Survival Horror: Then and Now.

[Salandrin]

Back in the day




Today




Fond memories and unpleasant memories. Let's discuss on how this change affects you all, whether you love it or hate it.

[Thrage]

I think survival horror as a genre died out a long time ago. These newer games in those series are Action games. Even Resident Evil 4, probably one of the best games ever made, doesn't really feel like Survival Horror to me all that much. There's a sense of helplessness that needs to be present in Survival Horror that recent games just don't get across - Leon is cool and all, but I don't feel like I'm in serious trouble playing as a professional government agent who got his job by surviving Raccoon City. There are certain other aspects that have fallen to the wayside as well - low ammunition, low amount of heals in the world, things to make the player feel the need to conserve. I haven't really seen a true Survival Horror game in a long time.

[Solmyr13]

Survival Horror hasn't died out; I made the mistake of thinking that before people on these forums showed me Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Two weeks later and I'm about... two hours in because I can't play for more than 20 minutes at a time. If you're looking for something to just make you cry, this is your game.

Also why are they butchering Silent Hill some more? After two it just started a slippery slope.. just stop.

[pocky_rin]

*fears the wrath of video game nerds*
Is bioshock a survival horror? Because I wet myself in fear playing it haha.
In my mind a proper survival horror would be like Bioshock crossed with the sandbox elements of fallout.

[OrcsRLame]

I think survival horror as a genre died out a long time ago. These newer games in those series are Action games. Even Resident Evil 4, probably one of the best games ever made, doesn't really feel like Survival Horror to me all that much. There's a sense of helplessness that needs to be present in Survival Horror that recent games just don't get across - Leon is cool and all, but I don't feel like I'm in serious trouble playing as a professional government agent who got his job by surviving Raccoon City. There are certain other aspects that have fallen to the wayside as well - low ammunition, low amount of heals in the world, things to make the player feel the need to conserve. I haven't really seen a true Survival Horror game in a long time.

Not to mention Leon is this crazy acrobatic badass that cuts fools with his knife and really feels like he belongs in the DMC section of the Capcom universe instead of RE.

You should try Amnesia though, I refuse to play it for fear of unintentional urination.

[Salandrin]

Survival Horror hasn't died out; I made the mistake of thinking that before people on these forums showed me Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Two weeks later and I'm about... two hours in because I can't play for more than 20 minutes at a time. If you're looking for something to just make you cry, this is your game.

Also why are they butchering Silent Hill some more? After two it just started a slippery slope.. just stop.

Silent Hill 3 was great, 4 was ok, Homecoming was ok as well, Shattered Memories was eh...and Downpour looks great.

The SH series is still fine aside from the monstrosity shown above.

---------- Post added 2012-02-28 at 03:49 AM ----------

*fears the wrath of video game nerds*
Is bioshock a survival horror? Because I wet myself in fear playing it haha.
In my mind a proper survival horror would be like Bioshock crossed with the sandbox elements of fallout.

Bioshock as great as it is, is old. Bioshock 2 was just a disaster in my honest opinion, but I'll leave it at that.

[Thrage]

*fears the wrath of video game nerds*
Is bioshock a survival horror? Because I wet myself in fear playing it haha.
In my mind a proper survival horror would be like Bioshock crossed with the sandbox elements of fallout.

Bioshock is kind of on the edge of survival horror. It's the most recent game I can think of that comes close. Never tried the other game mentioned. The atmosphere in that game was just plain incredible, though. The demented splicers' singing Jesus Loves Me echoing off the walls is one of the coolest/scariest things I've ever encountered in a game.

Ammo can be scarce in BioShock which works in its favor, but if you ever die, you're instantly back via vita-chamber and can go right back to the action. Fear of death isn't really a big thing in BioShock. Take the original RE/RE2 for instance though, and your resources are severely limited. You only get a certain number of healing herbs, certain number of ammo boxes, even a certain number of ink ribbons (used to save your game). Every choice you made was important, every bullet you shot, the loss was felt. That's what defines the genre to me - working with minimal resources to get out alive.

It's a style of game that really only appeals to a certain mindset of gamer - the slightly masochistic one that loves a good challenge and wants to beat it just to spite it after being chewed up and spit out. Unsurprisingly, most gamers are not this type. That's why the genre is at least greatly diminished.

