August 3, 2003

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.

August 3, 2003

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.

August 3, 2003

…Iru!

Platforms: PSX
Release Date: 1998-03-26
Regions: Japan
Chris’s Rating: ☆☆☆☆
An extremely dated exercise in unwavering linearity, …Iru! is only interesting when contrasted with better games.

I have a huge collection of obscure horror games that I have amassed over the years. Most of them are Japan-only PS1 releases, and these days they are neigh unplayable. They are so old and clunky that sitting through them is a serious test of my patience. But I keep them around and try to play one through every once in a while because occasionally there is a gem hiding in that geriatric pile. Titles like Hellnight and (I’m told) Overblood 2 are examples of games that still have a lot to teach us about horror design. Every time I buy an old horror game I hold out hope that it’ll be another Clock Tower: The First Fear, an interesting take on the horror genre, something that forces me to adjust my assumptions about what horror games are. A little stroke of genius just waiting to be discovered. Unfortunately, …Iru! is not one of those games.

…Iru! is a first person 3D horror game for the PS1 made by Takara in 1998. The title roughly translates to “…something’s here!,” but the word is so generic that it befuddles most search engines. Iru takes place in a high school that features a large mechanical clock in its center. A number of students who’ve stayed late to finish preparations for a school festival find themselves locked in one night, and soon the bodies start to pile up. The intrepid protagonist, a stoic upperclassman, must figure out what’s going on and try to save his girlfriend from the grips of the nefarious entities vaguely referenced by the game’s title. The game is a first-person exploratory adventure game; you walk around, collect items, and occasionally solve puzzles, but there’s no combat or any other form of action sequence.

That short description probably gives you enough information to guess at Iru’s gameplay. You solve some puzzles, unlock some doors, explore the school, talk to people. Boilerplate stuff, pretty standard for this kind of game. But as routine as this may sound, Iru manages to screw it up in a way that gives me new respect for other adventure games.

Iru’s major flaw is that it refuses to give the player multiple goals. At any given point in the game there is one operation that will advance the story. It might be talking to a person, or visiting a certain location, or using an item. Whatever the action, there’s only ever one correct action at any given time. You cannot get to point C without passing through points A and B, in that order. This makes Iru extraordinarily linear; there’s no way to actually diverge from the main path because the main path is the only path! While other games in this genre tend to implicitly create short- and long-term goals for the player, Iru’s goals are always immediate: find the next story point.

Unfortunately this linear design is somewhat antithetical to an exploration game. What is the point of exploring a space if there is nothing to find? What’s more, the game generally does not give out any clues about where you should go next. You find yourself somewhere in a high school with many rooms, any one of which could contain the next plot point necessary to progress. You could walk aimlessly around for hours and still miss it! That’s not exploration, it’s a waste of time.

Iru is at its worst in the first hour or two. The purpose of this segment is to set the characters and story up, and it involves talking to various students and faculty in sequence. But of course, you can’t know where those people are, so mostly this hour consists of visiting each room over and over again until you find the one that has somebody in it. The game gets a tiny bit better as it goes on because the plot begins to provide more specific goals, but it’s still extremely tedious. In my Silent Hill Downpour review I noted that nobody wants to search for needles in haystacks in video games because it’s just not fun. Iru, unfortunately, is entirely structured around just such an operation.

The real-time 3D engine behind Iru must have looked pretty bad even in 1998, but by today’s standards it is absolutely horrendous. The sound is poor but sometimes unintentionally hilarious, and the controls are bad but serviceable (thank goodness they included a run button). Iru’s story is fairly random and nonsensical, but it doesn’t matter. There are only about ten puzzles in the entire game, but it took me close to eight hours to finish; that should give you some idea of how much time you spend just walking around.

There is one thing I liked about Iru, and that’s its hiding mechanic. Every once in a while (maybe three or four times over the course of the game), an enemy will chase you into a room and you’ll have a limited amount of time to hide before they kill you. You’ll hide in a locker or a cardboard box or something, and then a cutscene will play that shows the enemy walk in, look around, and then leave. Though simple, these sequences are when the game is at its peak. There is a nice graphic at the top of the screen that shows the enemy approaching, and despite the general low quality of the game, the time pressure makes it click (if only for a minute or two). Unfortunately these sequences are scripted and only happen a few times throughout the game.

What is the value of playing old games like Iru? The game itself has almost nothing to teach us; everything it does has since been done more effectively by better, more widely-known games. Nor is this one of those “almost genius” titles that occasionally stuns us with flashes of brilliance. It’s just an old game, weighed down by dated conventions and flat-out bad design. What can we possibly learn from it?

I am a firm believer in the idea that every failure has something to teach us. In this case, Iru’s absolute linearity has made me appreciate the way that Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and every other good horror game ever uses layered goals that operate over different terms. If nothing else Iru has got me thinking about systems in better games that I have thus far taken for granted. It is a sharp contrast from many better games, and that contrast is good meat for study.

August 3, 2003

Silent Hill Downpour

Platforms: Xbox360, PS3
Release Date: 2012-03-13
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★☆☆☆
A disappointing entry in the Silent Hill series, Downpour’s flaws stem from a few major design decisions.

Silent Hill Downpour is a disappointing game. It is clearly the worst Silent Hill game to date, and it was justly panned by the press. But what the press can’t agree on is what exactly is wrong with it. Some reviewers like the combat system, others hate it. Some reviewers abhorred the story, others found it interesting. The problems with the game are many, but there’s no consensus on which are the worst.

It’s not that Downpour is half-assed; it is clearly the product of a huge amount of effort. You can tell by looking at it; the art and story and design are deep enough that somebody must have thought about this game pretty hard. The developers clearly know the series; it’s not an exaggeration to describe the game as an amalgamation of previous Silent Hill mechanics and scenes. While there are bugs and other execution problems, it’s not glitches or poor programming that ruins the game. Rather, this is one of those rare games that takes a gamble on a Big Idea, a wholly different approach, and fails miserably. I suspect that the disagreement about which aspects of Downpour are rotten stem from a macro-level design problem, a single decision that caused ripple effects throughout the design of the game. Depending on where you look, you might see a ripple and identify it as a problem. But the real problem is larger, more basic, and its influence is pervasive.

Identifying this underlying flaw can be difficult. It’s hard to separate the symptoms of the disease from the affliction itself. I’d like to work backwards from some mundane execution issues until we discover Silent Hill Downpour’s core problem, the root of all of its other issues. Let us treat the shape of this game is a tree so that we can start at one of the leafs and attempt to make our way back to the trunk.

To that end, let’s start with a rather simple–but frustrating–user interface problem. One of the most annoying things about Silent Hill Downpour is that a “Press A to Pick Up” icon appears every few steps. Murphy, the protagonist, can barely cross the street without being prompted to pick something up. Sometimes he’s discovered an important item, but usually it’s a weapon which will be swapped for Murphy’s current weapon if he decides to collect it. The problem is that the same prompt is used for both items and weapons, which destroys your ability to ransack the area for important items and clues. You can cover a space looking for items, but mostly you’ll only find weapons that you do not want; if you are carrying around a shotgun you’re not about to drop it for a brick. Can you imagine an Adventure-style game that is filled with useless junk which you must sift through to find the one important item? Worse, you can’t actually see what it is that the game wants you to pick up; you must spin the camera up and around until you locate a glowing item on the ground. You do this every few feet. Take a few steps, look at the item pickup. Take a few more steps. Look at the item pickup. It is infuriating.

