More survival horror candidates

I’ve come across a few more games that may or may not be classifiable as survival horror:

So if anybody has info on these games (like if they are survival horror and if they should be included in the database), let me know in the forums!

Second Sight and other rumors

I’ve added Free Radical’s Second Sight to the list, even though there is almost no information available about it yet. Apparently it will be a “Resident Evil-inspired” horror action game. Hopefully more information will be released soon.

I wonder if Capcom’s Glass Rose (Garasu No Bara, offical site in Japanese) will be survival horror. It’s not yet clear from the information available, though the game sounds pretty cool either way.

Another game that may or may not be survival horror is Silicon Knight’s Too Human. IGN is reporting that the game may not even ship on the current round of hardware, so perhaps it is best to hold off on speculation until more details are available.

Finally, there have been some rumblings about Rockstar’s Manhunt lately. Several sites have called the title survival horror, but after reading the descriptions I remain unconvinced. It seems like an violent action/sneaking game to me. The closed circuit video stuff looks somewhat scary, but it doesn’t seem like this will really be a “horror” title.

Silent Hill 3

Silent Hill 3 is out today here in North America. I’ve got a copy already and I’ll post impressions as soon as I can. I am quite excited–Silent Hill is by far my favorite series in the Survival Horror genre.

Old School Horror

I completed the original Clock Tower for the SNES this weekend. I had misgivings at first; I mean, who would have thought that a survival horror game could be done as a side scroller? The game was excellent, however, and I am very glad I played through it.

Though completing Clock Tower doesn’t take very long, the designers at Human Entertainment did an excellent job in the replay department. The game features 9 unique endings (two of which I managed to see), some of which can only be unlocked by failing to accomplish certain tasks. The game also does tricky things like sealing off certain rooms and moving other rooms around to keep even veteran players on their toes. I was quite impressed.

Unfortunately, the original Clock Tower was never released outside of Japan. If you can find the ROM, an excellent English patch exists that will let you play through the game without knowing any Japanese.

After playing Clock Tower I realized that it is very similar to the GBA version of Disney’s Haunted Mansion. Haunted Mansion isn’t out yet, but from what I saw at E3 the GBA game looks a whole lot like Clock Tower. As you can probably tell from this Preview at GameSpot however, Haunted Mansion GBA doesn’t look like it will be nearly as good. In fact, the version I played at E3 was positively atrocious. However, I suppose I should withhold judgment until the game is released.

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare

Platforms: Xbox360, PC
Release Date: 2012-02-22
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★★
Small, tight, and fascinating, this short follow-up is better than the original Alan Wake.

“I think the major is just about to fall asleep over his typewriter-although his fingers are still racing feverishly over the keys…”

“It’s a creepy thought.”

“This is the moment when he may write something he will regret later. And he has no correction fluid. That’s a vital part of my plan. May no one give the major a bottle of correction fluid!”

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is about a writer who can influence reality with his writing. He has spent the last two years trapped outside of the normal world, but now he has the chance to write himself back in.

Unfortunately, altering reality isn’t so easy. He can author events that, if the circumstances match his description, will come true. But there can be side-effects. Symbolism and suggestion can alter the world just as easily as exposition.

And he has competition. His adversary is a doppelgänger named Mr. Scratch, a psychopath who is the embodiment of the bad reputation that Wake cultivated before the events of the first game. Mr. Scratch has his own plans. One of them is to trap Alan Wake in a time loop within the little bit of reality the author is trying to influence. Another is to assume Wake’s identity and dispose of his wife.

This is the setup for Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, the XBLA follow-up to Remedy’s 2010 horror game about the reality-altering writer. Though American Nightmare is a much smaller game, it’s better than the original in almost every respect: the game play is tighter and more interesting, issues with collectable items have been fixed, and the story is better integrated. Combat is deeper and more varied, the levels are large and interesting, and the core elements that made Alan Wake fun have been left alone. Though a game of comparably tiny scope, American Nightmare takes the Alan Wake formula and perfects it.

The core mechanic of the game is the time loop Wake finds himself trapped within. There are three large areas that Wake visits over and over, trying to tweak his changes to reality so that the result he wants will come to fruition. Within each level there are enemies to fight, NPCs to talk to, items to find, and areas to explore. American Nightmare deftly fast-forwards item quests each time through a level segment so that you don’t actually spend too much time performing the same actions over and over again. Each loop plays out slightly differently, and though the stages repeat the story is constantly moving forward.

“Try to imagine that everything that happens to us goes on in someone else’s mind. We are that mind. That means we have no soul, we are someone else’s soul. So far we are on familiar philosophical ground. Both Berkeley and Schelling would prick up their ears.”

The time loop mechanic is brilliant for two important reasons.

