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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
