The Survival of Survival Horror

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 one I’ve attempted to make here before as well–is that the difference between these two types of games has less to do with the way that they are controlled or the amount of action they contain than the pacing and moment-to-moment game strategy that these games encourage. Cross also expertly points out that while both RE5 and Dead Space are action-oriented, Dead Space is very clearly designed to scare the player (though it’s success in that respect is sometimes damaged by its approach to combat pacing).

This is a very important distinction, and I like how Cross has called RE5 and Dead Space a new “quadrant” of survival horror. As we discuss the evolution of the modern survival horror game (which has been a hot topic here lately), I think that noting that these new games differ dramatically from each other (and from those of the past) is key to understanding how the genre is changing.

Give Cross’ article a read. It’s well-thought-out and quite timely.

Brain Dead Space

When I was a kid some developer realized that with the advent of the 2x CD-ROM drive you could stream really tiny, really crappy video off the CD onto a PC. This lead to an explosion of universally-terrible “interactive movie” games like The Journeyman Project and Spaceship Warlock. Though the genre probably contributed to the advent of good games like The 7th Guest, Phantasmagoria, and Myst, there were a couple of years where the genre was entirely crap. One of these games was called The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum, and it was yet another click-randomly-until-you-win type of game. I saw an awesome, one line review for The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum at the time that simply read, “Great graphics, but where’s the game?”

Dead Space isn’t that bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it reminds me of The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum. The production value for Dead Space is off the charts, the game play is fun, and there are some neat innovations to be found in the game. It’s just that the whole thing is so slick that you can pretty much zone out and play it through without the need to think anything through. It makes sense to me that the next Dead Space game will be an on-rails shooter; the first sort of felt like that to me as well.

Dead Space is a good game, but it’s not a fantastic game. At least, I don’t think so. You can read about it in my full review.

I Hate Optional Mini-games

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 in Resident Evil 4. Or the, uh, shooting gallery game in Dead Space. The Shenmue series is one of my favorites of all time, but it is a serious offender in this category; though the games include required mini-games (which I have no quarrel with), they are also chalk full of optional challenges that don’t need to be completed to finish the game.

These mini-games follow a pattern. The challenge must carry some sort of reward, otherwise it’s just a way to waste time. You know that when Isaac in Dead Space interrupts his attempts to get off the alien-infested ship so he can partake in a little zero-G air ball, it’s because he wants to get some big reward at the end. Even worse are the games that rate you behind the scenes; it’s like, you finish the game, and the screen says “Congratulations on finishing the game. However, you failed to find all of the furry bunnies. Your rank is E-.” I hate that. It’s bullshit. If they wanted me to find all the bunnies then then should have made that part of the required conditions for winning. Look, I am sorry that I failed to carry out all of the books in the goddamned library without dropping any of them three days in a row, Master, but could you please give me your special advice that you promised anyway so I can get on with the freaking story?

Here’s the problem with optional challenges: they are very rarely ever the same level of quality as the rest of the game. When development teams responsible for these games see their deadline approaching, the optional mini-games always take a back-seat to the rest of the content because, hey, it’s optional. Required games, on the other hand, get played by the team a lot more because they are required for progression, and as a natural consequence they end up being a lot more fun. Carrying books out of a library? LAME. Catching leaves from the tree outside the library between your fingers. AWESOME. That’s how it always works–optional content always loses out to the required content when time is short and push comes to shove.

Now the real deal-breaker, at least for me, is that optional challenges are not really optional. I want to beat the game, and that means BEATING THE GAME. I mean all of it! I got stuck for about three months on the original Shenmue because I refused to progress in the game until I had achieved first place in the forklift race mini-game. You know what, that mini-game sucks! If you so much as brush a wall with your forklift your velocity instantly goes to zero and you have immediately lost. I played that stupid thing about one hundred times, to the point at which I was able to get second place every single time, and yet I never, not even once, came in first. Finally a friend beat it and discovered that the great reward for such a difficult challenge is a miniature forklift item that says “first place,” at which point I gave up and just played the rest of the game out. The shooting game in Dead Space was probably intended to be a fun diversion, maybe a way to give out an achievement or something, but I spent an entire hour beating that stupid thing. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t ultimately rewarding, and it didn’t “break up the game play” in a good way. It was a challenge that I decided to complete, and when it was done I swore one last time and moved on with nothing to show for it but a new power node.

