Survival-Horror Genre Going Extinct?

Destructoid is running an opinion piece looking at the state of the survival-horror genre in games, suggesting that the way it has developed over the past several years has been detrimental to its own future. "During the nineties, horror games were all the rage, with Resident Evil and Silent Hill using the negative aspects of other games to an advantage. While fixed camera angles, dodgy controls and clunky combat were seen as problematic in most games, the traditional survival horror took them as a positive boon. A seemingly less demanding public ate up these games with a big spoon, overlooking glaring faults in favor of videogames that could be genuinely terrifying." The Guardian's Games Blog has posted a response downplaying the decline of the genre, looking forward to Ubisoft's upcoming I Am Alive and wondering if independent game developers will pick up where major publishers have left off.

Comments

That's just what they want you to think

[Anonymous Coward]

And then an other genre comes flying out of an air duct or dark corner!

Gaming article composition Algorithm

[pm_rat_poison]

How to make a gaming article when you have no original material:
a.) roll a d6

b.) According to the result, choose one of the following:
1.) PC
2.) Adventure
3.) Single Player
4.) Survival Horror
5.) DRM-free
6.) Windows-only

c.)Insert result in following sentence: Is this the death of $getrandomstring() gaming?

Same problem as movies.

[B5_geek]

True horror/fright can only be produced by ones imagination. While Hitchcock understood this and did a decent job of using it only books ever get it right. Instead today as with movies you mostly get sub-par lighting that hides things from your view.

Remember the mess that Doom3(?) was that you couldn't hold your shotgun and flashlight at the same time? The game imposed a limitation on you that felt forced and limited the submersion.

One game that got it right; Thief. The suspense of trying to sneak, and then panic heart-attack when you step on a squeaky floor!

I have played Alone in the Dark, and many others in the genre but none have ever had me wound-uptight as Thief did.

Re:Same problem as movies.

[try_anything]

It also doesn't work if dying means you respawn one or two minutes earlier in the game. Call of Duty single-play mode is like this. I realized this when I realized that I never paused the game when I wanted to answer the door, talk on the phone, or get a drink from the fridge. I just left my guy standing there, and if he died, so what?

When save points are so frequent, dying doesn't even impede your progress through the game unless you do it five times in a row. As a result, to make the game challenging, there have to be individual segments that are INSANELY challenging, which just makes you angry. You only get scared if dying once is a big deal. If dying twelve times in a row is what it takes to get a gamer's attention, he doesn't get scared. He gets angry.

So, you go through the entire game never being scared. You're just bored, moderately engaged, or angry depending on whether the difficulty is too low, about right, or too high.

Games that let you choose your save points, like the original Doom and Doom II, were much scarier, because you would limit your saves out of pride, and you'd also get caught up in the game and forget to save and then GAAAH I'M ABOUT TO DIE AND THIS IS REALLY SERIOUS! You panic about dying because it took half an hour of good play to get where you are, and if you die, you lose it all.

If (like me) you were normally too proud to save in the middle of a level, it meant that there was a great buildup of suspense through the level, because you had more and more to lose the further you got. In checkpoint games, it doesn't matter where in the level you are, so there's no buildup and climax, no arc to the game at all except what they can build up artificially through tacked-on story elements.

Re:Same problem as movies.

[try_anything]

The kind of fear you're talking about is great, but I rarely get it from games. I treasure the memory of playing an "Aliens" mod for Doom. "Keep it tight, people." "Check those corners... check those corners!" You can't see anything, but you can hear the aliens breathing. Then SHRIEK they're in your face. It got to the point where my heart was going a mile a minute the whole time, and it took me a long time to calm down afterwards so I could sleep.

Unfortunately my success at finding good horror games (and horror movies, for that matter) is so low that it isn't even worth trying anymore -- one good game in ten means paying hundreds of bucks to find a good game, plus the frustration of sitting through so much garbage.

So, yeah, I do like the second kind of horror you're talking about, but I've kind of given up on it.

