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In-Depth: Scare Tactics - How Horror Games Have Evolved Their Controls
by Jeffrey Matulef [PC, Console/PC]
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February 8, 2011
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[In this Gamasutra analysis, Jeffrey Matulef takes a look at how horror games have evolved their controls, including examples from the Resident Evil, Doom and Silent Hill series.]
Ever had a dream where you're in imminent danger, but your legs are too heavy to run away? That's how I felt playing Resident Evil. Hitting left to rotate and up to walk towards the screen was completely unintuitive.
Making matters worse, I'd have to recalibrate my senses every time the fixed camera would shift position. "Move left, no wait YOUR OTHER LEFT! No Jill, don't run into the armoire! Go AWAY from the monsters. Ah hell..."
It's commonly believed that the goal of this backwards design was to emulate the sense of panic one would have when confronted by the unknown. While sensible, it's a personal preference whether you can handle that kind of agitation while scrambling for your life.
In the last decade however, horror games have found more intuitive ways to restrict players. Resident Evil 4 shifted the camera behind the player's shoulder but retained its stodgy movement, disallowing you to move and shoot at the same time.
This was a sticking point for many. Not only did it run contrary to how other third-person shooters controlled, it was unrealistic since you can move and shoot simultaneously (if not accurately) in real life. This was especially ridiculous when you had to stand perfectly still to start swiping monsters with a hunting knife.
I'd argue that this worked brilliantly in conjunction with the equally limited AI. The infected would sprint towards you (a la 28 Days Later) until they got about 10 ft away at which point they'd slowly shuffle forward (a la Night of the Living Dead). They'd tend to surround you, so you'd have to find a gap -- either by blasting them away with a shotgun or shooting their legs, bringing them to their knees -- allowing you to break free from their ever-dwindling radius.
Once far enough away you could make a quick 180 degree turn and start shooting them until they'd surround you and the process would start again. What made RE4 so intense was that you were frequently surrounded yet had just enough time to methodically aim your shots so long as you didn't panic, which was much easier said than done.
If you were able to move and shoot simultaneously it would have lead to a lot of circle strafing and the enemies would be a pushover unless their AI was tailored for this change. This was implemented in the similar Dead Space, and resulted in a quicker-paced action game where I was too busy shooting to feel any sense of dread.
 It isn't that action games can't be scary. They just do it in different ways. While the Resident Evil series has been progressively empowering its players, its first-person shooter brethren, Doom, has done the opposite.
In the first Doom there was no reload button (one could hold 60 shotgun shells at a time without reloading) and players could sprint indefinitely. Despite being assaulted by hundreds of denizens of hell, I felt badass enough to face them head on without batting an eye.
Doom 3, however, in a very controversial choice, didn't allow you to use a flashlight and a gun at the same time. This made some degree of sense for the large two-handed guns (though I can't imagine it could have been that hard to find duct tape on a military base) but not being able to hold a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in another was downright ridiculous. Much like RE4, this restriction made the game a whole lot more intense, practicality be damned.
Unlike any Resident Evil games, you're still completely mobile in Doom 3. You can run quickly, jump, and carry a generous amount of guns and ammo with you at any time. With my sight reduced, however, I still felt vulnerable no matter how powerful I was. Deciding when to drop my guard to illuminate my surroundings provided a brilliant and tense tactical challenge.
Dark environments aren't a prerequisite to a game being scary, though. When done poorly, it just leads to a lot of squinting. Silent Hill 4: The Room was uncharacteristically brightly lit with a lot of light drab, grey environments, but it was terrifying in spite of that. Enemies could be heard at most times, so even when it looked safe, I knew it wasn't.
 While Doom 3 and Silent Hill 4 spooked with sound, RE4 and Dead Space did the same through its absence. One thing that prevented RE4 from being as scary as it should have been was the music. It got tense when enemies were afoot, but went quiet as soon as the last one had been defeated.
There was one brief sequence in the second chapter where you're escorting a girl through a village at night in the rain where there's no music whatsoever, so it isn't clear when enemies are around. This was easily the most frightening sequence in the entire game for me not because of what I could hear, but rather what I couldn't.
