legacy of boris and arkady strugatsky’s roadside picnic, 1972-2010
silent hill (konami, 1999)
The fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh
and lastly for halloween, the game that, for me, started it all. oh, sure, i’d played resident evil before, but this game’s the only one that ever really scared me. even now i still get the creeps.
it controls much like resident evil, its primary competition at the time, though a bit easier due to the camera being somewhat free-roaming. in addition, you have something of a big town to explore, though there’s not much to see thanks to the overwhelming fog covering everything (which was to cover up the playstation’s hardware shortcomings, but became an integral part of what made the series work.)
the premise is simple: harry mason is a writer and single father who takes his daughter cheryl to silent hill on vacation. a figure steps out in front of his vehicle late in the night, causing him to swerve and crash. when he comes to, cheryl is gone, and strangely enough, so is everyone else in the town. the sound of footsteps lead him into an alley, and that’s where it becomes apparent that something is deeply wrong (as if the freaky weather and missing townspeople weren’t hint enough!)
the rest of the game details harry’s increasingly desperate search for cheryl in a town full of monsters and a reality that doesn’t seem to want to stay still, often shifting into a nightmarish version of itself that often looks like a NIN music video.
the game draws obvious inspiration from a number of sources, everything from lovecraft to lynch, a couple of blatant references to dean koontz’ phantoms and the movie psycho, among many many other movies, books and authors. in fact, they’re so numerous it becomes a game of spot-the-reference/name-drop.
part of what makes the game so creepy is how ambiguous it is; while early in development, satan-worshipping themes were much more prevalent, but konami’s higher-ups told team silent to tone it down (largely due to perceived objection in america.) the result is a much more disturbing, inscrutable plot that lends itself to interpretation, and analysis of silent hill and its sequels has been a cottage industry for the better part of two decades.
while silent hill 2 is arguably the better game, silent hill 1 cemented my love for the survival horror genre. it established a lot of the visual tropes for this particular brand of horror and honestly is probably the closest we got to a stephen king story in video game format until alan wake came out.
dark souls (from software, 2011/PC release 2012)
In the Age of Ancients the world was unformed, shrouded by fog. A land of gray crags, Archtrees and Everlasting Dragons. But then there was Fire and with fire came disparity. Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, light and dark. Then from the dark, They came, and found the Souls of Lords within the flame. Nito, the First of the Dead, The Witch of Izalith and her Daughters of Chaos, Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, and his faithful knights. And the Furtive Pygmy, so easily forgotten.
With the strength of Lords, they challenged the Dragons. Gwyn's mighty bolts peeled apart their stone scales. The Witches weaved great firestorms. Nito unleashed a miasma of death and disease. And Seath the Scaleless betrayed his own, and the Dragons were no more.
Thus began the Age of Fire. But soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain. Even now there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights. And amongst the living are seen, carriers of the accursed Darksign.
Yes, indeed. The Darksign brands the Undead. And in this land, the Undead are corralled and led to the north, where they are locked away, to await the end of the world... This is your fate.
Only, in the ancient legends it is stated, that one day an undead shall be chosen to leave the undead asylum, in pilgrimage, to the land of ancient lords, Lordran.
you’ve probably heard of this game by now. massively influential, brutally difficult, and a remarkably esoteric story. dark fantasy in the berserk mode, with a strongly western conceit and execution despite being japanese in origin. final fantasy this ain’t, moonlight butterfly notwithstanding. i’ve long held that while this game is very much in the vein of dungeon crawler RPGs, it hits all the hallmarks of a good solid survival horror game too. it has all the hallmarks of it -- resource management, overwhelming opposition, and a haunted, empty kingdom filled with monsters and the undead with very few people to talk to.
while technically a spiritual (if not outright) sequel to the ps3-only demon’s souls, it stands well on its own and is arguably superior to its predecessor as well as its sequel. however, all three games play more or less the same (as well as bloodborne on PS4, which i have unfortunately not played.) the game’s central gameplay premise is pretty simple: it’s a third person action RPG complete with stats and equipment and things to hit. you know the type. where things differ is its emphasis on slow, purposeful exploration (made all the more interesting by how interconnected lordran is.) it also steps away from its competitors by not being focused on aesthetics either -- while graphically it's on par with the likes of skyrim or slightly older games, and getting through sen's fortress funhouse rewards you with a breathtaking view of anor londo, any beauty is inherently incidental in relation to the game's overall statement.
