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[PATV] Monday, August 1, 2011 - Extra Credits Season 1, Ep. 4: Where Did Survival Horror Go?
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
This week, we discuss Survival Horror games and why the genre is suffering.
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As much as I love the them, the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series have done a lot to mess with horror... particularly their own sequels. The original games succeeded in producing emotional responses so well, in part, because of their novelty, but they were so aesthetically unified that it became difficult to discern what parts of the game were the source of that fear. So, the future titles simply borrowed or copied parts of the originals.
This was the mistake. You can't change a portion of an aesthetically unified whole and expect the same result. Look at Silent Hill Downpour; it was so close to being perfect, but a few choices ruined the entire experience. The fight sequences were gritty and rang true to the overall feeling of the metaphor that was being projected. This wasn't the dodging, rogue-like combat of Homecoming; it was brutal and trying. The weapons degraded, which reflected the destructive and brutal nature of the combat itself. That seems great but combat is inextricably linked to the design of the opponents.
So, when the opponents, or monsters, have design flaws, the effectiveness of combat is hampered. The problems were small, but troublesome. To begin with, there were only a few monsters. This was a result of the larger, free-roaming areas that have been classically present in most titles. You can't have many unique monsters when you want to create a large over-world. However, would you want a large over-world? Wouldn't your overall metaphorical aesthetic be better served by a feeling of claustrophobia? The town was supposed to represent both freedom and the chains themselves, so you could go either way, but "free"-roaming did very little to improve the game. Maybe it was supposed to make us feel chained to a silly quest-puzzle-system, but I doubt they went that meta with it.
Many of the monsters made sense, but others didn't. The giant bat creatures were a good idea, but not in this combat system. Metaphorically, they might have represented the limitation of vision presented by the (trying not to spoil anything) opening cinematics. That's not the issue, though. Having a large, powerful monster that pursues the player is a good idea, and a great way to increase feelings of helplessness, but when it jumps up and down from floor to ceiling in predictable patterns, and when it scurries about like that, it really clashes with the brutal, prison-esque feeling of combat that the game spent so long trying to develop. It increases game difficulty slightly, and produces some panicked moments of frustrated digging, but it clashes. You can either make them powerful or make them run away, but without linking it directly to something reasonable in your overall aesthetic, it's just going to muddy the waters.
Silent Hill 2 was an aesthetic masterpiece. It wasn't, objectively, the greatest for game-play, but it fit together, all of it, really well. The limit on monster-types reflected the personal projections of the main character. It made the town smaller, but also, in its execution, a large and disturbing force of unfathomable power and evil. Downpour showed us a Silent Hill that was larger than the main character and even made us well aware that the worlds of the characters were similar. So, then the world should reflect it. Why the storm hags?! Did the main character beat up his mother in the shower? If it's a projection of the other characters, then shouldn't there be more of them? Silent Hill 2 blatantly told us that the characters see different... drastically different, versions of the town. Downpour seems to be suggesting a synthesis of the many worlds... or at least of the monster projections. If that's the case, and the monsters, bats, hags, brawlers, prisoners, are projections of the other characters, then why a limited variety? Why aren't the other fights as brutal? I think they missed a huge chance in monster design.
If they went for the multiple-character-monster-projection idea, then they missed their opportunity to make it relevant to the player. We care about SH2's James Sunderland because we spend all game playing him and getting to know him, so his projections have an impact on us. That guy who was standing outside of the caves in Downpour? I only started to care a bit after I found out what he had to go through. At that point, it was too late to go back and re-experience those monsters from that perspective. The time had come and gone.
See what I mean? Over-world, story, combat, characterization, character development, number of monsters... Monsters may be only one part of the world, but the choices made in their production affect all other areas of the game. Conversely, all of those choices reflect intensely on how we experience the creatures themselves. A good aesthetic is a unified aesthetic, unless dispersal is what you are going for, but then it's still unified under an idea.
Coming back to the point, in order for your players to get the experience you're trying to give them, you need to craft carefully and deliberately. Crafting is limiting possibility to expand meaning and function. If we want to create good horror, then we need to focus on unifying all parts of the game so that they flow into each other, but mostly into the goal: horror.
Emotional response relies on getting your audience to immerse themselves in the experience and care about it. But, like the interactions between the uncanny valley and the fusiform face are, it's easy to tell when something's a little off and it'll ruin the whole experience. See Clocktower 3 for examples (Great game, but the magical transforming girl bits kind of choked the horror). Or the dialogue in Resident Evil.
As much as I love the them, the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series have done a lot to mess with horror... particularly their own sequels. The original games succeeded in producing emotional responses so well, in part, because of their novelty, but they were so aesthetically unified that it became difficult to discern what parts of the game were the source of that fear. So, the future titles simply borrowed or copied parts of the originals.