First, it is an extremely smart way to create an interesting game without pouring the vast resources necessary to build a modern AAA title. By reusing level art and characters, American Nightmare packs a whole lot of gameplay into a fairly small amount of content. You might think that having a game with only three levels would get pretty repetitive, but the way items and characters are mixed up with each visit keeps the game fresh and interesting. Console games are expensive, and development cost creates a tension between financial risk and creative freedom. By intelligently reusing expensive assets (the levels and characters), Remedy creates breathing room for creativity in the game design itself. From a game production standpoint, American Nightmare is an extremely slick design.

Second, the time loop allows Alan Wake’s central story innovation, the manuscript pages, to shine. In Remedy’s first Alan Wake game, Wake constantly finds pages from a manuscript that he himself has written, though he can’t remember it. The pages describe future events, and they are never wrong. It’s an interesting story telling mechanic because it flips the normal role of narrative documents in horror games on its head. Instead of filling in the backstory with events of the past, Wake’s manuscript is describing (and, we eventually realize, dictating) the future.

The problem with the first Wake manuscript is that the pages are sort of hard to find. Without them, the game devolves into a rather simple shooter and a lot of running in dark woods. But to find them, the player must throw any pretext of participating in the narrative out the window: Wake has to stop looking for his wife and start canvasing the levels if he expects to find every page. As I wrote in my review of Alan Wake, the collectable system conflicts with the large, linear design of the levels, and hurt the game considerably.

This problem is very cleanly resolved in American Nightmare by the time loop. First of all, most of the manuscript pages (which again describe future events, albeit with a lot more clarity) are placed in places where you cannot miss them. They shine like a lightbulb and even appear on the mini map. Better yet, if you miss a page the first time through a level you can pick it up the next time through; you have many chances to collect everything. Since the levels are designed to host multiple goals throughout the game, they are designed as large open arenas rather than linear paths, and this makes exploring them a lot more fun. The approach works so well that the original Alan Wake seems a bit clunky by comparison.

“But why shouldn’t they feel so cocky?”

“Because it is feasible that they, too, are nothing but mind.”

“How could they be?”

…

“But it is possible that a completely different author is somewhere writing a book about a UN Major Albert Knag, who is writing a book for his daughter Hilde. This book is about a certain Alberto Knox who suddenly begins to send humble philosophical lectures to Sophie Amundsen, 3 Clover Close.”

All of this, the time loop and the smart level reuse and the manuscript pages, serves a singular purpose: to let the writing and story behind Alan Wake flex its muscles. The story here isn’t the most complicated thing in the world, and though the narrative is not deep it is extremely interesting. There are threads in the story, clues dropped throughout the game that invite the player to wonder about the events taking place. At one level, Alan Wake is fighting The Taken in a small Arizona town. At another level, Wake is playing out his own manuscript. At another level, the content of the screen might actually be an episode of Night Springs that Wake authored. And of course, at another level, Wake is a video game character we are driving around with a controller on our TVs. This is fertile philosophical ground; it reminded me of Sophie’s World, a philosophy textbook wrapped up as a novel by Jostein Gaarder (which I’ve quoted a bit here). Though American Nightmare isn’t trying to teach you about existentialism, it provides a lot of mental meat for your brain to chew on.

And that, I think, is the mark of a really good game.

Rise of Nightmares

Platforms: Xbox360
Release Date: 2011-06-09
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ☆☆☆☆
A lame zombie brawler is rendered unplayable by its motion control scheme.

Rise of Nightmares is a first-person horror beat-em-up that relies on the Kinect sensor for controls. You pivot your shoulders left and right to turn, put your foot forward to walk, and punch or slash with your fists to attack enemies in first person.

At least, that’s what the game tells you to do. The controls do not work. They are an abject failure.

This might not be the developer’s fault. My limited experience with several Kinect games so far has been generally frustrating. But Rise of Nightmare is by far one of the most broken games I’ve played, and it’s all thanks to the body motion controls.

The Kinect requires about 6 feet of clearance between itself and you, with nothing in between. I’ve lived in a lot of different places–we moved nine times in the last decade–and of all the places I’ve lived in, my current house has the largest living room. Even if I push my coffee table all the way back against the couch, which is itself touching a wall, I can barely create six feet of space. Rise of Nightmares tells me that I’m in the “optimal play position” at this location but then warns me that I am too close constantly. OK, so I flip my coffee table on its end, move the (vastly superior) Wii Balance Board that I hide under it elsewhere, and that buys me another two feet of space. Now I really am in the optimal range for the Kinect, but the game is still awful.

