Behold the true face of fear and horror, a creature of such wickedness and despair… wait, wait a minute. Hold on let me look at my notes….. Sorry everybody, looks like the photo of unspeakable terror got mixed up, my bad. I hope it didn’t get sent to a My Little Pony site. Looks like we’re just going to have to make due, ooh ahh, so scary… ok let’s move on.
In the last part I went on a rant about survival horror design and for this part I want to finish my train of thought. Tone or atmosphere is the other half of what makes a great survival horror experience. The problem is that a lot of designers are having trouble getting the tone right.
The problem with tone can be seen in trying to keep it throughout a series. If you look at the evolution of Resident Evil, it has gone from being about a lone survivor who must get out of a horrible situation. To a one man/woman super zombie killing bad-ass who must save the entire world.
The change in tone is part of the problem with designing horror titles: How do you keep scaring the player in the same universe over multiple games? Going back to the last article, repetition is one of the main deterrents of horror, and having a series of games all dealing with the same type of enemy is very repetitive.
The part where designers write themselves into a corner is with trying to wrap up all the plot points by the end of the game. When there’s no mystery to solve, you lose the mystique of the situation. Silent Hill is one of the few series that has avoided this problem, thanks to the designers not explaining the Meta situation of the world, and switching protagonist each game.
I want to show you something, here are the intro cut-scenes to Left 4 Dead 1 and Left 4 Dead 2. After watching that, if you had no idea the titles of either game, would you know that both games are part of a series and feature the same gameplay? The switch in tone between the two was very jarring and if I were to quickly describe the tone of those two videos it would be:
Left 4 Dead 1: 4 Unlikely survivors must team up to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Left 4 Dead 2: Dawn of the Dead directed by Michael Bay.
The other problem with tone is trying to inject horror into settings not made for it. We see this in action titles that try to mix things up half way through. Titles like Uncharted, Gears of War and the original Far Cry, each tried to mix things up with horror segments. The problem is that you can’t just take a game where the player spent the last few hours kicking ass and blowing stuff up, then slow things down and throw a monster in to scare them.
Let’s take that picture of My Little Pony as an example. Imagine if someone remade Dawn of the Dead but done entirely in the same style as My Little Pony. Would it be weird? Yes, unusual? Yes, but scary? Not in the slightest. This is due to the tone of the world does not mesh with horror.
To create a good horror game, the tone must be established from the get-go and the game play to compliment it. You can have strong characters as we saw with Undying, as long as the mood can keep up. We’re coming to the end of our horrific ride, and I have two more stops to go.
As a quick side-note, you don’t know how disturbing it was to search Google images for the right My Little Pony picture to use. In fact, don’t Google image anything mentioned in this series. As the fan art may be more creepy then the original.
Up Next: When Hobos Attack