Dead Space had similar sequences where you'd venture through an area without oxygen and the sound would go quiet. All you could hear was your heartbeat as a necromorph lunged towards you through adequately lit corridors. While it's scary to hear enemies you can't see a la Doom 3, it's equally unsettling for enemies to appear without making a peep.
While restricting senses and movement can create a tense scenario, a happy medium is when a game has slick, responsive controls, but limits resources. Metro 2033 controls like a standard first-person shooter, but practically every action in it requires an extra step.
Recharging your headlamp or night vision goggles requires manually pumping a rechargeable battery, ammo is scarce, and guns require frequent lengthy reload times. You're still a muscle-bound hero with guns, but given the odds you're up against, you're still vulnerable.
There's no one right way to design a horror game, but I find the theory that games are only scary when you're weak to be erroneous. There are plenty of other ways to elicit fear such as restricting movement, depriving senses, or limiting resources. As long as it serves the tone, it doesn't matter what you can or cannot do.
[Jeffrey Matulef is a freelance writer whose work can be found at G4TV.com, Eurogamer, Joystiq, and Paste among other places. He's also a regular on the Big Red Potion podcast. You can contact him at jmatulef at gmail dot com.]
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I also agree with the music bit of RE4. I swear if that music wasn't present when enemies were around, so I basically wouldn't know enemies were lingering or whatnot, I would have been really afraid.
Condemned was a nother game that scared me with its sounds
Doom 3 was a one trick pony in terms of design, you enter a dark room, a panel in front of you opens making a monster appear, and at the same time a panel opens behind you making another monster appear that will flank you while you deal with the first one. Dead Space 2 uses the same trick, only in a more chaotic and hectic manner. Unfortunately the gameplay design of Dead Space 2 does not accommodate this change from the original game very well and the gameplay ends up feeling very awkward.
The original Dead Space kept you on your feet and made you feel vulnerable, while having gameplay so well balanced that you could emerge victorious often, but nevertheless always felt the threat of imminent death. Dead Space 2 was a lot more predictable in structure so it lost some of its edge, and the horror was even further defanged by very poorly implemented spawn patterns that resulted in frequent frustrating player deaths because the game was overindulging in being unfair.
A thing of import in horror games is to make the gamer feel vulnerable, and maintain the illusion that death might be just one step away without these apprehensions being delivered on by actual player deaths very often. The more you die the more routine it becomes, and when the checkpoint was a minute away anyway you start to have ambivalent feelings about the threat and the horror is defanged.
Dead Space 2 does this quite often--it perhaps is not music..but its more than just sound effects. I can't remember if Dead Space 1 does this...played it like a year ago.
As for Metro 2033--the game is great..but the enemies too fast/strong and the weapons are too weak/flimsy...they feel empty--Like shooting Nerf arrows at a charging bull---whether that "bull" is human or mutant.
As for the Resident Evil series...I see it slowly moving to an action oriented game opposed to a horror game series. It's really not that scary or eerie for that matter--In a way it could almost sit next to any 3rd person shooter--only time I was even a bit worried in the game was when you had to carry around the flashlight in the caves(either you or your partner) a massive flashlight at that--which would incapacitate either you or your partner.
Dead Space is about facing the fear.
Amnesia is about evading fear.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is about antecipating fear.
And so on...
Also, for me it's a toss-up as to whether or not Doom was scarier than Doom 3, but I'd say that Doom was far more immersive, thanks in part to the inspired sound effects (e.g. hearing an imp snarl behind you) and also thanks to the way in which you could set enemies fighting each other. I'd also argue that the duct-tape mod actually made Doom 3 more scary, as it naturally pushed the player into a "tunnel vision" mode: if you're focusing on what's in the spotlight, you're not paying attention to the darkness around it.
Unfortunately, for all that I enjoyed Dead Space 2, it feels too much like a spiritual successor to Doom 3, which I think makes for a step back in gaming design - both for action-shooters and for survival horror. Not only is the focus on overly predictable set-pieces and simplistic AI, but as per last week's Penny Arcade strip, the game seems geared towards a "fail fast" philosophy: on a first playthrough, many of the set-pieces are incredibly difficult to survive on a first play. As a result, you end up repeating them several times, which completely kills any drama/horror in the situation: you know where the enemies are going to pop out from (give or take a small amount of random repositioning) and you know how they'll behave.
