Making Survival-Horror Games Scary: Part Two

Click here to view Part One

The first part of this series covered areas that could have been more frightening in Resident Evil 4, this final segment will elaborate more on what it did well.

Strengths of the game
1. Enemies become progressively more abnormal
Resident Evil 4 begins with Leon searching a Spanish peasant village. Unfortunately, the villagers are hostile to Leon and the first part of the game is a frenzied battle against the entire town. However, they still appear human. The only thing that's odd at this point is that they take an alarming number of bullets from your pistol to kill, coming back at you after being shot several times in the head.


A typical welcoming committee for government agents in the village of Pueblo

As you progress through the village area, you run into a much stronger enemy, a guy with a sack on his head and a huge chainsaw. He takes a remarkable amount of ammunition to put down and the concealment of his humanity with the sack over his face makes him more intimidating than the rest of the villagers.


The village theater must have had a Texas Chainsaw Massacre screening the day before Leon showed up.

After night falls the village becomes truly terrifying. The villagers are harder to see and now some of them turn into much more powerful enemies when killed. Their head explodes and in its place comes a twirling blade tentacle that can quickly kill Leon in a few hits.


On the positive side, the blade tentacle does actually improve this woman's appearance.

Later in the game different things spawn out of their heads, such as this thing that can lunge forward and chomp Leon's head off in one gulp.

What the hell!

Headshots were previously the most effective way to kill the villagers. Now they become risky as that makes it more likely that these dangerous tentacles are going to come out of their corpse.

An enemy that arrives much later in the game, called a regenerator, is one of the creepiest I have seen in any game.


This picture doesn't do it justice.

If you shoot it, you blow parts of its body off, but that only delays it for a few seconds as it regrows that part. If you blow a leg off, it will flop toward you on the ground like a fish. It can then leap up at Leon from the ground and start biting his face off.


Ouch!

The game does a great job of keeping the enemies from becoming stale, every time you think you know what you'll be facing their appearance is changed, they gain a new ability, or become less human. This keeps the player uncertain about his opposition, keeping the atmosphere frightening.

Sound Effects
One of the highlights of the game is the quality of its sound effects. All of Leon's various firearms make satisfying retorts when fired. Human enemies scream pitifully when shot in the head or leg.


An unusual squishy sound is made when their head gets blown off as well.

However the highlight for me are the calls of the humanoid enemies. Whenever one of the villagers spots Leon they point dramatically at him and call their buddies for help. This usually comes out of complete silence beforehand as well, making it a dramatic moment.

One of the later groups of enemies is a bunch of monks. They chant throughout the entire time they're trying to kill Leon, a sinister background noise to combat. When they are ready to attack with their scythes, flails, or other weapons they will yell something right in Leon's ear. When they manage to sneak up behind you this is quite terrifying, as you know you're going to get hit by something painful.


They also need to get outside of the castle a bit more often.

The regenerator is a star performer in this category. It has a weird wet raspy breath that it makes as it shuffles toward you. When you shoot it, it grunts strangely. It's limbs explode wetly when shot off. The flopping sound it makes as it hops toward you along the ground if you blow off one of its legs is just like a wet fish.

Any horror games needs to put a lot of effort into its sound effects if it wants to fully involve the player. Vision and hearing are the two main senses stimulated by games, you can't afford to neglect one of them.

Player Deaths
One important aspect of a survival-horror game is that there should be a fear of death. If the player does not have to worry about being killed, a great deal of tension is lost. There are many horrific ways Leon Kennedy can die in Resident Evil 4. He can be blown up by dynamite, be disemboweled by a peasant with a pitchfork, get hit by crossbow bolts that are lit on fire, get crushed by a rolling boulder, and many other options.


My personal favorite is head lopped off by chainsaw.

It's important that a horror game show the player character dying. If this part is skipped over then the reality of failure isn't shown to the player. It also makes the enemies less frightening if their ability to cut off your character's head isn't displayed.

