To create a scarier horror game...

In trying to make my game as scary as possible, I have played Penumbra, read through several articles on the subject of horror in videogames, and am currently playing the Silent Hill 2. I've also played Dead Space, Resident Evil (1, 2, 4), the first Silent Hill, Clock Tower, and several other horror games.

I've discovered firstly, that how the enemies in these games look has absolutely no affect on my tension. Secondly, tension is extremely important to how "Scary" a game is. I remember vividly the sewers from Silent Hill 1, which had me on the edge of my seat, just HOPING that I wouldn't encounter any enemies. Every single time a tunnel turned off, I was either terrified to find monsters dropping from the ceiling, or incredibly relieved to see that the passage was clear. The tension came from the fact that each enemy was a HUGE threat, because I was low on health, had no healing supplies, and wanted terribly to conserve ammo.

If a made one mistake, and the monster got me, I'd be dead. In most games, this hardly matters. For example, in Dead Space, EVERY Single time I fought a deadly horde of enemies, there was pretty much no tension. Not just because the game was too easy and I had ample healing supplies and ammo, but because I knew if I died I would be restarted to where I was RIGHT before I fought the horde. I'd have lost no progress. But in Silent Hill, there was no sort of autosaving feature or checkpoints. If you died, you were doomed to return to the last place you saved, which would mean repeating a LOT of enemy dodging, running, and maybe even puzzles. So with so much at stake, you really DON'T want to die.

Now, even on Silent Hill, the second or third time was never as scary as the first time, because I had already seen it all before, and knew exactly what to do. I read an article on this repetition, that said it breaks immersion and reminds you you're playing a game, so that it is bad. But I think it's necessary, because the horrible thought of re-doing everything is the perfect way to keep the player edgy about death. Assuming the story and actual game are good enough to keep you wanting to play. There are many less-interesting games that this kind of repetition erally could kill, because at losing all that progress, you'd just give up and find another game.

I think saving systems are too comforting. They remind you that you can mess up and you'll still be okay. But you can't just get rid of them, because long games DO need a way to allow the player to get back to his spot. So you can increase the penalty of dying and build more tension by forcing the player to repeat a long section if he died. After so many repetitions, though, this system fails also. You're not only reminded you're playing a game (Because of the interface and linear style of the story), but you become tired of it.

So now I look at one of my favorite horror games ever: Demon's Souls. On this game, when you die, you DO have to repeat but a long section., but the interface of death helps prevent it from breaking immersion. Rather than selecting a saved game and loading it, your DEATH is saved and will forever penalize your saved data! I love this, because it;s even worse than restarting. Your mistakes can NEVER be undone. You get the convenience of being able to quit a game and come back to it later, but the fear of dying remains strong, even after multiple deaths. The deaths and loss of supplies can mount, and mount, and mount until it seems like you have no hope of making any further progress. THIS is where DS's system fails.... you can always return to earlier worlds and plunder for supplies.

Now there are many things in DS that are finite, but the healing moongrass was infinite. A basically limitless supply of healing items breaks the tension a lot. This is why DS isn't a survival-horror game, but an RPG. In DS, I never truly felt like I'd reach a "pont of no return", because I could always collect more grass, and could therefore retry the level as many times as I needed to win.

So what I've decided to do for Warning's Save system, in order to maintain tension and immersion, is save at EVERY choice. Record EVERY mistake, and keep the interface out of the player's face. Because there are finite supplies and plenty of mistakes to be made, the player will eventually die and have to restart the whole game. But because the player can and will learn from their mistakes, much of the early game tension will be gone the second playthrough. The problem is, if the player dies towards the end of the game, and they have to restart ALL of it, they'd probably never touch it again.

So what I'll need to do, is incorporate a way to let the player die, but only have to repeat the last day or so. (Think of each "Day" as a chapter.)
My current idea is to feint the death as a nightmare that warned of the coming day, and that when the player wakes up, that'll be the real experience. But to maintain the importance of death, I can't just let the player die and die and die until they master the level. My compromise is to, upon awakening from one of these "Nightmares" (That is, after dying), let the player repeat the day... but at hunger, thirst, and "sanity" slashed 50%.