So, to bring this rant to a close. Developers: make your goddamn mini games required for progression. If you do that and your game is no longer fun, it means the mini games suck. Fix them or cut them. Just, whatever you do, don’t make them optional.

Dead… Space?

I’m playing through Dead Space at the moment. Well, more precisely, I’ve been playing through Dead Space for close to three months. I am having a lot of trouble staying interested in it. This is kind of surprising to me because there’s really nothing wrong with the game at all. It’s a model of modern game design, the technical execution is fantastic, and there’s even been significant thought put into the systems that are responsible for most of the horror content (the sound system is great). But for some reason I just can’t be bothered. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with the game, and playing it is fun and all, it’s just sort of uninspiring for some reason.

Sometimes, a game comes along that is fatally flawed in a certain way but also has a spark of brilliance. Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit) was like that for me. The game had a vision, and it was pretty well executed, but at the end it totally fell apart. But the vision alone carried the entire experience; even though the last third or so was pretty shoddy compared to the initial experience, I ended up really liking the game. Hellnight is a similar story: the graphics are bad, the controls are dated, the collision detection is wonky, and yet the whole thing is held together by a few genius design choices.

Dead Space feels like the exact opposite of that phenomenon. There’s nothing wrong with it–nothing at all. And yet, there’s no spark of brilliance either; it’s very, very well executed, but ultimately fairly routine. It’s even pretty innovative for this kind of game, and yet the innovations, while good, are all minor improvements over a well-defined formula. There has yet to be a moment where I see the hand of a designer with a complete vision of the experience moving behind the scenes. Dead Space is really slick, but it feels like it was built by robots who were programmed to know the core features of all horror games. There’s just no character to the game.

I’m not finished with Dead Space, so the game may yet prove me wrong (that’s certainly happened a few times before). I will hopefully finish it off in the next week or two, at which point I will have to figure out a way to write a review for a game that is perfectly executed and yet somehow lifeless.

Eversion


It goes downhill from here.

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 Geemu’s cursed RPG works the same way: it evokes a feeling of familiarity in the user–an involuntary feeling of comfort–and then twists that feeling into something much more sinister than it really has any right to muster. I ran across another game this evening that strikes me as an excellent example of this theory.

Eversion is a light, Mario-esque platformer. It has happy music, 8-bit graphics, and a unique game mechanic. It’s unfortunately only available for Windows (though it ran without error on my Mac via Crossover). At first, it seems like somebody’s cute attempt at 1980’s era platforming game play. But very quickly it becomes clear that the game has an agenda and it’s not all blue skies and happy flowers. I won’t ruin it for you, but give the game a shot. It gets pretty hard but I advise you to stick with it. Be sure to ignore the comments on the main download page, as they will spoil it for you.

Eversion works very much like Nanashi No Geemu in that it lulls you into a comfortable zone with a familiar style. It also twists its particular knife pretty slowly; it’s not until the fifth or sixth level that you really realize how carefully the entire thing has been planned. But the result is pretty neat, once again proving that horror does not require high-end graphics tech to be effective. (Interestingly, the game also adds more weight to the idea that sound plays a much more important role in the creation of tension.)

So, another ingredient of successful horror games: familiarity as a way to surprise the player. Not every title does this, but I think that a number of the really good ones do.

Nanashi No Geemu

I have completed Nanashi No Geemu, SquareEnix’s Nintendo DS horror game about a cursed 8-bit RPG, and posted a review. The game is a paradox. On the one hand, the game play is extremely shallow and repetitive. On the other hand it’s amazingly innovative and, at times, genuinely scary. Excellent execution of a mediocre idea, or mediocre execution of a great idea? I am not sure exactly with this one. In any case, read the review for details.

20th Century Boys

This is a bit off-topic for this blog, but I wanted to make comment about the film adaptation of 20th Century Boys (２０世紀少年) a pretty killer manga by Naoki Urasawa. The manga is about Kenji, a regular joe convenience store owner who realizes that a story he wrote as a child about the destruction of Tokyo is being used as basis for an insane terrorist plot. The manga is very long and quite complicated; it jumps back and forth between present-day Japan, Japan in the near future, and Japan in the early 1960s. There are a great many characters and the connections between them are hard to keep track of. But the whole thing is fascinating, both because it’s a high tension drama about a single man’s attempt to stop a madman that everybody else seems to love, and because it shows how the central characters age and change over time. It is not, I would think, an easy work to convert into a film.