For instance, early in the game the tutorial teaches you how to move. Put your foot forward to walk, further forward to run. About ten minutes later you must run across a sinking train car. OK, put your foot forward. Wrong, you die. I died 26 times in this location. What they actually want you to do is run in place, an action you have never performed, nor will ever perform again in this game. Only, the detection is poor, so even if you try running in place a few times, it might not work and you might feel like an idiot for dying 26 times in the first ten minutes of the game. This was the absolute worst example for me, but there are problems like this all over Rise of Nightmares. Simple actions, such as opening doors and punching with your fists, are routinely misread. And some genius at Sega decided to add a bunch of one-hit-kill sequences in which you must step back to avoid spikes. I obviously can’t step back because I’ve already got my back up against a wall just to be detected by the stupid Kinect in the first place.

Even when the controls are detected correctly it feels like you are playing underwater. Everything is so imprecise and slow–there’s a huge amount of lag between your action and your avatar’s version of that action on the screen. If you could see your avatar walking around it would look like a drunk person–it’s impossible to go straight and equally hard to turn to a desired angle reliably. I will admit that combat is occasionally fun, mostly because there are some fun weapons to wield, but it’s always a battle against the controls and not the monsters. Walking around is so difficult that the developers actually included a “walk to the next location for me” button.

The problem with this kind of game is that the controls are broken because of the novelty of the technology, not because the game design is afforded by that technology. Rise of Nightmares played with a controller would be a better game. The game is in service to the novelty rather than the technology being in service to the game design. It’s a gimmick.

OK, I’m done talking about controls. They are terrible and utterly ruin the game. I woke up with horrible back pain. Let’s move on.

Rise of Nightmares is, when you take the controls out of the equation, basically a House of the Dead-style light gun game with (somewhat) free movement and melee attacks instead of a light gun. The free movement thing is sort of a false feature, though, because while you can move freely within your environment (must resist urge to make a quip about movement controls here), the path through the game is almost entirely linear. There are minor reasons to explore (mostly to find weapons and collectables) but they are all ancillary to the main path and add little to the game. Free movement isn’t an obvious benefit to this kind of game–it’s a solution without a problem.

Given that Rise of Nightmares is best thought of as a light gun game without the light gun, there’s not a whole lot left to its design to explore. The levels are linear, the combat is simple and routine (collect weapons, attack and guard), and there aren’t a whole lot of other mechanics to dissect. The weapons are varied and fun, but they all basically do the same thing, which is hack limbs off the zombie things that approach you slowly one at a time. There are a few puzzles in the game but most of them are short and trivial; mostly flipping switches or finding items to unlock doors, things like that.

There is one mechanic that I liked and felt was underused. The Pyramid Head of this game (seems like every game has one lately) is a big dude in a trench coat with a metal plate over his face named Ernst. Thought he can open the plate, Ernst apparently prefers to walk around in circles blind. Occasionally you will run into Ernst while roaming the halls of some unlikely mansion, and in these sections you must stop moving so that he doesn’t hear you. It’s unclear which kinds of movements will make sound, so when the game warns you to stop and be quiet your best bet is to just freeze. Unless he runs into you, Ernst won’t notice that you are there as long as you remain quiet. Similar systems exist in other horror games (notably Amnesia: The Dark Descent), and generally those other games do it better. But as a Kinect game, this mechanic is the only time during play when the game context and controls align: ceasing all movement is actually hard to do, and though the game isn’t the least bit scary, I caught myself holding my breath once or twice as Ernst waltzed by.

The one thing about Rise of Nightmares that has me scratching my head is the story. Not the content of the story itself–that’s fairly nonsensical and not very mysterious. Rather, the very existence of the story is interesting. Remember, this is basically a light gun shooter like House of the Dead. It doesn’t really need any story to operate: either you like punching the air to kill monsters or you don’t. House of the Dead’s thin excuses for story have always been more than enough to carry those games because you either like shooting zombies or you don’t. Unlike other types of horror games, the mechanics are really the whole show.

That’s why I found it surprising that Rise of Nightmares spends quite a bit of time on story exposition. There are cut scenes and lots of characters, but above and beyond that the last fourth of the game is designed to communicate the story through play. That’s not to say that the story is actually good or anything–it’s terrible. But occasionally it contains (very brief) flashes of brilliance, and there sure is a lot of effort put into relaying it to the player. The effort is mostly wasted, as the story isn’t worth it and the control problems overshadow everything else, but it makes me wonder if Rise of Nightmares was originally planned as a traditional game. Perhaps it feels so broken because it was converted to a Kinect title mid-way through development? I don’t know, but I am surprised to see so much developer effort go into story in a game which has almost no use for it.

Though I complained quite a bit about the simplicity of Night of Sacrifice, the first-person Wii Balance Board horror game, Rise of Nightmares makes it look like an understated art piece, something designed to be simple rather than as a result of incompetence. Rise of Nightmares, on the other hand, is a more complex but much, much worse game.