You can fight me on this one: there's nothing better than a nice, juicy horror game. When it's done well, horror can paradoxically create an incredibly enjoyable, addictive experience, but the problem is that horror can often be a nightmare (yes, I went there) to get right.
So what are some of the things that can be done (and not done) to make horror work?
Use Tropes Sparingly
Horror as a genre - whether we're talking about games, movies, or literature - is fascinating to work with. There's so much that can be done with it in order to create that delicious terror felt within the player, viewer, or reader. The problem arises, however, when too many of the same techniques that were once effective are recycled again and again, because they were once effective.
There are a lot of horror tropes out there, and unfortunately because many if not most players have caught onto these tropes by now. As a result, players have a whole repertoire of expectations nestled in their brains, and these expectations are really annoying🧸 obstacles standing in the way of a good scare.
Expectations Be Damned
We all know that typical sequence of events (usually found in movies, but useful here to illustrate the point anyway). Person X creeps through Ominous Environment Y whilst tension and music build to a crescendo as they finally fling open Door Z or whatever, only to reveal nothing is there. Person X breathes a sigh of relief (as do you), turns around, then suddenly CRASH, out pops The Scary Thing. But you see, it was scary because The Scary Thing popped out from a different place to what we were leading y🍸ou to think! Hah! Got you real good.
No, you didn't get us real good, because we expected that even more than our original expectation, silly.
But along with being your enemy, expectations are al🐻s🎐o your friend when it comes to horror. All you have to do is subvert them.
Don't Give Us What We Expect
Playing with players' expectations is where things get interesting. One possible path to traverse is one of simply not delivering on the expectation that players have in a certain scenario. Walking down a long, dead-quiet and poorly-lit hallway? Players will be expecting something to jump out and give them a little scare, so simply don't let that happen. And if the accompanying ambience is tense enough, you can stretch out that lack of anything happening for as long as you want, suspending player in a constant state of terrifying anticipation.
A prime example is seen in the 2002 remake of the very first 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil game, with the famous Dog Jumpscare Scene. The anticipation leading up to that moment which fans of the first game knew would be coming, instead was met by a . The subversion of players' expectations built a moment of terror far more effective than if said expectations were merely fulfilled.
Or Maybe DO Give Us What We Expect?
Of course, you could also re-subvert players' expectations by letting them think, "this is the perfect moment for an obvious spook to happen, surely they wouldn't be so obvious as to actually make such a spook happen, so I'm sure it won't," them BAM, you spook 'em anyway.
Like that moment in P.T. when you , which happens quite early on in the game. From the get-go, that's exactly the kind of thing we'd expect would happen, but we replace that expectation with another expectation ("nah, it would surely be too obvious to have that happen at this point") just in time for the first expectation to come true after all.
An Ode To Jumpscares
Obviously, jumpscares spring to mind when one thinks about horror game tropes. Although these will often coax a good squawk out of us, I think we can all agree by now that nine times out of ten they feel like a cheap bash at crafting a scary situation. I do believe they will always have a place in the horror genre though, and shouldn't be entirely forgotten about because, let's face it, they do work. At least, in the sense that they can hold a lot of power over us.
But there's a time and a place, as well as a little concept called balance. The once-terrifying-but-now-all-but-completely-chewed-up 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Five Nights At Freddy's is built almost entirely on this one technique. Although most of us will admit that it does get our hearts racing, it never feels any deeper than a 'surface scare.'
But a jumpscare inserted into just the right moment can be brilliant. And FYI, it really doesn't need to be accompanied by a huge fanfare of sights and sounds getting all up in your face for it to be effective. One particularly stellar example comes from - a terrifying indie first-♌person psychological horror game from SadSquare St🃏udio.
There's a moment in the game that requires you to navigate through a pitch black hallway using the intermittent flashes of a camera (yes, a bit trope-y), but one of the flashes reveals a stationary figure standing silently a few steps in front of you which disappears before you can light up the hallway again. I know, still trope-y, but a perfect example of a trope executed well.
Back to what I said earlier: there are so many ways to play with horror, but one major theme to consider is expectation. Unforgettable horror experiences can be reached through either - or both - fulfilment and subversioཧn of our expectations.
But now that it's clear that we expect that, how will that expectation be fulfilled or subverted?