Jump scares, terrifying chases, and creepy monsters all make a survival horror game great. Survival horror is a broad genre in gaming, which includes the first person nerve-racking action of PT  to the third person run-fast-or-you-are-toast aspect of the Resident Evil𒆙 games. There is something for hardcore horror gamers and those gamers🥀 who just want to be a little scared.

Recent survival horror games have been falling short of expectations by hitting the same notes and relying on too many clichés. These played out gameplay mechanics, story beats, and characters need to stop. The best part of horror is the unexpected. By leaning on these crutches, developers are weakening their game’s overall impact. The focus of the game should be on gamer experience. A successful survival horror game makes the gamer scared to go around every corner, question everyone they meet, and never want to open a basem🍎ent door.

Survival horror games are not like horror movies, they need to keep the gamer’s interest longer than ninety m𓆏inutes. It is a tall order t🃏o keep a game scary and enthralling for more than six hours of gameplay. But just because it is difficult doesn’t mean developers should take the easy way out. Gamers have had enough of these run of the mill, paint by numbers game designs.

To truly make an impactful, fun, scary, and enjoyable survival horror game, developers need to take a long look at what makes great survival horror stand out. They should absolutely avoid everything on this list if they want to even remotely come close to making a great surviv𓆉al ho🐓rror game.

15 ও Using Rural People As The Bad Guys

Resident Evil 7 and Outlast 2 both double down on the Hills Have Eyes motif. If you live outside the norms of society and treat outsiders like the scourge, you might be the hot new villain in survival ho🤪rror games. The only problem is its poor writing and, at this point, the fact that it's the deadest horse developers can beat.

This old trope of rural people as horrible monsters adds nothing to the m🌃otivation or believability of who the gamer is running away from. The developer’s answer to why these people are doing such horrible things to outsiders is simply because they went out into the wilderness and have lost all sense of society and humanity. It is a cop out. People don’t become homicidal maniacs just because they live outside of town. Real motivation for baddies in survival horror games is essential for the player’s experience. The players need to believe the people chasing them have real reasons to do it.

14 QTEs

Survival horror games like to recreate the horror movie feel with a dash of player interaction. QTEs are the easiest and laziest way to do this. The player just mashes buttons while the gamer’s character does all the work. An example of a game poor doing this is Resident Evil 4.

Many gamers found fault in RE4’s reliance on quick time events. However, the developers saw it as an opportunity to add the mechanic to their survival horror game and the QTE continued throughout RE5 a🎃nd 6. The QTE harkens back to the arcade era of mashing buttons to hopefully pass a difficult obstacle. Survival horror games deserve a more sophisticated mechanic to heighten the drama. Shaking a thumbstick or mashing X is an annoyance that breeds resentment. It becomes more about the player’s ability to tolerate these fast action points rather than surviving the horrors before them.

13 🌳 Being Super Gross F🦹or The Sake Of Being Gross

Torture films had their moment in the sun during the early 2000s, but this trend continues to greജatly influence gaming. There is something to be said for showing guts and blood in a survival horror game, but there is♔ a threshold that many games cross.

The Dead Space series loves to show some nasty images and creatures. Because it is a video game, many gamers can stomach it better than others, as it is just a bunch of polygons after all. However, the mutation of Necromorphs is disturbing and gross for the sake of being gross. They are not the only one game to over use this though. There is an entire sequence in Outlast where you as must walk through several pits ജfilled with body parts, guts, and blood. T𓃲he developers want you to be scared, but all you are is sick.

Overloading the gamer with graphic images desensitizes and creates the opposite effect. The gamer is not horrified at the prospect of ending up like the gore🔥 they find laying around. They are bored by it. Showing less gore could go a long way to bringing back the terror.

12 Giving The Gamer No We♈apons

The Amnesia series took survival horror and made it more terrifying by disarming the gamer’s character♊. It was revol🎀utionary in 2010, but it is time now to leave it in the past.

By taking away the ability to defওend against attacks, developers force the player to move slowly through the game. It is a cheap way to make the game longer and appear more terrifying. What makes this inorgan꧙ic or tedious to the player is if the story, environment, and character do not support having zero weapons.

In Amnesia: Dark Descent, Daniel didn’t know what he 𒈔was fight🃏ing, so it helped with the believability of not being armed. Taking away weapons to just take them away makes the gamer question why is this even an aspect to the game?

