4 Blood-Curdling Factors That Create The Perfect Horror Game

A quick look around you or indeed up to the sky will tell you that today is Halloween and no doubt many of you will be preparing for this spooky holiday by marathoning your favourite horror films. But we here at WGTC feel that video games can provide something so much more terrifying than any movie can offer. Video games have that special something that no Wes Craven spookfest can hope to top: interactive terror. There are a slew of titles available that we feel encapsulate what it means to be scared -- Alien: Isolation, Five Nights at Freddy's and Outlast to name but a few. So, for your reading pleasure, we present a series of some of the most iconic and influential horror games ever offered. But we don't just talk about how good these games are. We dive into the inner workings of these titles and pull forth the very elements that make them stand out, that key aspect that creates such an impact on us horror fans. So, with that said, here are the four blood-curdling and indeed essential factors that make up the perfect horror game. 1) Character Vulnerability To me, it seems that video game development has been leading up to a truly remarkable epoch. With the way technology has advanced over the years – spring-boarding games into a more reputable media limelight, despite obvious controversies and nay-saying – there is one unwritten goal that seems to bind many titles together: to make the player want to explore a carefully crafted world. Graphical prowess, sheer scale, engaging plot and a slew of other factors all help draw the player in and keep them clinging to a virtual realm they've decided to invest hours of their own time into. A truly great game is one that makes players hopeful about discovering new things and investigating every nook and cranny of their chosen franchise; to keep them reaching for that next waypoint or sinking deeper into a new side mission. Whether it's the believable city life of Grand Theft Auto, the curious plot climax of BioShock: Infinite or the blank-slate mentality of Minecraft, what games ultimate want is for us to keep pushing forward. So what does this have to do with horror games? Well, the exact opposite of everything I just mentioned, to be honest. What makes titles such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Outlast so memorable and terrifying is the way they thrust you into an unimaginably frightening world in a position of abject vulnerability that keeps you pinned to one spot, cowering. In other words, effective horror spins on a dime and undoes all the hard work other games have done to keep you moving forward. Great horror makes you not want to keep going. Take the aforementioned titles above. Millions of gamers know the unparalleled dread of being hunted by a Brute or an escaped psychopath, using the shadows as our only weapon and the web-filled confines of an antique armoire as our only shield. It terrifies us to levels we never really experience while watching horror films because we're completely in control of the protagonist and, thus, their fate. Playing Amnesia and Outlast is the virtual equivalent of holding your hands up to your eyes in fear, but taking a peak through the gap between your fingers. That sense of scared curiosity is all too inviting, but you are always mindful of your own vulnerability. You can't attack or defend yourself, and even your ability to run and hide is met only by uncertainty: did the stalker see you crawl under the bed when they burst into the room? Because the possibility of dying feels almost inevitable and real, you know that your biggest enemy is exposure. Regardless of how beautiful the game looks, how amazing the sound works against you to create such an evocative atmosphere, you are consistently (often against your own judgement) struck by the thought, “no way am I going down that hallway.” Fantastic horror in the video games does exactly that. There is no going back from that one mistake you made when you decided to make a run for it. You don't have the firepower or melee skills to Ctrl+Z your way out of a horrifying encounter. Despite what we learn from other games about being the brave hero, about facing our fears head-on, horror games leave us in a vulnerable, whimpering mess. Something that feels all too real when done correctly. 2) A Consistent Sense Of Variety Before the harsh words come full blast, I fully realize that there is an ongoing backlash against Resident Evil 4 for somehow marking the end of survival horror because it had the gall to give you a fighting chance against your enemies with a concise and responsive control system. While the focus on ridiculous action-packed sequences was brought to the forefront for RE4, it’s not the gameplay we’re here to pilfer for our perfect survival horror title. Rather, it’s the sheer amount of variety packed into the game that always kept players on their toes while still delivering a consistently creepy experience. Many recent survival horror titles tend to stick to one or two environments, forcing players to find their way through dilapidated buildings and towns or, more commonly, decrepit spaceships that have gone mysteriously silent. While spaces like the USG Ishimura from Dead Space and the Sevastopol Station from Alien: Isolation will always hold a place in my heart for being genuinely terrifying, they’re missing the feeling that anything could happen at any moment. Sure, a Necromorph could hop out of a vent or the Xenomorph could do the same, but so what? It stops being scary after a short time. Yet in Resident Evil 4, you went from taking on a murderous village to fighting a giant fish with harpoons, getting chased through sewers by man-sized invisible bugs, getting impaled by grotesque (and still creepy) monsters with invisible vulnerable points or being chased by a huge statue that knocks down an entire building as it lunges after you. While much of this action was indeed goofy and campy, it kept players wondering what could happen next, never letting them get completely comfortable in one place for too long. Let’s say, for the sake of this feature, that you’re an argumentative internet commenter and found absolutely no joy in Resident Evil 4 whatsoever. It was just too silly