However, having watched the first film a few weeks ago (which covers about the first 1/2 of the story; the second film is in theaters here now), I am greatly impressed by the extreme care with which the story has been adapted. There are a few minor changes, and more than a few unnecessary scenes have been trimmed, but fundamentally the (quite long) film hits every single major plot point from the first half of the manga series perfectly. The characters are all there, and the actors and actresses portraying them have been so perfectly selected that most characters are immediately recognizable. This is, hands down, the most faithful adaptation of any comic, video game, or book to film that I have ever seen (the first couple of Spider-Man films were pretty faithful too, but they have nothing on 20th Century Boys). It’s as if the director sat down with the comic panels and used them directly as his story boards; with the exception of a number of omitted scenes, it’s pretty much all there.

The problem is, I get the feeling that the film will make absolutely no sense to viewers who are not already familiar with the manga. The transitions from scene to scene, from time slice to time slice, are too abrupt and arbitrary; in the original comic there were plenty of pages of exposition to ease the reader from one theme to the next, but the film has so many bases to cover in such a short amount of time that it is reduced to a collection of almost unconnected scenes (although each scene itself is quite good). Clearly the film suffers from its short time limit, even though it clocks in at two and a half hours. There’s just too much story to tell, and while a series of three films might have made more sense length-wise, the plot is very easy to divide in half and very hard to divide into thirds.

So I am left wondering if a work like this can be translated to film properly. Stephen King is famously hands-off when it comes to films based on his work because he believes film to be fundamentally different than writing, and he leaves it in the hands of his directors to render his works in screen format. But then again, almost all of the movies based on Kings works are terrible (though it’s worth mentioning that the non-terrible ones are absolute gems). In the case of 20th Century Boys, the director has been absolutely meticulous in the translation of the manga to film, and yet the result feels disjointed and off-pace. When I went to see the Silent Hill film, the friends I was with were evenly split about the first fifteen minutes: those who have played the games loved the well-executed film recreation, and those who had not played the games found the intro long and boring. I’ve yet to see the Siren film that came out here in Japan, but I suspect that it will be pretty bad if it just tries to recreate the plot of the game; there’s too many characters and too much cyclical interaction for the story to play out well linearly. Maybe the approach of the first Resident Evil film, which used the main characteristics of the series as its thematic basis but then presented an original story, is the better way to go (that film is unfortunately also pretty bad).

This is, perhaps, an area where games are closer to literature than to film. A game has a very long time to present its story, and details can emerge at a rate much slower than in a film. Maybe the reason that game stories suck so much (David Cage likened them to porn film plots) is that film-length tales are being dragged out for 10 or 20 hours when they really only have enough content to sustain two hours. Hmm, a new theory to consider.

LIT

Thanks to forums member faDeD for turning me on to a new WiiWare horror/puzzle game called LIT. I haven’t had time to play it yet–as you can probably tell from the dearth of posts recently, it’s been a busy month–but it looks like a lot of fun. I am keenly interested in how horror games might perform on services like XBLA and WiiWare; I suspect that the types of horror/adventure games that are being made for DS could work on these platforms really well, for about the same development cost. And damn it, somebody has to make a proper point-and-click adventure game using the Wii remote (to be fair, there are a couple of attempts already).

I am trying to decide if I should loosen the Quest criteria to include hand-held games. I am still working my way through Nanashi no Geemu (damn, that game needs save points), and with titles like Silent Hill: 0rigins already in the wild it seems like it might be a good move. I initially omitted hand-held games because there are very few portable horror games and I didn’t want to have to track down every last NeoPocket or Wonderswan to complete the Quest. But it seems like the only real contenders are the PSP and the DS, and even then most of the titles are on the DS. So maybe I should go ahead and count games on those platforms–they are certainly relevant from a content perspective. What do you think?

Us niche blogs gotta stick together

A friend sent me a link to a crazy blog this evening. Cunzy1 1’s Dinosaurs in Games blog is blog in which the author is attempting to catalog (and rate in terms of scientific accuracy) every instance of dinosaurs (or dinosaur bones) appearing in video games. The site was sent to me because his most recent post is about a project I worked on last year, Google Lively, but I love the site as a whole because it’s so focused and niche. Cunzy1 1 is clearly an expert in this field, and though the blog is still pretty young, it’s clearly a labor of love (and yes, he’s got Dino Crisis covered). I can relate to blogging about an extremely focused topic, especially one that is related to games, and Cunzy1 1’s Dinosaurs in Games blog made me smile. Check it out.