the biggest difference, however, is how uncompromising the game is, and how death is part of the gameplay. there’s no loading a prior save if you fuck up. if you die (and you will die, a lot, and horribly), you get dumped back at the last bonfire you visited, sans any humanity points and souls you collected, though you might be able to rescue them if you can get back to your corpse without dying. the game also does not stop for you; talking to people or using a dialogue box or menu will not pause the game, so watch your back. that’s not to say the difficulty is unfair (most of the time.) generally speaking, while the game won't forcibly shove you off cliff it's certainly happy to let you fall off on your own. (unless you’re in tomb of the giants...)
one interesting feature of the game is the multiplayer, in that it only sort of exists. as long as you’re connected to the servers, you’ll see the ghosts of other players throughout; bloodstains can be touched to play back a ghostly rendition of the last few seconds of someone else’s life, notes can be written and read using a special item, and you can even summon aid... or get invaded by someone out to kill you. (these latter two can only be done if you’re in human form... if you suck, like me, it’s not really a concern because you’ll be spending most of the game looking like beef jerky.)
it’s clear that from, true to their roots in making more or less japanese analogues to western dungeon crawler RPGs in the 80s, prefer the minimalist approach. you're dumped into the world with some basic background and left to fend for yourself. while the game teaches you some basic mechanics in the opening dungeons, actually exploring the world (and discovering just how creepy and sad the story is) is entirely something you have to do on your own. it can be overwhelming at first -- especially since your starting class is somewhat important, though you can build your character into whatever you want. but if you persevere, getting that VICTORY ACHIEVED message upon killing a boss is almost orgasmic.
PS: i strongly advise you bring a controller if playing on PC.
The radio is dead, food is running out, and the machines have started to think they are people. Underwater facility PATHOS-II has suffered an intolerable isolation and we’re going to have to make some tough decisions. What can be done? What makes sense? What is left to fight for?
and here’s this year’s classic.
i’ll be honest: i don’t like frictional. i thought penumbra was meh. i thought amnesia was creatively stagnant. i generally can’t stand the “i have no hands and i must scream” style of horror, and i’ve long resented the influence frictional have wielded on horror gaming. (i liked it better when everyone was ripping off resident evil 4.)
but that doesn’t mean i wasn’t going to give SOMA a chance. it’s mostly my own fault, really: i love sci-horror, having been a fan of the alien franchise since the mid-90s. so when i saw that frictional seemed to be moving away from the lovecraft-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off themes they’d, er, “explored” in penumbra and amnesia, my interest was piqued. this was new territory for them, after years of just ripping off a long-dead xenophobe for ideas, and i figured that an attempt at a sci-horror setting, while not original on its face, would, if nothing else, give me some more of a setting and theme i really enjoy.
well, i wasn’t wrong!
they went further than that, though. oh, so much further. they crafted a story that was like if system shock was written by philip k. dick. somehow they managed to wrap a core concept of underwater sci-fi base populated by monster robots and weird biomechanical constructs in a study of identity, consciousness, humanity, and a little bit of denial and regret.
gameplay is basically very much like amnesia -- you have no hands and cannot defend yourself, so you’re stuck hiding like a ninny a lot. ordinarily, this would irritate me, but the monster encounters are pretty spread out; most of the game is puzzle-solving and the occasional talk with an NPC who you essentially “escort” (read: she lives on an electronic tool you carry with you) throughout the game. and really, the big reason to play the game is because of the story, which is some good old-fashioned high-concept sci-fi the likes of which is nearly absent from video games. this is the kind of story the better sci-fi writers used to get rich off of in the 60s and 70s -- exactly the way i like my sci-fi.
if you like amnesia, you’ll like SOMA. if you hate amnesia, you’ll probably like SOMA too.
A cunning and ruthless killer is taunting authorities with a series of grisly murders. FBI agent Ethan Thomas' investigation will pit him against the most violent side of humanity as he unravels clues left by the killer.
monolith’s forgotten and neglected horror series, and arguably one intended only for 360, as the first game’s PC release never saw a patch (nor was it released on ps3), the 2nd game saw a PS3 release but no PC release, and the 3rd game doesn’t fucking exist.
it’s a real shame, as the two games that did see release are actually quite interesting in their own right. seeing release alongside the far more successful F.E.A.R., it takes a rather different tack on gameplay, being first person survival horror games with a strong melee focus.
there was a period of time in the mid-00s where there seemed to be a trend of horror games focusing on human violence and cruelty, which in my opinion has the potential to be far more disturbing than mere body horror. condemned is a prime example of this; you must punch, bludgeon, and occasionally shoot your way through an army of violently insane people. the city seems to be filled with them, living in the cracks and forgotten spaces of a decaying conurbation -- and there’s plenty of dead birds about, too. this sets the unsettling backdrop for your primary task, which is to track down a serial killer (which involves using forensic equipment at times!)
the story is very screwy, getting even more so in the sequel, which updated the melee system by quite a bit as well as filling in quite a few details, story-wise. ethan’s background, the source of the insanity, the reason for the dead birds, it all starts getting tied together... and then it fucking ends on a cliffhanger.
god damn it.
at least there’s a few really notable scenes... you’ll never look at mannequins and bears the same way again.
