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We talk to four developers at the bleeding edge of the genre.

Amanda Ripley is in a vent. The air feels heavy in here; thick. Her hands, which are actually your hands, leave sweaty palm-prints on the metal as you scramble toward the light. It’s hopeless, of course, the thud of heavy feet preludes the inevitable, and you claw out at air before the xenomorph is in there, right there, hungry for you.

Ten years ago, horror games were looking more like action games, and action games made money.

Alien Isolation is, arguably, the poster-child for what feels like a “horror renaissance.” It’s a snapshot of tone - claustrophobic, menacing - and mechanics - unforgiving, sophisticated - that’s at the bleeding edge of all that’s cool in horror game-making today.

Ten years ago, horror looked very different. In the mainstream space, good looking and well crafted games like Resident Evil 4 and F.E.A.R were spinning big bucks. The “golden age” of Japanese-dominated survival horror had been brought to its knees by a new-found focus on slick graphics, explosive set-pieces and layers of upgrading systems. In other words, horror games were looking more like action games, and action games made money.

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But as years went on, the trend started to run out of puff. Torn between the past and the present, the “horror game” grew into an amorphous blob, barely distinguishable from its shooter and action big brothers. Even Dead Space, touted as the new face of big budget horror, grew soft around the edges in subsequent sequels as developers tried to cram in more features to keep up with modern trends. Eventually, consumers grew bored, and publishers wary.

“The genre went quiet for a while because publishers tried to make it more mass market,” says Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels.

“But it created a hole and indies took advantage of it, thanks to digital distribution.”

Wrangled back into the public eye by cowboys operating outside of publisher pressure, horror began to quietly change at the pointy end of the decade in the independent space. Games like Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), Parsec Productions\' Slender: The Eight Pages (2012) and Red Barrel’s Outlast (2013) stripped us of common comforts like weapons and health syringes and threw our yellow-bellied bodies to the monsters in the dark. These were effectively “horror simulators” rather than “horror games,” and eagerly gobbled up by gamers.

Chuck Beaver, story producer on EA’s Dead Space, attributes the warm embrace of this new type of horror game to a broad cultural shift in what we expect from entertainment. We’ve grown hungry for new experiences, Beaver argues, and as a result smaller games now stand a chance to be heard among the fracas.

“Perhaps it’s due to the increasing sophistication of audiences regarding narrative and high-concept, combined with the success of new narrative/game business models such as Telltale’s Walking Dead that are much less bound to traditional controller mechanics,” Beaver says. 

The current golden-age of TV writing leaves people sensitized for smarter content.

“The current golden-age of TV writing [Beaver cites Six Feet Under, Lost, BattleStar Galactica, Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones] leaves people sensitized and hungry for smarter and more nuanced content. So, I think when horror comes through this filter, we see things like Slender being attempted and then meeting with success.”

It doesn’t hurt that this tougher, less hospitable mutation of the horror genre provides a genuine test of the wits. It takes many of its cues from a model briefly popularised by Japanese survival horror Clock Tower (1995), which places your weaponless protagonist at the mercy of a relentless stalker. But it also invokes more modern fears - the loss of your sanity, for example, or the unknowable power of the dark, dank internet.

“Free engines and technical advancements have made it very easy for people to create these sort of games,” says Frictional Games’ Thomas Grip.

“This has led to some very simple templates for making horror games, the most common being the one used in Slender: ‘A monster is hunting you and you must find some items before it catches you’. It is surprisingly easy to build a scary experience from this foundation, and thus it has become very common for these games to be created."

“It also helps that these sort of games provide excellent Let\'s Play material.”

Like a good horror movie, the power of the stripped-down horror video game experience stems from the player’s own imagination. The removal of familiar video game mechanics also removes a preoccupation with those mechanics, leaving us with nothing else to think about but what’s coming to kill us. YouTubers and their audiences are drawn to these sorts of games not only because fear is an entertaining (and ultimately quite accessible) emotion, but because they are so inherently cinematic. 

A game like Resident Evil can become very tense and provide good jump scares, but it very quickly loses a proper sense of dread.

“A game like Resident Evil can become very tense and provide good jump scares, but it very quickly loses a proper sense of dread,” says Grip. “In a game where you have a lot of combat, your mind is occupied in keeping track of ammo, aiming, what weapons to use, etc. So you lack the spare mental capacity to really start to fantasize about the world you’re in."

“But when you remove combat and any explicit core mechanic such as combat, you free up mental space in the player and also make the creatures less knowable. Now all of a sudden the player’s imagination kicks into overdrive and they start scaring themselves.”

Working within this model is not without common hurdles. Video games, as a rule, should be clear with their mechanics and intent, which butts heads with horror’s tendency toward the abstract. The longer the player survives in this world, the more they become attuned to the world’s mechanics, which strips it of vital mystery. But then, if developers try to be overly mysterious, the game can be janky, obtuse and unplayable.

“If you can’t let the player understand the game\'s mechanics, how do they play it at all?” says Grip. “Most horror games solve this by relying on very intuitive concepts, e.g. ‘A large monster is running towards you, so your best course of action should be to run and hide.’ ”

Even with this kind of simplification, there can be issues. You want your AI to be unpredictable, but not unpredictable enough to ruin a sense of momentum and progress. You want your player to feel immersed in a world, but you don’t want them to feel constantly lost. You want your game to be a challenge, but don’t want to force repetition.

“Horror games can often end up feeling frustrating, which breaks the immersion and the game stops being scary,” says Grip. This issue gets even worse when the experience you want the player to have is not as straightforward as the ‘monster hunts you’ scenario.”

Stripping the player of power also puts more pressure on what developers can do with the limited tools at their disposal. As Morin explains, this is a particularly big challenge when working with a smaller budget.

“If the player’s actions are limited, then you must create a wider variety of contexts in which they will perform those actions. But that is often costly in terms of production. We’ve struggled with that on Outlast 1, mostly because we had to ship the game before running out of money, but we shouldn’t run into that problem on Outlast 2 and hopefully we’ll avoid these issues.”

As a story producer, Beaver is preoccupied with the fine line horror treads between scary and a corny ‘80s slasher sequel.

“We found on Dead Space that a game can actually be too scary,” he says. 

We found on Dead Space that a game can actually be too scary.

“People need a break from constant white-knuckle terror. It is psychic pain, after all, even if intended as entertainment, so it’s particularly susceptible to wearing out your audience if sustained too long. As with all pieces of entertainment, pacing and dynamic contrast are crucial.”

But if the horror beat is ever-so-slightly off in any of its components - from timing to character models - then your game becomes a comedy.

“It turns out there isn’t ‘kind of scary’ or ‘almost scary,’ says Beaver. “There is ‘scary’ or ‘not scary at all.’

“More is less’ is basically a hard rule. If you overdo gore, for instance, it loses its effectiveness almost completely. Same with jump or scare gags, those wear out by the third consecutive time. And the less you can show of your monster, the better. The imagined terror of a blurry growl in the shadows is much more powerful than a monster in full key light.”

Alien: Isolation Released Oct. 7th, 2014

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