Let’s move a level up. Why are there crappy weapons strewn all over the ground? The answer is that weapons in Silent Hill Downpour degrade over time and will eventually break. A broken weapon leaves you defenseless, and even if you run away you’ll need to find another weapon before you can progress. But weapons break based on the way the player uses them, and thus the developers can’t control when the weapon will fall apart. Their solution was simply to blanket the game in weapons, thereby solving the problem of becoming defenseless at arbitrary times but simultaneously making it very difficult to find non-weapon items.

Another level up. Why do weapons break in the first place? Is it because they broke in Silent Hill: 0rigins? 0rigins also had weapons that would degrade, and left items around the world as a result. But 0rigins also allowed its protagonist to carry multiple items and swap between them quickly; it even had an indicator of how much more abuse a given weapon could take before breaking. Thus the player can spam the collect button to ransack an area without fear of losing their current weapon. Downpour has none of these things: it limits weapons to one firearm and one other item, there is no durability indicator, and items can’t be stored in the inventory as a backup. If breakable weapons had just been lifted from 0rigins, it seems like they would have gone ahead and lifted the whole 0rigins system. No, items need to break for some other reason.

We’re close to the trunk now. What would happen if weapons didn’t break? Well, you’d find the most powerful weapon (the fire axe, I think), and just carry that around through the whole game, thus rendering the entire weapon system moot. This was never a problem in earlier Silent Hill games because they were basically linear; the developers could easily schedule the release of new weapons to the player (not to mention new enemies) because they controlled the order in which items could be found. This way, previous games in the series used weapon pick-ups as a way to control the level of difficulty (and tension) across the length of the game. Downpour, on the other hand, is based on an open world design, where the player has much more freedom of movement than in previous games, and consequently weapons cannot be easily scheduled.

This is it. This is Downpour’s Big Idea: it is the first Silent Hill game to feature a large, open world for its town. Most other Silent Hill games have featured large outdoor areas, but they’ve never been really open; they’ve always been walled off at the edges so that the player is lead along a very specific path. The open world is a significant deviation from the series norm, and it is the core problem with the game’s design.

We’ve reached the trunk of the design, the root of the game’s decision tree. From here we can see other branches leading to other problems caused by the decision to employ an open world. Let’s follow one down.

I believe that what the developers at Vatra wanted was to make the entire town of Silent Hill a large recursive unlocking space, where the player would criss-cross the map many times, collecting items and solving puzzles on the way, all while progressively widening the available space. Much like the Resident Evil mansion, you might need an item from one side of town to solve a puzzle on the other side of town. Only, the space is much, much larger than the compact Umbrella stronghold. Though you have a map, borders of the space must be traced manually because there are blockades and abysses in the way, not to mention back alleys and side-street shortcuts.

One level down. The size of Silent Hill required the developer to reuse art heavily–it’s just too big to be completely unique. The houses in Downpour’s Silent Hill all look very similar, and some of them even share identical layouts with identical rooms. This isn’t because the developers were lazy (no shipping game was made by lazy developers), but rather the result of a trade-off between the size of the town and the cost of creating high-end art. Consequently Silent Hill is really easy to get lost in; there are not enough identifiable landmarks to get a sense of whether or not you’ve visited this street before (not to mention the ever-present layer of fog that covers the landscape). While each room in Resident Evil’s mansion has a different color scheme, a unique camera perspective, and an identifiable theme, the streets of Downpour’s Silent Hill all look the same.

Another level down. Herein lies a major problem for the designers. If they want the player to criss-cross the landscape, but the landscape is very large and lacks variety, they run the risk of frustrating the player with item quests. Say you need a particular key from one side of town to unlock a particular door on the other side of town. In classic Silent Hill design, this door represents the next step in the story progression–you can’t move forward until you open it. But the key could be anywhere! Do you really want to spend hours running up and down similar-looking streets, trying to find something–anything–that you might have missed before, hoping that it will lead you to the key so that you can progress? No, of course you don’t–nobody does. That sort of item search-a-thon has destroyed games with much smaller problem spaces. In a game like Downpour, where the problem space is huge, it could be deadly.

We’re approaching the end of this branch. The designers of must have struggled with this problem, and the solution they settled on is two-fold. First, they made almost all of the item puzzles optional. If you explore the homes of Silent Hill you will run across puzzles, generally requiring you to go somewhere or collect items, often by backtracking, which you can choose to complete or ignore. Secondly, the designers placed all of the required missions upon a linear path through the town. If you ignore the side missions and just progress towards the next story point you can complete the game without ever backtracking, thus saving you from potential search-a-thon frustration. On paper this seems like a great solution: players do not need to solve every puzzle in order to progress (resolving the key-in-the-haystack problem), and the player himself can regulate how quickly he progresses through the game. People who b-line for the end will have a linear experience similar to classic Silent Hill, while those who embrace the open world are given a bunch of secondary goals for which they must solve interesting traversal challenges. High-five, problem solved!

The leaf problem. In practice the approach does not work as well as I assume the designers had hoped it would. Here the shadow of a single design decision–the idea to make Silent Hill an open world–looms over the entire game, affecting the very core of it in ways that probably were not obvious at the onset of development. The result of the optional side-missions, at least for me, was a complete lack of agency. The game keeps telling us that Murphy is just trying to get out of Silent Hill, trying to escape as quickly as possible. But then it expects us to, in the middle of our flight from danger and his past, drop everything and search the town for some paintings? He should put his escape on hiatus while he scatters the ashes of some stranger somewhere in order to get an item that he already has? Downpour also shies away from setting explicit destinations, so a lot of the time in Silent Hill is spent running around aimlessly, taking turns at random, hoping that something new to do will show up. And if we solve the puzzles, then what? There doesn’t seem to be any gameplay benefit to the side-quests; any weapons handed out will break eventually anyway, and other than an achievement and possibly a story anecdote, there’s no reward offered for traversing Silent Hill more than once. Even worse, at the end of the game the character is pulled out of the town abruptly and never has a chance to go back and complete missions that are half-solved. I ended the game with an inventory full of worthless items that I spent a lot of time discovering but never actually put to any use.

The idea that Silent Hill itself should be an open, explorable world must have sounded good at first. It must have seemed like a great way to differentiate the game from the rest of the series without straying too far from the core elements of Silent Hill. It is a lofty goal, a genuine Big Idea. But I think it hurts the game deeply, and that its aftershocks retard almost every other major system in the game. It is the trunk of the game, but its core is diseased and the sickness reaches all the way out to the leafs of the design. The open world is, in my mind, Silent Hill Downpour’s most significant design failure.

But the open world is just a gameplay system, and Silent Hill games are more than just systems. The series was not made famous by its level design or combat system or inventory screen. It was made famous by its narrative, its characters, and its emotional affect. It’s the content of Silent Hill games, rather than the core mechanics, that keep the audience interested. Though we may spend most of our time climbing the tree, our real goal is to reach a vantage point from which we can observe the surrounding landscape.

We can, if we choose, write off all of the mechanical problems discussed so far as unhappy side-effects of the open world design. Sure, there are annoying flaws and bugs to be found in the nuts and bolts of the game, but it is not unplayable. Perhaps this is one of those diamond-in-the-rough games, and if we look passed its dreary gameplay we might find a compelling narrative lurking. Let us, then, turn our attention to the surrounding landscape.

The ground is dry and spotted with weeds. The key to any successful narrative is pacing. Silent Hill Downpour certainly looks like a Silent Hill game, but it does not feel like one. There is a serious lack of cohesion in the pacing of the game, the structure of the story, and even the characters it involves. There are visual and narrative motifs that are painstakingly introduced and then apparently forgotten. Questions are raised and then discarded. Game mechanics are introduced, taught to the player, and then never once used again. The nozzle controlling the flow of the story only seems to have two settings: information overload or deathly silence.

