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Horror is always a dying breed.
I think a lot of people are getting on RE6 as an indictment of the gaming industry, but I think it's becoming an indictment of a lot of media and their desire to appeal to mass audiences.
The thing that gets me is that while horror has always been a fringe thing (but one of the best things) only now are things very much not horror being labelled as so. Dead Space, RE5, the newest Silent Hill game which is a fucking multiplayer RPG... and it goes to movies and anime too. So many of them are loud frenetic pieces because they can't wait to show off their monsters.
I mean, as much as I like American Vampire and Hellsing, they're just action pieces with monsters. Nothing about them is meant to build personal tension, but I keep seeing them labelled as horror pieces.
Same thing with movies. Pieces like Van Helsing, Constantine, and Buffy the freaking vampire slayer are called horror now. (Though the series does have some genuine horror episodes)
I don't know why people do this. I get why horror isn't popular, but do we really need to smack the label on it if it's not?
Comments
Why can't we just let it die and then come back to life on its own?But there are zombie games! Zombie games everywhere! :P
On a more serious note, ZombiU actually looks like it'll be a nice tense horror game. It helps that a zombie bite actually fucking kills you like it's supposed to.
In almost all of them, zombies are an obstacle to mow down rather than objects of terror. Take Dead Rising. You're never actually afraid of the zombies. You just kind of stroll through ripping them up.
Don't get me wrong, it's fun but still.
Zombies were scary the first couple of times they appeared, then they were just a horror-derived branch of post-apo.
I think horror games are a bit different from, say, action games.
There are games like action games that focus on giving the player a sense of agency in terms of being able to do stuff--whether it's blowing shit up, gunning down zombies or aliens, or whatever.
True horror games depend on making the player experience a lack of agency--simulating the sense of fear that comes from being helpless (other than the option of escape).
So yeah, games where you're just mowing down hordes of zombies aren't really horror games, they're just action games.
Incidentally, that's why the Castlevania games are not horror games. You're there not to be horrified, but to kick ass and take names.
Medusa heads are horrifying.
I'd call Dead Space a decent horror game, but not what Resident Evil has become these days. You don't have to be helpless, just really, really screwed.
Except you're not really screwed either. In the first game, you're a voiceless indestructible badass.
It's a good action game but horror it ain't.
I agree you don't have to be utterly helpless, but you never really feel the oppressive sense of utter doom and being overwhelmed.
RE4's opening (regardless of the rest of the game) is actually really solid action horror. It's paced nice and slowly. While it's not subtle, it starts out more quiet and slow and then there's that entire section where your whole goal is to survive and shit run run awesome a shotgun! Now I can -OH FUCK I HEAR A CHAINSAW.
Yeah, I can't even begin to understand how Dead Space is horror. It's utterly interchangeable with any other action game, except that enemies tend to jump out from behind a corner and shout "boo!"
Are there any good horror games that don't involve undead creatures, aliens, or eldritch abominations?
Which is kind of what I'm talking about. It seems all you need these days are some flickering lights and some monster and you're horror.
Modern horror is just so noisy and frenetic, none of it tries to establish a sense of normalcy from which dread can evolve from. It's just SEE THE MONSTERS
^^SpecOps: The Line.
The Thief series, while not pure horror, is very scary in a bit less conventional sort of way.
The Penumbra series.
Many HL2 mods.
There's many more that I can't think of at the moment.
^ Does Deadly Shadows count for this genre?
Glenn: Kinda sorta maybe Clock Tower? It's not really clear what Scissor man is so...
Wait there's that giant slug thing in the SNES game so nevermind.
^^ Not really, I'd call it an action game with horror elements.
Still, those horror elements manage to be a lot more effective than many real "horror" games.
Well if Deadly Shadows doesn't count then I'll just wait until I pick up Thief Gold from GOG when it goes on sale sometime.
The same goes for the rest of the series, that's why I stressed that it isn't pure horror. Still, you should play it in chronological order.
Oh, yes - I heard that Amnesia: The Dark Descent is great, but I haven't played it.
Amnesia has zombies and an eldritch abomination.
Oh right, the first Condemned is a great horror game, with nary a supernatural monster (though there is some implied supernatural shenanigans)
The sequel takes a pretty sharp dip in quality though.
?
Honestly, thinking back to it, unless I'm just plain remembering it wrong, it's way, way, way overrated.
Though there are three versions of the game depending on some decisions at the start and I picked the one that turned out to have the "restore sanity" spell, so maybe it's just that one.
Even then, though, the insanity effects tended to be segregated from gameplay (something scary happens, then it takes you back to the room entrance and you're fine).
I think the problem with Eternal Darkness, which I really liked mind, is that once you know the game's biggest tricks they don't surprise you.
It's still a really solid horror game though.
Maybe with the wiimote addon that monitors your heart rate. Sanity could be connected to that then
Eh. The only qualifier for horror to me is that the game pushes an overbearing sense of dread and doom over all else. How effectively you can fight back only plays into it insofar as being too much of a badass might kill it, but you can be completely outmatched enough to preserve that aesthetic.
Most zombie games have stopped doing that and just use it as a shallow facade backdrop for kill kill kill the zombies yeehaw. Dead Space goes for the right oppressive atmosphere, even if you're considerably better equipped than your average horror protagonist.
I dunno, the huge thing at the end of Dead Space evoked a lot more "oh shit" in me than Saddler or Ouroboros, and the latter was almost as big and twice as slimy. It was all in presentation. Also no punching rocks in a volcano.
As for RE6, from what I hear it's not so much an awful horror game specifically as just an awful game.
> The only qualifier for horror to me is that the game pushes an overbearing sense of dread and doom over all else.
Which... Dead Space really doesn't have? I never felt dread. I mean it was startling in some aspects, like the first time a corpse jumped up, but not only is it an old trick, startling isn't the same as scaring. It also just led to the annoyance of me capping every corpse I found ahead of time.
Eh. I felt it. Whatevs.
The level of dread ebbed and flowed a lot in Dead Space 2. I think it hit it's peak when you had to revisit the Ishimura.
Dead Space, to me, seemed to have all of the elements present in a horror game, but instead of trying to create an atmosphere of dread, it just tried to use it for cool action. Successfully, mind you, but there really wasn't much dread other than the few sections where the game goes "oh, right, you have a wife you're supposed to be finding or something."