The Impact Factor

On Horror, Games, Death, and Immersion

Article

Abstract: Horror is a balancing act between immersion, momentum and tension. The movie genre is one of my favorites for its ability to create and draw me into a new worlds. Horror is not my favorite game genre, however. Player deaths can break immersion and halt forward momentum, which weakens them as horror experiences. My favorite horror games, Dead Space, Resident Evil 4 and SOMA however, are able to find this balance and each accomplishes this feat it it’s own unique way.

Horror speaks to me. I love the thrills, chills, kills. All of it. Slashers and monsters and psychological and supernatural. Every October I throw together a Scare Fest list, compiling a bunch of horror movies to watch and review. This year I even started doing a special seasonal podcast in which my fiancée and I discuss a recent scary movie we’ve seen together: Snuggle & Scream.

There are a lot of reasons I love horror, too many to write out in this article. One of the main reasons, and the inspiration for this article, is immersion. The genre as a whole is routinely effective at world building. The movies craft their characters, motivations, and the antagonist  clearly—and have them fit into a cohesive world. The source material mandates this. To be scared you need to be involved. A part of that world. Often this can be difficult when the ‘truth’ of your world involves werewolves and ghosts and preternaturally strong psychopaths. Horror movies often create worlds entirely dissimilar to our own. So they work to create a setting detailed enough that the viewer is transported there. Once you’re in the world, you can be scared.

John Carpenter's The Thing brought me into a new world. A terrifying one.

The immersion typically found in horror films is a strange one, though. There’s limitations. You’re in the world, you are the characters… right up until they die. As a viewer, you’re free from the deaths and murder. In the best horror films, you’re affected by it as if you were the character themselves but there’s that crucial separation that occurs at the character’s last few moments. The observer-participant hybridization is something that continues to fascinate me about horror, and one of the main reasons it’s my go-to movie genre.

Horror’s observer-participant dynamic allows for several things, the most important of which is momentum. Deaths do not remove you from the experience. Quite the contrary, deaths are a key facet of the experience. Despite rapid ends to character arcs, you’re (almost) always treated with one continuous experience. Culling, whether it be of characters or questions, is additive in horror—it narrows the focus and builds towards the film’s conclusion.

In Alien, you are the crew of the Nostromo. Until you're not. Because they're dead.

Despite my fanaticism for horror movies, that level of adoration hasn’t directly translated to a passion for horror video games. Don’t get me wrong, I do love horror games. I’ll talk about my three favorites here shortly. Several horror games have even been seminal in the understanding and implementation of modern game design. I would say, however, that as a whole horror games struggle to recapitulate the feeling you get while watching a scary movie. All too often, horror games fail at preserving momentum.

How do horror games, even some of the best, struggle to maintain a brisk momentum throughout? It all comes back to immersion. Like I wrote above, in horror movies you’re immersed right until the point of death. Your immersion breaks for a few moments, and then you’re right back in with the characters who’re still alive. But dying is a serious issue in games. The immersion in games does not end when a character dies. You are that protagonist whether you die or not. Death results (usually) in a game over screen and being sent back to your last checkpoint. This loop is problematic in three important ways. First, you lose momentum. The actions of your hero are halted dead in her tracks, only to be repeated once you make your way back to where you died. Second, it breaks immersion. Dying and coming back to life five minutes before you ate it isn’t something that happens in real life, nor is it a part of the game world that’s ever explained. To clarify that last point: when you die and respawn in Outlast it doesn’t fit within the reality of the game. There’s no explanation to it. There isn’t something like “In this insane asylum, those confined within its walls are doomed to live and die endlessly.” Or something to that effect. You respawn in a horror game because you have to, not because it fits the truth of the world. Functionally, the game just pretends you didn’t die. And finally, player deaths remove tension. Knowing what killed you and where it’s hiding (usually) strips fear from the encounter, and makes the final experience weaker overall.

Friday the 13th had a great / terrible game over screen. Seeing this too often
can kill the 'horror' of your time with any horror game.

Horror works when you have a perfect balance of the three: immersion, momentum, and tension. Horror games work when the balance of difficulty and death is titrated in such a way that you need to just barely survive. You are constantly in fear of dying, but death comes infrequently. Because you’re ostensibly one of the few characters that survives the ordeal, or at the very least makes it to the end of the ordeal (i.e. the end of the game), death is more set-back than an intended possibility. So few games get this balance right. In some, you die far too often and it kills momentum, tension, and immersion. In others, you never die and the game loses its scariness, transforming into either an action or exploration game depending on the underlying systems. Fortunately, there are a select few horror games that do an excellent job at maintaining this delicate balance. They also happen to be my three favorite horror games of all time. Let me tell you about how all three get the balance of difficulty, death and momentum correct, each in their own unique way.

