Is Survival/Horror dying?
There is an article currently up on Destructiod that talks about how many old school game mechanics that have dropped out of style were actually strengths for the Survival/Horror genre. The article argues that the evolution of gameplay controls and camera movement have led to less interesting games. Another article in the Guardian refutes these ideas and says that the downfall of Survival/Horror is not upon us.
Personally I have never been a huge fan of Survival/Horror games. However, it does seem that any game that is scary is being labeled as Survival/Horror. It was my understanding that the core gameplay in a true survival game was maximizing resources to try and stay alive. Items, weapons and ammo all need to be conserved as much as possible, forcing the player to do drastic things to continue in the game. This is not what I felt while playing some of the more recent horror games like Dead Space and Left 4 Dead. While these games are gory and have scary moments they are basically the slasher film while original Survival/Horror games are more in the vein of psychological thrillers like The Shining.
But again, this is not my specialty. I am sure that everyone else has more input on this, especially when it comes to what classifies as a Survival/Horror in recent memory.
-Seth
Posted under Daily Question
I agree with the article that survival-horror is a dying breed. People have thrown around the term survival-horror whenever they hear a zombie/monster is in the game, but there is so much more to the genre than that. Dead Space is not survival-horror; it’s an action-shooter with some scary elements. Most people don’t get the difference between a scary shooter and survival-horror, and this article explained it well.
After finally playing Resident Evil 4 last year, I was completely underwhelmed. It was a fantastic action game, precise shooting controls, all great stuff.. but I didn’t feel that sense of dread and hopelessness as I felt in RE 1 & 2 and the early Silent Hills. Ammo was plentiful. Shooting was so easy. The camera angles allowed me to see everything and rarely be surprised/terrified by what’s around the corner. I never felt like I was against all odds, and I definitely never felt fucked on a psychological level like Silent Hill did to me.
The author is completely right; the controls evolved to the detriment of what made survival-horror so great. But this is sort of a dilemma, because I am the first to agree that tank controls and fixed camera angles FEEL outdated. How do you keep these elements that made survival-horror so appealing, fresh?
I think the real question here is how does one define a survival-horror game? What Garth describes:
- Limited Ammo (Helplessness and dread)
- Limited Camera (Surprises and dread)
- Against all odds (Helplessness)
- Scary shit
All of these elements are in Chapter 6 of Half Life 2, which no one would ever consider a survival-horror game but it fits all the given criteria. Also I have played through RE4 and I thought it was a very fun game but I agree there is not a lot that scared me but there is a somewhat limited camera and limited ammo. So then is it not a survival-horror game simply because the annoying chick yelling Leon was funny and not scary? As I am sure Seth remembers I played through another game called The Suffering. Which had precise controls, a 3rd person movable camera, and was beyond fucked up. Was that a survival-horror game? How about BioShock? BioShock has tons of horror elements.
So I think the conclusion the article tried to make is wrong. Using “old design” like limited cameras was a means to an end. It was used to make the players dread their next step and fear every room. Trying to say that the removal of this is leading to the death of survival-horror is like saying that 3D lead to the death of the platformer. The real question is how to use the new technology available to create a sense of dread and horror instead of relying on out dated mechanics that simply had these characteristics as a side effect.
Personally I think the real killer of suvival-horror will be same as point and click adventures: multiplayer. Left 4 Dead is an interesting study for this. The noises that the boss zombies make give the player a sense of dread and the finales are certainly helpless situations, but is it a survival-horror game?
-Mark
All valid points. Is it possible that “survival-horror” was a Capcom marketing term that unexpectedly caught on industry-wide, and was never intended to encapsulate all of these other games? I think that term fit the original Resident Evils very well, but perhaps it doesn’t belong anywhere else (besides precursor games like Clock Tower and the original Alone in the Dark). It was a clever name for a genre that helped a lot of fans come to terms with the game design. But let’s be honest… the shitty camera and limited ammo and limited save files would not be fun in any other genre. But since it was a “survival-horror” game, these shortcomings were acceptable, and in reality, embraced by many fans of the series.
After thinking more about this, I feel like survival-horror isn’t going extinct, because it never thrived in the first place beyond RE/Silent Hill. In reality, Capcom got away with the genre term because of the massive success of RE, but all other horror-themed games were simply scary action-adventures that tried to ride the success wave by calling itself a survival-horror game (including The Suffering, Nightmare Creatures, etc.).
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