Make us whole again.
hoo boy, where to start?
i suppose i should start from the beginning. in the run-up to this game’s release, there was a lot of speculation that this was a sequel, then a spiritual sequel, to system shock 2; it was actually in development long enough that it was initially intended for the xbox1.
so when it came out, was it the next great -shock game? kinda, and kinda not. first and foremost, this is a game in the resident evil 4 fashion, and comparisons to the two are apt. the camera is over the shoulder third person, and there are some pretty hefty action sequences. that being said, it retains enough of the old-school surhor trappings to deserve the label.
this is one of the bigger franchises for being so relatively recent (first game came out in 2008.) it’s not enough that there’s three games, two with their own DLC; there’s also a bunch of side games, a mountain of comic books (the best ones drawn by the very talented ben templesmith,) two full-length animated movies (bad ones), and a couple novels (decent.)
visceral shunted a lot of the series’ background information into the side material, but lucky for you the only things you really need are the three main games, the third game’s DLC, and extraction, which comes with an animated and voice acted version of the first game’s comic book tie-in as an unlockable. there’s actually some quite rich worldbuilding in the supplemental material, but it’s not necessary to understand the story.
and what a story. on its surface, it’s just another aliens knock-off. you know the type: somewhere in space, there’s a zillion monsters in some far-off human outpost and you get to clean up the bullshit. the plots are really a dime a dozen. hell, when i first played the first game, it took me two whole chapters to realize there was something else going on beyond “doom 3 in third person.” while dead space does basically follow a lot of this kind of sci-horror’s tropes, it turns enough concepts on their head to stand apart a bit. the first is the effective amalgamation of “zombie apocalypse” scenarios (not common in futuristic sci-fi) with the creepy shapeshifting body horror (and awful monster sounds) of john carpenter’s the thing. the second is a religious horror element, with the very scientology-like unitology being perhaps the sole religious belief in an otherwise secular galaxy, which naturally causes some friction, particularly with earth’s governing body. savvy readers will guess that there is some correlation between these weirdos and the mutant space zombies running amok, and you are correct. throw in a bit of cosmic horror (that gets ramped up to 11 in the third game’s DLC, which takes place after the main game) and you have all the makings for a proper lovecraftian space romp. giger would be proud.
the main series generally follows the efforts of isaac clarke (whose name comes from a pair of famous sci-fi authors,) a lowly systems engineer called to do a repair job on a mining ship in the ass end of nowhere. when he gets there the crew is (un)dead and the ship is in the process of decaying out of orbit. from that point on, it’s pretty much a steady descent into madness, despair and death for the next three games. earthgov wants him, the unitologists want him, and something out there wants to keep piling up the corpses.
there’s a sort of B plot as well, as detailed through extraction, which is amusingly enough a rail shooter (a la house of the dead) and the more conventional dead space 2 DLC, both of which are console-only (extraction is on wii and ps3, while severed is on ps3 and 360.) the two games generally center around a woman named lexine, and the men who try to protect her. you don’t play as her, but she is arguably the central character of this side series, as the church and government are as interested in her as they are in isaac. sadly there hasn’t been much resolution to this, as the story seems to have ended with severed and the series is on hold following weak sales of DS3.
dead space 2 also released with a great amount of side material, including not one but two side games as prequels -- ignition, which is a short puzzle game for XBLA/PSN, and the weakly-named dead space, for mobile platforms. both are decent, though dead space mobile wears out its welcome a bit and reuses a lot of DS1 assets. neither are explicitly important to the series, though they do fill in a few gaps.
