Survival horror games need a face lift. When I say survival horror games I'm not talking about Dead Space or Resident Evil, more in line with games like Outlast, Amnesia, or more recently Alien: Isolation. While both types of survival horror games suffer from this problem the more action oriented games give you interesting ways to deal with you adversaries allowing the game to fall back on these mechanics when the game loses its scary edge. In these, I guess I could call them "stealth", survival horror games you basically have two options, hide or die horribly. In the beginning of these games there is a pretty decent chunk of time where the player is surrounded by the games atmosphere to get them ready for a big scare or first contact with the games monster. This first hour or two supplies some of the most tense time I've ever spent in a game, I am coming to grips with my surroundings, imagining what horrors could be lurking around every corner, and just waiting for the game to throw its first punch. Then, finally, it happens and my heart starts pounding out of my chest, my muscles tense up, and I "scream" if I'm being kind to myself, it's more of a whimper really.
At this point I have either been frozen by fear and killed or I'm running for my life. Regardless of the outcome, maybe some of column A and B, afterwards I have made it out of the encounter and I want another peak at the beast, I need another look. So I walk around peaking around corners until I finally see it and its taking its walk around the level looking for me I guess and slowly but surely my fear fades away and never comes back. I know what the monster looks like and my imagination will never be able to conjure up anything worse. On top of all that, just like any other game I am progressively becoming more effective with dealing with any given situation and getting a feel for the distances at which things happen and the peripheral vision of the monster. These works are handicapped by the very medium for which they were made.
The length is a large factor that hampers the scare factor of many of these experiences. Outlast is 5 hours, which isn't too long, Amnesia is 8 which is stretching it, and Alien: Isolation is a whooping 19 hours. All of them lose their scariness only a couple hours into the game. There are only so many times that I can hear the music pick up and know that things are gonna get rough. Only so many times I can watch my character meet their demise until I start to laugh and start thinking of the most ridiculous way I can creep past these baddies. In Amnesia I created a special strut that consisted of walking forward with cycling between both lean keys while I avoided the monster as if to prove to the monster I don't care. I know that many would say that I am not immersing myself enough in the world but I feel like the game should be able to grab me and pull me in, which it does but only as long as a regular horror film would.
Some games have solutions that work for the most part for these problem like throughout Outlast the game throws different monsters at you with different personalities giving you new opportunists to imagine what they will do once they catch up. I know Amnesia also has different bad guys but they are all basically the same fleshy husk with different heads. P.T. is another game that uses a short run time to give me one of the strongest scares in my life and then after that initial scare, the game just piles on the pure weirdness that silent hill and Kojima himself are known.
My dream scenario for a stealth survival horror game would be a game that, whenever the player reaches a state of failure they are thrust into another environment that is completely alien to the previous and they are given an even more gruesome creature to encounter. When the player successfully completes an objective the game will analyze the world they made it through and avoid similar themes and try to really give the player something they can never truly adapt to. Or maybe even a game that supplies the player a variety of ways to manipulate the monster similar to Alien Isolation, but with a ridiculous amount of options, like a metal gear solid 3 of horror games.
Stealth horror games have so much more potential in them than I feel like developers are realizing. For such a popular genre, especially in the youtube and streaming space, to be almost wholly ignored by the AAA games industry as of late is a disappointment. I can't wait for Until Dawn even though it looks like a terrible horror movie I feel like it could somehow pull it off simply because of the novelty of being a game. And of course SOMA is gonna kill me later this year.
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