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Welcome to Chris' Survival Horror Quest. Here you will find a database of every console
survival horror game ever created, complete with commentary, screenshots, game data, and
forums. My goal is to play all the titles in this genre to learn what makes
the good games good and the bad games oh so bad. Check out the database,
the forums, and
info on how you can help!
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Stop! Don't open! ... that door.
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 (click for larger)
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A Teaser
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Wishing you well!
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Let's fund some indie horror games
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DreadOut needs your help!
But some of these games need help to reach completion. I propose that we help them out by donating some cash or voting on Greenlight. I'll highlight two games here but feel free to link to more in the comments below. There's a lot to see!
DreadOut is a Fatal Frame-esque third person horror game by an Indonesian developer, and man it looks awesome. The developer is close to meeting their funding goal ($25k, which is like a rounding error for the level of quality that they are pushing), but only has 4 days left. Drop everything and go give them some cash! There's also a playable demo for all platforms if you need convincing. Thanks much to Michael from Frightening for the tip-off about this one. Michael also has a pretty cool video preview up.
The Forest is something completely different. It's an open world horror game something or another--I'm not really sure. But the trailer is super hot and all it needs is Greenlight votes. So go vote for it.
There are more--a lot more--in development or recently released. Post your favorites in the comments and let's help these guys bring their games to market. |
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Year Walk
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Given the tremendous glut of mobile games available today, it surprises me that there aren't more horror games. There are a number of zombie shooters, a bunch of Halloween-themed games, and some interesting text adventures, but very little designed to actually scare you. Other than End Night and amateur-hour Slenderman knock-offs, serious attempts at horror are all but nonexistent on Android and iOS. Don't even get me started about Dead Space Mobile.
Until now, anyway. Recently Swedish developer Simogo has released Year Walk for iOS devices, and it's pretty dang awesome. The premise involves an ancient Swedish tradition of "year walking," walking through the forest at night on a certain day of the year after fasting in order to have a vision of the future. You'll explore a confusing landscape by scrolling and swiping to move in first person, and along the way puzzles will present themselves. The game even has a companion app that explains in more detail the mythical characters that appear in the game, and you really must download that as well.
As far as horror games go, Year Walk is pretty good. It has some flaws--I'm not sure about swiping down to move forward and several of the puzzles are just pattern memory things--but they are minor. The art and sound is very strong, and the story is very interesting (though I can't tell you why). It's a little bit light on the horror aspects, to tell you the truth, though horror is by far the best genre to describe this game. All in all, the design is solid, interesting, innovative, but not revolutionary.
What makes Year Walk so special is that the core gameplay has been architected around a tablet interface. This isn't just a horror game on a tablet, it's a tablet horror game. Everything from interesting multi-touch puzzles to the presentation of the world itself to the integration of the companion app fits naturally with the host platform. Year Walk is a native citizen of mobile, and its design works because of this deep understanding of the types of interactions that only a mobile device can provide. I can't give you too many details without spoiling it, but it's hard to imagine this game running on any other platform.
If you have an iPad, give Year Walk a go. I hope we see a lot more like it. |
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Dark Escape 3D
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Every once in a while I get an angry message asking me why I omit PC games from this site, or why I fail to include visual novels and light gun shooters. The reason is mostly logistic: I have a limited capacity to buy and play games and so I need to contain my research in some way to make the project feasible. When I look at the number of PC horror games that have ever been made, and the lengthy steps required to purchase and run these games, it is an easy decision to avoid them purely on cost/benefit grounds. The same can be said for visual novels: the form is slow, there are a ton of them, and I don't expect to learn a whole lot about how horror games can be made by reading text set against static images (even when the text is really good!).
Light gun games are also omitted for this reason. In my youth I spent inordinate amounts of money on Lethal Enforcers, Terminator 2, Time Crisis, and House of the Dead, and even now I enjoy a good light gun shooter every now and then. But these games are rarely designed to actually scare you--they are almost always designed to be challenging target practice systems wrapped up in some arbitrary contextual skin. You can shoot vampires in Vampire Night, and zombies in House of the Dead, but neither game was designed to actually frighten you. Even the Silent Hill arcade shooter is just the dispatching of zombie nurses over and over with some fog in the background and film grain in the fore.
