Horror games come in many different flavors, but often describe themselves as either a psychological or a survival horror game. Here I have tried to identify some of the key differences between these genres from a game design perspective, and dive into how they influence the overall experience of playing the game.
But first, let’s talk a little bit about atmosphere and why it matters.
Atmosphere as a Vessel of Immersion
The overall atmosphere of the experience is no doubt crucial for any work existing in the horror genre. It is well known that the two most important elements to get right when building a scary game are lighting and sound. But what is it exactly that makes these so effective?
Scene lighting and sound design have shown themselves to be effective tools in evoking a creepy atmosphere. This is no doubt due to the shared experiences that we as humans have: everybody has felt unease or even dread when walking down a dark path, suddenly unsure if they’re alone; and everybody knows the experience of hearing a sound that one cannot quite place. These two elements are nowadays fairly easy to get right when building a game, thanks to the tooling of game engines giving us easy access to realistic lighting and spatialized sound.
By building the right atmosphere for our game, we allow the player to get more immersed in the experience. What this means is essentially that the player is more willing to enter into an unwritten contract with the game developers, where the player takes anything the game presents them with at face value. The player’s mind is less likely to wander off and start thinking about technical aspects of the game such as the graphical representation, limitations of the medium (not all of the player’s senses are stimulated by computer games), and the specific gameplay mechanics and win conditions that underpin the gameplay.
Here the rest of the experience must be ready to meet this malleability of the player’s mind and utilize it to the highest effect.
Fear of the Unknown
With the player thus prepared to join us on this journey, we can start building tension and fear through specific interactions and events inside the game. In this section, we will take a look at some overarching game design questions and examine how survival and psychological horror genres answer these in subtly different ways.
Exploring in the Dark
A very effective mechanic is to make the player explore their surroundings while simultaneously making this activity feel unsafe or even dangerous. By giving the player a specific goal, but not telling them exactly where to go in order to achieve it, we force them to head out into the unknown. No matter if there is no actual danger posed to the player, it is enough that the player has been conditioned previously to expect the possibility of danger. They will feel a great deal of tension from simply entering a new, hitherto unknown location.
This feeling can be prolonged if, in addition, this new location does not give up its secrets easily. Perhaps the layout of the space is confusing and maze-like, or perhaps the player can only see their immediate surroundings inside a larger space. Two great references for this technique are Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Scanner Sombre.
This approach is often utilized by games in both survival and psychological horror, but there is a crucial difference: survival horror games often sprinkle some collectible items or resources throughout the location. While this is in itself an effective strategy to keep the player exploring, it comes with a downside: the moments when the player finds these resources have a potential to decrease tension. Instead, players will take stock of their supplies, craft an item, etc. The result can be worse than just the release of tension: the player is rewarded and left feeling just a little bit more used to being in the dark. This has the potential to condition the player into being less scared over time.
It is more effective to instead give the player a single goal inside said location and then have something dramatic happen when they achieve it, shifting the experience to a new beat. If the only reward for the player is progress through the game, they will be less distracted by trying to find ways to master the game mechanics and instead focus on being present in the moment.
Obscured by Darkness
The exploration of an unknown environment can be combined with an actual danger to the player. This is often achieved through some looming presence hunting the player in the form of a scary monster. By combining the need to navigate a hitherto unknown environment with a dynamic danger, we can craft moments of terror inside the player’s mind. This is, once again, most effective if the player does not know where exactly the danger is coming from. If the player knows that the monster is there, but not exactly where, it will make navigating the environment and searching for their goal even more intense. With this dynamic element of the monster moving about, it also causes previously discovered paths through the environment to become temporarily unavailable, pushing the player in new directions.
The pitfall that some survival horror games fall into is that too often they not only show the player exactly where the monster is but also give the player a somewhat straightforward way of responding and making their way forward. By giving the player none or very limited ways to prod the monster out of their way, we nudge the player to choose flight over fight in these situations — forcing them to turn their back on the danger. No monster is more scary than the one that’s behind you.
A good reference here is one of the monsters from SOMA, which only attacks the player if they look at it.
The Taking Away of Freedom
A survival game will typically offer the player a larger set of actions they can take. In many cases, the player might even be given a metaphorical gun — some way to fight back against the dangers of the game. This can be detrimental to the experience, because with every pull of the trigger, tension is released.
This doesn’t mean that a psychological horror game cannot utilize weapons. Releasing tension at the right moments is crucial, but the balance needs to be carefully designed. Fighting back must create a cathartic, hail-mary moment. Perhaps the player is even unsure whether this action will actually save or doom the player-character.
A great reference here is Amnesia: The Bunker.
The downside of player freedom is that the more actions are available, the more difficult it becomes to design for specific, low-level gameplay beats. While purely emergent gameplay can be just as scary, it can be more challenging to make sure that the players are having the exact experience we want them to have.
The other consideration is that the more actions we give to the players, the higher the chance that they will be distracted by these on their game mechanics level and forego being present in the moment.
Closing Remarks
This post could perhaps be summarized as this:
Survival horror is a game, psychological horror is an experience.
A game will focus more on giving the player fun mechanics to engage with, whereas an experience will focus more on evoking the desired emotional response in the player.
None of this is to say that survival horror is somehow worse than psychological horror. Indeed, many games exist on a spectrum with some balance of both survival and psychological horror mechanics. Choosing and mixing between these boils down to what sort of experience we want the player to have while they play the game.
One element that I haven’t addressed is the power of the overarching story, world-building, and narrative that the player is presented with — but that’s perhaps something for a future blog post.
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