The recently released Wii horror game, Ju-on: The Grudge, is not a fantastic game. It’s plagued by a game design that values one-hit kills and requires levels to be replayed over and over, and yet it’s so simple that no amount of replaying can really make you a better player. The level designs themselves are […]
Problem: Balancing game difficulty across ten or twenty hours of play in a way that enables all types of gamers to enjoy your game is hard. Games that get too hard will be frustrating, but games that are too easy are boring. There’s a sweet spot between those two that makes a perfect game, but […]
I’m close to ten hours into Resident Evil 5. So far, I’m throughly enjoying it; it’s not some great masterwork but it’s an extremely well-made game and I haven’t run into any major frustration points. Unlike the technically similar Dead Space, the moment-to-moment game play is deep enough that simple pattern alterations (new enemy, new […]
About four years ago I was working in the game industry making video games. At the time I was getting ready to start on a PSP game (this was before the PSP had shipped, but game development was already in full swing), and I wanted to get up to speed with my company’s 3D graphics […]
There’s a pretty great article over at GameTopius called The Survival of Survival Horror about the way that modern survival horror games resemble their predecessors. The author, Thomas Cross, draws a line in the sand between games like Dead Space and Resident Evil 5, and Siren: New Translation and Silent Hill 5. His point–which is […]
I can’t stand ’em. I have no problem with mini-games per se; it is specifically optional mini-games that get my goat. You know what I mean, the kind that you can skip without hurting the game but if you play all the way through are guaranteed some sort of reward. Like the shooting gallery game […]
Lately Nanashi no Geemu has got me thinking about how horror operates at a fundamental level. One of the keys, it seems to me, is connection with familiarity. Silent Hill uses normal, every day locales (an elementary school, a mall, an apartment complex) and then taints them with monsters, death, and eventually decrepitness. Nanashi No […]
My goal in running this site, as I originally wrote back in 2003, is to identify the characteristics common to all good horror games. Five years later I’m going to revise that statement a little, because for every rule that I can come up with there is at least one major exception. So I am […]
Jim Sterling has an interesting article over at Destructoid called How Survival Horror Evolved Itself Into Extinction. In it he argues that as games have become more technically advanced, the key features that made PS1- and PS2-era horror games scary have been, well, fixed. Sterling talks about the difficulty of having to deal with awkward […]
Site regular and forums member death2all recently e-mailed me with a simple question: do I think that the proliferation of “action-horror” games is the death knell for the survival horror genre? Will games that put an emphasis on action, such as Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space, replace the traditional survival horror recipe of item […]