You've heard of the Sierra Madre Casino. We all have, the legend, the curses. Some foolishness about it lying in the middle of the City of Dead, a city of ghosts. Buried beneath a blood-red cloud, a bright, shining monument luring treasure hunters to their doom...
intentionally an unusual choice today.
by itself, fallout new vegas is an RPG in the bethesda mode, though somewhat stripped down in terms of world space and places to explore. new vegas stands apart from its immediate predecessor fallout 3 (as well as skyrim) by having a smaller, but more populated wasteland to explore; it’s mostly occupied and defended by NCR troops, so it’s less of a wasteland and more of a semi-secure territory just behind a stalemated frontline. (which you could argue kind of misses the point of fallout, but that’s a discussion for another day.) it’s almost pleasant, nevermind the giant wasps, firebreathing geckos, deathclaws, and occasional bandit.
and then there’s dead money. as the first DLC released for the game, dead money turns the gameplay on its head, switching modes from an open-world RPG with some optional light survival elements to a full-on survival horror, removing most of the player character’s gear and forcing them to scrabble for supplies and equipment amidst a long-forgotten casino resort town. this would be fine, except the town is flooded with a poisonous red mist that hides the menacing ghost people, seemingly undying mutants that glow in the dark under their mining gear and hunt for anyone foolish enough to visit the sierra madre casino. you’re ill-equipped to deal with them -- or anything you run into inside the casino proper -- but that’s okay, because the three other poor fools thrown in with you are just as bad off. and god help you if you have a low endurance stat.
as interesting as it is to play a survival horror transplanted into new!fallout’s systems, it’s the story that sets dead money apart, drawing inspiration from the 1948 neo-western “the treasure of the sierra madre” (get it?) the player is lured there by an ancient looping radio broadcast, promising escape, wealth and a chance to begin again, but quickly finds there’s nothing there but ghosts and regret -- and no way out. you’ll have to decide who to trust, and what to hold on to. and in the end, the only ones who make it out are the ones who’ve learned to let go. all in all, it makes for a strong part of new vegas’ DLC lineup, and sets the theme for the rest.
carrollstreetstation reblogged
Anthony Burch is well known for writing the meme riddled peaceful game Borderlands.
he’s being sarcastic, but i actually believe it was going to be bad. even with kojima and del toro involved, there was no way it could A) make up for 10 years of konami fucking the franchise to death and 2) possibly recreate any of what made SH1 or 2 so great.
I actually think he knows what he was talking about in this case. From everything I’ve seen about Silent Hills (I haven’t played it myself) it’s fantastically terrifying and mind-fuck-y, and adding combat (which is a tradition for Slent Hill games as far as I can tell; again, haven’t played any) probably would have diminished the terror a bit. Or a lot.
And REALLY, do you honestly think Anthony Burch doesn’t understand the difference between a wacky, world-hopping, funny, power fantasy game about shooty guns and memes; and a game about being trapped in an ever repeating, ever degrading house, trapped with a ghost intent on killing you, or at the very least, scaring the shit out of you?
Just because the games have wildly differnt writing styles doesn’t mean some of the same writing skills are required. It’s all about eliciting the response you want from the consumer of your media. Regardless of his skill in actually producing horror games, I’m willing to bet he knows a little about the mechanics of how one is put together.
i don’t know if that long screed was in response to me or oddbagel, but my post was in response to burch himself.
i’ve long argued that horror games without combat are bad games. unless your player has no actual arms or hands there is no reason to not pick up like a 2x4 or something just to defend yourself, and i hate the trend of first-person horror games started by amnesia that are all walking simulators with jump scares. and the PT demo just looked like shit to me -- another middle finger to a series i once loved, this time with the added insult of looking like yet another amnesia clone.
the silent hill trilogy (i refuse to acknowledge anything past the third) had combat, and it’s never been great (they operated on the classic resident evil hold-button-to-autoaim style) but that was why it was effective, because you weren’t a superhero or space marine, you were just some dude (or girl in the third) and kinda sucked at self-defense -- but damn if your character wasn’t going to at least try!
the argument i hear most often towards forcing the player to be unable to defend themselves is “if i was in a situation like that i’d be panicking and just trying to get out.” yeah, and if i was in a situation like that i’d be nervously looking for the exits too. but that’s in real life. this is a game, and it bugs the hell out of me that so many of the problems you run into in games like this simply would not happen if the protagonist had hands. it’s contrived and immersion-destroying.
alien: isolation has the right of it -- the game lets you arm yourself with mostly improvised weapons, they serve mostly as ways to bypass lesser dangers and chase away the big bug itself. but you’re still a wuss. there are no BFG 9000s in alien: isolation. if the alien spots you, don’t even bother running, you’re already dead. just because you’re armed doesn’t make you not a wuss. you’re still just a crybaby with a wrench to the alien.
to me, that is the best way to do survival horror -- one where just because you have a gun doesn’t mean you can’t get your shit wrecked. you think the hunters in resident evil gave a shit that you had a piddly little 9mm? hell no, they ripped your head off in one move anyway, over and over again.
tl;dr i am old and bitter and i hate amnesia and grumpy about silent hill and miss the old days of survival horror