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All I want for spook month is more classic survival horrorWhat’s the deal with green herbs? [studio applause]
What’s the deal with green herbs? [studio applause]
Listen. Outside your window, the chill wind chuckles in raspy glee at autumn’s death rattle. The branches of dying trees rake their gnarled fingers against the glass. You are spooked. You turn to the warm glow of your monitor for comfort. Instead, you find the most terrifying thing imaginable: an unpopular opinion about a videogame. On the internet, no less. You blink and rub your eyes in disbelief. Still, the words remain. Stark. Unforgiving. Undeniably spicy: “Resident Evil Villagewas disappointing and its success does not bode well for the future of survival horror.”
You go to type a comment but, uh, your fingers are gone, or something. Just hear me out.
Resident Evil Village: The Village | My Fav Thing In… (Resident Evil Village Gameplay & Review)Watch on YouTube
Resident Evil Village: The Village | My Fav Thing In… (Resident Evil Village Gameplay & Review)
But their prancing pink paterfamilias was already gone, braying something under his breath about vampire boobs.
Vulnerability means limitations. Health and restorative items. Ammunition. Situational awareness. Safe places. Possibly even narrative direction. All should be in short supply. So why is, say,Back 4 Bloodnot survival horror? You can run dry of ammo and medkits. There are zombies, and sometimes the zombies ambush you. Well, bear with me here, but I believe survival horror games are not a type of action, adventure or puzzle game as much as they are a type of strategy game.
“If one more person asks ‘What’s the weather like up there?’ I stg…”
The design structure of Resi 1 and its fantastic remake mean that success is based on how well you plan for the future. Limited ammunition is one thing, but the actual trick is that there aren’t enough bullets in the Spencer Mansion to kill everything in the game. So it becomes about planning routes; feeling out the Mansion for the most optimal throughways, clearing them of threats, and having exit strategies in mind. Alongside this is inventory management: taking only what you need, and leaving enough space for anything you might pick up along the way.
Both Resi 4 and Resi 2 remake automated some of this tension, to an extent, with adaptive difficulty systems. But to do this stuff well requires a loving designer’s hand to individually sculpt each route and hurdle, each milestone and shortcut. It requires a type of design that is continually in conversation with itself, ensuring the shotgun shells you picked up a half hour in don’t risk making you overpowered for the midgame.
All game design is hard, natch. I am merely an internet dickhead. But I am going to brazenly stride out of my wheelhouse and say that this type of design is harder than most. And to what end? Disempowerment is a niche mood. Stealth games don’t always sell particularly well. The Evil Within 2 did not sell well.REmake 2did fine, but I reckon a lot of that was on name recognition. It’s a lot of work without guaranteed return.
You know what did do well?Phasmophobia. It’s a game that I feel is emblematic of where survival horror is right now - a scattered host of creative offshoots that pick and choose founding elements, then use them as a springboard to create more modern offerings. I can’t say it doesn’t make sense, either. Why write a host of NPC’s with limited interactions when your mates can delve into the darkness with you? Why rely on static narrative to recreate The Thing’s sense of paranoia and distrust when you can make players suspicious of each other in real time?
Other horror successes have taken the opposite route, looking further back into the past than even Resi 1, eschewing mechanical concerns for pure narrative spooks.Until Dawnand its wayward offspring, for all their sparkly motion capture, are effectively FMV games, but make much more sense as a contemporary Netflix and snacks group experience than trying to explain to your aunt how tank controls work.
Fear is easier to extract in insolation, decoupled from mechanical baggage. The explorable escape-room/ghost train experiences that run from Slender and Amnesia all the way up to P.T and the quieter moments of Resi’s most recent incarnation ask little more from the player than a willingness to push on into the horrific. Checking your inventory every fifteen minutes to manually combine shotgun+shells is, I’ll admit, not particularly spooktastic. It’s not even spooxcellent.
Yer ghost huntin' truck in Phasmophobia
Lamentum
All I want for spook month is more classic survival horror, and I will piss and moan until I get some. But you know what? None of my complaints actually matter. I am but a crusty relic, lacking even the relevance to curse whatever wayward explorers exhume me from my dusty crypt. Resident Evil 8 sold extremely well, was a lot of fun, and made a lot of people happy. Even better than this, though, is the fact that I don’t even have to be diplomatic about it. Survival horror has, like Bruce Campbell’s chin, stood the test of time. The indie space has my back.
Remothered: Broken Porcelain
This dreadful deluge doesn’t seem to be slowing down either. I haven’t had a chance to playAlisayet, but i looks great. It appears to feature pant-shittingly scary dolls, a rare but effective beastie that my favourite horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, has made me even more afraid of. As for the future, I’m cautiously optimistic aboutChoo Choo Charles. I love the idea of open world survival horror. Evil Within 2 dabbled with it to great effect, andDays Gonepulled it off for about 45 minutes before you got overpowered, so I’d welcome more.
So, what have we learned? That making any definitive statements about the death of a certain genre, while useful if you’re trying to make a point in a spicy, devilishly handsome op-ed, requires a certain amount of tunnel vision, and that indie games are in such a fantastically diverse place right now that most tastes are catered for. Bless these visionary necromancers for dredging up such wonderful corpses, dressing them up, and dragging them along to the party.
