| Tachikoma said: Not really horror per-say, and honestly the appearance of the alien was more of a jumpscare, i would consider the game to be more of an action/suspense title than a horror title. |
I'm not one to usually defend that game, buy the Alien was definitely not a jumpscare (outside of specific scripted sequences). The whole idea behind jump scares is that they are usually scripted, have very little build up, and are very brief in presence. That's why people don't like them. The scares always feel unearned and cheap because the genesis of the scares come from being suprised and caught off guard rather than from a genuine feeling of terror.
That's the exact opposite of the way the Alien funtions in that game. While the times when the Alien is able to be interacted with are directed, for the most part, its actions are unscripted. Being attacked by the Alien is triggered by a list of predictable and avoidable actions done by the player, just like any other enemy in any other game. The tension felt when being in the vicinity of the Alien is not unlike the tension felt when ghosting through a stealth game, and is only given it's horror flavor by the setting, the premise, the sound design, and the visual design of the Alien itself. Being in the immediate viscinity of the Alien both part of the build up and part of the scare in its own right because of these factors, and because of how long these can last, they are rarely ever brief.
Obviously a differnent, more intense kind of scare happens when the Alien spots you, but by that point, it feels earned. You understand the rules of interacting with the Alien, and you are experiencing that scare because you broke one of those scares. The scare can last longer than most jump scares too, because of the earned ability later on to ward off the Alien temparerily with fire.
This is all, of course, not accounting for design oversights where the Alien kills the player through flaw in the AI design rather than an intentional result of the way the enemy is designed, etc. Those are obviously unintended exeptions to the rule, and not deliberate design decisions the way jump scares always are. I think calling it a horror game is definitely accurate, and that the prevalent feeling of suspense throughout the experience is more a result of intelligent game design than it is an indicator of it being a different, but closely related, genre/sub-genre. I don't think it's a particularly good horror game, or even a very good game at all, but it definitely deserves to be called a horror game.
Horror is far from my favorite genre, but it's the genre I'm most interested in from a game design POV because of how much it benefits, more than any other genre, from being interactive. I'd also say that I've never truly been satisfied with any of the many horror games I've played because most of them have many common design decisions that I think negatively impacts the horror done in those games. I, perhaps controvercially, don't think there's ever been a horror game that has been truly exceptional from start to finish at pacing, executing, and maintaining a completely uncompromised feeling horror and terror throughout the entire experience. I think that many of the most well known "good" horror games do a few things exeptionally well, but I truly feel like in order to be effective, the game needs to be pretty much perfect in every aspect that impacts the scares and the application of those scares, and no game has ever come close.
I've spent an embarrasing amount of time thinking about why this is and how it could be done better to actually create that first truly perfect horror title.