...And as mentioned before, eventually the player will HAVE to reach a point of no return. a point which means they must replay the entire game to beat it. I really don't want this... it breaks immersion completely, but it's unavoidable to maintain tension. I think with a system that saves constantly, and allows the player to retry if the die, but with permanent penalties, I can very well keep tension up without discouraging the player from playing. Being able to retry, and with all the foresight of knowing what's ahead, should prevent most players from ever reaching the point of unplayability. I guess I'll see when I actually have the system and game up and running.

This isn't a journal about the development of my game, though. I want a discussion on what YOU think makes a game scary, or how you think I'm wrong. If anybody's up for it, I hope I can catalog a ton of techniques to use in my game, over time.

helplessness and the fear of the unknown and unexpected. the games that have actually managed to scare me most often tend to not be horror based games. STALKER does this really well. it's world is already pretty horrible, what with bloodthirsty bandits and mutated dogs and other beasts, but the open world kind of offsets that, because you know you can get away or seek refuge in a settlement. the first time you traverse the underground, however, its like you're playing a completely different game. there are dark narrow corridors and rare often unseen monsters that lurk within them. there's a fairly stark contrast between the two, and it's only when you're comfortable with the open world that they throw the latter in your face.

I really don't care a thing about horror games, and I don't usually enjoy the ones I try. But I do think tension is an important part of all games, and if you really want to freak the player out, autosaving really is the way to go. I recently started playing a demo of Jagged Alliance: Back in Action (with plans to buy the full game soon -- it's fantastic), which is a strategy game that blends role-playing and real-time strategy elements together and combines them with a new convention called "plan and go," which I first discovered in an excellent indie game called Frozen Synapse. In the demo, you're four mercenaries against an army of national soldiers in the middle of this swampy research facility. You're given the ability to hide, sneak, shoot, and do all sorts of crazy tricks that mercenaries would normally do in a potential combat situation. But here's where things get dicey. Once combat is started, you can't manually save. You still have the option to load your last manual save, which can cut down on some of the tension. But if you score that perfect kill, you're not yet out of the woods. If three more guys are coming after you, you're stuck having to plan your way out of the skirmish alive, whether you engage them or run for safety (neither of which are guaranteed success if they're smarter than you). If one of your mercs dies, the game autosaves. Because you have to manually enter "plan and go" mode, you could end up taking shots before you even realize the enemy is upon you. Now, the game is forgiving enough to mimic the original behavior that its predecessor, Jagged Alliance 2, had if you check enough autopause boxes. But if you check no autopause boxes, you're likely to lose the game within moments, and autosave will remember which mercs died in the fight. It was a tenser experience than even the one I felt when playing Far Cry for the first time and I realized I couldn't save unless I reached the checkpoint (and the disturbing realization that if I crossed the checkpoint with low health and little ammunition, I might be screwed out of further progress). So, I don't think the tension you're looking for in your horror game is exclusive to horrors.

A perfect example of how tension can be placed in any game: in my coffee game, Entrepreneur: The Beginning, the game only saves at the start of each new day. Whatever failures or mistakes you made the day before cannot be erased. Saving serves only as a marker, not an opportunity to redo a bad decision. James once discovered how in over his head his decisions had brought him when he stole from the shops too many times in one day and was hit with a $300 penalty the next morning (after the game auto-saved). He learned his lesson, but now he was gonna have a terrible time recovering that money he lost. The autosave even challenges your foresight on which ingredients to buy in a given day. Yes, in the end, nobody dies, but your path to success or failure is permanently fixed with each new day, and just like in real life, you can only hope that your decisions will have panned out for the better. And nothing is scarier than real life.

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Aha, of course not! The thing is, many games use tension REALLY well. I think horror games benefit most from it, however, and (Especially modern ones) use it very poorly. You're only afraid to lose if you have something to lose, and in Dead Space, Silent Hill: Homecoming, FEAR, and some other "horror" games, I hardly felt any tension build up, and was thus never afraid. I wouldn't even call these games horror games. They're just action games that rely on scary imagery, gore, and "jump-scares" to scare the player, rather than psychologically tricking the player into a state of fear.