There are, however, exceptions to every rule, and when it comes to light gun shooters, the exception seems to be a game called Dark Escape 3D. It's a big arcade cabinet, the kind where you go in and sit down, and it sports all kinds of technical features: a vibrating seat, 3D screen (complete with glasses tethered to the cabinet), 5.1 surround sound, and even a heart rate monitor built into the handle of the turret-like guns mounted in front of the screen. If you believe the marketing, the game is designed not only to scare you but to adjust your score depending on how scared you become.
I located this behemoth at the local arcade while visiting Japan on holiday. It cost about $2 for one play and $1 for each continue, but I couldn't pass it up. I was, unfortunately, disappointed.
It's not that Dark Escape 3D is a bad game. As shooters go, I'd say it's fairly mediocre--there are a lot of cheap hits and the targeting reticle is often deactivated, which is pretty annoying. The visuals seem designed to show off the 3D effect rather than present the game. Though the game looks nice, the design is nowhere near the quality of say, Time Crisis 2 or House of the Dead 2. But, you know, it's a shooter: you point the gun at stuff and pull the trigger and that's about all there is to it. So it's not bad.
And surprisingly, it actually managed to pull off a pretty good scare. I didn't expect it to get the drop on me, but early in the game there is 
These guys? You shoot them.
The problem is, the effect was significantly diminished when the game tried it again a minute later. By the third pop-out scare my heart rate, as reported by the game, was holding steady, and I was already becoming bored. Though it tries to be scary, Dark Escape 3D is just another light gun shooter: zombies come out and you shoot them in the head before they can scrape you. Then the camera moves and more zombies come out and you shoot them. After the third of fourth zombie face has jumped out of nowhere to fill your screen and scream bloody murder, the pattern is pretty clear; you shoot it in the head and move on.
Dark Escape 3D has a lot of tools at its disposal, but all it does with them is pop-out scares. Just one after another, over and over. I was hoping the heart rate monitor would be put to some game play use (e.g. you could detect when the player had begun to relax and schedule a pop-out scare at that time), but unfortunately it seems relegated to a HUD element and some worthless score bonus at the end of a stage. The pop-out scare is a highly effective--and totally legitimate--way to scare people, but it only works when they aren't expecting it. It's best used sparingly, in small doses. There's a reason that everybody remembers the zombie dogs crashing through the window in Resident Evil: it's the first pop-out moment in the game and so it was a legitimately terrifying event. Dark Escape 3D doesn't understand this. It just hits you with a pop-out zombie and then another and then another. The power of the scare is lost after the first few.
The problem, I guess, is that even with near-perfect environmental controls, the developers of Dark Escape 3D are still stuck with the fact that they are making an arcade game. They need to kill the player off every three minutes or so to ensure a steady stream of quarters. The market for arcade games is drying up fast in Japan--the spot where I found Dark Escape used to be a haven for weird games and is now entirely shooters, driving games, UFO catchers, and virtual horse racing games. So given those constraints there is little choice but to make a shooter. And because they made a shooter, all the tech at their disposal ended up being wasted on a petty gimmick.
15 minutes later and $5 poorer, I stepped out of the cabinet with a reaffirmed belief that I am not missing much by omitting light gun games from the Quest. The format is simply not expressive enough to actually experiment with interesting emotional mechanics. |
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The Value of Uncertainty Part 2: Negative Space
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This unassuming scene is key to mapping the negative space in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure.
Another interesting trait of horror games is that the exact same logic is often applied to the narrative. Horror game narratives are vine-like, twisting and turning in ways that you don't expect. Suspense is the feeling of knowing that something is coming but not knowing what, or when, it will arrive; this is true whether the suspense is generated by a static-emitting radio radar, a long staircase that seems to go impossibly deep into the ground, or the suggestion that an ancient curse may still be in effect. If the player knows what's going to happen ahead of time, the feeling of tension is lost; as with the mechanics obfuscation, it is necessary to hide details of the story from the player so that they are forced to operate with incomplete information. They are not in control.
There are many names for this approach, but my favorite is negative space. In this context, the term describes the bits of the story that are never explicitly communicated to the player. If we write a complete narrative down on index cards, with one event per card, and then pour the whole lot on the table, the cards that land face down are in the negative space. The reader can probably piece the story together from the cards that land face up, but he'll have to use his imagination to fill in the blanks.
Akira Yamaoka described his approach to the narrative in Silent Hill as "creating space for the imagination." He provides a pretty nice framework for thinking about negative space: he talks about the "stacking" of clues, fragments of (often conflicting) information that provide enough detail for the player to form a working theory about what is going on. The key to Yamaoka's approach is that these clues are designed to mislead the player into thinking they understand the story so that a late scene can pull the rug out from under them when the "true horror" is revealed. Remember, the goal is to keep the player from becoming comfortable.
