Putting the “horror” back in “survival horror”

The Silent Hill: Shattered Memories team talk genre reinvention.

Survival horror, it’s generally accepted, has fallen on hard times. The progress of the Resident Evil franchise perhaps typifies what Destructoid’s Jim Sterling http://www.destructoid.com/how-survival-horror-evolved-itself-into-extinction-114022.phtml">terms “evolution into extinction”: the last numbered iteration was an action game in all but heritage, preferring pad-mashing brutality to ammo-deprived suspense, laser sights to locked doors, turrets to tenterhooks.

Drawn to the bombastic production values and sales figures of major action releases like God of War, and with one eye perhaps on the downfall of PC-based point and click adventuring, the genre’s oldest hands have dosed up on adrenaline. Resident Evil 4’s release was undoubtedly the turning point, its baying mobs and customizable weapons a far cry from the lurking terrors of yore. In 2008, Konami threw its hat into the ring alongside Capcom’s in the form of http://archive.videogamesdaily.com/reviews/xbox360/silent-hill-homecoming-p1.asp">Silent Hill: Homecoming, while EA’s Dead Space applied the same principles in zero G. Even the Project Ego/Fatal Frame games, protected from turbulent market developments by their relative anonymity, are starting to twitch a little: the fourth one made use of a shoulder aim.

It’s a transition the minds behind the latest Silent Hill, Climax Group, are all too familiar with. Discussing the development of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, a Wiimake of the PS1 original which launches in the UK on 26th February, Lead Producer Tomm Hulett comments wryly: “We looked at survival horror games now, and we saw they were really all about action, to the point where we call them ‘action horror’ games. Monster jumps out, you pull out your gun, you shoot him, he’s dead, you’re not scared anymore.”

Climax made its own contribution to this shift in Silent Hill: 0rigins, a dyed-in-the-wool PSP prequel which – prior to Homecoming, at least – boasted the franchise’s most combat-capable protagonist yet, but when it came to Shattered Memories, the developer was ready to turn a new leaf.

“The genesis of it wasn’t so much a reactionary thing as it was, you know, ‘when’s the last time I played a horror game that really scared me?’” says Lead Designer Sam Barlow. “A kind of feeling of ‘I’ve played a lot of horror games now and the template is fairly fixed’.
“And rather than picking that apart and stripping elements out, we said ‘right, let’s throw that away, and let’s pretend we’ve come down from Mars and we’ve never played a horror videogame. But we know what horror movies are like, and we know what thriller movies are like, that kind of stuff, and so what would we come up with?’ So it was trying to think of something new, something fresh and exciting, to see if there was a better way of doing horror in games.”

Light and dark: weapons of choice in the survival horror developer arsenal.

That “fresh and exciting” approach proved fairly straightforward: weaken the player to the point of incapacity. “We took out the elements that empower the player,” Hulett explains, “and threw you into this hostile environment, this nightmare world, where these intelligent creatures are pursuing you at every step. They can go through doors, they can climb over walls. They’re trying to get you, actively. And you have very little resources to escape them.”

Direct combat doesn’t exist in Shattered Memories. As anxious father and full-time fish-out-of-water Harry Mason, you can bat the franchise’s trademark walking cadavers away when they grab you, deter them with flares, hide from them and block their approach with movable objects, but you’re only delaying the inevitable. An eye for exits, rather than headshots, is crucial to success.

Harry's phone serves the same purpose as Isaac Clarke's holo-projectors: it feeds you maps and objectives without jerking you out of the world.

“Rather than iterating on how combat’s worked in other horror games we kind of said, ‘what is absolutely terrifying, what is pure horror?’,” Barlow goes on. “When you’re a child and you wake up screaming from a nightmare, it’s usually a nightmare involving you being chased and not being able to get away, being alone and vulnerable in the dark, that kind of thing.”

In hindsight, it’s a wonder Konami hasn’t taken this approach in the past. Where Resident Evil arguably leaned towards action gaming from inception, breezily free of undertones and mightily obsessed with blood-and-guts moneyshots, Silent Hill is a thoughtful beast. Its enemies are two parts metaphor to one part in-your-face physicality. Besides basic problems of implementation, the presence of combat systems has always resounded oddly with the franchise’s greyscale ethereality.
It’s important not to take the implications of Climax’s move too far, though. Being alone and vulnerable needn’t be incompatible with being able to defend yourself: horror is more nuanced than that. In his article on the genre’s decline, Sterling makes a rather significant oversight: he neglects to consider Monolith’s excellent F.E.A.R. and Condemned titles, all intensely combat-driven, all utterly, utterly terrifying.

You can run. You can hide. But not forever.

This aside, Shattered Memories may be the quiet revolution the genre needs. And there are other reasons to have faith in the future of spooky entertainment this month: Heavy Rain, though not a survival horror game in itself, is similarly averse to codified models of play, similarly opposed to the rule of the gun. Market phenomena come and go, but there’s something timeless about a good scare.

I totally agree, the game was SURVIVAL horror, no SHOOTING horror

just finished silent hill last night...pretty good game, but a little on the short side

also i thought dead space was a good blend of survival horror and action - without going overboard in the action department...too bad the sequel is going to screw that up