Bits of trash are scattered everywhere. Here’s an example. The first two or three hours of Silent Hill Downpour play completely differently than the rest of the game. There are mechanics introduced (such as a yes/no question system with character morality implications) that are never revisited. The game spends quite a bit of time introducing crows as a foreshadowing motif, only to then forget them completely. There’s an otherworld transition involving fire that is replicated once more and then never used again. A ledge-grab sequence in the second hour is not used again until the very end of the game. Murphy spends some significant time in a cave with his lighter (rarely used thereafter) reading about its history (which has no subsequent bearing on anything), and fighting a monster type that we never really encounter again. The game teaches you how to throw weapons, a move deemed so valuable that the right trigger is dedicated to it, and this is a move you will perform once for the tutorial and then never again for the length of the game (except by accident, when you discard your weapon in the heat of battle and die as a result).

Downpour does this over and over again, although the worst offenses occur in the opening scenes. It’s as if these first segments were developed independently of the rest of the game–not only does it not feel like a Silent Hill game, it doesn’t feel like the rest of Silent Hill Downpour.

The road runs right off a cliff. Downpour’s most damning failure, I think, is the pacing. Since its inception the Silent Hill series has operated on a consistent rhythm. There’s a descent into the fog world, followed by some time in an indoor section that builds tension up to a breaking point. Just as the tempo reaches its crescendo the fog world is replaced by the otherworld and the level of tension is suddenly doubled. Rather than rising and falling, Silent Hill’s otherworld transition cranks the tempo up to maximum and then holds it there. The player is put under sustained stress as he traverses the otherworld until finally he is released back into the fog world, more dangerous now than before but a welcome respite from the oppression of the otherworld. Recent Silent Hill games have tweaked the formula slightly, but they have all maintained a rhythm to the progression. Beats in the narrative are followed by beats in the gameplay. The pattern of gradual increase of stress, followed by a long, constant stress, followed by release and relief has been used in every Silent Hill game to date.

A thick haze blankets the landscape. For all the bits of pervious Silent Hill games Downpour attempts to copy, it completely fails to reproduce the rhythm that makes the series feel familiar. Part of the problem is the open world, as the duration spent in that area can’t be easily controlled by the developers and thus it’s never clear exactly when the next story point is coming. Downpour does periodically route the player into an extended indoor area (a library, a church, etc), and these areas are where the game is the strongest. And the game has a few startling otherworld transitions as well (such as the Hansel and Gretel sequence). But for the most part, the otherworld transitions happen at random times, often in the middle of mundane, tension-free play. The first transition in the game happens much earlier than any other Silent Hill game to date, at least as best as I can recall: we’re thrown into the otherworld in the first 30 minutes, long before the game has had a chance to really get its hooks in us and ratchet up the tension. Then the otherworld vanishes for several hours, only to return after a tension-free cutscene. The timing is completely inconsistent; there are no discernible beats in the narrative and the transition points feel arbitrary.

The otherworld often involves a running sequence inspired by Shattered Memories (with shades of the red fog section of Silent Hill 3) and is initially a high-tension experience. But as with Shattered Memories, these sections lose their power when they become more difficult. Running through a maze is not very fun, and if you die and restart it is much less fun (and much less tension-inducing) the second (or third, or fifteenth) time around. After restarting a few times you’re thinking about the set of commands you’ll need to input to progress rather than the symbolic implications of the corridors Murphy passes through. Occasionally the game will drop Murphy off in a non-chase otherworld area, but these are not very effective either; the oppressive feel of every other Silent Hill otherworld is completely missing from Downpour’s.

The weak otherworld, made even more impotent by the lack of build-up before its introduction, makes Downpour feel like a random jumble of scenes connected by long, monotonous open world sequences. The tight tension spring, so deftly coiled and released in previous games, is absent. It sometimes feels more like a slinky.

We climbed Silent Hill Downpour’s gnarled gameplay tree and are rewarded with a desolate scene; an inconsistent and untidy, even spatially suspect landscape. The angles do not align, the ground has giant fissures running through it. Neither the climb nor the view are rewarding; there is no glory in the challenge and no value in the prize. The careful gardening that made the early Silent Hill games so wonderful is nowhere to be found here. It’s like an alternate dimension Silent Hill game where things are really bad and nothing makes sense. Quite like a scene from Silent Hill itself, I guess.

August 3, 2003

Amy

Platforms: Xbox360, PS3
Release Date: 2012-01-11
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ☆☆☆☆
An interesting idea is completely ruined by mechanical flaws and lackluster design.

Amy is one of those games that sounds great on paper. Designed by Paul Cuisset, a veteran game developer famous for creating the seminal Flashback (one of my favorites), Amy is a horror game in which you must lead a small autistic child of the same name through a zombie-infested town to reach a hospital where she can hopefully receive treatment. The whole town is infected with the zombie virus but Amy is immune, which means that the protagonist, Lana, will remain human as long as she stays close to Amy. If they are separated the virus starts to set in quickly and within a minute or two Lana will herself become a zombie. There’s a little stealth along the way, puzzles involving pair play with Amy and Lana, and not a single gun to be found. It sounds like a pretty neat premise; it sounds a bit like Siren (another favorite). On paper it’s a design that should provide a large problem space to explore, and one that should service the game’s horrific theme.

But of course it doesn’t work. Amy is god-awful.

I knew this going in. Jim Sterling at Destructoid, a die-hard horror fan if there ever was one, called Amy “one of the worst games of all time.” Several friends who play games for a living warned me that Amy was horrible, possibly even uncompletable. But often I have found that even the most terrible games have a little spark of brilliance lurking in them somewhere–a faint glow that, while insufficient to save the game, is worth discovering.

Now that I’ve completed the game I can say with conviction that Amy has no such spark. It’s not just that the level design is terrible (it is), the puzzles are contrived (they are), or that the stealth design is horrendous (it is); Amy is a fundamentally broken game. Almost every mechanic in the game is buggy or flawed in some way. Collision detection, path finding, combat, puzzle progression–you name it, it’s broken. Take combat for example: when Lana is hit by an enemy she stumbles back away from the direction she is facing, which sounds ok until you realize that this will cause her to actually walk into her attacker when she is hit from behind. You can spend your time collecting items but your inventory (including your weapon) is emptied at the end of each chapter anyway so it’s quite pointless. Or consider the controls: the camera is pulled in so tight that Lana has to walk in wide circles to go anywhere. Of course, collision detection doesn’t work either; you can hit electrified fences and the like without actually getting anywhere near them. It’s impossible to appreciate the design because you can barely play the game.

That said, I think that even if Amy was free of mechanical issues it would still be a poor game. The mechanics of holding hands with the child to heal, allowing yourself to become infected in order to sneak passed zombies, and forcing the player to leave Amy alone in order to solve puzzles all seem to have depth, but almost none of that depth is explored in the game. Almost every puzzle in the game is a version of a simple problem in which you must get Lana and Amy into appropriate locations so that one can raise or lower an elevator while the other boards it. These puzzles are predicated on the supposition that in the future mankind will have deemed it fit to remove elevator call buttons from their normal location inside the carriage and instead place them across the room or in other rooms altogether. Even excusing the contrived setup, these puzzles are just too simple to sustain an entire game, even a short one like Amy.

It’s worth noting that the developer, VectorCell, released a patch for Amy after it was released. The patch apparently adds more checkpoints and auto-saves between chapters. Many of the reviews that came out when Amy was released complained that the game could not be completed because the checkpoints were way too few and far between, and this problem seems to have been significantly mitigated by the patch. This doesn’t actually make Amy any better of a game, mind you–it just means that it’s now possible to complete.