It also doesn't help that it often takes 20-30 seconds to get from the pre-battle checkpoint to the set-piece - and the death scenes are unskippable. Between the two, I very nearly walked away from the game at several points, simply because I was sick of sitting through the repeated exposition and dismemberings.
However, to bang my usual drum, I think Fatal Frame (Project Zero) absolutely nailed the survival-horror vibe. The lead character was a young girl, which provided a justification for her relatively weak abilities and the FPS "picture taking" system meant that the player's skill and reflexes were actually important. And it was also spooky - by the final level, I was spooked enough to consider abandoning the game unfinished. It wasn't just me who was spooked, either; one of the ghost attacks nearly gave my friend a heart attack!
I think I'll just point back here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/32578/Dead_Space_2s_Bagwell_On_Disempowerment
_Engineering_Fear.php
and here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KamruzMos/20110202/6944/The_fine_balance_of_Survi
val_Horror_design_and_Dead_Space_2.php
Everything I have to say is already there:
1)
"One common method for instilling fear in players is limiting a player's mobility in the face of gruesome enemies, exemplified in Capcom's seminal survival horror franchise Resident Evil."
I think it's a misconceived assumption. Why people think the resident evil movement is the way it is to limit player mobility?
It's the way it is to be a precise way to move your char around with the fixed camera system, which is used to build a feel of realism to every scene, like a real security camera or a movie shooting angle, plus the graphics possibilities of having pre-rendered scenary. The rest of the gameplay is based upon this first base core feature: the fixed-angle cameras.
If you are pressing forward and the camera changes, you're still moving forward, why would a I want a per-camera based movement orientation, which is gonna change all the time making me fix the movement each transition, and have the movement be relative to me, instead of relative to the character?
"I sort of disempowered the player in Dead Space, giving him very limited resources,"
Maybe I might have to try Dead Space on a console to see the point. I just killed everything in my way for the whole game and the only resource I felt in lack was inventory slots.
"Well, I think in order to scare the player, you really need to sort of cap how much control the player can have."
Now that's a wrong assumption. Survivor Horror was never about liminting player control. It's like saying Fallout is a Survivor Horror, since I can shoot an enemy 30 times on the forhead and he wont die cause I don't have enough "level".
"So in RE4 and a lot of those survival horror games, they all have these pretty clunky control schemes that don't let you do all the things that you can do in most other shooters, for example."
Have people noticed that most shooters don't have good weak enemy spot systems that go any further than head shoots? Thus RE4, Dead Space and On-Rail Shooters do. Unreal Tournament movement habilities stand strongly on the way of this kind of interactivity, and pushing it with surreal enemy health point or total lack of ammo will just be forceful to the play style, making the game more of a puzzle.
"Hey, we should be trying to scare players by doing things that are actually kind of scary rather than making them just feel helpless."
Best thing you did.
2)
What makes the survival horror style is not having less ammo and less resources. It's having
less enemies. If you enter in a room and the games launches a dozen foes against you, then it's
telling you that you have enough power to handle a dozen of them. It's telling one against a
dozen is a balanced fight. I think they're more scared of you than you're of them...
Dead Space is one of the five most frightening games I've ever played, but I think the real key to the frights is the game's amazing audio and sound effects. Best I've ever experienced in a game, bar none.
That said, personally I think first-person games are much scarier on the whole than third-person games. Games like F.E.A.R and even Half-Life 2 (Ravenholm!) feel much more intense with the FPS camera view.
The RE design was a bad choice that was overlooked because there was nothing else comparable at the time. Now it is just an out of date approach to survival horror.
In Dead Space, you feel like you are screwed all the time because the atmosphere, environment, and level design convince you that you are.
In Resident Evil, you feel like you are screwed because you can't adequately control your character.
One of these approaches lends itself to suspension of disbelief, one does not.