DON’T GO IN THERE: Building horror in games

I really hate being scared. Every year, for his birthday, one of my oldest friends always asks that I sit through horror movie with him. He clearly gets enjoyment from watching me get a heart attack, so Happy Birthday, jerk. I clearly make friends with terrible people, but all anecdotes aside, I really like horror games. Being in charge as an active player changes the horror in games from the kind you get in movies to something way more interesting.

But what makes for good horror in games?

From the setup to the end of the game, F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon) barely manages to startle you. You start out as a highly trained special operative with the ability to kick somebody so hard they die and the ability to slow down time. In fact, there is no threat that you can’t shoot or kick to death. F.E.A.R is basically like one of those plastic overlays people put on Atari 2600 games, but with spookiness instead of color.

F.E.A.R might not be the best horror game, but it's a stellar FPS with A.I that stands up to this day.

While the mechanics rate a firm one on the scream-o-meter, F.E.A.R’s atmosphere and set pieces rank higher. You walk through dimly lit hospitals, abandoned buildings, and scientific facilities. Every hallway light flickers just before you round a corner. Every time you can’t see into a room, the spooky Ring-like girl who haunts you throughout the game is this close to jump-scare-ing the hell out of you. Horror takes a lot of work to pull off right and though F.E.A.R made admirable strides, it fell a few feet short.

Fun fact! The horror you feel is inversely propositional to the amount of machine guns and superpowers that main character has.

If F.E.A.R was a covered overlay, Amnesia: The Dark Decent is your worst nightmare come to life. Where F.E.A.R gave you superhuman abilities and lots of guns, Amnesia gives you a crippling phobia of the darkness and a lamp that’s always running out of fuel. You wake up in a dark hallway, deliriously trying to remember your name, and stumble through what appears to be a medieval castle as your vision blurs then finally fades out. You spend the remainder of the game just trying to figure out who you are, why you’re here, and how to get the hell out of dodge.

Uh, you know what? You can go first. I'll just hang here. Near the torch. Where it's not superscarydark.

The mechanics of Amnesia are built around horror. You fight back against any of the monsters in the game, your main source of light has little fuel, and the click-and-hold mechanic you use to move objects around is tailor made for hiding in a closet with the door cracked. You go insane if you hang around in the dark too much or if you look directly at the enemies, leaving their appearance a mystery. You will always invent something scarier than any designer can create; the best horror movies don’t show the monster right away, after all.

Let me put it this way: this thing here is the friendliest face you're going to find in this whole damn castle.

I have no idea where I am, I'm terrified to move, and my lamp is almost out of fuel. Everything is awful.

The game is quiet, but never silent. You can hear the castle creak, the wind howl outside the windows, and things moving in the distance. When you turn your back, you can swear you hear something stepping behind you, only pausing when you do. The unsettling labyrinthine level design is full of twists, turns, and secret passages; you get lost easily, leaving you unsettled and your comfort zone in the far distance. The mechanics, the controls, and the way the world looks makes you really feel as helpless as your character is supposed to feel.

It’s clear that combining action and horror is difficult but if we look at System Shock 2, we can see that it’s possible. Like in Amnesia, you’ll hear plenty of ominous moans and groans as you wander around twisted corridors of the Von Bruan starship and you’ll pick up terror-stricken audio recordings which document the collapse of the ship and its inhabitants. The more you learn the more you realize just how monumental the enemy you face is and how impossible your task seems.

You won't be finding a lot of allies on the Von Braun, so you best settle into to facing your enemies alone.

System Shock 2 handles controls awkwardly at best; you don’t feel helpless but you certainly don’t feel like Rambo either. You start out as a soldier but you can’t handle weapons well. You even swing your wrench unbearably slowly, which means you need consideration and planning to fight enemies. As you move through the game, you increase your skills with weapons, hacking, or telekinetic powers to bludgeon, shoot or magic enemies to death. By impairing your abilities, System Shock 2 combines action and horror. You would panic too when half of your shots miss the shambling thing coming right at you.

Yeah, just try to tell me you could see this thing in your face and not totally freak the hell out.

Horror in games must have been a hard concept for game devs and writers to wrap their heads around. How can you scare a player who can miss your jump scares by facing the wrong direction? How can you make a player feel helpless when most games are a power fantasy? With a lot of hard work (and some not-so-scary games), developers and writers managed to come up with a whole new kind of horror. So sit back, put on your headphones, and give you heart a start or two with a spooky game.

If you don’t share this Topic Post, nightmares will haunt you forever until you do. Save yourself and share it.

Don’t forget to follow TheMagnusKit on Facebook and Twitter. You’ll be haunted by spooky ghosts otherwise. 

P.S. the original System Shock is getting a remake! You can download the demo on GOG for free!. Go do it! There's also a kickstarter if you're into that kind of thing.

Pickling Games: Atmosphere

Imagine that you wake up on a train. There are only two other people in your car, both say that they didn’t see you get on. The train stops, and with a heaving sigh and a "Well, end of the line" from one of the other passengers, you enter a dirty train station. High above you, gigantic screens show a man, speaking to all of you. He mentions the" generosity of our benefactors” in allowing you to live in “one of humanity’s finest remaining settlements.”  Meanwhile, you can get a better look at the people inside the station. They are frightened, depressed, and extremely wary of one another. The police force abuses the populace with total for fun, taking some into “interrogation rooms” and beating others for nothing more than not picking up a can. You can see the desperation and anger in the citizens who wait for a single bag of food from an automatic dispenser. Walking out of the train station, you are blinded by the flash from a security drone taking pictures of all the populace. “Welcome to City 17”, the overseer says.

Though over a decade old, the opening of Half-Life 2 still stands as one of the best introductions to a world in games.