There’s really not much positive to say about Amy. It is severely broken, and even if it was not so damaged, it seems incapable of flexing its design muscles. A potentially interesting design is utterly wasted on this game. It seems likely that the developers were forced to ship this game long before it was ready–the unused powerup slots and inventory space in the user interface indicate that there might have been more game here once upon a time. Almost every game I complete has something worth exploring, some little interesting spark to suss out and examine. Amy, on the other hand, is one of those titles that has absolutely nothing going for it.

August 3, 2003

Ikenie No Yoru

Also known as: Night of Sacrifice
Platforms: Wii
Release Date: 2011-03-24
Regions: Japan
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
Incredibly simple gameplay is made scary by the use of the Wii Balance Board for movement.

Ikenie No Yoru (???????, “Night of Sacrifice”) is the only game I know of that uses the Wii Balance Board other than Nintendo’s own Wii Fit. It’s a horror game set in rural Japan, a desolate spot called Tsukuyomi Ravine, and stars five high school students identified by colors. Blue is the protagonist, Yellow is the heroine, Pink is the popular girl and Red is her boyfriend. They are visiting a home owned by Black’s father, who vanished without a trace some years ago. You can leave the characters with color-based names if you want, but the game encourages you to name them after your real life friends.

The game mechanics are extremely simple. Walking in place on the Balance Board causes the first-person viewpoint to walk forward in the game. You set the pace with your feet, and often you will find it necessary to literally run for your life. The Wiimote acts as a flashlight and allows you to steer your character through the house, the surrounding buildings, and of course, various basements and caves and other foreboding places. These areas are inhabited by ghosts who will kill you in a single hit if you get too close (the game helpfully records the exact time and date you were ‘cursed’), but they can generally be avoided by high-tailing it or occasionally sneaking around. There are doors to open and a few notes to find lying around, but there is no inventory, no items to collect, no health and no life bar and no weapons. The levels are pretty much linear–all you can do is traverse from point A to point B, avoiding ghosts along the way. This is first person exploration in one of its simplest forms.

From a design perspective, Ikenie No Yoru is barely even a game. There have been simple, non-combat first person horror games before (think Hell Night and Echo Night: Beyond), but those games involve more traditional item puzzles, or at least labyrinthine level design. Ikenie No Yoru does feature a few different forms of challenge (sneaking, running away, hiding, searching, balancing on the Board), but all of them are based on the two extremely basic inputs: moving forward by walking and navigating with the Wiimote. Heck, the only button used in the game is A, and only then to open doors. The enemies are generally brainless, and though they will sometimes chase you, they mostly just stand around. The only puzzles in the game involve figuring out how to navigate through gauntlets of enemies without getting grabbed and cursed, and generally these are very easy. In fact, the game designers have gone out of their way to make sure the game is easy: some levels even have signs that say things like, “anybody being chased by a ghost should hide out here.”

Sounds pretty unsophisticated, right? The graphics are passible, but this is a Wii game and they are nothing special. The art style makes some interesting choices related to character design, but mostly you are walking around through very dark, oppressive places. Basements and caves and tunnels and things like that; if you have ever played a horror game before it is all familiar territory. The enemies are the same sort of pale-person-with-no-eyes type that plague a lot of other recent Japanese games, and there are only three or four variations total. The music and sound are quite nice, and in some places done particularly well, but for the most part the sound is understated and subtle. There’s a story, and it’s presented in an interesting way, but it has no real bearing on the game play.

Ikenie No Yoru is a horror game with literally nothing extra. It’s only real stand-out trait is that it uses the Wii Balance Board for movement. It is about as basic as you can make it.

And yet, the crazy thing is, it totally works.

Ikenie No Yoru is way scarier than it has any right to be. There’s nothing about the game itself that is particularly convincing, and as a grizzled horror game veteran I pride myself in waltzing through these games as an analyst rather than a participant, but Ikenie No Yoru got the drop on me more times than I’d like to admit. The game play is trivial, the graphics are inconsequential, and the story is mostly revealed outside of the game itself. But despite its absolutely basic interface and ho-hum content, Ikenie No Yoru is a scary game.

The key to Ikenie No Yoru’s success is the Wii Balance Board. The first-person interface, combined with actually stepping on the Board to make your character take a step in the game, makes the content totally work. Similar games with similar interfaces (like Calling and Ju-on: The Grudge) are not as effective because they do not use the Board. Even so, it wasn’t clear to me what it was about the Balance Board that made it effective. Why does Ikenie No Yoru’s content work when similar games come off as simplistic and arduous?

First, the level design and game content, while simple, is well-made. There are no mundane problems with collision detection or controls, and the levels remain diverse and compelling even though they are incredibly linear. The character animation is pretty good and the story is interesting. Though there’s not much to it, what’s there is good. Most importantly, there’s nothing to pull you out of the experience.

Before playing Ikenie No Yoru I wondered if the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion would make a game designed to raise your heart rate with exercise extra scary. Now that I’ve completed the game it seems like a solid explanation. The required physical motion is pretty light, but it did cause my heart rate to go up. I walked a total of about 15000 steps for this game, and toward the end I could feel each running escape in my calves. There is definitely enough work going on to increase my physiological state, but not so much that I was aware of it while playing. After each session, however, I noticed that I had started to sweat, and my legs had that pleasant burning associated with a good walk. During play my focus was squarely on the game. The two factors of the theory are elevation of physical state without an obvious cause and a contextual cue from the outside environment that the mind uses to make up a label for the elevated state. Ikenie No Yoru seems to meet those requirements perfectly: walking on the Balance Board is enough to cause your heart rate to rise and your breathing to increase, but not so much that you are conscious of it. At the same time, the game is streaming its horror content in first person, sans any sort of HUD or other on-screen display, directly into your brain through your eyes and ears. If we believe that Two-Factor works, the theory tells us that our brain may react to these inputs by mistaking our elevated physical state for fear and synthesizing an emotional response. The result, at least for me, was a fun and sometimes genuinely stressful experience.

As an aside, Ikenie No Yoru also has a funny bonus mode that you can unlock after beating the game on Hard Mode. The funny mode, called Heart Mode, uses the game content and characters to create a short faux-erotic game (“eroge,” as the Japanese say). It’s just a joke: there’s no actual nudity or erotic content of any sort, just the characters saying the same vapid things that eroge characters say (“I’m going to need to to check my entire body for signs of the curse!”), and I’m sure the developer didn’t intend for anybody to actually take it seriously. Still, I have to wonder: there is evidence that the brain hack described by the Two-Factor Theory can be used to falsify arousal the same way it can falsify fear. Is Heart Mode more effective as erotic content than it was intended to be because it requires the player to walk in place a bit as he plays? I didn’t actually unlock the mode, but it’s an interesting thought.

Though the content of Ikenie No Yoru is pretty thin, there are some areas where the developers betray their hardcore influences. The game is broken up into missions, short episodes that are organized around several playable characters. There’s also a section of missions called “Afterward” that take place after the main events of the game and star anonymous characters. The missions unlock such that you play a few missions with a character, then go play some Afterward missions, then go back and play more with another character. It’s not as complex or interesting as the crazy characters-over-time spreadsheet in Siren, but it serves a similar purpose: it delivers bits of story, out of order, across multiple characters, such that that the significance of certain events is not clear until the game is complete. There’s some Silent Hill film grain going on, and the characters look like something out of Kamaitachi No Yoru, solid-color silhouettes (presumably to make it easy to mentally replace them with the real life friends after which they are named). In addition to the simple narrative the game is occasionally interrupted by cell phone messages (from unknown senders, of the “diediediediedie” variety), which is a nice touch as well. Though Ikenie no Yoru is clearly designed to be a casual game, its developers are clearly familiar with the hardcore stuff.