11 Only Using The Dark To Scare Us ꦰ

Not being able to see what is coming for you is scary and using light effectively can heighten the horrir experience. ꧟But the dark isn’t the only way to scare gamers. Slenderman is more terrifying in the dark because he looks ridiculous otherwise. On the other hand, making a game take 🐓place only at night or over the course of one night is a bit of a stretch. It gives off the appearance that the game can only succeed if you can’t see everything in front of you.

Arkham Asylum is not a horror game, but the sequences in which the gamer must fight through Batman’s fears are unsettling and scary. They do not use the dark to drive the terror and instead allow the situation and environment to play with the mind of the gamer. Layers of Fear blends dark and light horror elements well to show that seeing something can drive a gamer to hide in the cღupboard just as much as not being able to see.

10 Making Gamers Collect Fuel To See In The Dark 🌃

Collecting fuel to progress through the game has been a staple mechanic in a lot of survival games. Survival horror’s spin on it is to make the player budget fuel in order to see⛄ what is in front of them. There isn’t anything more annoying and video gamey than forcing the player to collect batteries or matches in order to progress through a survival horror title.

All the heavyweights mentioned above do this in some form from Amnesia to Alan Wake. The player becomes more focused on supply and harvesting than being a scared little child in the corner crying and wanting the big bad monster to go away. Developers need to ditch this mechanic ♔quick. Gamers want to be immersed in a truly scary and seamless experience. They do not want to open every drawer lookin⛦g for more fuel.

9 ﷽ Putting The Lore In Notes Scattered Around 🐟

In an RPG like Skyrim or a deep intricate universe like Assassin’s Creed, leaving behind written entries or diaries to provide more color to the world is great. In a survival horror game where zombies are chasing you from room to room, it🌜 detracts from the experience and the story.

The last thing anyone wants to do is spend time reading the notes of mental patients when there are killer mutants on the loose. To truly make the gamer scared, the background should be shown to them through actions and the environment they encounter. They should not be spending a large portion of the game reading about how everyone went mad. SOMA, a game with a co❀mplicated premise, could have benefited greatly if they ditched the written 🤪logs and went for a more narrative telling of the events.

8 ℱ Dumbing Down Protagonists

Memorable and iconic survival horror protagonists have one in thing common, they don’t make dumb decisions. Chris and Jill from Resident Evil don’t make poor decisions when the mansion is taken over by zombies. ▨On the other hand, Alan Wake makes just a laundry list of silly and eye roll inducing decisions throughout his game.

The protagonist is the gamer’s way i🀅nto the universe, so they need say and do things that make sense. The game should not mimic a bad horror movie, as it should be like a scary short story with a protagonist that can hold their own. Developers need to have that horror movie audience in their head. If they think the audience would be yelling at the screen, “Don’t go in there, stupid!,” then the developers should listen.

7 Making Women Easy Targets 🦹

Survival horror games abuse the damsel in distress trope more than any other video game genre. Silent Hill 2’s premise is about a father trying to find his daughter. Outlast 2 has your character trying to find his wife, who had been raped and kidnapped by the crazy rural people. Until Dawn's Sam walks around in a towel in a poor attempt to make the gamer feel vulnerable. There isn’t a cliché in t🧔he survival horror book that needs to stop sooner than this one.

The idea that a character can only be propelled because a woman they know is in danger is not a real plot. The treatment of women in survival horror games needs to improve as well. Developers need to trust that gam🃏ers who love survival horror games want to be scared first and foremost. They do n🔜ot want anything to take them out of the experience like facing, yet another game that treats half of the population horribly.

6 ✨ Creating Powerful Enemies That Are Easily Duped/Beat

Pyramid Head, Nemesis, and the Shibito from Siren are iconic survival horror game villains that give gamers nightmares to this very day. The only problem with creating such a big iconic monster is making sure that the player finds them terrifying once they encounter them. The Necromorphs in the Dead Space series and the Splicers from Bioshock quickly bec♐ome cannℱon fodder that offer little resistance to the gamer.

The worst thing a survival horror game can do is show off how big and bad their enemies are early in the game and not commit to them. Enemies need to work smarter like the Alien from Alien: Isolation. Developers need to lose the 🧸idea that any old enemy will do in a survival horror. It is hard to maintain theဣ horror atmosphere as it is, so adding in enemies that are just an annoying hurdle shatters the illusion.