But yes, the topic of ways to build tension's purpose definitely expands beyond horror games.


It's interesting that you mentioned "helplessness", because a feeling of helplessness is essential in building tension. What you're talking about is the game allowing you to run from enemies, and then throwing sections at you which you CAN'T just run from the enemies. This is fine for an action game, but I think in a game that''s TRYING to scare you, it should be the opposite.

Instead of forcing you to fight enemies, force you to RUN from them. The comfort of being able to hide somewhere is necessary to create the contrast between being safe under the bed, and then vulnerable in the open. I haven't played Amnesia, (I actually want to purchase it, but the demo didn't work well with my graphics card, so I'll honestly never be able to play it until I get a better computer) but in that game, you have no hope of defending yourself from the monsters. You can only run.It's terrrifying. It's not like the forced run that SH: Shattered Memories did (Which wasn't scary at all), but you tell YOURSELF to run, because you see these monsters and know you're helpless, and don't want to die and lose all your progress.

For my game, there will be some supplies to keep you alive in the house, but not enough to last. The player will have to enter one of three (For now "Dark Zones") which, unlike the house, are not safe. I've mentioned that over time the house will become infected, and it will, but it will always be free of enemies. In these "Dark Zones", large fragments of the game's story will be revealed, and supplies will be found, (to encourage the player to actually explore them) but there will also be dangerous entities. To an extent, the player will be able to fight back with guns... but for the entirety of the game ammo will be so scarce as to allow only six or seven shots the entire game through, so most of the time, you'll have to be sneaking around down there dodging the enemies. (Although to keep them from becoming predictable and dull, they will be few and far between.)

Silent Hill 2 is probably one of the easiest games ever (there is even a freaking difficulty mode where you can kill enemies just by running into them) and it was still terrifying because it was able to create tension in other ways.

Meanwhile Silent Hill 3 suffocated you with enemies, some of which were poorly designed and made encounters with them as loud as possible.

Think about how an adventure game, a genre that cannot rely on action, would scare the player.

Even being fully armed, there were quite a few moments where I said to myself "I don't want to go any further." there's definite power in being able to change the player from war hero to pants-pissing coward in a matter of seconds.

Penumbra did this, which I think you mentioned playing. They also incorporated a "fear" element that disallowed you from actually looking at your enemies for long, otherwise your screen blurs and eventually its game over. this worked pretty well because on top of not being able to fight your enemy, you're also not allowed to know where they are or what they're capable of.

Imagine an adventure game where you never actually see your enemy, but you're constantly under threat of it.

if you haven't yet, i highly suggest you try out Missing: http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=773

My three rules on horror games:

1. The gameplay must promote "escape" over "confrontation". That is to say, the player is rewarded more for avoiding enemies rather than defeating them. With most ammo-based games, defeating a monster will set you back a significant number of bullets and will give you no EXP in return.

2. The player must constantly be expecting something bad to happen to him. This is basically established by the "mood" of the game, by the snippets of journal entries you find next to disemboweled corpses, by the psycho strings playing in the background, and by the depressingly gray and broken-down surroundings the player finds himself in. I hear a lot of you talking about the fear of the unexpected, but I don't think that's as big a part of horror games as the fear of the expected. If you're playing horror game, you're expecting bad things to happen. I find a blood-stained hallway with no enemies more frightening than an enemy jumping out where you don't expect it.

3. Threats that pop up must be dealt with immediately. The less time the player is given to react (within reasonable bounds), the higher the tension. Part of why Metal Gear Solid isn't a horror game is that you see enemies coming long before they actually become a threat. The other part is that you're playing as Solid Snake, and Solid Snake doesn't take any shit from monsters or zombies (see Rule #2).

