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At the time I was convinced that the radio sounds played a key role in Silent Hill’s brand of fear. And a decade and a half later, I still think that the radio, and the greater soundscape that Silent Hill employs, is a big part of what makes the series scary. But the radio isn’t just a great sound, it serves a specific gameplay purpose: it is a fuzzy form of radar. Its job is to escalate the level of tension felt by the player and also to warn him of enemies in the immediate area. Though many games employ some form of radar, this one is a bit different because it is so indistinct. When the static sound flairs you know that enemies are close, but it’s not possible to tell how close, or in which direction they reside, or even how many of them there might be. It wasn’t the thought of lurking nurses that scared me, it was knowing that they were near and not knowing exactly how near. There’s something insidious about that, about having enough information to be concerned but not enough to act. Without the radio, the scares would have devolved into surprise attacks, which might work once or twice but would thereafter become routine. With a more specific radar, the uncertainty about the location of the enemies would be removed and dispatching them would become routine. Much has been written about how the sound of Silent Hill’s radio is itself a tension inducer, but I wonder if the fuzziness of the information it provides is also an important aspect of its function.<\/p>\n Silent Hill isn’t the only horror game with a fuzzy radar. In the early Resident Evil<\/a> games, the sound of zombie moans and their lumbering footfalls warned you that danger was near, even if the angle of the camera restricted your view of the room. Like the Silent Hill radio, this communication was indistinct; it put you on your guard but did not give you enough information to anticipate the position Of course, none of these games have any kind of actual radar on the HUD–they don’t have a HUD at all. In fact, only a very small number of horror games actually have any sort of on-screen display. The absence of a HUD is often chalked up to “immersive” game design; the theory is that removing elements that do not appear within the game world itself increases the immediate believability of that world. I suspect that this is true, especially in games like ICO<\/i>, but I think that horror games have another, more important reason to omit the HUD. Like the fuzziness of the Silent Hill radar radio, obscuring the HUD is a way to obfuscate the details of the game state from the player.<\/p>\n Obfuscation of game state is an idea that shows up in all sorts of places in horror game design. Take the Resident Evil health system: rather than a health bar or number, classic Resident Evil gives you a three state abstraction: FINE, CAUTION, and DANGER. Each state indicates a range of health values; sometimes you will take a hit and the state will not change, other times a hit may cause you to go directly from FINE to DANGER. Of course, under the hood these states map to something like a health bar, and dedicated players have deciphered the underlying system<\/a>, but during normal play this system obfuscates the amount of health you have. Your health value is further obscured by the herb combination system. Are three herbs taken individually as powerful as three herbs combined? Is a green and a red herb combined the same as three green herbs? Does combining with a blue herb affect the amount of health recovered? The Silent Hill series has played with non-obvious health meters too: depending on the game, the information you get is limited to a pulsating color or an image that becomes more noisy as damage is taken. Siren<\/a> doesn’t provide a health meter at all.<\/p>\n How near is the Slenderman in Slender<\/i>? Can the creatures in Amnesia: The Dark Descent<\/i> see you or not? You can hear the monster in
\nLow visibility. No HUD.<\/p><\/div>My TV was hissing. It was a small set, 15 inches across, set on a short table in one corner of my ten-tatami-mat room in Kyoto. It was 1998, the middle of the night, and though my hosts were two floors below me, I worried that the sound would reach through the thin walls and wake them. It was a familiar hiss–it is the sound of an detuned radio, the sound of white noise, static. This particular static was coming from a radio clipped to the belt of a man standing in a dark hallway, a large pipe in his hand, his small flashlight casting a narrow oval of light around him. It was also a harsh sound, one that made me uneasy. I wondered if my host family could hear it. More importantly, I wondered where the mangled nurses that it was trying to warn me about were lurking beyond the beam of the flashlight. This is one of my clearest memories of my first experience with Silent Hill<\/a>.<\/p>\n![](\"img\/screenshot\/thumbs\/re4_thumb.jpg\")
\nBetter visibility, but still no HUD. No specific information.<\/p><\/div>of the enemies. Fatal Frame<\/a> has a visual radar, a glowing filament that brightens near areas of interest, but it too is non-directional. Enemy Zero<\/a> is an entire game based around the concept of a fuzzy radar: the alien monsters roaming the space ship where the game takes place are invisible, their position revealed only by the incessant beeping of a warning device. The closer the enemies are, the faster it beeps; beeps beyond a certain frequency mean that you’re probably already dead. It’s an incredibly obtuse way to warn the player of impending danger, but then again, that’s probably the point.<\/p>\n
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