The Horror Genre Article continues in the Virtua Month of Horror SPEEWWWKAAAAA!!! Now we're talking about the games that got it wrong and a deeper look at what makes and breaks the concept! Try to keep your brains!
As amazing a concept as it can be, there can be plenty that can go wrong with Survival Horror at its very core. There are games that get their weapons and the feeling of shooting completely wrong. Sometimes, the targetting system can be awkward on purpose to enhance the scare effect of helplessness. Some games take this to mean they can make the targetting system as rubbish as possible and that will work. No, do not do that.
Where Alien Isolation got this concept to a near perfect, if somewhat languid experience, Agony took the concept of running and hiding and shat it right out. You need to be able to hide. Agony glitches so badly, hiding is utterly useless more often than not. When you are running and hiding from the farmer guy, Jack Baker in RE7, you feel the horror! If you have a knife against his shovel, you feel raw terror when you see him bust through a wall saying "There you are!" That sort of real feeling of helplessness is what you need and it goes so far when you can do nothing but run and hide. If you can't even run and hide, however, what can you do? Die! That's what! Then you'll probably turn off the game!
Running and hiding was a concept that put Five Nights at Freddy's on the map. While it dropped the ball on the concept of jump scares that aren't annoying as all hell, it still garnered a following from sheer gameplay and building challenge. That, plus the lore and the characters.
There we come to a core that can also make or break a game. The story and the characters can bring your game from good to LEGENDARY and that is no exaggeration. FNAF has a great lore when it's not walking all over itself and forgetting whole chapters. Cut out your own square of Silent Hill's story, if you'd like, because it also gets choppy after the first few games, but what is there is very well crafted with subjects of psyche and the subconscious.
Even if the story and the characters only work in one game, that can catapult that game into the stars. Doom had the most minimal story and character, but somehow brought Doomguy to the mainstream in a way that cements him there still today. Dead Space, the first and only the first game, has a pretty decent story to pull you along the haunted space corridors to fight space monsters with a space spinal suit. It and Half-life brought about an amazing use of the silent hero because he is you and you are looking for a way out and a way to survive.
Then there are plenty of games that dropped the ball on Resident Evil. Yes, Resident Evil was a genre all its own, basically, because no one remembers Resident Evil Survivor everyone needed tank controls, slow moving enemies, scarce resources and stupid dialogue. They took all of these elements of the game and spilled them over the pavement. This, plus the fact that there were SO MANY of them! Just look at my Worst Games of the Sega Saturn 2 you will see plenty of them. Not all of them are the worst examples, but there are some very horrible ones (not in a good way). Then there's Countdown: Vampires, Deep Fear, and I could go on for days listing them. Trust me. There are a lot.
There are so many concepts that go into Horror in gaming, as stated before. I've scratched the surface of games that do this well and not well, but these gameplay mechanics and visual style cannot be overstated. So, let's keep this going and keep these articles from being novels! Virtua SPEEEWWWWWMOOMOOMOO!!!!