Ikenie No Yoru is a very short, very easy game. It has few flaws, mostly because there’s not enough there to actually be flawed. Despite its casual approach and extreme simplicity, it works very well as a horror game because it uses the Wii Balance Board as a primary input. It is a fascinating example of the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion in action, and, occasionally, surprisingly scary. It’s worth a look as an outlier in this genre that works.

August 3, 2003

Dead Space 2

Platforms: Xbox360, PS3
Release Date: 2011-01-25
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
Slick as ever, Dead Space 2 is way more interesting than its predecessor.

I had problems with the original Dead Space. It played well enough and was clearly a high-end, well-produced game, but it just didn’t do anything for me. There was nothing to keep me interested, and for a guy who has a whole site dedicated to horror games, that’s saying something. In my review of Dead Space, I concluded that the major problem with the game was that it was simply too straightforward; it almost never required me to think very hard about what I was doing.

I am quite happy to report that Dead Space 2 is a significant improvement over its predecessor. The game remains an incredibly polished high-end game, but certain changes to the formula allow it to be much more successful, both as a fun action game and as a scary horror game. Rather than just enumerate all of the improvements Dead Space 2 makes over the original, I’m just going to focus on the areas that I think afford horror in the game.

By far, the most dramatic improvement is in the design of the levels, both in terms of the layout of the space and the way the levels are visually represented. Dead Space 1 had pretty much one level theme: “inside a space ship.” Dead Space 2 provides a significantly more diverse environment. The key is that Isaac is no longer on a space ship: he’s now wandering around a giant space colony. There are malls, stores, and government high-rises. The setting allows the narrative to explore environments that are common to horror games, including a church, its morgue, and even a school. Though Dead Space 2 also has its share of maintenance shafts and studded metal hatches, on the whole the levels are much more diverse and interesting. Each area looks visually different and the overall color palette changes from area to area as you progress, making it much more visually appealing. It’s still a pretty linear affair, but now there’s a lot of reason to progress: it’s fun to see what’s coming next.

The second key to making Dead Space 2 a better horror game is the focus on characters. Isaac in particular has a lot of dialog this time around, and he’s constantly taking his helmet off, which reminds us that he’s still just a fragile human under that badass armor. There is a fairly poor plot twist early in the game, but after that the characters are interesting and believable. Isaac is still a pretty stoic dude, but his character is improved by the constant appearance of his dead fiancée. Her apparition is scary in and of itself (and she looks phenomenal, with light pouring out of her eyes and mouth), but her real benefit is that she gives Isaac a chance to reflect, show some weakness, and maybe wonder whether or not he’s gone completely crazy. The voice acting helps sell the characters as well; at one particularly great point we hear Isaac’s voice start to falter, and we know that he’s really nervous about the area he’s about to enter. Because he’s been established as a real character, the effect works: we get pretty nervous too.

The rest of the game is pretty similar to its predecessor, but everything has been streamlined. Gone are the terrible mini games, but the interesting power node system returns. Most of the puzzles still involve shooting, time slowdown, or telekinesis, but they are better constructed and more fun than before. Zero G movement is vastly improved, and the level segments without gravity is where some of the most interesting exploration problems take place. And, when Dead Space 2 decides to be a big, bombastic action game, it pulls it off really well and doesn’t overdo it. Some of the problems from the original return (the invincible enemy still isn’t any fun), but for the most part Dead Space 2 is better in every category.

It would be remiss of me not to mention how fun the gameplay is. Even absent the horror content, Dead Space 2 is a really awesome shooter. There are certain weapons that seemed weak initially but with practice became insanely powerful. The weapon variety is also nice; once I found four guns that I was happy with I didn’t even bother buying any others because I was very satisfied. As I mentioned above, the levels and puzzles are also improved, so even if this game wasn’t about scary stuff I think it would be quite enjoyable. I got pretty hooked and finished all 13-odd hours in three or four lengthy gaming sessions. Importantly, the design has come into its own; it has progressed beyond “Resident Evil 4 in space,” which seemed to be the guiding idea behind the first game.

All that said, I think that Dead Space 2 still sells itself a little short. All the parts are there, and this time around they work together very well, but the game never reaches that transcendental state where the mechanics fall away and you are absolutely immersed in the game. Dead Space 2 is still too straightforward to be an excellent horror game; while it’s much more interesting than the original Dead Space, it still doesn’t give us enough cognitive meat to chew on.

To understand where Dead Space 2 goes astray, we need to be familiar with the concept of negative space. Negative space is all the things that the game doesn’t tell you; the areas that it suggests exist but never renders clearly. It is where all of the paths that are blocked off lead; it is what’s behind the locked door you can never open. It’s the parts of the story that are suggested but never addressed, or the answer to riddles posed by conflicting evidence. It is the area where your imagination is free to roam, where no solutions have been authored in advance. It is up to you to fill in the blanks, draw connections, and come to your own conclusions.

Negative space is a fundamental part of almost all forms of successful horror media because it allows the author to create fear that is tailored just for you. Or rather, the author lets you create your own fear; negative space allows you to come up with a personal explanation for things, and that’s almost always scarier than anything a game or film can show you on the screen. Is Silent Hill a more interesting place when we believe that it’s the creation of a crazy cult that’s into organized crime? No! It’s a much scarier place where there is no explanation, when the logic that guides it is apparent but fuzzy, when you yourself have to guess at what is going on.

Dead Space 2, like its predecessor, doesn’t build enough negative space for the player’s imagination to explore. Not that it doesn’t try–there are details and hints dropped occasionally that contribute to a small amount of mystery, but for the most part the events that occur in the game are pretty cut and dry. The linearity of the levels contributes to this; there’s only ever one correct way to go, and you have a little tool that will draw a line in that direction if you get confused (though, to be fair, the end of the game handles this very well). The dialog and logs left by former crew provide a few juicy morsels, but most of them are concerned with the next short-term goal rather than expanding the depth of the universe within which the game operates.

For example, early in the game we learn about “planet cracking,” a futuristic slash-and-burn practice that extracts resources while destroying the source, but this idea is not revisited over the course of the game. It’s mentioned in passing at the very, very end, and by then the effort is wasted; you could remove those details from the game an not affect the experience one bit. The few bits of narrative mystery that are there seem to be concerned with setting up a plot for some future game rather than expanding the imagination space. The biggest potential mystery of the game, namely “where did all these monsters come from,” is answered pretty concretely early on and then never revised. The eye machine, which is referenced obliquely over and over again in dialog, eventually comes and goes without the revelation of any new clues or any obvious change in the game. Dead Space 2 has many opportunities to expand the area of negative space it provides, but in most cases it passes them up to its own detriment.

In addition to a negative space that it two sizes too small, I also think that Dead Space 2 respects the player too much. I’ve mentioned how “respectful” design can hurt horror games before. The idea is that the game shouldn’t change the rules on the player mid-way through the game. In fact, it should take steps to enable its content to be more accessible to a wide range of players, like automatically adjusting difficulty or making it very obvious what the rules of the game are. This approach is correct for most types of games, but it can be antithetical to horror. The horror game requires that the player be kept on their toes; they need to feel as if they are not in control of the situation in order for it to remain scary over the length of the game. Not knowing what the rules are, or believing that the rules can change at any time, is an extremely effective way to keep the player from becoming comfortable and treating the game as a purely mechanical problem.

