If there’s one thing I’m super passionate about, it’s the innovations that horror brings to the table in the gaming industry. Horror tackles strange & unsettling ideas that few other genres are willing to attempt, and naturally when you apply that out-of-the-box thinking to games it becomes a recipe for a truly unique experience.
But horror is nebulous. What is scary? It’s different for everyone, however there’s common themes shared by most people. Sometimes it may not even be about the scariness itself, but the morbid fascination fans attach to the sheer creativity of a truly horrifying idea.
That brings us to the topic at hand. How exactly has horror been evolved by the gaming industry? What works? Why did it work? What lessons do horror games need to learn from the champions of horror? This question feels more important than ever lately, so join me as I put a magnifying glass to some of the fan favourites over the years.
I think fans and developers alike can’t have an earnest conversation about the art of horror games without bringing attention to one of the most crucial themes of success.
Have you ever found yourself playing a horror game and you’re wracked with tension despite the fact nothing is happening? Instilling that sense of terror through games is incredibly challenging to pull off, but creating paranoia in the player is one of the greatest tools to success the developer can inflict upon their audience. Let us look to examples of inspiration on how developers have achieved that.
Visceral Games’ Dead Space franchise is a horror game staple, the first entry in its series being the most impeccable example of maximizing the use of map space and paranoia. It was a good one-two punch, unpredictability was fostered by simultaneously making the player distrust every area in the game with the abundance of vents hiding potential enemies and force them to continuously return to these same areas.
Due to the randomness of enemy spawns from every available vent, coupled by the story pushing the player to re-visit already cleared areas that were potentially no longer safe, it was a self-fulfilling anxiety engine in the most fun way possible.
The developers capitalized on this further by using the same methods enemies would appear to fake out the user at frequent intervals. Sometimes vents exploded by themselves, sometimes monstrous cries and skittering feet echoed down the halls. During “Dead Space 2” in particular, the story surprises the player with a return trip to the wreckage of the USG Ishimura knowing full well the fans knew what horrors lie within the derelict craft.
So what did the developers do? Nothing! For multiple minutes upon entering the supposedly dangerous source of necromorph horror, it’s basically a scenic tour for the player’s trip down memory line. By granting the player a break for the horror in seemingly the most dangerous area in the entire game (despite the solace being brief), it resets the player’s complacency with carnage and once again starts to induce paranoia that something is coming…But from where? When?
Dead Space’s mechanics highlight an important distinction in horror that just because the player might be armed with badass sci-fi weaponry, there are effective methods to delivering stress and anxiety with the power of unpredictability.
In another example, Creative Assembly’s “Alien Isolation” famously created an authentic and unpredictable atmosphere to its iconic Xenomorph through the creation of a “two-brain” AI direction system. It was a simple but terrifying hypothesis for an enemy in a horror game, “what if the monster could learn?”
The developers achieved exactly that. Throughout Alien Isolation’s gameplay, the player is forced to hide and outsmart the Xenomorph, but with a twist. Everything the player does, including previous gameplay in which they died, is all remembered by the creature. It uses previous encounters to predict the player’s behaviour and strategies, attempting different behaviour the next time to counter them in turn.
This is further made stress-inducing by the fact there is a secondary AI, a disembodied “director” that can see what both the player and the Xenomorph are doing at all times. If despite the monster’s efforts to adapt, the player proves too difficult to find or has found a particularly devious defence they are repeatedly exploiting, the director AI will begin to help the Xenomorph by feeding it hints to the player’s position and behaviour, encouraging its mental evolution even further. It would even measure the aggression of the creature, directing the Xenomorph to leave the area or unexpectedly show up depending on how much pressure had been put on the player.
This is perhaps one of the most impressive modern innovations on the horror game franchise, the folks at Creative Assembly designed a horror villain that could genuinely become a custom adversary tailored exactly to each individual player’s personality. In doing so, they created a highly unpredictable killer where no guide, no pre-preparation, can really offer any comfort or edge to tackling the threat that lies before them.
It’s a compelling lesson that creating one incredibly important unpredictable element that constantly haunts the player can create unique experiences that are memorable and terrifying, it capitalizes on the idea that not only can the player not predict what the monster will do next, but they cannot trust themselves on what they know about it.