[unholytestament]

Resident Evil stopped being survival horror when the third one came out. Yeah, hearing "STARS" caused you to jump every now and then go bolting for the nearest exit, but the second you got in any way decent at using the dodge mechanic the entirety of the game became a non-issue. Knifing Nemesis to death became second nature, and the game became a joke. Then Resident Evil 4 drug the lingering notion the series was in any way related to survival horror out behind a dumpster and emptied untold amounts of ammunition into its corpse. I'm not saying they were bad games, they just weren't survival horror.

And when it comes to Silent Hill the last one that was worth a damn was number 3. The Siren games might have been good if the English dub wasn't absolutely ridiculous.

[vizzle]

OP, go play Amnesia before you make a thread like this.

[Thrage]

Not to mention Leon is this crazy acrobatic badass that cuts fools with his knife and really feels like he belongs in the DMC section of the Capcom universe instead of RE.

Fun trivia: Devil May Cry's Dante character was originally intended to be Resident Evil's Leon. DMC, while in development, was judged as too far-removed from the Resident Evil series, so it was retooled into what we now know as the DMC series, and Leon became Dante.

The main difference between the two is that at the end of the day, Leon could still be a real person. Sure, he's crazy acrobatic, and kind of a ninja, but he doesn't do anything a real person could never do.

[OrcsRLame]

Fun trivia: Devil May Cry's Dante character was originally intended to be Resident Evil's Leon. DMC, while in development, was judged as too far-removed from the Resident Evil series, so it was retooled into what we now know as the DMC series, and Leon became Dante.

The main difference between the two is that at the end of the day, Leon could still be a real person. Sure, he's crazy acrobatic, and kind of a ninja, but he doesn't do anything a real person could never do.

You're preaching to the choir bro, it doesn't get more DMC nerdy than me. You can really see the design influence of RE on the first DMC game in particular, which is of course, as you said, because it was actually designed to be an RE game. Everything from the camera, to the room layout, to the weapons just screams classic RE. Of course there's no real comparison between Dante and Leon. All but the most basic of DMC enemies, (and even then those would be like mini-bosses) would rape Leon.

And then they gave the series to European developers and decided Dante should be an emo half man half demon half angel. *Rages and kicks Tameem Antoniades in the balls*

More fun trivia. Nelo Angelo's name is Italian for Black Angel, and is actually incorrectly romanized. It's supposed to be Nero Angelo, but the name fell victim to the common L to R English to Japanese translation error. You would think in this day and age translators would have learned to be more careful with that.

[papaya]

love me some good resident evil

[Deleted]

I think rather than it having died out, its resurrection is coming. There is the Dead Space series (though part 2 veered heavily towards action whereas 1 was awesome) and Amnesia. If they manage to make more DS1's I'll be happy.

[Caiada]

Most of them relied on 1) controls sucking, 2) graphics being incredibly non-distinct, and 3) goddamn jump scares. They were fun at the time because we didn't have good controls or graphics anywhere else, and jump scares are still pretty scary, but it gets really old, really fast. Real survivor horror games are so few and far between (now) for the same reason good horror movies have always been. More than any other genre, they rely on creating a feeling, and all the crutches we used to have to make that feeling are gone. You can't just tell a great story and have great gameplay in a horror game, because without that feeling of paranoia and fear of loss, it's just an action game. I don't agree with people who say RE4 wasn't scary. I do agree with the ones decrying RE5, DS2, and a lot of the other 'action-y' horror games that have come out. We've lost the survival and just gone to action-horror, because honestly, none of these protagonists, with their perfect aim while moving and easy maneuverability regardless of the situation, none of them should fear death. Does Master Chief fear death? Does Soap fear death? Probably not. Why do so many games tend towards completely unrealistic character abilities and make them completely unrelatable, deriving all their fear instead from shock value and jump scares? Make me feel like I'm there. Make me be reminded of wondering around that first RE4 village, honestly scared of what the hell these people were capable of, these real people.

TL;DR- The survival horror genre needs to have more realistic characters and more personal fear to survive in an era where everybody's an action-hero and you can't coast by on shit controls and atmosphere. Make more Amnesias!

[Voidgazer]

Though I am not really a dedicated fan of the survival horror genre, I'd like to speculate (I really like to) about the nature of these games with you.