As for immersion, I agree completely. Few modern games are really immersive. Note to game designers: There's nothing realistic about looking at a bush and not being able to figure out whether you can step over it, or looking at a tree and not knowing whether there's an invisible corridor that will prevent you from ducking behind it. Nobody in World War II died while trying to take cover behind a pile of sandbags that were un-jump-overable for the sole reason that they marked the edge of the battlefield. Level designers need to stop putting visual verisimilitude over everything else and once again start considering the verisimilitude of the whole experience.

One aspect that all immersive games share is that you can almost always predict how objects and terrain will affect your movement. Gosh, just like in real life! That's actually more important to immersion than making the terrain look realistic. If you're examining every rock and bush as a game construct instead of perceiving it as a "real" object, then you're going to see the monster, scary noise, or eerie apparition as just another game construct. You think, "Well, here's a new game object. Looks like a werewolf. Let's figure out how to interact with it. I'll start by walking towards it and seeing what happens. I'll probably get killed, but I might as well be systematic if I want to figure out how it works." That's not an immersive experience :-)

"Hmmm, there's a toddler sitting on the floor of my living room finger-painting with blood."

Immersive game reaction: "What... the... FUCK is a mysterious toddler doing in my house? Whose blood is that!!?"

Non-immersive game experience: "I wonder if I can jump over him?"

Left4Dead?!

[Doches]

Umm...What about Left4Dead? I fail to see how the genre can be 'dying' if it includes a wildly popular new release? I mean, I guess you could argue that Left4Dead isn't similar enough to to qualify as a member of the genre -- but it seems like a perfectly valid (and, frankly, awesome) way to evolve the genre. Oh, two more words:

Dead Space.

Maybe you've just got a really, really narrow definition of what qualifies as 'survival horror'?

not for me

[ILuvRamen]

I think most people are like me after playing regular FPS games. I don't get scared, I just get motivated and angry. They're like "oooh, are you gonna make it out alive" and I'm thinking "umm yes, and I'm gonna drive this motorcycle so far up that zombie's ass he'll be farting exhaust fumes. Then I'm gonna go BOOM HEADSHOT, BOOM HEADSHOT! Then I'll scream 'THAT'S RIGHT BITCHES!' and then break out the window all actiony and we'll see what's what then! You can't intimidate or scare me!" It's really either that or actually act really scared and freaked out about whether or not you're going to survive the entire game and who the heck wants to feel like that for like 8 hours? You could just walk around New York City alone at night for free to feel that, and most people tend to avoid that feeling. So if they'd just let me scream "****ing zombies, DIE!" and give up trying to scare me, it'd be fine but then that's not really survival horror.

Survival horror, not action horror

[FrostDust]

The reason games like Res. 4, Silent Hill Homecoming, and Left4Dead aren't proper survival horror is that your first reaction to seeing an enemy is to kill it. In the original Resident Evil or Silent Hill, killing everything in your path would result in you running out of ammo quickly, and/or taking massive injuries due to bashing them up close in melee.

While you could interpret survival horror as being about, as the name implies, surviving scary situations, the genre is supposed to achieve this by making you feel vulnerable and desperate. This was achieved, as stated before, by limiting your supplies so much your were forced to sneak around and avoid enemies, or by making you dread the situation, fearful you could be overwhelmed at any moment.

Silent Hill achieved both of these rather well, especially with the radio and flashlight. Keeping the flashlight off prevented enemies from finding you, but you could barely see. The radio would keep you on your toes, looking around frantically for the enemy the that is there, but you can't yet see. The general inhumanity and psychological implications of the monsters, as opposed to the zombies of Resident Evil, also added to the creepy atmosphere.

Going through with the attitude you could kill everything would easily get you killed. Survival horror is about surviving because you do so against all odds, not because of good combat skills. So, as the genre evolves into action horror, it is definitely not the same as survival horror.

Re:Make up your minds

[ConanG]

Don't forget World of Goo! That's a pretty original game.