Ingredients of Horror: Atmosphere and Difficulty


Atmosphere? Check. Difficulty? Not so much.

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 going to omit the “all” portion of my goal statement and focus on the major characteristics that good horror games tend to employ. In this first post on this topic, I want to talk about the role of atmosphere and difficulty. Now, atmosphere is probably a characteristic worthy of its own post, but for now I’d like to discuss the atmosphere as it directly relates to difficulty in horror games.

Above-average difficulty is a common trait in popular horror games. The original Resident Evil is a hard game; on top of difficult controls the designers go out of their way to force the player to aggressively ration their resources. Other than Capcom’s Maximo, I can’t think of any games outside of the horror genre that effectively punish the player for saving their progress. Resident Evil 4, a much newer game, has been streamlined and simplified, but it’s still a pretty challenging game. And generally, I think horror games are a lot less forgiving about the degree of challenge that they apply to the player; there’s often no option to continue, save points are few and far between, and most protagonists can only withstand a few enemy attacks before they are killed.

At first I thought that difficulty was there just to increase the amount of stress that the player experiences while playing the game. Making death an all-to-easy outcome of any given encounter heightens the player’s need to move carefully and make few mistakes, which I figured helped the game feel scary. While that assessment is true, it doesn’t go deep enough. I now think that difficulty is directly tied to the feelings of fear that good horror games are able to create, and not just because the threat of death is stressful.

A couple of years ago game designer and author of a fascinating blog Dan Cook authored an article about generating artificial emotions (link probably requires Gamasutra.com registration). In it he discusses a cognitive science theory called the Two Factor Theory of Emotion. Dan says,

The theory states that in order for an emotion to be felt, two factors must be present:

  • Physiological change: The person feels elevated heart rate, sweaty skin and other elements of physiological arousal.
  • Cognitive label of the physiological change: Based off the context of the situation, the person assigns a label to the physiological change.

Simply put, when your body reacts physically to some stimuli and you mind assigns meaning to your physical state, you synthesize an emotional response.

This theory has lead to some really interesting experiments where researchers have been able to convince test subjects that they felt a specific emotion by causing physiological changes to occur for some unrelated reason. The idea is that if your body is in an elevated state and you are suddenly introduced to some unrelated context, your mind can misread the physical reaction you are experiencing and synthesize some emotion that you would have not otherwise felt.

I think that this has obvious implications for horror games. If we assume that difficult, unforgiving game play causes the player physical stress, we can assume that playing these games causes a “physiological change” to occur. Did you jump in your seat a little the first time those zombie dogs came crashing through the window? Your heart rate was probably up, the adrenaline was pumping; your body reacted physically to the game. At the same time, the game is piping horrific images, characters, and sounds into your brain at sixty frames per second. The atmosphere of a good horror game is one designed to be scary, and based on our (admittedly rudimentary) understanding of the Two Factor Theory, this may be enough for your mind to label the physical stress you are experiencing as fear. The physical effects of the difficult game play and the scary context provided by the game click and suddenly you are ready to turn all the lights in your house on.

One way we can lend some credibility to this theory is to look at the games that fail to cause this perfect juxtaposition to occur. Of those types of games we have an almost endless supply. Some games don’t get the atmosphere right and the difficulty feels unnecessary and boring. Many more games nail the atmosphere but, probably in the interests of being main stream, are not actually all that hard. A lot of games are difficult in ways that causes frustration rather than stress. I read a review of Dead Space in which the reviewer noted that the game was considerably more frightening on the Hard difficulty than it was on Normal. I also stand by my declaration that Siren is the scariest game I’ve ever played–it’s also one of the hardest.

I think that it’s pretty safe to assume that horror and game play difficulty are closely related, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to believe that the Two Factory Theory is a way to describe that relationship. But, as I said in the introductory paragraph, difficulty isn’t the only way to make a game scary; some games, like Silent Hill 2 (my #2 scariest game after Siren) and Hell Night (probably #3) are able to be extremely scary without relying on difficult game play. There are other traits, other variables that horror games leverage to assert their power over us. I’ll discuss more of those in a future post.