Dead Space 2 would be a better horror game if it respected the player just a little bit less. For example, Isaac often has to climb into maintenance shafts in order to get around locked or blocked doors. These shafts are like tiny air ducts; the space is claustrophobic, the camera closes in to show only Isaac’s immediate area, and often he travels through walls with some pretty scary-sounding stuff happening on just the other side. These areas are intended to be scary, but ultimately I found them relaxing. I can be quite certain that nothing will ever attack me in a air duct because there is no way to defend myself. The game respects the player too much to allow for a cheap, un-blockable hit, and so these areas are guaranteed to be safe. If the game had hit me once or twice over the course of the game in an air duct, each passage would have been much scarier. I wouldn’t have been able to relax in the knowledge that I can predict the game’s behavior. The maintenance shafts would have become areas where I had no weapons, rather than areas were I am in no danger. To some degree, the slickness of Dead Space 2’s game design also prevents some avenues for horror; it just can’t bring itself to change the rules on the player often enough to keep me unbalanced.

Dead Space 2 is engaging, the production values are through the roof, and it’s very fun. It does a pretty decent job of mixing action and horror, and though I think it misses a few opportunities to expand its horror repertoire, there’s no denying that it’s extremely well made. The improvements over the original Dead Space are simple but effective, and the result is a much stronger game. No longer content as a Resident Evil 4 clone in space, Dead Space 2 has come into its own. It’s a really fun, and occasionally quite scary game.

August 3, 2003

Catherine

Platforms: Xbox360, PS3
Release Date: 2011-07-26
Regions: USA Japan
Chris’s Rating: ★★★★
A thriller with sex, curses, and… block puzzles? Catherine is one of the most innovative and difficult-to-catagorize games ever.

Though this site has cataloged many horror games, most fall into one of a few distinct categories. You’ve got your exploration / puzzle games (in first or third person), your action games, a couple of stealth games and the occasional brawler. Throw in an adventure game or two and you can account for almost every horror game ever made.

Except for Catherine. Catherine defies categorization; it is unlike any game I’ve played before, horror or otherwise, in both theme and play style. It’s certainly a horror game, but the brand of horror it has to offer is a unique blend of fear-that-my-secret-will-be-revealed and insane, ego-crushing difficulty. It’s an adventure game with no exploration, a puzzle game with a significant story. It plays with sex, relationships, the emotional significance of marriage and adultery, and will even teach you a fair bit about various alcoholic drinks. Catherine is a weird, difficult, fascinating, and stressful game; I don’t think there’s ever been a title quite like it to date.

Vincent is a 30 year old programmer who spends most nights drinking with his friends at the Stray Sheep bar. He’s been going out with Katherine for five years, and lately she’s been hinting (read: threatening) that the next step in their relationship is marriage. Vincent isn’t ready for such a big commitment; “What’s wrong with our relationship the way it is?” he asks. He loves Katherine, or at least he says he does, but he can’t bring himself to actually consider the possibility of marriage. For the moment, his approach to the problem seems to be to drink it away.

His situation takes a dramatic turn for the worse when, after getting particularly hammered one night, Vincent wakes to find a strange girl naked in his bed beside him. His memory from the night before is hazy, but he gathers that he met the new girl, named Catherine, at the bar and eventually took her home. Catherine is the polar opposite of Katherine; she is young, athletic, blonde, fun-loving, and quite cute. Despite her good looks and apparently intense interest in Vincent, her presence is terrifying: Vincent realizes he’s cheated on Katherine, and if she finds out it will be the end of their relationship. Catherine, for her part, lets him know that if she ever found out that he was seeing other girls, she’d kill him (and the way she says it, sitting on his chest and tracing a line down his bare sternum, he’s not quite sure if she’s joking).

Vincent tries and fails to break his new relationship off. In the mean time, his primary goal is to ensure that Katherine and Catherine never find out about each other. The news is full of stories of men found dead in their beds, and the rumor mill suggests that these men were cursed by women they had wronged. At the same time, Vincent has a series of nightmares involving sheep, an endless staircase, and Katherine. He can’t quite remember the details in the morning, but he knows something is going on. I mean, above and beyond his problem with his girlfriends.

Catherine has a long and interesting story. The bits I’ve covered here account for the first hour or two of play; things continually worsen for Vincent over the course of the game, but there are some twists and turns along the way that I didn’t expect. The story is told through dialog, mostly in-game with an occasional cut scene, and the writing and voice acting is great (I played the Japanese version). The art and presentation is also top-notch. Catherine sports one of the best toon shaders I’ve every seen; it perfectly captures the manga chic art style upon which the game is based. Oh, and the sound, particularly the music, is similarly high end.

But it’s the story that provides the incentive to keep playing; though the game itself is fun and the production values high, the main reason to complete Catherine is to find out what happens to Vincent. The story is so well told and the characters so interesting that I was willing to work really hard to see the game through to its conclusion.

Now that I’ve spent so much time talking about story, it might surprise you to learn that Catherine is mostly a block puzzle game. Each night Vincent has a nightmare that constitutes the main component of the game: scaling a large tower made of blocks that he can move around to create a path. Blocks can be pushed or pulled, will stick to adjacent blocks and sometimes have odd properties (there are blocks that crumble, blocks that explode, slippery blocks, etc). The bottom of the tower is falling apart–the blocks float in space over a giant abyss–and so Vincent must constantly ascend in order to survive.

The block puzzle parts of the game are hard. I mean, really hard. Atlus released a patch shortly after Catherine went on sale that made it slightly easier (continue items give you two continues instead of one), but even with the patch the game is neigh impossible. You will die in this game, over and over again, on the same level, sometimes for days on end. It was not uncommon for me to die 50 or more times on a single level towards the end of Catherine; we’re talking about sections that take several hours to complete with no save points on the way. The block puzzle mechanics are smart and the puzzles are fun, but goddamn, the game is hard.

The other significant mode in Catherine is the Stray Sheep mode. In this mode the player can control Vincent as he drinks with his friends, checks his e-mail on his phone, and walks around the Stray Sheep bar. This is where much of the story exposition occurs, and it’s the “Adventurey” part of the experience. The best part about Stray Sheep mode is that Vincent can send and receive e-mail from Katherine and Catherine on his phone. The phone writing interface is genius: it lets you compose messages from a collection of options for each line (the options change with every mail), and your goal is to write the message such that Catherine (or, more often, Katherine) doesn’t get angry. This system completely captures the stress of trying to write a carefully-worded but highly political e-mail. It’s one of the best parts of the game because it puts you right in Vincent’s shoes and makes you feel like an accomplice to his adultery. It’s possible to purposefully write these messages like a jerk, and apparently if you act like a jerk throughout the whole game the ending changes. But given the setup I suspect few people will do that; they’ll act the way Vincent wants to act, which is desperately to placate his suspicious girlfriend and simultaneously rid himself of his unintentional lover without provoking an attack.

I have a few issues with the game, almost all of which have to do with the block puzzle mode.

The first problem is a big one: the controls are not tight enough. That’s not to say that the controls are loose; on the contrary, they are wound so tight that you’ll play with the d-pad rather than the analog sticks. But even highly responsive controls are not enough for the level of difficulty Catherine asks of its players. Specifically, the game fails to parse the difference between “turn around” and “turn around and go forward” way, way too often. Many times turning around will result in unintended movement, and in a game where a single misstep can cost you the level, that really sucks. I thought at first that I just wasn’t being precise enough, and that the problem would go away as my muscle memory improved, but this didn’t actually happen: I was unintentionally running all the way up until the very last level.

The game play in the block mode has to do with moving blocks. It must be done very quickly or Vincent will fall to his death. However, a single wrong move generally dooms the player. Part of Catherine’s intense difficulty is that there’s no undo, no way to go back and revert an unintended move. Combine that with not-good-enough controls and you have a recipe for frustration. I cannot count the number of times I accidentally pushed a block when I intended to pull it, or jumped onto spikes when I only intended to face them. It happened to me in every level, in every play session. Games that are this hard can’t have ANY issues with the controls, or the difficulty becomes arbitrary and frustrating.