As you may have already guessed Silent Hill is one of my favorite games ever. I really love the story about it. But was it scary? No. SH is definitely a psychological horror story, which requires a thorough comprehension of the characters' stories, personal motives and (in)human nature in general. Understanding of characters' deeds, their sins and comparison with real world events is what really makes it a horror story. But I got carried away a little. Let's return to the survival horror genre.

Let me start with the first element of the genre - survival. Though it goes really well with horror, intensifying the gaming experience, survival is actually a separate gameplay concept on its own. Survival in general is a very basic concept - the goal is to not die. A player faced with it pretty much in almost every game, but it isn't that apparent most of the time. In my understaning, what really makes survival a great gameplay element is very limited resources. Making decisions when to fight your way through or run away, to heal yourself or struggle with low health for some more, even to save the game right now or not. Managing all the little resources you have, and finding more things to survive, while tryining to minimize the expenses is what I think survival should stand for in gaming.

Moving to the horror next. Some of you may strongly disagree on the next two things I must say. First of all, barely any games or actually other media is actually scary at all. And secondly - the only effective scary methods so far are the jump scares and monster closets. It's because they play on our reflexes, which are faster than the intelligent thought. You get scared by something fast moving in your direction, especially if it accompanied with loud sounds and menacing looks, before you can realize it's not real and holds no real danger to you.

There's another horror technique which is also based on the primeval fears that still haunt human subconsciousness - body horror. Mutilated, decomposing or otherwise damaged or twisted bodies is a common sight in horror games. Monsters and their victims are subjected to it likewise. This technique aimed at animal fear of death's material manifestation - famine, disease, corpses and alike. All those things were quite common and dangerous on the dawn of mankind, but are rarely seen in the modern (relatively) prosperous society. So now macabre monsters can cause the feeling of disgust and repultion at best. Some people (such as myself) may actually find the corrupted and surreal humanoid monster design fascinating.

But most players frown upon the idea of jump scares, but how can we improve the horror element of the genre? Again the answer lies in ourselves. One of our deepest fears, though less suitable for use in games than the previous two, but probably the strongest one is the fear of unknown. You know that there's something right behind the corner (or behind you!), you know it's dangerous, you know it's dreadful, you it's out to get you... but you don't know what is it. If you're afraid of it, but you don't know what it is and how it looks like, your imagination will do the work to truly horrify better than any artist or the most powerful graphics engine. The suspense is very often overlooked in the horror games, making the monster reveal the main event instead, which often results in fear fading, often following action gameplay taking place. But there's one problem with this approach to horror - replayability value is infinitesimal. Sooner or later you'll have to reveal the monster, otherwise the player will figure out that there's actually nothing is waiting for him behind the corner, that there's no real danger. The player will just rush through the rest of the game ignoring whatever you might have up your sleeve to try to scare him. If the monster is revealed once, the player will get the time to study it's appearance, and won't be terrified by the growling sounds in darkness, because he know exactly how monster looks.

And lastly, some examples. Amnesia, which is brought up quite often threads like this, is highly overrated game. It is a good game, just not as great as people tend to praise it. Amnesia started pretty well with the suspense element, making you stop and look for cover every time you heard a strange sound, seen a door opened by a gust of wind etc. Later on the monsters started to appear, seemingly searching some (your) warm flesh to feed upon. But I quickly noticed that those monsters were actually just scripted visual effects, disappearing after they turn around the corner, not reacting to me, even if I chased them openly to take a better look at them. But those weren't the real monsters, which got introduced later into the game. The real ones were really patrolling the place, and attacking the player if they saw him. But by that time the player already knows how they look, and there is only one type of monsters in the game. In order to avoid them, the player must remain in the dar, which slowly drains sanity. As it turned out though sanity hasn't actually had a major influence on the gameplay, and was quite easily regained during the playthrough. What might have been an interesting resource system for a horror game, turned out to be pretty useless. Well, at least that's how it was for me. With all this said the game basically was turned into a stealth game with puzzles. Amnesia had potential to become a great horror game, and in fact it brought a small wave of survival horror games popularity, but it still wasn't scary or survival oriented enough.

