Featured Blog | This community-written post highlights the best of what the game industry has to offer. Read more like it on the Game Developer Blogs.
Backrooms, Liminal Spaces, And The Subliminal Menace Of Loneliness in Indie Horror Games
The other day I was told that my writing is appreciated and that I need to write more… so I'm taking a moment to write about a rabbit hole that I’ve fallen down since working on BlueSuburbia!
This is about the horror of liminal spaces, and the intrinsic surrealism of our digital world… That beautiful awful loneliness of existing in the electric void of shared virtual fantasies that video games are.
Video games are the closest thing that we have to existing in someone else’s dream. Carefully constructed fantasies that we share with players. These are our fever dreams, both pleasant and awful.
Tomb Raider 1, Level 14: Atlantis
Computers lend themselves well to horror, surrealism, or absurdist expression, because (at heart) the concept of computers does not make sense.
The fact that we created this very virtual, non tangible, inherently ephemeral and transitional “world” outside of our physical reality is fascinating to reflect on. None of this is real. This post isn’t really either. It exists only as 0’s and 1’s, unless you print it out. Then it’s part of a tangible reality.
Our virtual reality is an electronic ephemeral concept that is something of an expression of our collective conscience, for good or bad… but so much of this “not real” is vital to our daily existence.
If you look at it that way, then we’ve created a weird dependent symbiosis between computers and people. Computers are strange things, easy to break and prone to malfunction, but behind that malfunction lies the realm of our beautiful and often terrible virtual nightmare.
Since working on BlueSuburbia, I can’t get enough of that feeling. If you’ve encountered it at any formative part of your digital life then you know what I mean!
Old school video game terrors: Tomb Raider Yetis, Tomb Raider’s Great Wall level, the sad zombie in Space Quest XII, and Alone In the Dark (original)
My go-to games when growing up were PC games. DOS games, or demos collected from demo disks.
(Tangent: I recently found these again and was over the moon! So many memories!)
The iconic low-fi graphics we now relegate to “nostalgia” is something I remember viewing as often terrifying. It had a unique “I’m alone and I don’t want to be in this place” feeling.
The lack of detail meant you could read so much more into it, especially fear.
My initial experience with games like Alone in the Dark and Tomb Raider often still surpass anything today (I speak for myself, that’s not a generalization).
Maybe we rely on too much when we place so much value on visual fidelity? Maybe horror is elsewhere?
Despite the incredible depth of detail AAA games today have, I think the older lack of detail, the hidden things, what remains unsaid… is why horror in games remains such a unique experience. This is why I think the PS1 era style horror boom is so popular right now. I wrote about that here: Exploring the beautiful world of indie horror games (why work from smaller devs, and indie devs, is so meaningful)
The loneliness of Tomb Raider’s Tibetan Foothills was awful… Or even the dread of having to go into Tomb Raider 2’s Yeti Cages is something that will always highlight how terrifyingly lonely crawling through video game spaces can be. There could be more in that darkness than just low-poly Yeti’s! What if!?…
“This is an indie horror game with first-person puzzles. Terror and fear have enveloped the city. The maniac has returned. You sneak into his lair to try and stop him before he goes too far…”
The terrifying menace of loneliness is a unique quality to three-dimensional spaces. If I watch a horror movie, I am with the protagonist. I am a witness, but not alone. If I’m in a video game, then I have to be the protagonist. I am alone.
Fears to Fathom – Ironbark_Lookout