to make or change.
While no combat can cause repetition, having too much combat can cause the same effect. Titles like Dead Space and Alan Wake reveled in combat. The issue is that the player is largely fighting the same enemies and situations throughout the game. Fighting one necromorph in Dead Space was freaky; fighting 100 of them the same way loses that effect.
Battles in horror games play out the same way each time due to both limited enemy design and AI. This is one area where horror game designers should take a page from action and FPS titles: making adaptive enemies. Fighting enemies should be a meaningful experience, forcing the player to react differently based on the situation, not funnel a group of enemies into a small room and throw a grenade in there.
One of my goals as a designer is that I want to design a true horror game that pushes all the right buttons, something that could scare even me. Right now I’m writing up a design document for just such an idea. If I could make a game that scary, I’m sure it would put a few people in the hospital… which I guess would be sort of bad. I’ll put a warning on the box and intro screen, it’ll be fine.
Up Next: We’ll conclude this intermission with a brief talk about tone.
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