It's important to underscore the connection Yamaoka makes between negative space and the player's imagination. In fact, the purpose of the negative space, above and beyond keeping the player uncomfortable, is to provide an area for the mind to explore. Noel Carroll writes,
Nevertheless, a great deal of the sustaining interest in horror stories concerns the discover of the unknown. The majority of horror stories are, to a significant extent, representations of process of discovery, as well as often occasions for hypothesis formation on the part of the audience and, as such, these stories engage us in the drama of proof.
We've all seen predictable horror films, and they are always terrible; even an artistically elegant film cannot sustain our interest if the arc of the plot is obvious from the onset. We enjoy horror in no small part because it allows us to explore that which we do not know--to try to map the negative space.
It's also interesting to note that the mere suggestion of the existence of negative space can increase the effectiveness of a narrative. I'm a big fan of Haruki Murakami's novels because they are always about that which is unsaid; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, one of my all-time favorite books, has enough negative space to house the Titanic. Another Murakami work, South of the Border, West of the Sun, is a good example of negative space as a passing suggestion of something far below the surface of the narrative. In it a man is suddenly reunited with a childhood friend, and he begins to fall for her. But the years intervening their childhood friendship and adult romance are a mystery, and her behavior is sometimes unexplainable. The book can be read as a simple drama about a man having a midlife crisis, but in typical Murakami fashion the ending reveals a small detail that throws all of the preceding events into question: the protagonist realizes that he cannot actually prove that his mysterious lover exists. The key to this revelation is so minor that you might gloss right over it, but for an astute reader it is the equivalent of Yamaoka's "true horror": the author has just thrown us into the deep end in the final pages by suggesting, only suggesting, that things are not as they appear.
I've 
The effect of foreign culture on the perceived depth of negative space.
Negative space serves two major functions in horror narratives: it deepens our interest by forcing us to think about what is going on, and it keeps us unbalanced (and therefore, not in control) by reinforcing the idea that we are operating with incomplete knowledge. I'm a pretty hardcore Siren fan, and after 100%-ing that game I have a pretty good idea of what happens and why, but there are still a lot of questions that I don't have answers to. Though most of the questions are eventually resolved, Catherine is keeps you guessing for most of the game. Hell Night doles its plot out in reliable chunks, but late in the game it does something that forces you to reevaluate all of your assumptions. And of course, Silent Hill 2, the king of negative space in games, remains one of the most highly respected narratives in game history. It's no accident that these games are highly regarded; the existence of negative space is a boilerplate requirement for horror narratives. |
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The Value of Uncertainty
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Low visibility. No HUD.
At the time I was convinced that the radio sounds played a key role in Silent Hill's brand of fear. And a decade and a half later, I still think that the radio, and the greater soundscape that Silent Hill employs, is a big part of what makes the series scary. But the radio isn't just a great sound, it serves a specific gameplay purpose: it is a fuzzy form of radar. Its job is to escalate the level of tension felt by the player and also to warn him of enemies in the immediate area. Though many games employ some form of radar, this one is a bit different because it is so indistinct. When the static sound flairs you know that enemies are close, but it's not possible to tell how close, or in which direction they reside, or even how many of them there might be. It wasn't the thought of lurking nurses that scared me, it was knowing that they were near and not knowing exactly how near. There's something insidious about that, about having enough information to be concerned but not enough to act. Without the radio, the scares would have devolved into surprise attacks, which might work once or twice but would thereafter become routine. With a more specific radar, the uncertainty about the location of the enemies would be removed and dispatching them would become routine. Much has been written about how the sound of Silent Hill's radio is itself a tension inducer, but I wonder if the fuzziness of the information it provides is also an important aspect of its function.
Silent Hill isn't the only horror game with a fuzzy radar. In the early Resident Evil games, the sound of zombie moans and their lumbering footfalls warned you that danger was near, even if the angle of the camera restricted your view of the room. Like the Silent Hill radio, this communication was indistinct; it put you on your guard but did not give you enough information to anticipate the position 
Better visibility, but still no HUD. No specific information.
Of course, none of these games have any kind of actual radar on the HUD--they don't have a HUD at all. In fact, only a very small number of horror games actually have any sort of on-screen display. The absence of a HUD is often chalked up to "immersive" game design; the theory is that removing elements that do not appear within the game world itself increases the immediate believability of that world. I suspect that this is true, especially in games like ICO, but I think that horror games have another, more important reason to omit the HUD. Like the fuzziness of the Silent Hill radar radio, obscuring the HUD is a way to obfuscate the details of the game state from the player.
