I agree with you here. I also believe that the horror would set in more if you were afraid of dying. The consequences should be bigger. I'm not saying it should be Witcher 2's mode where the whole game resets when you die, but there needs to be something to make people afraid to keep playing. That makes them want to stop playing because it's so scary. I'm thinking like Amnesia, but somehow you need to cause damage to the enemies so you don't quite feel TOTALLY helpless. I don't know. That's why I don't design games, I guess.

Yeah, i think that the survival aspect of a survival horror game comes mostly from the fact that there are a very limited supply of items, especially health and ammo. Its a very hard thing to balance due to discrepancies in player skill. For example, I've never beaten Resident Evil Code Veronica because i simply backed myself into a terrible corner in the first few hours of the game.

Modern game design, with less emphasis on challenge and more on accessibility, has deemed it necessary to give players the ability to buy their own ammo and health items with some kind of name currency. This robs much of the tension out of the genre, to the point where id be hard pressed to call dead space or resident evil 5 survival horror games at all.

@Sooty: I'm not saying that it should be taken and implemented as is from MGS3, I'm saying as a starting point it's the perfect system to convey frailty of your character. It gives you more of an incentive to constantly be wary of confrontations and when confrontations do happen, you would need to be careful of how to mitigate the injuries.

For example, in Silent Hill 2 your exploring the town and you come

ross a handful of medical supplies. You would then have to be very wary of not getting hurt in fights or to get into fights all together for fear of wasting the items. Couple that with the fact that you could very well be injured and be unable to heal yourself because you don't have the right medical supplies. You would need to go out and explore the town for the supplies you need, all the while your slowly dying because of this untreated injury.

Your now injured from this fight, searching this town for medical supplies hoping you come across the needed items while simultaneously trying not to get into combat and your movement is starting to become slower because of your deteriorating health.

No thanks, that system in MGS3 wasn't exactly anything cool. You get hurt, you go into a menu and after a button press or two you're patched back up. It adds nothing to the experience. It certainly didn't make the game any harder, so what's the point? The menu hopping just got tedious.

Amnesia is the best example of a modern day survival horror game. You're helpless and fighting against the plight of insanity.

Why isn't there more horror?

I'm not a giant fan of survival horror games, hell I couldn't even force myself to finish Doom 3 when it was first released. I couldn't handle how dark it was coupled with the fact that you had to continuously switch between your flashlight and your gun. Survival horror games have changed since the years of Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, and Clock tower but the one thing that hasn't really changed is how little survival is actually implemented into the system.

Survival in these games have strangely only truly meant that as long as you don't die during the fight you'll be fine. It doesn't matter how many times you get hit by the enemies as long as you can make it through the fight alive you can just heal up quickly. It has made combat less of a danger and more of a hindrance, it'll slow you down but there really isn't a reason not to fight them, eventually you'll be up to full health as long as you find something to heal yourself. This sentiment has brought a lot of survival horror franchises into horror action games, and I think it's a real disservice to the genre and a lot of the fans of the genre who really want to get lost into the world they are playing. We were even given a glimpse of a gameplay system that could really bring gamers more into the mood of a survival horror game, yet no one seems to have even considered it. I'm of course talking about the survival system that was present in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

This system forces you to deal with your wounds by using medical supplies you find on your mission, and if you don't fix yourself up in a timely matter you are hindered. Did you get shot during that fight? Better dig out that bullet, suture that open wound, apply a bandage, otherwise your health takes a drop. Are you bleeding out from a wound that you can't fix? You need to find some equipment or sooner or later you will bleed out and die. This system was something I thought worked so well for the story and environment that the game was set it, and it could do wonders to rejuvenate a genre that developers don't know how to evolve without it just going away from their roots and into a full on action game.

I've been astonished that there are few if any developers that looked at this system and tried to implement it into their games. What do you think? Would this be a great thing to implement into survival horror games or should we stick with the current system we have?