Let us transition to a game that followed a similar philosophy. Scott Cawthon’s hit series “Five Nights at Freddy’s” was an entry into horror games that personifies the union between the helplessness of being trapped and the paranoia of unreliable and sparse information on the world around the player.
Fascinatingly enough, the system behind how it worked was simpler than anticipated. The player is expected to survive the five nights trapped in a security office, their main defence being the use of security cameras to anticipate and react to approaching animatronics attempting to kill them. So why did this work if the player could see what was coming?
Math! Each individual animatronic enemy had a corresponding difficulty level tied to a set number. The twist being that not only would the player be unaware of what difficulty level they were currently set to, but this would exponentially increase on a randomly generated scale over the course of a night, as well as every time they advanced into the next night.
This served to create from the player’s perspective was incredibly erratic and unpredictable behaviour out of the animatronics, made even more erratic by the nature in which they moved between rooms on the map which was also based on a probability based system. Trying to understand the behaviour of these enemies was like trying to guess correctly in a casino, it was a futile effort to understand and trying to would mislead the player into ever more perilous and insecure situations.
If that wasn’t cruel enough, Scott Cawthon had the sinister idea to make using the valuable security doors and cameras that the player would use to defend themselves a limited resource, discouraging their over-use and leaving the player perpetually vulnerable to death whilst they would have to take their eyes off the open doors to check camera feeds.
In summary, the player found themselves in an environment where they simultaneously had to manage a very limited resource to learn all they could about a foe that was going to be constantly changing its behaviour, becoming ever more aggressive as it did. It’s a maddening and stressful situation of paranoia at its purest that left the player questioning what they knew and constantly making their knowledge on the threat out-dated and flawed. The player was as much their own enemy in this circumstance as the monster was.
Let’s talk about dead things for a moment. Part of why Scott Cawthon’s franchise was so beloved was the uncanny valley theme of “things that act alive that shouldn’t”, a classic but effective trope in horror. What’s more upsetting than dead things moving? Darkstone Digital, the developer behind “The Mortuary Assistant” tackled that in their own unique way.
Sound queues, whilst often great for setting the mood in horror, can sometimes be a doubleedged sword. An abrupt sound accompanied by the movement of a creature can draw a player’s attention and make them very alert something is happening or has happened. Not in the mortuary assistant! Whilst it has its own fair share of spooky sounds, one of its greatest triumphs is remarkably the silence at just the right moments.
Whilst the player conducts their tasks throughout the game, they find themselves experiencing horrifying supernatural events around them courtesy of the resident dead folk they’re forced to work with. Its upsetting enough when the dead act on their own accord and do things they shouldn’t be able to do, but the developer took this further by creating jump scares and erratic moments that happen just conveniently placed in the corner of a player’s focus, without any sound prompts.
Specifically, the game encourages the player to focus on their job and to do that, they have to look in a certain direction. They find themselves so busy looking at the body on the table, they don’t immediately react to the ghoul perched on a nearby cabinet staring at them silently. When the player finally does notice and shifts the focus of their view towards it, it suddenly and very quickly scampers out of sight.
The mortuary assistant uses the simple trigger of upsetting things lurking in the peripheral view and distracting the player’s vision elsewhere to create well-timed spooks that don’t depend on the monster reacting to the player, but rather the player finally reacting to finally realizing there’s been something in the corner this entire time.
With all these games covered, what did we learn from this trip down memory lane? It provides us with a basis to understand from different examples over the years of how horror games have nurtured the potential of player paranoia with the tools of unpredictability. This is the lesson future developers need to carry forward. If you want your players to be scared, you need to tailor an experience to encapsulate one, or more, of these horror game virtues.
Make your player distrust the environment like Dead Space does, make them struggle to understand the behaviour of their foe like Alien Isolation, make their tools to understand the danger they’re in unreliable like in Five Nights at Freddy’s, make them concerned about the smallest changes in their vision.
Unpredictability is one of the main cornerstones in which horror games can deliver us the best, and scariest, experiences possible.