Scarier than that is a slow-moving, implacable threat that roams the map looking for you. Mother 3's ultimate chimera, the old men at the start of Space Quest IV, the behemoth in Live-a-Live, etc. The more horribly the player dies as a result of coming into contact with this thing, the better. It's also a good idea to make this thing uninterested in the player particularly -- it doesn't care about you, it just kills.

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On the "bloodstained hallway being creepier than random enemies", I agree completely. Visuals and sounds that imply the existence of a possible threat, but don't completely confirm it, are absolutely terrifying. Especially when you know you're helpless against any enemy. Silent Hill does this through the radio's static emission. Although the game has too many enemies that are too easy, it still makes you a little nervous knowing there's something in the room with you that you can't see.

That brings me to the previously mentioned helplessness. You KNOW something is there, but you don't know WHERE it is, or WHAT it is. The interesting thing about this is that's it's only scary in isolated environments with specific enemies. In DeadSpace for example, the developers tried to build an ever-present feeling of vulnerable to enemies by making them constantly jump through vents and emit noises. But it never scared me. Partly because the enemies were FUN to fight, but also because it happened so often that you became desensitized and no longer cared. So in horror games, to get the best affect, you really need to keep the climatically scary scenes sparse.

On the enemies being fun, that leads me to think about the awkwardness of Silent Hill's combat. It's absolutely awful, but this contributes to the fear of enemies in many ways. It feels so easy to mess up, and it really is a task to fight. Therefore, you don't want to fight, and would rather avoid the enemies. Which means you don't like seeing them. Which I'm sure leads to a subconscious fear of them.

And it's been implied that maybe I'm focusing too strongly on the enemies & action, but I really do think they're THAT important to a horror game. No matter how well done the imagery and sound is, it takes a forced REACTION to really immerse the player. And you have to be really immersed and ignorant of your surrounding for the psychological trickery of implied fear to work and for you to feel afraid. On the visuals, though, I do think they're extremely important. A game that can capture good atmosphere draws you in MUCH better than a game which just throws gore and blood at you.

Penumbra, for example, created REALLY mysterious and tense atmosphere in the beginning. (Speaking specifically of Black Plague.) I remember being chilled at just how the game felt. But as you progress, the atmosphere seems to get admittedly lazy.... and even though the game remains creepy, I only really found it "scary" in the beginning.

I think it's important to differentiate "creepy" and "scary". Bioshock was quite often "creepy", but never "scary". Even Dead Space sometimes put out a "creepy" atmosphere. In fact, the first Dead Space very often was one of the creepiest games I've ever played. The visuals are extremely well done on some parts. I was disappointed at how generic everything felt on Dead Space 2, by contrast. ...But to the point, visuals and audio are necessary for creating an air of "creepy", but to really be scared, you need to be tense and worried and nervous, and I just don't think static graphics can do this without the assistance of an actual obstacle. (Enemies)

Onto audio real quick... Silent Hill 2 has incredible sound design and I want to recruit Akira Toriyama for my game. :|

I wanted to bring up roguelikes as an example of an unexpectedly scary game. Since death is permanent, making a mistake can cause you to lose literally weeks of progress, which can be pretty effing scary. Interestingly, since a true roguelike is turn based, the tension doesn't come from poor reaction times, but from a number of other factors. The most tense moment a player can encounter encounter is when she's one turn away from death, and her next choice will either save her or get her killed.

Roguelikes share a lot of the same aspects as Horror games. Players deal with limited resources and tense combat that is usually resolved very quickly. Mistakes early on can cause big problems later, and many difficult encounters are foreshadowed appropriately. The enemies encountered are typically as strong or much much stronger than the player, and require a great deal of strategy to defeat. All of this adds up to create an atmosphere where every step could be your last.

Singe Roguelikes are randomized, they handily sidestep the issue of repetition by making every game different. This also adds to the idea that you can never truly know what's around the next corner (until you're much more experienced with the game, anyway).

So I guess I'm saying that you don't need to specifically make a horror game to make a tense, sometimes frightening environment. You can achieve it solely through gameplay.

Combat and saving has been discussed but don't forget about taking particular things away that the player has relied on.

Silent Hill 2 does this quite often.

