Yesterday I was watching Zero Punctuation as I always do on Wednesdays; this week was on the newest Silent Hill game. Like Yahtzee my love of the Silent Hill series has died off in the past years (Silent Hill 4: The Room killed the series for me); watching the review made me want to replay 2 again rather then buy this new one. However it’s what he said in the review that got me thinking about horror games, that there are two main styles of horror. Either the Western “big scary monsters are out to get you” style, or Japans “you have no idea what is out there, but it’s coming for you” style. I’ve must have played more games of the latter style then former, but I agree with Yahztee that Resident Evil 4 was a more Western approach to horror created by a Japanese team. Now here is my argument, as an experience the Japanese style games are better, but as games the Western style games are better.
Until Resident Evil 4, horror titles were stuck in a rut of bad controls, horrible cameras, and window breaking scares (first time was scary, 50th time not so much). Even the Silent Hill series while at a deeper level of horror were compared at the time as a derivative Resident Evil clone. Playing the Silent Hill games is different then watching them, as you don’t have to deal with the obtuse controls. This is the main reason why I’m not going to replay Silent Hill 2; the controls are so bad that they remove any and all desire to play the game. Now I know what people are going to say, that the controls make the experience, but the control system should not get in the way of game play in my opinion. Japanese style games focus less on combat since they’re going for more cerebral scares, but shouldn’t that mean that the controls could be made responsive and that you would still be scared?
The epitome of this combat system was last seen recently in the game Rule of Rose; it had a great story in my opinion and some of the worse game mechanics and controls I’ve seen in a horror title. Imagine for a second if Silent Hill 1 or 2 was remade for modern consoles and given a Resident Evil 4 update (over the shoulder cam, responsive controls, etc), do you think that the game will still be the same pants wetting experience? I believe that a game can still be psychologically terrifying while having the controls of a Ninja Gaiden or post Resident Evil 4 title. That kind of belief is behind my horror ideas, that you can make the player a bad-ass and still scare the living daylights out of them.
Thanks to Resident Evil 4, we have seen an evolution in the horror genre with game play and controls, now I would like to see an evolution in psychological terror in the genre. I need a reason not to play games alone in the dark 🙂 .
Josh