This is the opening to Half Life 2, considered one of the best video games ever made. A large part of this is because of the well-constructed and designed world and atmosphere of the game. Atmosphere is the salt of the video game world. It adds flavor to normal games and drastically increases the chance of preservation. Those few games that get it right are guaranteed at least a footnote in the history of Video Games.

So, how do you do atmosphere right?

The Shock games (System Shock/System Shock 2/Bioshock 1, 2, and Infinite) are loved by many players.  Every step you takes, every sound you hear, and every new room you see adds to the atmosphere of the game.

From the very opening of System Shock 2 you know that only a thin metal wall separates you from the gigantic cold void of space.  As you move through the station, enemies’ mumbled cries echo around the empty rooms and the slowly decaying station machinery blips and beeps. The game shows you clear evidence of the people living there: audio diaries, magazines left out on beds, and discarded drink cans in the mess hall. More importantly, the layout of station is designed for people, rather than just a level in a game. All of these little things make the space station of System Shock 2 a haunting and unforgettable environment despite uncomfortable combat, a confusing upgrade system, and wildly unbalanced weapons.

The villain of System Shock, SHODAN, adds a huge amount to the atmosphere  with her almost Max Headroom style messages.

If you are interested in western RPGs in the slightest, chances are you have seen a lot of discussion and comparison between The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In Morrowind, the minute you step into the playable part of the game (in the hold of a ship), you hear all the sounds you actually might hear on real wooden boat; the creaking of the wood, the water splashing against the hull, and the footsteps of the people upstairs. These little environmental sounds immerse you in the area, to say nothing of the visual aspects of Morrowind.

The first town looks normal, but even that has tons of visual and audio cues that let you know that it’s as close an to a real place as video games can create. The town is built around a few buildings, like the Trade House and the Guard House. There’s a lighthouse near the water and several lower income houses near the less desirable, swampier parts of town. The outdoors themselves are really well put together as well, and give you clues about how this world works. Step a few feet outside any town and the you find mushroom trees, giant bugs that serve as a sort of public transport, and areas ranging from damp swamps to giant mountains hidden in swirling clouds of red ash. Your character reacts to all this like you actually might.  You have to wade through ash storms when you encounter them. They slow your forward movement and force your character to shield their eyes. When you walk under the mushroom trees, you can see various creatures scuttling  underneath and flying gas creatures moving gently from place to place.

The first area you see in a game helps set the tone for the rest of your time int the world, and a lot of games don't use the first area as well as they could.

Skyrim misses a lot of these little touches. The sounds of the world are generic and your character moves the same whether you are trudging through snow or running in a field. The dungeons of Skyrim are almost always designed in the same way. You follow a crescent shaped path only to find a switch at the end which allows you to move from the beginning to the end much quicker. The dungeons are oddly quiet and the exact same color palette and textures do start to wear on you. These details make you feel unconnected from the world and reduce atmospheric quality of the game.

However, there are parts of Skyrim that do further atmosphere, like the lighting and weather systems. In one of the first dungeons, a single fire on top of a pedestal illuminates a broken down chamber, and the enemy slowly crosses the room. The flickering flame and the quality of light make the room seem warm, somehow. You can almost feel the one room of heat in this cold tomb, and feel the trepidation when the enemy emerges from the shadow.

You find the best moments in Skyrim happen when you're exploring. When you trudge up a mountain, over rocks and through a blizzard, only to look up and see an ancient structure slowly appear out of the snow, you get a feeling like you're exploring something that's been untouched for years. You can almost feel the cold that chills your bones and the snow that weighs your feet down. The sense of adventure here is almost unparalleled; what's in that template, just waiting for me to find it?

Discovery is one of the best things in The Elder Scrolls series, and Skyrim definitely has that in spades, but other issues weigh it down when compared with earlier games.

Atmosphere does not always have to be beautiful or inviting; the dark and lonely world of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games tosses you into a dangerous and tense fight for survival. This series of games takes place in the area around the Chernobyl reactor, famous for its 1986 nuclear disaster. You assumes the role of a stalker, an adventurer who goes into the “Zone” to bring back mysterious artifacts created by disaster.

Most worlds draw you to go outside and adventure, but not the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series. Every time you go out into the Zone you risk getting mauled by psychic dogs, gasmask-wearing snorks, or white eyed blood sucking humanoids that can become invisible at will. The unfriendly humans can be even worse. When walking through “The Zone”, you can hear the haunting cries of the mutated animals and feel a chill run up your spine, you can see the far off light of gunfire and decide whether intervening is smart given your ammunition count and health. You can see the various radioactive anomalies light up as an unfortunate person or animal wanders into them and feel your steps become more cautious to avoid a similar fate. You can feel the cold of the rain and the anticipation for safety upon seeing a friendly group of stalkers around a fire. The world forces you to treat it with caution and respect, making it far more memorable than most video game locales.

If the mutants of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R don't creep you out, I don't want to know you.

Imagine dropping into the cockpit of a space fighter. Immediately, you see the metal bulkhead in front of you that reads “Trevithick Dock.” You select the “launch option”, and your ship is carted through the station until you are on the surface, the black void of space around you. In the distance, you can see millions of stars through the translucent glass of your cockpit. Inside the cockpit, you can see your ships controls, and watch as your avatar responds to your commands, readying to ship for launch. Around you, your audio feed picks up various ships docking and leaving as well as the Dock master’s stern warning not to cause any trouble. You launch your ship off of the landing pad and suddenly, the galaxy is open to you. All you have to do is chose where to start your adventure. This is what atmosphere does. It creates memories that stick with you for far longer than any game can last. 

Welcome to the galaxy, pilot. Where to first?