This was the mistake. You can't change a portion of an aesthetically unified whole and expect the same result. Look at Silent Hill Downpour; it was so close to being perfect, but a few choices ruined the entire experience. The fight sequences were gritty and rang true to the overall feeling of the metaphor that was being projected. This wasn't the dodging, rogue-like combat of Homecoming; it was brutal and trying. The weapons degraded, which reflected the destructive and brutal nature of the combat itself. That seems great but combat is inextricably linked to the design of the opponents.
So, when the opponents, or monsters, have design flaws, the effectiveness of combat is hampered. The problems were small, but troublesome. To begin with, there were only a few monsters. This was a result of the larger, free-roaming areas that have been classically present in most titles. You can't have many unique monsters when you want to create a large over-world. However, would you want a large over-world? Wouldn't your overall metaphorical aesthetic be better served by a feeling of claustrophobia? The town was supposed to represent both freedom and the chains themselves, so you could go either way, but "free"-roaming did very little to improve the game. Maybe it was supposed to make us feel chained to a silly quest-puzzle-system, but I doubt they went that meta with it.
Many of the monsters made sense, but others didn't. The giant bat creatures were a good idea, but not in this combat system. Metaphorically, they might have represented the limitation of vision presented by the (trying not to spoil anything) opening cinematics. That's not the issue, though. Having a large, powerful monster that pursues the player is a good idea, and a great way to increase feelings of helplessness, but when it jumps up and down from floor to ceiling in predictable patterns, and when it scurries about like that, it really clashes with the brutal, prison-esque feeling of combat that the game spent so long trying to develop. It increases game difficulty slightly, and produces some panicked moments of frustrated digging, but it clashes. You can either make them powerful or make them run away, but without linking it directly to something reasonable in your overall aesthetic, it's just going to muddy the waters.
Silent Hill 2 was an aesthetic masterpiece. It wasn't, objectively, the greatest for game-play, but it fit together, all of it, really well. The limit on monster-types reflected the personal projections of the main character. It made the town smaller, but also, in its execution, a large and disturbing force of unfathomable power and evil. Downpour showed us a Silent Hill that was larger than the main character and even made us well aware that the worlds of the characters were similar. So, then the world should reflect it. Why the storm hags?! Did the main character beat up his mother in the shower? If it's a projection of the other characters, then shouldn't there be more of them? Silent Hill 2 blatantly told us that the characters see different... drastically different, versions of the town. Downpour seems to be suggesting a synthesis of the many worlds... or at least of the monster projections. If that's the case, and the monsters, bats, hags, brawlers, prisoners, are projections of the other characters, then why a limited variety? Why aren't the other fights as brutal? I think they missed a huge chance in monster design.
If they went for the multiple-character-monster-projection idea, then they missed their opportunity to make it relevant to the player. We care about SH2's James Sunderland because we spend all game playing him and getting to know him, so his projections have an impact on us. That guy who was standing outside of the caves in Downpour? I only started to care a bit after I found out what he had to go through. At that point, it was too late to go back and re-experience those monsters from that perspective. The time had come and gone.
See what I mean? Over-world, story, combat, characterization, character development, number of monsters... Monsters may be only one part of the world, but the choices made in their production affect all other areas of the game. Conversely, all of those choices reflect intensely on how we experience the creatures themselves. A good aesthetic is a unified aesthetic, unless dispersal is what you are going for, but then it's still unified under an idea.
Coming back to the point, in order for your players to get the experience you're trying to give them, you need to craft carefully and deliberately. Crafting is limiting possibility to expand meaning and function. If we want to create good horror, then we need to focus on unifying all parts of the game so that they flow into each other, but mostly into the goal: horror.
Emotional response relies on getting your audience to immerse themselves in the experience and care about it. But, like the interactions between the uncanny valley and the fusiform face are, it's easy to tell when something's a little off and it'll ruin the whole experience. See Clocktower 3 for examples (Great game, but the magical transforming girl bits kind of choked the horror). Or the dialogue in Resident Evil.
Many reviewers have cited frustration at the difficulty killing zombies and just generally surviving the world. This difficulty is so high, especially at the beginning of the game before players are well equipped, that the game definitely deters first-timers. But that's because they aren't sure what to expect from the game.
If you go into Zombi U expecting the fast-paced action of Left 4 Dead, you'll be disappointed. If you're expecting the over-the-top set pieces and scripted events of Resident Evil, you'll be disappointed. If you go in expecting the psychological horrors of Silent Hill, you'll be disappointed.
Zombi U, I would argue, is actually one of the few true SURVIVAL horror games. This game is stressful because death is at every turn. In many other horror games, like Dead Space, sure you're scared of the monsters, but once they jump out at you and give you that first fright, you calm down and fight them. The monsters themselves are scary so much as them getting the jump on you is.
In Dead Space, if you saw a monster sitting a far way away from you and had a radar that stated "there are no other monsters near by" you wouldn't really be that worried (assuming that your radar was accurate). In Zombi U, if your radar says "three zombies right there doing nothing" you better be scared because those zombies will destroy you. Zombies jump out at you from time to time, and there's plenty of shock involved, but shock isn't the core fright in Zombi U, it's the constant, looming threat of imminent death. You really feel like you're surviving, not fighting.