2008’s Dead Space, by EA Redwood Shores (a.k.a. Visceral Games now) is first on the list. Let me make something clear from the start. Unless you’re incredibly, overly, pain-stakingly cautious, and good at third-person shooters, you will die during your time with Dead Space. It’s going to happen. Isaac Clarke, space-engineer turned space-alien slayer, can die in some pretty gruesome ways. Why deaths work in Dead Space as opposed to other titles, though, is how intimately they are a part of the game’s narrative and world. Ok, sure, Isaac Clarke isn’t supposed to die and the game offers no explanation on why you respawn. Death in Dead Space, however, is edifying. It builds immersion. The mysterious necromorphs are at the heart of your experience. Necromorphs are these emaciated, gory humanoid forces of dismemberment and death. Throughout most of the game, though, their particular brand of evil is a mystery. Why they are, what they are, and what their purpose is. While the game offers other types of narrative to answer these questions, one of the key ways in which you begin to understand your foe is death. They ways in which they decapitate you, disembowel you, build Dead Space’s world. There aren’t very many characters with which to interact in Dead Space. The necromorphs have no other way to communicate with the player other than tearing you limb from limb, so your early deaths act as a conversation. On top of all that, the ways in which they kill the player (rending extremities from torso, generally) reinforces the central gameplay mechanic of ‘strategic dismemberment.’ Shooting off necromorph limbs is the only way to kill them. Well, that plus a swift stomp to their noggin. Your death works synergistically with both world building and gameplay. In that way, Dead Space finds it’s own way to balance player deaths with its horror intentions.

Deaths are used as both conversation & world building. They're essential
to your experience with Dead Space.

Resident Evil 4 is next on the list. I love the Resident Evil franchise, but it wasn’t until the fourth entry into the main series that it really clicked for me. And I think a large part of why it felt so good to play, and felt so authentically horror, is because it nailed the balance of death and momentum. What I didn’t expect, however, is that the infusion of better action elements would be the reason behind this balance working so well. Leon Kennedy isn’t your standard powerless horror protagonist: he’s a government agent who has already proven his skill at killin’ zombies. With that knowledge, it makes sense he comes equipped with plenty of tools to handle his situation: guns, knifes, grenades, you name it. And you know how to use them. In addition, you have access to a fairly generous merchant who shows up everywhere to keep your personal armory stocked. All of this is necessary though, because Resident Evil 4 pits you against unfathomable odds. While playing the game you always feel like you’re on the cusp of dying. After each fight you’re left with precious little health and even less ammo. But you made it out alive. Resident Evil 4’s scenarios are perfectly designed to give the player this feeling over and over again. Case in point is one of the game’s earliest encounters in the town square. The player is tasked with fighting off a seemingly endless horde of angry villagers. The fight can last upwards of 15-20 minutes. Every time I’ve played the scenario I feel like I’m teetering on the precipice of death—my health is too low so I’m forced to sprint to a distant house to hide and heal, or my ammo is low so I try to bait the angry mob to come at me one at a time by strategically running way and re-engaging. Sure, you can die (and I did), but with skillful play and the right difficulty setting (normal or hard depending on player skill) Resident Evil 4 kills the player only a precious handful of times, and has them spread out often enough they don’t severely impact immersion or momentum.

You might be a badass, but Resident Evil 4 continually finds way
to put you on the precipice of death.

The most recent addition to this list is Frictional Game’s SOMA. The game does so much exceptionally well, and it’s easily one of the best games I've played this year. On top of having an incredible and mature sci-fi narrative that leaves the player with lingering existential dread, SOMA also has created a stunningly immersive world that is reinforced by a perfectly crafted balance of death and momentum. Perhaps most importantly, SOMA tries to scare the player very differently than most other horror games. SOMA isn’t about the fear of death and dying, like in Dead Space or Resident Evil, but rather the fear that arises when you ask questions like ‘what is death’ or ‘what does it mean to die.’ SOMA would be terrifying even if it were impossible for the player to die. But there are monsters, and you can die. Smartly, SOMA moves away from one-hit-kills like those in games like The Evil Within or Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It’s always two. This maintains momentum and severely limits replaying sections. Further, monsters appear frequently (or infrequently) enough that you’re constantly on edge that they might appear, but you’re never bogged down having to move past monster after monster. It maintains their scare factor. And finally, SOMA gives the player interesting ways to avoid dying. Some enemies, for example, can only see you if you are looking at them. This creates a new kind of tension. The player not only must move without looking at the monster, but it also places you physically closer an enemy than most other games. That quasi-safety in proximity creates a near-death feeling horror strives for. As a result, SOMA is a fantastic horror experience. Game or not.

SOMA moves away from scaring the player with death. It scares the player
by making them think about what death actually is.

The best of the best, whether movie or game, balance the many tensions that exist in horror. Horror games must be exceeding hard to design in this way, which makes the exceptions I described above all the more worth commending. So maybe give one of them a shot this Halloween weekend. Happy Scare Fest everyone.