Obfuscation of game state is an idea that shows up in all sorts of places in horror game design. Take the Resident Evil health system: rather than a health bar or number, classic Resident Evil gives you a three state abstraction: FINE, CAUTION, and DANGER. Each state indicates a range of health values; sometimes you will take a hit and the state will not change, other times a hit may cause you to go directly from FINE to DANGER. Of course, under the hood these states map to something like a health bar, and dedicated players have deciphered the underlying system, but during normal play this system obfuscates the amount of health you have. Your health value is further obscured by the herb combination system. Are three herbs taken individually as powerful as three herbs combined? Is a green and a red herb combined the same as three green herbs? Does combining with a blue herb affect the amount of health recovered? The Silent Hill series has played with non-obvious health meters too: depending on the game, the information you get is limited to a pulsating color or an image that becomes more noisy as damage is taken. Siren doesn't provide a health meter at all.
How near is the Slenderman in Slender? Can the creatures in Amnesia: The Dark Descent see you or not? You can hear the monster in 
Lots of specific information.
I think that horror games, more than any other genre, go out of their way to hide specific details about the game simulation from the player. It's not that details such as health or ammo supply are not relevant to the simulation, it's that the game wishes to keep you in a constant state of uncertainty. To that end these games obfuscate all kinds of details that are considered incisive in other genres: health, ammo supplies, enemy locations, and even the core rules of the game itself. The end result, I think, is a scarier game.
As a counterpoint, let's consider a game that not obfuscate its game state: Dead Space. Though Dead Space has no 2D HUD, it still provides the player with plenty of information--much more than the other games discussed in this post. Isaac's life bar is attached to his back, his gun prominently displays the number of shots remaining, and he has a special gadget that shows him where to go whenever he is lost. This information is reassuring. In the heat of battle, we can rest easy if Isaac has full health; even a couple of direct hits aren't likely to kill him. We know where we're going, and how much ammo and health we have, at all times. Though there's some uncertainty in the narrative (a topic I'll tackle next time), the game mechanics leave nothing vague. As a result, I felt that Dead Space lost a lot of its horror bite; it's missing that overwhelming feeling of oppression that the others are able to pull off. All the information makes it a bit too easy to relax.
Uncertainty is a valuable commodity amongst horror games because it is part of the greater plan to make you feel that you are not in control of the situation. Loss of control, I have come to believe, is one of the core traits of all successful horror games; those games that evoke a feeling of helplessness are the ones we find the most frightening. Causing the player to believe that the events unfolding within the game are beyond his control is a complex task, and uncertainty is only a small part of it. But even so, making the player to feel uncertain about key game rules helps to knock his confidence down a peg or two. And when every system in the game is intentionally obfuscated, the feeling of uncertainty, and therefore lack of control, is strong indeed. |
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Alan Wake's American Nightmare
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I had heard something about a new Alan Wake game, released as a short XBLA downloadable title, way back in February of this year. I jotted the game down in my mental list of titles to look up later and then promptly forgot about it. The game came and went without much of a murmur, obscure to even to the collective consciousness of my twitter feed.
Then sometime last month I noticed that the game was on sale. Not via the XBLA dashboard, mind you: it's impossible to find anything game-related there nowadays. Somebody on Twitter, maybe a Remedy employee, mentioned that Alan Wake's American Nightmare had gone on sale. I booted up my trusty 360 and after ten minutes of struggling to find the game in Microsoft's labyrinthine user interface, I finally discovered it wedged between an ad for a sports drink and a promo for The Avengers. There was little reason to wait for a sale, though--the game only costs $15 full price.
Though I enjoyed the original Alan Wake, the DLC missions didn't grip me and eventually I left them unfinished. Frankly, I was expecting American Nightmare to be more of the same. And while it is a throughly Alan Wake game, I am happy to report that it is really good. So good, in fact, that I like it more than the first Wake game.
You can read my review for details. The game is interesting, fun, and very smartly designed. I am a fan. |
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The Walking Dead Isn't Horror
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A couple of years ago my brother, a comic fanatic (and indie comic artist/author/publisher), gave me a copy of The Walking Dead for my birthday. A few years later he gave me a DVD of the first season of the show based on that comic. And that is why, when I read that Telltale had released a Walking Dead episodic game on Xbox Live (as well as PSN, iOS, and PC/Mac), I made a mad dash for my television.
