Oh, and every 10 minutes an angry, screaming bear appears. The rest of the game involves pressing random buttons and staring at motionless rooms. The only source of fear that one can derive from the game “Five Nights at Freddy’s” – the epitome of this hackneyed mechanic – is anticipation for a loud noise. The “scare cam” format cultivated by YouTube personalities like “PewDiePie” and “Markiplier” may allow for digestible clips, but it is a cheapening of art for the sake of artificial reactions. One can point the finger at the jump scare epidemic partly at YouTube “Let’s Play” videos, whose exaggerated screams have emitted a cheap and lucrative source of entertainment in the past few years. Rather than tension, jump scares only evoke an annoying lack of imagination. Jump scares rely on a sudden loud noise, and a goofy face jumping into a camera as a lazy crutch. Game developers would do well to remember this mantra, as over-reliance on jump scares has infested the genre, particularly in the indie sphere, for some time. Īll horror games would do well to follow a simple maxim: jump scares don’t create nightmares. Similarly, “Batman: Arkham City” and “Batman: Arkham Knight” engage player’s anxieties about games as a vessel for their own fantasies. The image of Batman strapped onto a conveyor belt by Scarecrow can still elicit shudders years after it is played. With its beautiful scenery and creepy imagery, “Arkham Asylum” is a bottomless treasure trove of haunting delights. “Batman: Arkham Asylum” is a game that efficiently accomplishes this yet typically goes unrecognized as part of the genre. Video games are works of fiction, and it’s their job to trick players into forgetting what they know. The more the player begins to understand the environment of the game, the less there is to fear. Everything the player needs to know about the game is gleaned from just a cursory scan. In spite of its status as a massive sleeper hit, “Slender: The Eight Pages” fails because it lays out all of its cards on the table within the first – and I’m being rather charitable here – five to ten minutes. At every turn, the best horror games force players to constantly question their surroundings, double take at every corner and make them jump from every slight hint of motion. That is the psychology that prompts shrieks from players when a character runs down to the basement or when a parasite has infiltrated the party and disguised itself as one of its guests.Ī horror game has failed if the player settles into complacency and – as a result – must constantly throw wrenches into its gameplay. We fear that which we cannot comprehend or recognize. The three key components for a devilishly spooky and well-done horror game include unpredictability, an aversion to cheapness, and an awareness of environment. Given the plethora of possibilities that game designers have at their disposal, it is frankly horrifying to see so many rely on cheap tricks in their thirst for an easy YouTube sound bite. The genre lends itself to gaming characteristics which commonly include open-world exploration, manipulation of point-of-view and confrontation with the unknowable, as based on modern ludology. In the past few years, the horror genre has experienced a meteoric but predictable rise in the video game industry.
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