The other major problem with the block mode is the checkpoint system. Levels have checkpoints, but towards the end of the game there are very few. In the last couple of levels you’ll reach the one and only checkpoint very early in the tower (in the first 5th, usually). Since one wrong move can screw you in this game, the way to progress up the tower is to try something, fail, restart, try something different, succeed, go to the next section, try something, fail, restart, etc. What happens in practice is that you keep doing the same actions over and over and over again, making tiny amounts of incremental progress as you attempt to memorize each section of the tower. You’ll find yourself completing the puzzle areas immediately after the checkpoint again and again–20 tries, 40 tries, 60 tries later. At that point the puzzles hold no value; you know how to complete them and are in no danger of failing, so they become a route chore. The game would have been much better if there were more checkpoints so that you don’t have to repeat the same ten puzzle areas for each and every failure.

Despite a few flaws and the thumb-agony difficulty, Catherine remains an absolutely fascinating game. It’s challenging, both as a game and to you, the player. It asks difficult questions like “what is the value of marriage?” “is it cheating if you were drunk?” and “which is better: a complex long-term relationship or strings-free casual sex?” And when I say asks, it literally asks: at the end of each level Vincent is quizzed on his position on life, relationships, and love. The game then gives you an Everybody Votes-style breakdown of what all the other players said. This is ground not frequently trodden by video games, and almost never at this level of quality. The story is interesting partially because it plays with sexual imagery while simultaneously dealing with these sorts of sticky commitment questions. When Catherine appeared naked in Vincent’s bed my emotional response was increased stress rather than titillation; the game already had me under its control and was able to work its emotional levers as it saw fit (note that Catherine has no real nudity, but it’s a bit racy nonetheless).

The goal of a good horror game is to suck the player in and then apply stress to their psyche. Catherine does this wonderfully, in ways I’ve never seen before. It’s one of the hardest games I’ve ever played, and it’s not without a few flaws, but even so it’s one of the best games I’ve played for the Quest.

August 3, 2003

Nanashi no Geemu: Me

Also known as: Nanashi no Game: Me
Platforms: DS
Release Date: 2009-10-27
Regions: Japan
Chris’s Rating: ★★☆☆
This sequel maintains its predecessor’s unique approach to horror and fixes some problems, but it is still a little too simple.

Nanashi No Geemu: Me is an evolutionary sequel to the original Nameless Game for DS. Like its predecessor, Me (pronounced “Meh,” meaning “eye”) is about a cursed DS game that kills its players within seven days unless they are able to complete it. The game divides its time between this 2D 8-bit Dragon Quest clone and a first person 3D mode covering both screens (the DS is held sideways like a book). My main complaint with the first game was that the cursed game was used only as a narrative device and had little game play purpose–in fact, the entire game seemed too simple. Me addresses some of those concerns, but it fails to correct a number of the basic control and interface problems that made the first game something of a chore. That said, all the good parts about Nameless Game return in this sequel which still manages to be pretty fun.

The Nameless Game series builds tension through the use of two main conceits: quality sound design and the cursed game itself. The sound and music, especially the in-game music from the cursed game, are phenomenally well done; it’s no exaggeration to say that sound is the primary vector for horror in this game. The cursed game, as well as the ancillary UI screens and associated interface (Nameless Game mimics the main DS dashboard screen), are so meticulously constructed that they ground the entire experience in reality. By presenting a near-flawless recreation of a classic game style, the Nameless Game legitimizes the entire experience and makes it very easy for us to buy into the story and game content.

It’s a good thing, too, because other than the cursed game the rest of the experience is pretty weak. The graphics are good for DS but dated by any other standard, the control system remains terrible, and the story is pretty predictable. Nanashi No Geemu: Me suffers from amateurish mistakes in its first person mode. For example, it’s easy to get hung up on walls and edges that can’t actually be seen from the narrow perspective. There’s one terrible level segment in which you must walk around through a graveyard, avoiding a patrolling ghost who is mostly invisible. To complete this stage you must observe the ghost, wait for an opening in his path, then run to another area of the graveyard and collect an item. The graves are laid out in a random pattern, and it’s almost impossible to tell which areas your character can pass through and which are too thin. If you happen to venture into one of these thin spots, chances are you’ll get stuck and then promptly grabbed by the invisible roaming one-hit-kill ghost. It’s like playing a budget FPS from 1998, except without any guns.

That said, the developers of Me are clearly trying to correct some of the design issues that plagued the first Nameless Game. Though the 3D levels remain linear trips from one point to another with little interactivity along the way, Me introduces some much-needed puzzle mechanics using the cursed game. In order to progress through an area safely you must load up the cursed game to see an 8-bit representation of the room you are standing in. Items and hazards that are invisible to the naked eye can be viewed in the game mode, so once you’ve figured out how to safely progress in the game you can then go back to the real world and follow the same path. Unlike the first Geemu there are now hidden items and unlockable levels of a whole new game (more on that in a moment) to be found in within the cursed game’s levels, which makes them a lot more interesting.

The best addition to the formula is the “eye” which appears in the title. Early in the game the protagonist’s left eye (represented by the left DS screen) becomes “infected” by a particular ghost, which allows him to identify areas where ghosts are present. When entering an area containing a ghost the left DS screen will start to get noisy; the closer the ghost is the more dramatic the distortion becomes. This is basically a visual version of the static-emitting radio from Silent Hill, and works almost as well. Ghosts are still one-hit-kill hazards in Me, and the distorted eye serves as a nice tension-inducing foreshadowing device. There are also some nice puzzles involving objects and other level details that can only be seen by the left eye and not the right–suddenly there is a reason to take time and look around the environments rather than simply running straight through. The addition of the infected eye is by far the best improvement Me makes over its predecessor.

The other major change in Me is the inclusion of a second cursed game. In addition to the cursed RPG is a hellish (but optional) side scroller. To play the cursed side scroller you must collect cartridges in the RPG world, each of which represents a level. The side scroller design is a punishing one in the vein of Jinsei Owata no Daiboken, I Wanna Be the Guy, and Super Meat Boy; it’s the kind of game which invites you to jump onto a platform only to reveal it to be covered with hidden spikes. The side scroller fits with the cursed game theme, and I was excited about it when I started the game. The problem with it is that the scroller controls are not quite competent enough to support the level of difficulty that the developers have targeted. The jump button is unresponsive and the other controls are a little too loose. A game like Super Meat Boy can get away with an insane level of difficulty because its controls are extremely tight; the design is hard but fair. Nanashi No Geemu: Me’s side scroller controls, on the other hand, are not tight enough to make the difficult play fun; far too many times you will die because you pressed the right button at the right time and the game failed to respond. This lack of responsiveness in the controls pretty much destroys the cursed side scroller, stripping it of all fun and rendering it a frustrating chore.

There are a lot of other minor changes to the game that improve the experience. The ghosts are used much more intelligently in Me than its predecessor, and are often tied to puzzles in the cursed game. As in the original Nameless Game, the cursed game starts to exhibit bugs and visual artifacts as the curse takes hold. This theme of degradation is extended to the real world and the mock DS UI screens in Me, giving the impression that the curse is affecting the protagonist at a very personal level, almost like the otherworld in Silent Hill. The story, while still fairly boring, is more complicated and less derivative than the original.

But generally speaking, Nanashi No Geemu: Me is the same game as its predecessor with a couple of simple (but mostly effective) tweaks and additions. They key components that made the first game work, namely the sound and cursed game, continue to be effective. The underdeveloped aspects of the first game’s design remain, by and large, overly simplistic. While the quality of the game has unquestionably improved, the degree of improvement is fairly minor; these are things that should have been done in the original Nameless Game.