I wasn't disappointed. The Walking Dead game is fantastic--it's one of the best adventure games I've played in a very long time. The interface is simple but effective, the tried-and-true adventure game play fits the needs of the story well, and the writing is absolutely top-notch. It's not easy to make a game like this today; somebody at Telltale has a deep understanding of how adventure games work and why they are still viable in the market, despite the failure of the genre over a decade ago. It is exactly the right game for this series, I think: no other genre could have hit the emotional notes that are the series' signature as well as this one does.
And yet, although it concerns a small group of people attempting to survive a zombie apocalypse, with all of the dramatic zombie attacks and bloody dismemberment that you might expect, The Walking Dead is not a horror game. At least, not by Noel Carroll's standards. In his seminal text on horror, A Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Carroll meticulously argues for the existence of "art-horror," the emotion we feel when consuming works of horror (I wrote about Carroll's ideas earlier this year). Art-horror has specific requirements that set it apart from related genres like suspense and mystery. One requirement is that a monster be involved. Another is that said monster must be plausible, dangerous, and disgusting, a role that the sauntering deceased for which the game is named clearly fulfill. But even considering the zombies, obvious horror tropes that they are, The Walking Dead fails some of Carroll's other requirements for horror.
One of Carroll's most insightful requirements is that the monsters of art-horror be "extraordinary." That is, they must be something that isn't expected, that surprises the protagonists, that isn't a normal element of the world. This is in contrast to fantasy, in which monsters or other crazy beings are "normal" because the setting itself is extraordinary. Finding a troll in your back yard is a lot more surprising than finding one in Narnia. This "extraordinary being in an ordinary world" definition allows Carroll to cleanly separate works of horror from works of fantasy, even though both contain monsters that fit his other prerequisites.
The zombies in The Walking Dead, however, are not extraordinary. They are dangerous, sure, but they have become a fact of life for the main characters. The protagonists now live in a changed world; the new normal is a world in which the dead shuffle about looking for anything living to eat. Lee, the protagonist, is not surprised to see zombies. He encounters them, and kills them, regularly. Though they were initially weird, with time and exposure they have become ordinary. The world that these zombies inhabit, and how the protagonists react to that world, is The Walking Dead's principal concern. Per Carroll's requirements, this means that The Walking Dead isn't going for art-horror.
Which, actually, you don't need to read Carroll to understand. The Walking Dead has some intense scenes, but it's not scary. It's not trying to be scary. Carroll writes about how the emotions of characters in art-horror works ideally run parallel to those of the audience, but the characters in The Walking Dead are rarely scared. There's no hiding in the corner or sobbing in a dark room for these grizzled veterans. They are competent, aware of their surroundings, and paranoid. They are angry, political, and scheming. And though they experience moments of vulnerability, the game doesn't go out of its way to communicate how scared they are, because it's not really going for scares. It's got its eye on something else.
The real genius of The Walking Dead is that it forces you, the player, to step into the shoes of the protagonists and make hard decisions posed by the harsh world around them. The central question it is asking, I think, is whether or not you can maintain your humanity in the face of disaster. Do you act consistently when presented with the same problem in different contexts? How far will your moral compass sway when you are caught between starving, getting stabbed in the back as you sleep, or becoming food for some shambling corpse? Your decisions can't be taken lightly, as they affect the way the rest of the game plays out.
My Lee is trying very hard to retain his humanity, to remain civilized. Even when it puts him in the line of danger, my Lee acts according to a strict moral code because he believes that deviation from it will result in chaos, and because he must set an example for the child in his charge. This leads to some significant hardship on his part, but he is confident in his decisions. There's nothing requiring you to play this way: you could choose to be more opportunistic or vindictive depending on the situation; after all, isn't surviving the most important thing at the end of the day? Even if it means somebody else doesn't make it?
This uncomfortable middle ground between what is right and what is best in the face of absolute disaster is the emotional area that The Walking Dead wants to explore. Though it's using zombies to get there, it's not a horror game; the intent is to make you think about how you live your life rather than to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.
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Donation!
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Thanks to a generous gift by "mdowns2," I am now in possession of Alien Resurrection for the PS1. Awesome! After ...Iru! I thought about taking a break from old first-person games, but now I may change my mind. Hmm, so many horror games to play, so little time! Thanks, mdowns2!
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