Face Me And Scream

Written by: Michael Enger

Creating creepy environments in a video game isn’t just a simple walk in the park (unless it’s a midnight stroll through the parks of Transylvania), because there are a lot of things that can go wrong. The right combination of silence and noise can create the oppressive atmosphere that makes your heart pump and your skin crawl. Being a big fan of the horror genre I usually jump at the chance to have myself scared witless by digital entertainment so I have seen things done well and things done badly.

Clive Barker is a horror writer who has dabbled in video games and, while impatiently waiting for his recent endeavor to hit the store shelves, I picked up a previous title he has branded his name on entitled Clive Barker’s Undying. The horror story which the game mechanics circulate around is interesting and unique enough to keep me playing for a while, but in the end the gameplay gets in the way and I quickly grow tired of the game’s failed attempts at scaring me. Although there is something unnerving about hordes of enemies piling out of graves to claw at my flesh, it does tend to get tedious in the long run. Things that come around the corner without warning is good for shooter-heavy games like Doom3, but when the story in the game is as fascinating like the one in Undying, then I am expecting more than a simple run-and-gun experience. I want to be frightened, not empowered.

Although the game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem doesn’t really try to create a creepy atmosphere with it’s bright and simplistic graphics, there are some parts of the game that are genuinely scary. Your character has a sanity meter and when it runs low strange occurrences keep happening; your character dies suddenly and violently, you see flies crawling on your TV screen or the game pretends to delete your save file, something that had me running over to the GameCube in pure desperation. Without using the usual darkened corridors or flashing images of something horrid standing behind you, the game efficiently frightens you and does so as a punishment for playing badly.

Click to enlargeMan, I’m tired of this street…A mod developed for Half-Life² called Halloween HL2: Pumpkin Night on the other hand, does a wonderful job of ruining the atmosphere completely. Without spending too much describing the terrible level design I’ll just say that they separate every creepy encounter with minutes of monotony, forcing you to walk over great, detail-less, distances and you end up spending 90% of the game time doing absolutely nothing. What they clearly failed to remember was that the fear you experience during the silent moments is based on the anticipation that something is going to happen and although I know that something is even more shocking when you don’t expect it (example: the ending of Carrie), you have to balance out the silent parts a little bit or else people will just get bored.

The list of games that claim to have “horror elements” is quite long; too long if you take into consideration how very un-frightening most of the games are. Shooters like F.E.A.R. and Condemned: Criminal Origins utilize scare-tactics to keep you on your toes but without a strong story to back it up you end up being more scared for your health-bar than your sanity. There doesn’t have to be quivering bodies that drag themselves after you or an empty room with a crying child in the corner for something to be scary, but simply having characters jump out at you from time to time doesn’t classify the game as horror. That being said, I still appreciate when a game at least tries harder than just sending wave after wave of enemies at me and every horror-themed shooter has its moments when the simple scare-tactics work very well and I’m at the edge of my seat for the next hour. I guess that it is my love for those moments that fuel my disappointment when they aren’t executed perfectly.