Solve a puzzle? Something bad is probably going to happen.
Solving a puzzle is one of the riskiest actions you can take in Resident Evil 4. Virtually every time, it will cause a boss battle against some terrifying enemy, a horde of villagers to come howling at you, or other bad things to happen. The same is true for entering any area that was initially devoid of enemies. If nothing hostile is immediately visible, it's safe to bet that won't last much longer. Any horror game that manages to make the player dread progressing through it is doing a great job.

Background Details
A final important touch that some games neglect is to make sure that the scenery you're moving through is suitable to the game's atmosphere. In Silent Hill 2, the game takes place with an eerie fog throughout the entire town, which blocks off most of the player's vision. This was actually a mechanism to allow the game to work with the PS2's graphical capabilities, but in does double duty by also helping to terrify the player. Enemies are present in this fog and may come at the main character with little to no warning. It's difficult to prepare for a foe that you can't see at range.


Although you can at least have a big stick ready to hit something with.

It's also important to have additional details that reflect what happened to the victims of the tragedy before the player showed up. For instance, if most of a town was murdered there needs to be corpses, blood smears, and other such evidence present.


Bodies stuck on sticks are popular as well.

If, like most horror plots, some sort of medical experiments were being done, have some evidence of the victims around.


Here the scientists were trying to discover what happens when you stick sharp spider legs through someone's back.

Conclusion
Fear is one of the emotions that is hardest to evoke in videogames. This is principally because all the details have to be correct for it to work. If the game is too well lit, if the enemies look silly, if the sound effects are poorly done, any little thing being badly done can ruin the effect. The most important part of a successful horror game is to get these elements done right. Otherwise it's just a joke.

Making Survival-Horror Games Scary: Part One

Many recent survival-horror games like Dead Space succeed in creating some frightening moments, but they don't maintain that environment throughout the entire experience. Part of this is because many survival-horror games are now basically action games that replace enemy soldiers with enemy monsters. A monster becomes much less scary when you can focus your mind on how you're going to be killing it with a pistol or shotgun as opposed to how you're going to survive the next few minutes. However, it's still possible to create a frightening experience with a well-armed player. Even Resident Evil 4, one of the best recent titles I can think of, could be greatly improved with a few changes.

Areas for improvement

1. Don't turn off the scary music after all the enemies are dead.
Whenever an enemy appears, some tension building background music turns on. Unfortunately, as soon as you kill the last enemy in the area it immediately turns off. This lets you know you are safe. This is a problem when you're trying to make a player feel frightened through your game. It would have been better to keep that music going so that the player still has to keep looking around, not knowing if there are more enemies in the area. For a really clever move, perhaps one or two enemies have one of their legs injured so they show up after the player thinks all the enemies are dead. Then they stab him in the back while they're distracted picking up all the items off the ground from the dead foes.

2. The scariest enemy is the one you don't see
Resident Evil 4 does do a better job with this than some games. There are a couple of boss fights where you have to run through an area completing a puzzle while dodging an enemy who attacks from the shadows. However, in later parts of the game many enemies stand right out in an open, well-lit area like the game changed into Call of Duty.


Such as this fellow who shoots at you with a humongous Gatling gun.

Ideally, you want the player to be dreading moving forward in the game. If they don't know where an enemy is attacking them from, that will certainly limit their desire to keep advancing. In comparison, if you know there's an enemy right behind that barrel up ahead, you can form a strategy of how to deal with him. When you don't know if he's behind the barrel, in the dumpster, behind the creates, or right behind you, uncertainty is added, creating tension.

One of the most frightening parts of Resident Evil 4 was when nightfall came in the village. During the day, it wasn't that hard to see the villagers. Once night falls, you're defending yourself from more indistinct shapes.

Although the ones holding torches give their position away.

Additionally, if the enemies are concealed and come out of nowhere you get the additional benefit of startling the player. Even things that aren't frightening at all become scary when they come out of nowhere. When I saw Avatar in 3D the first few ashes from the big tree burning down certainly startled me when they came out of the corner of my vision.


AAAAHHHH! Oh that's part of the movie.

