The horror genre is an interesting genre for me as my appreciation for it has changed over the years. When I was younger, I was a huge baby: afraid of the dark, needles, and bugs and so on. Here’s a fun fact: I couldn’t play the Adventures of Lolo when I was 4, because one of the characters scared me.
You’re probably wondering why I’m committing “coolness suicide” by admitting my past fears. Well the reason is that I haven’t felt fear in a long time. Two leg surgeries and chronic pain are an excellent one-two punch to being scared. I’ve been trying to find a game that can scare me for the last few years, and nothing has managed to do the job.
Coming back to present day, the reason why I find horror games fascinating is that I’m a firm believer that everyone needs a good scare now and again. Part of what makes a great horror title is atmosphere, and the other half is a very specific style of game design, both I’ll be examining in upcoming parts.
Now, let’s talk about that lovely lady at the start of this entry. Younger gamers may think that this scene is from an old school horror game; however it’s actually from a beat-em-up. Splatter House 3 for the Sega Genesis was one of the first games I played at the time that had a sense of atmosphere. Granted that atmosphere took place in a setting where a Jason Voorhees imitator body slammed a giant teddy bear monster.
That image was also one of the first legitimately unnerving things I saw in a video game. At this point, I can’t tell what is scary or not for most people, so as you read this you may either be creep out, or think that I’m crazy. However, visuals while vital aren’t the only part of the equation. Here is the scene being played out and notice how the music adds to the experience. This image has been so engrained in my head that I’ve had nightmares in the past with people looking like that chasing me.
Atmosphere is very hard to get right, and something a lot of designers these days have forgotten about. Just throwing monsters and gruesome sights at the player one after another doesn’t make a game scary or atmospheric. If you look at Resident Evil 5, where there is a greater focus on action and backdrop instead of on horror for example. Or the areas in the Dead Space series where the player is stuck in a room until everything else is dead. I don’t want to delve too much into this topic now as I don’t want to repeat myself in that upcoming entry mentioned above.
Over the course of this series, I’m going to examine some of my favorite horror games and how they managed to combine atmosphere and game design to create something scary.
Up Next: The Glass Break Heard Round The World
