T w e n t y S i d e d

The convention is that survival horror games are very brutal and unforgiving. The combat is finicky and mistakes are devastating. Resources are scarce, and consuming too many now can mean hitting an impossible barrier down the line. Your character tends to die often. Even the ability to save is sometimes rationed. Allow me a moment of presumption and arrogance, but I think survival horror game designers have been undermining the very atmosphere they’re trying so hard to build. They’re doing it wrong.

Consider these two types of fear:

1. Oh no! The grue is going to eat me! How horrible!
2. Oh man. The grue is going to eat me and I haven’t saved in half an hour.

Now, if your goal is to just create a serious challenge for tenacious players to overcome (and some people really do like that sort of thing) then routine player death is a required component of that. But I think in most cases the extreme difficulty is part of a misguided attempt to make the game more frightening. You feel the first kind of fear when you’re immersed in the game. You only feel the second when you are not immersed. The first kind is the thrilling kind. The second is an immersion-breaking killjoy. Which means that – counter-intuitively – if you want to scare a player you should make every effort to avoid killing them.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Games and the Fear of Death”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In response my article on the decline of Survival Horror, Luke Maciak suggests a different kind of SH game, and while I always love discussions on gameplay mechanics, this one really scratched my particular itch. I think it would make a tremendous game.

What he’s proposing is a Survival Horror game that focuses on the strengths of the genre (being in frightening situations) and de-emphasizing the things it does poorly. (Combat, which also undermines the scare factor of a game.) Read his bit for the full set of ideas, but the short version is that the game should focus on hiding from monsters as opposed to fighting them.

Allow me to join in with the armchair game design… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Survival Sneaker”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.