3. Cut out the exposition on the origin of the monsters
One reason many people hated the prequels to the Star Wars series was that it offered an unnecessary explanation for how the Force worked that seemed ridiculous.


You're not really special Anakin, it's just the midichlorians in your blood.

A large part of the appeal for the first three films to be released was that the Force was mysterious and you felt like Luke Skywalker was figuring it out himself as the series progressed. When the mystery was ruined in the prequels, many people were upset.

Similarly, Resident Evil 4 offers an unnecessary and somewhat ridiculous explanation for why all the villagers and mutated monsters have been created. Oh, some weird fossils they found in the village ended up infecting everyone and making them into mindless slaves of Lord Sadler, their leader.


The source of all evil.

Just as concealing the physical form of monsters from the player's view increases the tension and atmosphere of a game significantly, avoiding an explanation of the source of the monsters helps a lot as well. It's similar to how the Black Death worked in Europe. Everyone was scared out of their minds because they had no idea why half their village was dying every day. If they had known that it was caused by bacteria, they probably would not have been as frightened. Even if nothing can be done about a problem, knowing the cause of it reduces the fear of it dramatically. Especially when you have to contort the nature of reality to a ludicrous extent for your explanation.

With these three additions to gameplay and story, most horror games should easily succeed in increasing their effect on the player's psyche. In the next section of this bit I will mention what Resident Evil 4 does well, items that should also be featured in every horror game.

Click here to view Part Two

When Your Ally Quits

When someone on your team quits or has his internet connection drop in a RTS game, it reduces your chances of victory dramatically. You only have a limited amount of concentration available and when the units you have to control suddenly double you will not be anywhere near as effective a commander. Resources to build troops won't be harvested as efficiently, units won't be built in sufficient numbers, and your army won't be managed as effectively in combat.

Unfortunately, many RTS games add even more penalties to a player when their teammate quits. There is usually a limit to how many troops you can have at a time. For example, in Company of Heroes, you can only have a certain population number worth of units fielded at once. As you take territory on the map, this number rises a bit, allowing you to build more troops. Different units also have different population values. A squad of pioneers, the basic worker unit for the Wehrmacht faction, takes up 2 population. A Panther heavy tank, in comparison, takes up 12 population.


In the German army, pioneers were the rough equivalent of combat engineers, not these guys.

In team games, each player can field the same population of units based on how much of the map your team controls. However, if one of your allies quits the game, the maximum population of units you can build does not go up. This basically means that if you were playing a 2v2, you now have to fight their combined force of units with half the number of troops. Additionally, you may be stuck with some of your population tied up in units you don't want, such as pioneer squads, which prevent you from building better troops. This is not a recipe for success. If an ally quits the game you should still be able to build as many troops as you could when he was still playing, otherwise the contest is completely unfair.


You get very little out of losing an unequal battle as well. Unlike the Alamo, no one will want to paint a heroic scene of your outnumbered last stand in Starcraft.

Another major problem in some titles is that when your ally leaves you no longer have access to his resources so you're forced to use your own resources to build troops from his buildings. This is a huge problem if your ally had been hoarding resources the whole game, as his reserves of gold, lumber, and other items are not available for your use ever again. This poses an imbalance wherein your opponents now have more resources than you and can thus outnumber you easily by building more soldiers.


Breaking open his bank to get his resources is rarely an option.

The worst error a game can make is that when a teammate quits, their units and buildings aren't transferred over to their team's control. They just stand around wherever they were when he quit for the remainder of the game. They don't even attack their former enemy if they are in range. This means that you are definitely left facing multiple opponents at a huge disadvantage as you're now one army short whenever battle occurs.

Warcraft 3, in comparison, does things the right way. When an ally quits the rest of the team is granted control of their remaining units. They preserve their resources and population, allowing the remaining teammates to use their resources to build troops from their buildings. The team is still at a disadvantage by losing one player's concentration and skill, but they have a much more fair shot at winning. It is inexcusable for any RTS game to use a different model.