How do you deal with horror games when things get too scary?
You’ll Shit With Fear
Resident Evil 7 hit shelves this week, and it’s turned out to be a pleasant surprise. In the first part of my Game In Progress review, I called it “a strange, glorious rebirth,” a confident horror game that I believe is as funny as it is terrifying. Down in the comments, several readers expressed interest in picking it up but were held back by their concerns about how scary it could be. Tavernacle had some words of wisdom for them:
If it helps, remember that it’s just a game and the worst case scenario is you may have to replay a room again. I was terrified of Amnesia: The Dark Descent until I died for the first time, got sent back a couple rooms, and realized the only really bad thing that could happen was if I ran out of oil and couldn’t find the next puzzle in the dark.
NakedSnake ran with that thought and tied it back into how horror games are built:
This is an important dimension of an effective horror game. Games that kill you all the time are not horrifying, because death becomes routine. The best horror games keep you on the edge of your seat by always teasing death but rarely actually delivering it. Horror games need to remember that you want to tap into the player’s fear, not their sense of frustration. Conversely, players looking to subvert this fear can rush into death/disaster on a regular basis, thereby diffusing the carefully established sense of tension.
Speaking of tension, the biggest point of discussion around RE7 is how well its first-person perspective works and whether it holds the game back from being a “true” Resident Evil game. First off, I just want to say that I understand how difficult it is to look at videos of RE7’s early hours or even play the demo and comprehend what it could possibly have in common with the pace and structure of an old school Resident Evil game, but as I’ve said in the comments, as you get further into it, this really does emerge as the closest thing to classic Resident Evil since the GameCube remake and Resident Evil 0. SingingBrakeman cribbed some thoughts from another outlet’s review about how the first-person camera ups the tension and evokes classic Resident Evil:
One aspect that another reviewer highlighted was that your ability to turn was slowed down from most first-person games. This is likely helpful to the VR experience, but it had the additional virtue of making the act of turning suspenseful. There was a constant tension for that critic between turning to further explore side passages or rooms, since a threat could materialize in front of them while they were distracted. In this way, it mimicked the intentional obscurity of classic Resident Evil’s static camera angles while still offering the player more control over their view.
Going There
Also this week, William Hughes looked back at Wolfenstein: The New Order’s concentration camp level, Camp Belica, and tried to reckon with its attempts at respecting and evoking the horrors of the Holocaust while also delivering a some thrilling video game catharsis. Simon DelMonte shared some thoughts on the principles of tackling this subject matter:
I am not a video gamer and don’t often read game coverage here. I am, however, Jewish and have a deep interest in how the Holocaust is portrayed in pop culture. So the fact that I didn’t feel like screaming, hitting something, or giving the game designers the finger is either a tribute to the designers not screwing things up or to Will’s (usual) writing skill.
I am not at all offended by the game’s attempt to acknowledge the Holocaust. But even if the game failed to achieve much, if someone comes away from playing this and has any expanded understanding of the Holocaust, of the level of hatred Nazis had (and sadly still have) for Jews, it might be good that the game dared to go there. Holocaust denial is and probably always will be with us. Anything that denies the deniers is fine by me. I just hope no one comes away from the game and thinks the Holocaust is as much fiction as giant robots and Kabbalistic cabals.