So, as before, this is a good game for people interested in horror game design to play. This is a game that absolutely requires headphones, so make sure you have a pair before you start. If you’re just looking for some fun thrills on your DS, Nanashi No Geemu: Me might leave you unsatisfied.

August 3, 2003

Alan Wake

Platforms: Xbox360, PS3
Release Date: 2010-05-14
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
Great writing saves this psychological action thriller from its slightly-too-simple gameplay.

Alan Wake does not bill itself as a horror game. It’s a “psychological action thriller,” which is a label that very clearly describes what the game is about. There are supernatural elements, sure; the protagonist for which the game is named spends most of his time fighting The Taken, people who have been possessed and entirely consumed by an evil force called The Dark Presence. But it’s really not a horror game, and makes almost no concerted effort to scare. However, pending the creation of Chris’ Psychological Action Thriller Quest, I feel pretty comfortable including Alan Wake here; even if it’s not really a horror game, it’s in the company of friends.

It’s hard to write about Alan Wake without revealing parts of the story, which is very much worth experiencing in its original game form. In the interest of keeping this spoiler free, I’m going to talk about Alan Wake in terms of its successes and failures without a lot of actual examples.

The core game loop in Alan Wake is surprisingly similar to Obscure (though there’s no two-player mode, sigh). The central combat mechanic involves using a flashlight (which can be boosted for a short amount of time) to burn away a nebulous darkness that protects The Taken. Once the darkness is gone, you can take them down with regular pistols. This is very similar to Obscure, though the execution is much better than in Hydravision’s earlier example. A typical moment in Alan Wake will involve Wake running through a dark forest when he is suddenly jumped by a couple of scythe-wielding Taken. Guns are ineffective until the protective darkness has been burned away, so the moment-to-moment play consists of dodging away from attacks, keeping the light on each enemy, and then taking them down when they are vulnerable. There are a few other weapons occasionally at Wake’s disposal, such as flare guns and flashbangs, which are highly effective. But most of the game is just running around in the dark, getting jumped by guys, and shooting them.

And, as far as horror games go, that’s a pretty simple core loop. It’s very common for horror games to select simplified combat mechanics in exchange for improved narrative control, so Alan Wake is hardly alone here, but the effect of its simpleness is amplified because the main focus of the game is, unlike many other horror games, action. If you’ve seen reviews lamenting Wake as “repetitive,” it’s probably because people got tired of shooting guys in a dark forest after a while. I can see where they are coming from.

On the other hand, Alan Wake goes all out in its attempt to increase its interestingness along another axis: narrative. Unlike many of the other games on this site, Wake’s narrative is not one of these combination-of-confusing-details sort of thing; though the story itself is a little convoluted, it plays out in a very straightforward fashion. As I said in the opening, it’s almost impossible to talk about the story in Alan Wake without spoiling something, so I’ll just say that the story in Wake is pretty good. It’s got that Stephen King-esque taint-of-evil-hiding-in-rural-America style down pat, and throws in a fairly interesting twist to the whole thing (which, at the end of the game, left me wondering how it could all work out, like a time travel movie in which a character kills his father). Alan Wake’s narrative unfolds in two different, though not entirely orthogonal, directions: as cut scenes and game events which take place as you play, and as bits of manuscript that Wake finds throughout the levels. The way these two connect is pretty interesting; though lots of horror games have documents and manuscripts to find, none of them work quite in the same way as the ones in Wake.

In addition, the writing and dialog in Alan Wake is really good. In particular, Wake’s agent Barry steals the show. But even Wake himself is pretty interesting, and there are several other complicated (for a video game) characters that make their appearance. The manuscript pages themselves are excerpts from an unfinished novel of Wake’s, and remind me of the novel snippets in Deus Ex, although in this game the content is much more directly related to the events of the game. I think the narrative is easily the strongest part of Alan Wake.

Alan Wake is also one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever seen. The characters are a little weird (damn you, uncanny valley), but the environmental art is absolutely phenomenal. Seriously, I’m not really the type of gamer that cares about graphics, but Alan Wake is a really, really nice looking game.

Where things start to go astray is the level design and combat loop. The combat loop, as I mentioned before, is pretty simple, but its simplicity isn’t a problem in and of itself. Rather, the way that enemies appear is a little problematic. Wake will often be running through a forest when suddenly it gets a little darker, and shadows seem to move quickly across the landscape. This is your cue that enemies are about, and you should expect to be attacked in the next minute or two. Since the game takes place in large, open areas, enemies will often approach Wake from the side or from behind. To deal with this problem, the game has a pretty cool effect where it slows time down, pans the camera out to reveal the approaching enemy, and plays a tension-increasing stinger sound, all at the same time. The result is that you see approaching enemies, even those behind you, in a way that gets your blood pumping.

This works really well at first, but once the enemies have been revealed game waits for a while before using the effect again. During a given fight, enemies tend to come from all directions, so it’s not uncommon to be attacked by guys that are behind you. It really sucks to get hit by somebody you can’t see, and that problem is aggravated by ranged enemies that throw blades at you. Even worse, Wake can take hits while he is already reacting to another hit, meaning that if you have bad luck and are hit by two or three guys at the same time, it’s basically instant death.

The levels are also quite large; the traversable space is sometimes so wide (especially in the forest) that it’s hard to tell which way you should be going. Alan Wake actually provides a really cool HUD to solve this (something I haven’t seen before, a sort of “this general direction” cursor), but during a fight it’s very easy to get disoriented. And since almost every level takes place at night, the darkness of the environment adds to the confusion.

But the large level design actually hurts Alan Wake in another, more important way: it makes exploring for the purposes of item collection a chore. I ranted about this a bit already, but the size of the levels conflicts with Alan Wake’s collection quests. Most importantly, it makes finding the manuscript pages, which is the key element that keeps the game interesting in the face of its somewhat simple game play, pretty unfun. It turns out that most (but not all!) of the pages are placed in places that you’ll naturally run across just by playing, but as a player there’s no way that you can be guaranteed to find every page unless you carefully search each area. I went over each level with a fine tooth comb because I really wanted to read all the manuscripts, and let me tell you, walking around it a super dark forest tracing the edges of the accessible space is not very fun (and, despite my best efforts, I still didn’t find every page). These levels were not made to be ransacked–they were made to be fairly linear passages for the player as he travels from one scene to the next. But because the placement of the manuscript pages (and, to a much lesser extent, the collectable coffee thermoses) is unpredictable, a player must choose to either sweep every level for hidden items or run straight through and live with a lot less story detail. It sucks that those two are in conflict and such a decision is even necessary.

And that’s really the only major misstep that Alan Wake makes. It’s not a complicated game (other than the graphics tech–sheesh), but it also hits the mark most of the time. I felt that confusion about the levels, the placement of collectables, and some of the combat mechanics damaged the game a bit, but on the other hand I enjoyed the interesting story, I liked the presentation format that it used, and I really liked the characters that it stars. There are no problems with controls or anything like that–Alan Wake doesn’t waste any time on pedestrian design flaws, but it does get bogged down with a few meta-flaws.

Still, it’s a very fun game and, despite being steeped in classic American horror, it’s pretty unique in this genre. Though simple, I think it’s the kind of thing that pretty much every horror fan will enjoy.

Chris's Survival Horror Quest

Curses, key cards, and the study of horror video game design.

By @c_pruett

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare

Rise of Nightmares

…Iru!

Silent Hill Downpour

Amy

Ikenie No Yoru

Dead Space 2

Catherine

Nanashi no Geemu: Me

Alan Wake