and over-the-top. Well then, look no further than the Condemned series for another way to feature a ton of surprises and still be a tense experience from beginning to end. This under-appreciated gem of a series featured its fair share of boring stages that took place in abandoned buildings, but it also led players through an interesting assortment of locales that were chock full of scares. For example, one level takes place in an eerie doll factory staffed mostly by deranged homeless people with a love of creepy toys. To make things worse, they’ve turned some of the dolls into explosive traps that chase you throughout the factory, complete with eerily familiar sound boxes straight from the worst childhood. However, the prime stage for showing off variety without losing the feel of the consistently oppressive atmosphere is one which finds you escaping a sudden bear attack in an empty lodge. It sounds absolutely ludicrous, but the first time the deranged fuzzball bursts into the room and tears you pieces, you’ll agree that it’s a scary experience. The perfect survival horror game manages to find ways to keep players on their toes while introducing a number of totally different scenarios. As games like Alien: Isolation showcased, being stuck in the same environment for 20 hours doing the same thing over and over again is nowhere near as horrifying as being attacked by a rabid Kuma in a claustrophobic lodge. If you want to sustain your horror throughout an entire game, you’ve got to take the risk to switch up your circumstances while maintaining a consistently scary tone. It’s not easy, but when done right, it’s a valuable step towards perfecting your game. 3) Pacing When P.T. crept unassumingly onto the PlayStation Store in the wake of Sony’s Gamescom event back in August, fans were left understandably confused. What was the sole purpose of this game? (If you could even file it under that category.) Did Hideo Kojima troll the industry once again by branding the title under a fake company — in this case, the 7780s studio. And, if P.T. really was a playable teaser, what in God’s name was it teasing? As it turns it, P.T. was in fact a playable tease for an all-new Silent Hill game that is being overseen by Kojima himself and Guillermo del Toro. Eagle-eyed players were able to find this out for themselves by “completing” the demo, thereby unlocking an end credits scene that showed Norman Reedus’ character appear on screen followed by the moniker, Silent Hills. It was a fantastic setup. One that left many members of the gaming community reeling in excitement. But this excitement detracted from one simple fact: P.T. is a phenomenal horror experience in and of itself. Granted, if you went into the title completely blind — and hey, more power to you — then it may have seemed a little disorientating at first. But stick with it and you’ll discover an experience that is haunting, focused and above all, masterfully paced. Strip away the razor-sharp visuals and gameplay mechanics and you’ll find a jet-black secret lurking deep within the rotting core of Kojima’s creation. But in order to uncover the mystery, you’re forced to proceed through the same corridor over, and over, and over again, discovering fresh information as you go. Some critics faulted the game for its linearity but for me, it’s all the better for it. In creating the perfect feedback loop, every time you open the door only to start at the beginning once again, you feel a little bit more knowledgeable and, depending on your resistance to horror, confident. P.T. is a psychedelic trip that is, arguably, one of the finest and indeed purest horror experiences of recent years. We only wish a demo such as this, one that is so brilliantly crafted and contained, wasn’t such a rare breed. 4) Creepy Environments When a cultural product weans inspiration from its peers — whether it’s within music, movies or video games — said product always treads a very fine line between homage and out and out pastiche. Err to closely to the original, genre-defining IP and the title is labelled as a derivative knock-off; a sub-par experience that could only hope to be talked about in the same breath as its forebearer. So, when EA announced Dead Space back in 2008, all signs hinted that it would, like so many before it, fall foul to those irreparable pitfalls. Except, it didn’t. With an engaging narrative, bone-chilling atmosphere and an almost unforgettable setting in the USG Isihmura, Dead Space freed itself from the shackles of convention and was able to be considered as a true sci-fi horror experience on its own merit. Yes, it echoes the genre greats like Alien, Event Horizon and the irk, but Visceral Games took Ridley Scotts’ mantra — crafting a foreboding haunted house in space — to a whole new level and immersed the user within a universe that was well-rounded and horrifying in equal measures. And boy, was it horrifying. Creeping around the vacant halls of the Isihmura, clutching nervously to your ever-trusty Plasma Cutter as you go, was a truly nerve-shredding experience. Not only did the sound design elevate the journey as a whole, the fact that you played as Isaac Clarke — a blue-collar and, crucially, silent protagonist — infused the game with a tangible sense of loneliness. Fans of the series will know that Clarke begins to lose his marbles with each passing iteration, but within the original Dead Space, he was an unassuming engineer who had to fight his way through the abandoned ship tooth and nail. He was, for all intents and purposes, the unlikeliest of heroes. He didn’t want to be mowing down Necromorphs any more than you or I, but he adapted. Like the Isihmura itself, Isaac was an empty shell, lost amidst the stars as the nefarious Unitology cult ran rampant all around him. In many ways, we learned more about our silent protagonist gradually as we explored the various regions of the ship. Horror games ought to take note of Dead Space for its use of environments. The USG Isihmura may bear semblance to the Nostromo and other famous space voyagers in fiction, but Visceral Games’ flagship vehicle was crafted with such attention to detail that it felt as though every nook and cranny served a purpose. All beautifully contained within a single, blood-drenched milieu.