There's not too much that's scarier than "I don't have a map of this area." to me. In addition the sequence in the hotel at the end where you don't get to use any of your items. And when your flashlight runs out in the historical society: hope you remembered that battery!

Silent Hill 4, despite often being hated, also does this in a very awesome way: it takes away your safe house. You start to take damage from the very thing that used to be your healing spot. The game got really tense for me starting from that point.

I think that aside from taking away game mechanics, changes to the game world can be terrifying, especially if the game pays no mind to this. Silent Hill has the trope of the "Dark" world, where you do the exact same place again, yet it's different. Or, doors stop going where they used to and instead lead you somewhere else. Things that make you question your own sanity, you know, "Wait, was it like this before...?" are pretty frightening for me.

In addition, "mundane" things in weird places can be frightening: Silent Hill loves its wheelchairs, but Silent Hill in general has made me fear boiler rooms and industrial fans in real life, and Silent Hill 2 made me hate elevators.

I don't mean to absolutely gush about Silent Hill, but I just love it so much. I've played the Resident Evil games, and the while I actually enjoy the backtracking and inventory management that many people hate, I find that the "licker on the ceiling" and "dogs burst in through the window" not as frightening as a toppled over wheelchair in an empty pool...[/spoiler]

Another particularly awful thing is where the player has multiple items that they KNOW they will need, but a limited inventory.

Less obnoxious, and therefore more effective is one item that runs out with many uses. Say... a baseball bat is used to kill zombies. And to break windows to get valuables inside. And to... i dunno; knock back flaming projectiles from the headless horseman.
Now you're breaking windows and destroying zombies and knocking back fireballs and then your bat is broken. OH SLIME! There's a zombie boss and the most effective weapon is... a bat.

Yeah, this and the forever-needed flashlight/gas lamp are my fav horror elements.

Indeedy, I was going to mention roguelikes as well. This is especially true in roguelikes where it becomes pretty difficult to build up strong characters. Surrounded by monsters, low on ammo, no exits, etc... Even if it's turn based, the tension is there, you're really thinking about what you need to do. Granted, tension in this case is different from terror, but the feeling is still there.

Playing Cataclysm for example, I was on the run, leg badly injured, and arm broken, and poisoned. I managed to get to a gasoline station where I was able to hold off off some zombies until a zombie hulk managed to get close. By that time, most of the gas pumps had been damaged, so in a moment of insanity, I smashed a lit molotov cocktail at my feet, blowing the entire gas station sky-high. Granted, I too was blown sky-high, but the scenario, with dinky ASCII graphics and no sound, was still able to convey a great sense of pressure and urgency.

In regards to RPG horror games, I would have to agree that penalizing players for death is a good way to add tension, but the need to redo the entire game would be a good way to kill the game as well. The feeling the player gets is more, "Aw, fiddlesticks, now I have to go through all that again" rather than "Aw, nutterbutter, I've died and the princess will never get out of the other castle alive."

Personally, I think great tension should be built up not by factors outside the game (needing to play again, knowing that you're going to have to redo things, grinding all over again) but rather by factors that are felt in-game (the world will be destroyed, the player will die a horrible gruesome death, etc...)

Another example would be table-top RPGs. You tend to fear your PC dying not because you're going to have to do everything again, but more because you've gotten attached to that character. Granted, at higher levels a True Resurrection becomes trivial, but at lower levels, you're really worried about your character and the party, not about the mechanics of having to repeat the game.

But that's enough rambling from me for now, heh heh.

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Cool, another Cataclysm player! That game is gaining a fanbase fast.

Permadeath is a great (assuming that the game is, basically, a roguelike) way to add tension -- exactly the right word -- but I have to disagree with the way you framed it. Knowing I'm probably going to die soon is all the tension I need, but it's not enough to make a game scary. I would not focus further on tension, but on atmosphere and horror.

Really, it's hard to disagree with anything said in this thread.

I don't believe that tension is necessarily horror, it just happens to make sense in a survival horror game in terms of emphasizing survival.

Limited save system as a compromise, except maybe on the easiest difficulty.