

The human mind has always been fascinated by horror and the macabre. While originally stemming from ancient folklore and stories of oral tradition, tales of frightening nature can even be found in some of our most prominent religious texts (does the story of “The Levite and his Concubine” in the book of Judges, from the Old Testament, ring a bell?). Just as the human mind is entranced by stories of brilliant success and achievement, of the common man coming to make fate itself bow before him, so is it beguiled by stories of him meeting horrific and incomprehensible ends at the face of dark forces we could barely imagine, let alone try to explain. Sometimes, the two styles may even inhabit two sides of the same horror story.



In every form of storytelling and creative media, horror has found a successful place, whether it be literature, movies, or even within the theatre and art world. It sits comfortably alongside other major genres like comedy, drama, or romance, often intermingling with them as writers deem necessary. Likewise, just as it has found a home within these other mediums, it has built a relatively storied history within the world of video games as well.

Horror in video games has an interesting past, involving few strong contenders and innumerable also-rans (at least in comparison to other genres), but has almost always been closely linked to point-and-click adventure games. First appearing in progenitor form in the titles Haunted House for Atari in 1982 and Sweet Home for the MSX in 1989 (Japan only), it took quite some time for horror to be fully realized as a potential genre in-and-of itself. Much of this can be attributed to Alone in the Dark, which was released for MS-DOS in 1992 and has since been unofficially deemed the father of modern survival-horror (being the first to be in 3D). Even then, the concept of horror was still experimented with outside of ‘survival-horror’ in adventure games like Brain Dead 13 (1994, MS-DOS) and Harvester (MS-DOS), and with the inclusion of horror elements in the FPS genre with games like DOOM (MS-DOS, 1993) and Wolfenstein 3D (MS-DOS, 1992). All that changed when Capcom released the blockbuster hit Resident Evil for PSX in 1996. That single title was what truly opened up the possibilities for survival-horror as a distinct and viable gameplay genre in its own right, paving the way for the genre’s evolution for almost 17 years, even coining the term ‘survival-horror.’



Traditional survival-horror is very particular in its tropes and format. The player character is often an average person trapped in a sinister locale ranging in size from as small as an apartment to as large as a town. They must strategize, travel, team up with others, and survive an onslaught of monsters, demons, or other horrific creatures inherent in the sci-fi or supernatural bent of the story, eventually escaping the ordeal to their life of normalcy. Firearms and projectile weapons with limited ammo can often be found to defend oneself, along with occasional melée weapons like bats, steel pipes, a board with nails in it (which typically leave you much more open to attack, and will sometimes even break after prolonged use), or whatever other item the story calls for (ex: a camera). Combat itself tends to be of lesser focus, making the character feel much weaker than traditional action games. The control style of early titles was often marked by uneasy movement and awkward fixed camera angles that served to unnerve and disorient the player, adding to their sense of helplessness. Various everyday items and keys must be found, combined, or otherwise utilized to solve puzzles and progress forward in a way that hearkens back to the point-and-click adventure format the genre branched off from. Lastly, death, game over, and failure scenes tend to be particularly disturbing and violently gruesome, as befitting the overall tone of the game, and therefore operate in a way that discourages frivolous or risky play behaviors.

For the remainder of the PSX generation and well into the next, lasting at least three major iterations of each, the genre rested on the shoulders of two major juggernaut franchises: the previously mentioned Resident Evil from Capcom, and the soon-to-follow Silent Hill from Konami. Although both series stuck closely to the aforementioned format, it should be noted that they were both massively successful by being polar opposites in every other detail. Resident Evil tended towards sci-fi plots involving zombies and scientific-experiment mutants, and dealt with stories of people trying to survive an outbreak within large and labyrinthine buildings; Silent Hill tended towards supernatural stories of people trying to find their way through the eponymous town while fighting off bizarre monstrosities, and usually involved a more complex plot drive. SH’s stories could be fairly subtle, obscure, psychological, and even outright ambiguous or inexplicable. There were a fair number of other survival-horror games produced during this time period, but while some have been notable, none reached the critical or commercial success of these two franchises.

Sensing the climate of the genre growing stale, Capcom labored for six long years, and through multiple iterations, to re-invent the series and the genre. Resident Evil 4 was released in early 2005 (on multiple consoles), and was a massive blockbuster hit that changed survival-horror forever. Emphasizing much more of an action aspect, the game removed the fixed-camera style and sense of desperation from the previous entries in the series in favor of a shoulder-mounted third-person camera and precise aiming system for strategic shooting. Enemies came at you in droves, ammo and supplies were plentiful, and horror was conveyed through bizarrely frightening opponents who could easily kill the player and occasionally had to be defeated in a specific way. It was a game like nothing the world have ever seen, and brought the genre more fans and interest than ever before.



The major issue with Resident Evil 4, however, is that the noticeable move of adding more action to the series set a terrible development precedent that has slowly driven the genre to mainstream slump today. Specifically, more action has been perceived as equal to greater sales numbers, which is rarely true. Recent iterations of the franchise have continued to emphasize the action characteristic more and more over the horror aspect in order to maximize potential sales, leading to some of the worst reviews in the series for the recently released Resident Evil 6 late last year. Silent Hill’s own drive to add more of an action bent was coupled with issues faced by foreign developers taking the reins in attempt to revitalize the series, resulting in the franchise continuing to sink further and further into mediocrity and obscurity beginning with the fifth iteration (Silent Hill: Homecoming, 2009) and leading through the eighth (Silent Hill: Downpour, 2012). Dead Space, an immensely successful new franchise that single-handedly carried the genre for its first two iterations in 2008 and 2011, which appeared to be just what survival-horror needed, recently forwent horror in attempt to maximize sales itself; it abandoned almost all sense of horror in the drive towards action-oriented titles with its latest iteration, Dead Space 3, released two months ago.