On the other hand, I want to note the Dead Space series. I was really hooked by the first game, its industrial design, space and alien horror motives as well as the monster design a la The Thing. And though the main horror technique here is the same old jump scares, they're done really well, thanks to the great sound and music work. The resource management, such as health, ammo, weapon upgrades etc. is less intense as it should have been on lower difficulty settings, but on the highest one it feels just right, so I'd recommend playing the game on any other difficulty. The game tries to tap into psychological horror as well, with ghost stories and schizophrenia, but it's still very simplistic and superficial. But the first two scare methods are done quite well in this game. Though Dead Space has a slight bias to the action style gameplay, which only worsened in the second game, so I'm worried about how the tihrd game will turn out. I especially want to note one difference between the first and second Dead Space games. In the first game, regardless of 3D person view, Isaac Clarke feels more like a protagonist, a player's personification in the game world, rather than an independent character. This effect was achieved simply and effectively due to Isaac being a silent and faceless protagonist (though you can briefly see his face during the intro cutscene), leaving the player himself to fill in his character. In the second games the developers decided to give Isaac voice and a set personality, leaving less space for players' imagination. I cannot emphasized enough the importance of imagination in horror games, well, actually in any game.

In the end I want to ask you to take a good look at the old survival horror games and think what made them better games (if they really were), and to be a little more forgiving towards the new survival horror games, because you and only you can help to restore the genre and send it in the right direction, by supporting developers of the game you like, and providing feedback both positive and negative.

[Deleted]

The Fallout series has the potential to be a really good Survival Horror game, unfortunately the graphics are severely lacking by todays standard and resources are not as scarce as you would think they'd be in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. To be honest, the moment you step feet out of the vault in Fallout 3, you'll rarely be running dry on ammo, food or shelter unless you're extremely unlucky (Or bad).

I really, really love the idea of Fallout. Scrounging for survival in a giant ruined and blown-out cityscape, every bullet to be savoured and every meal and sleep like a gift from above. Mutated horrors stalk the streets and humanity survives in small pockets of society, barricaded and guarded, attempting to carve out a living and restoring themselves to former glory.

Unfortunately Fallout 3 (especially) ended up being a rather silly adventure for the most part. Not much scrapping or scaring going on in that game.

Sorry for getting a bit off-topic, but someone mentioned Fallout and I couldn't help myself.

[Restos3]

@Voidgazer: Always nice to read your posts.

With that said, I must agree with you. Those techniques you described came long before video games, as you surely must know by now. My point is, that even with that incorporated to almost every horror game, I still freak out when they really pull it off the right way. There's nothing scary about a big boom sound around a corner with a close-up of a monster. It's jumpy, but nothing else.

Like you, I'm a huge SH fanboy, and probably my favorite game. (hard to notice aswell!) But the scary moments in Silent Hill weren't those close-ups or these big noises. For me at least, there are more scenes in the game that freak'd me out, but not involving any monster.

Just like Ju-On movies. It has gross scenes, but the suspense is more scary than the horror itself. At least for me.

Horror games until today are great games (not all of them fo sho) but I miss games like Silent Hill 2 (eg). I do not hate the newer games because there's always something worth to see or experience.

[wartywarlock]

I think I was about 11 when silent hill first came out. Jeepus. I remember sneaking down one night to play it some more, man most easy bust my parents ever made lol..SCREEEAAAAAAMM!

[Uriel]

the games mentioned "today" arent survival horrorgames..
They are set in a similar Dimension like the "orginals" but belong to a different kind of Gamestyle.
To name a bad example: Dr Mario is set in the Mario Dimension somehow..but itsnot a classical Jump and run like the original Marios.

Book of memories could be compareable to Diablo Series..you fight many Demontype creatures with several other Players. Though diablo was never a Survivalhorrorgame.. (exept the First one on the first time playing maybe)

so you cant compare old and new survivalgames if you dont post new survivalgames... This is like "wich is the best jump and run game" and you offer Mario and Tetris.

a Valid comparsion would be resident Evil 1 to Revil5, or Silent Hill 1 to SH Homecomming.
The video you picked for revil5 is not suiting to the context imo.

[tauchs]

idk, i'd put Dead Island in the survival horror genre, even though it had it's flaws, was still a pretty good game imo. The newer RE's did make me sad with their clunky controls though.