Generally, when one thinks of "Survival Horror" in the video game world, the Resident Evil series will be the first name that pops up, followed by Silent Hill. To me, they both miss the point.
While both games can fall into a "survivoristic" mode, I've never found that much horror in them. Sure, Resident Evil has zombies, or mutants or whatever, but it's always been another run-around-and-shoot-stuff-that-moves game to me. It might as well be Nazis. You are trained military with guns, fer christs sake! You BETTER be able to survive those things. Walking around with a loaded shotgun doesn't really provide me with a sense of impending doom, knowing full well I can blast whatever beasty is around the next corner into 40 little pieces.
And Silent Hill, which dabbles more than a bit in the supernatural, winds up just coming off as just plain weird more than scary. Nothing like the little mutant babies that just follow you around in Silent Hill 1 to be creepy...but the strange mannequin monsters, sure they are definitely strange, but hardly scary. And the whole "
pyramid head monster rape scene" is a bit over the top.
Nope, if you want a true scary video game experience, you need to pick up one of the games in the lesser known Fatal Frame series.
Fatal Frame does scary the right way. You aren't running around with guns ablazing, not that guns will do you any good anyway against ghosts. All you've got is a camera that, given enough time to focus, will "capture the essence" of the attacking spirit in question.
But, really, the scariness goes beyond the combat.
Fatal Frame is the gold standard as far as I'm concerned in trying to make a haunted house game work well. It's one of my design goals to somehow capture the spirit of it in a board game format. Somehow. Some day.
Submit a Story
Register
Get Started
Webmaster Tools
Comments with -10 or lower "thumbs" are removed from display.
For the most part, I'm going to agree with this article.
Fatal Frame sure does
Until I play this game, I'm going to have to say Resident Evil and/or Silent Hill are the best examples. Prove me wrong Fatal Frame.
This better not be a 2009 release for the U.S.
Gothic Girl loves FF4 so much she's basically helping with the advertisements on it.
In Silent Hill, it's all up in the air, and you're at the mercy of some unseen force. You can't exorcise or free any of the monsters/ghosts... you just have to try and survive/escape. Even worse, when the demons come from within the character, you realize there's really no escape... there is only that sense of desperation and isolation.
Silent Hill 4 had to have been the freakiest one for me. Those ghosts still scare me to death more than the fleshy monstrosities of previous installments (not to say they weren't scary, of course).
As for Resident Evil? ... uhm.. you're essentially blowing dead people up. Really angry dead people that yell at you in foreign languages (in the recent ones, anyway)... with sacks on their heads. End of story. XD Then there's just the fact that I can't take anything Capcom makes very seriously (sure, they make great games, but they're still so silly).
When it comes to "survival horror" I reckon games like Silent Hill and Fatal Frame take the cake. Playing as "average joes" has me feeling scared because you know that these people could easily die in real life, (just like myself). They have no weapons experience, no training, no special abilities. It also helps the scare-factor when they only have pathetic weapons like Golf Clubs, Baseball Bats, Cameras, Handbags, etc. (when you're thrust into a spooky environment, you're not going to always have guns at your disposal! I like that these games make do with what you can find).
It's damn scary trying to fend off monsters twice the size of your character with only a Wooden Plank to defend themselves with. >_>
Those games certainly have the "survival" aspect down-pat.
I'd say FF and SH are a step-above when it comes to the horror too. Fatal Frame is just flat-out horror - the type of stuff you see in horror movies (though I'd say it's scarier being a part of the horror, rather than just watching it). It's got tense atmosphere, spooky environment, "jump scares", eerie music, creepy baddies ... pretty-much anything you'd want in horror.
Though I agree with RCG about the enemies' tragic backstories - It's hard to feel scared of an enemy who didn't want to die and only wants to find peace.
I'd say that's why the Kusabi is considered (by fans) to be the "iconic" villain of the series ... He didn't have a sad backstory, he wanted to become "the Kusabi" (well, it seems he did), so players don't feel sorry for him. It's easier to be scared of him. And I guess that's why Sae was such a popular baddie too - She was behind it all and, though her story was sad, she turned absolutely mental once she had died and got a kick out of tormenting Mio.
Silent Hill, as RabidChinaGirl said, is downright disturbing. It's a town that revolves around your character's (or other characters') fear, guilt, etc. So anything can pop up at any time, and it'll always have some hidden and creepy message behind it. Every enemy, every item, every location ... it all has a meaning that links to a characters' psyche. I think the best example of this is in SH2 where you slowly begin to realize that everything is a manifestation of something in James's mind. You realize James is his own enemy.
Though on the other hand SH4 had a different sort of creepiness in the sense that Henry couldn't control anything - He was an innocent man dragged into the town for the sole reason that he lives in Walter's old apartment room. You can't help but feel sorry for the poor bastard and want him to live through it all. (again, I had a feelng of being scared whenever Walter popped up because he's yet another recurring villain -like Nemesis- who couldn't be killed. It was also pretty creepy knowing that everything in the game was Walter's crazed creation).
But enough of my mindless ramblings
I enjoyed playing SH3 a lot...I didn't have to worry about corpses...but I was always expecting then to wake up and grab me! The monster itself weren't scary, but the environment...what a pain..!