Thus the survival-horror genre has long since left its golden age and continues to peter out as consolidation drives all trends in the mainstream gaming industry towards unintelligent, action-centered shooters. While it is important to note that horror as a tool and concept for storytelling and atmosphere within a game will likely never truly die out, survival-horror as we know it may not last for very much longer.

The kicker to all of this is that a new form of survival-horror has come about in recent years as a sort of reformation movement within the genre, completely counter to the trend that is popularizing action-based ‘horror’ titles. Spurred on by the indie game movement, this new form of survival-horror emphasizes desperation and utmost survival in a way rarely experimented with in the past, through a first-person perspective. But is it really what the genre needs to survive?

Horror has often been used in FPS games to add a new element of interest to plots within those games, dating all the way back to the aforementioned Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. Yet it has never been persistent enough in its appearance to necessitate its own genre in the way that modern survival-horror has, especially considering the fact that it namely only effects the storyline and tone rather than actual gameplay, which still tends to conservatively follow FPS tropes. It has often been present in the genre to some extent, and is even the overwhelming theme of certain FPS games such as F.E.A.R. (2005), but it still has never altered the mechanics enough to fully remove those games from the FPS genre. No, this new brand of FPS horror does something very different indeed.

This new FPSH (first-person-survival-horror) has itself been experimented with in the past with games like Hellnight (PSX, 1998, Japan/EUR only) and Michigan: Report From Hell (PS2, 2005, Japan/EUR/AUS only), but was first brought to the fore with Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Steam, 2010). In this particular subgenre, the player character explores a sinister locale for various reasons, collecting items/keys and using them to solve puzzles and progress, as in standard survival-horror. The main difference is that not only is this new style played entirely from a first-person perspective (obviously), but the player character often has no real weapons or offensive abilities to protect themselves – in the presence of enemies or monsters, they must simply run and/or hide to get away. Any and all action is entirely removed from the game itself in favor of physics-based puzzles and stealth elements. It’s a surprisingly creative take on the genre itself, and definitely opens up room for new ways to immerse and engage the player, of which most people would say Amnesia deftly succeeds at.



While I personally was not a fan of Amnesia myself, my own reasons for disliking the FPSH trend have nothing to do with that and more with how I see the trend in the scope of survival-horror’s history and future, as well as people’s tendency to copy what sells, as with the RE4 issue. Essentially, my major concerns are two-fold:

First off, as popular and critically hailed as Amnesia was by many people, that sort of attention seems to have been dangerous for the FPSH subgenre in the same way it was for survival-horror following RE4: people have been disquietingly quick to adapt the subgenre into different stories for various different games, rather than be more original with the genre and continue to let it evolve. There are around 15 different major indie games coming out this year that play into that exact same gameplay style, albeit with different settings and storylines. In a genre that has shown only limited potential for major success to begin with, this trend appears to be an overkill which would be completely unsustainable for survival-horror, regardless of how skillfully formulated and well-crafted each of these titles are. Amnesia as a single experience began to lose much of its momentum towards the second half of the game as the various gameplay systems embodied within it became tiresome over an extended period of time. How are that many titles supposed to keep interest in such a genre for long without just leading it to a quick death?

Lastly, and even more importantly, the creation of such a (sub)genre is still bound by the very same dichotomous thinking that have made action-heavy, survival-horror-light games so common: the idea that you must either have a high propensity of action, or no action whatsoever, to make a game successful, and that removing all action somehow automatically makes for a better survival-horror game. As with the first point, so many indie developers have quickly given into that line of thinking, under the assumption that it is the future of survival-horror and the only natural way for the genre to progress as a whole. This thinking comes off to me as very restrictive, and seems very dangerous to the genre that I’ve grown up with and love. Quite simply, it implies that the genre has nowhere else to go but further into the FPSH subgenre, which appears more like one more death throe rather than a totally new rebirth.

Recently, Shinji Mikami unveiled his work on a new survival-horror title named The Evil Within. The reason why this work is so exciting to me personally is because it indicates Mikami is still willing to work with some of the basic tropes that made survival-horror so great. He personally said that he thinks “survival-horror has been drifting away from what makes it survival-horror. And so I want to bring it back. Bring back survival horror to where it was.” The fact that his game seems similar in style to RE4 shows that he understands the necessity of maintaining the essence of what the genre was and should continue to be, rather than getting too caught up with false dichotomies of how much or how little action is required. We’ll have to wait at least another year until we really know how significant (or not) this game will be to the genre’s evolution, but I truly think that here is still much room for growth and meaningful evolution of the genre within the confines of games like RE2 and RE4, as long as we stay away from yesteryear’s trends of games like RE5, RE6, or Dead Space 3.



Seeing the indie game scene explode with enthusiasm for new techniques of storytelling and gameplay has been exciting to watch in the past few years, and recent successes within it have shown that the right games can still compete commercially with titles from AAA developers that cost much more. Yet the independent sector is still subject to the same popularity trends that the corporate sector is, as much as it may try to be distinct and separate in many ways. My only wish is that they would come to help certain worn-out genres continue to evolve outside of the corporate sector, rather than just being a strange mirror, emphasizing opposite gameplay techniques while ignorantly falling for the same paradigms.