Part One

Evil never dies.

It can be burned, buried, or have a big fat stake driven through its black heart, but that’s never really the end. Scary things never truly die. They might disappear, but like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Stephen King’s IT, they’re really retreating, reforming in the dark, and waiting for the right time to reappear.

That’s how I feel about horror and mainstream gaming over the last console generation. It’s largely withdrawn from the light, appearing every now and then. There’s a compelling argument to be made that horror games are better off for not being produced within the publisher system, though its presence in mainstream gaming is missed. The most interesting experiments are taking place elsewhere: the indie scene, Kickstarter, mobile devices. Over the last month or so, I’ve spoken with a number of developers about their games, how they’ve set about building nightmares outside of the publisher system, and the exciting potential the genre still possesses.

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Based on the last couple of years it’s clear that the indie scene is undoubtedly bringing out the very best in the horror genre. Amnesia and Outlast are so confidently at home rummaging around in the dark, eliciting shrieks, while their glossier, higher-budget horror-game counterparts have undergone a major identity crisis – Dead Space being the most recent example. The reasons for this shift in power are numerous; firstly, the way the mainstream publishing system operates actively inhibits the production of genuine horror, and this has multiple knock-on effects which we’ll explore later on. New game spaces, like the independent scene or mobile, have become perfect incubators for authentic, meaningful horror at a time when the publisher system presents a hostile environment. Publishers have accidentally killed it with fire (and financial forecasting).

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A migration is already in progress, with talented developers leaving high-profile publishers to start their own studios - a phenomenon that’s hardly restricted to horror games, but that’s especially prominent there. Red Barrels is a great example. It’s an independent game studio based in Montreal, focussed on producing single-player downloadable games. Its co-founders had successful careers working at EA and Ubisoft, working on huge franchises, but earlier this year the studio put out its first title, a wonderfully fraught and nasty horror game called Outlast.“We did try to convince Ubisoft to let us do a horror game maybe five years ago. For some reason it didn’t happen,” says Philippe Morin, studio co-founder and the designer of Assassin's Creed and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. “My understanding was that with the horror genre, you can expect to sell a certain minimum, but it’s hard to reach the numbers of an Assassin’s Creed or any of those games.

“I guess in their calculation, it didn’t make sense to try to make a horror game.”

“ It's ironic to discover there’s a fear among publishers of horror itself, and it stems from an anxiety that it won’t sell."

It’s a trite argument now that high-end games have become increasingly conservative, holding back innovation, but in the case of horror I think that’s genuinely true, and the effects have been particularly detrimental. You only have to look at the progression of a relatively new franchise like Dead Space; over three games its gone from shlock suspense survival horror to all-out bro-shooter. My pet theory is that the success of the original Dead Space led to a much higher budget being approved for the sequel, and that one, seemingly benevolent decision killed it.

Barry Meade made a similar journey to Morin. He left Bullfrog and Criterion, where he worked on huge projects like BLACK and the Burnout franchise, to start Fireproof Games in 2008 with the help of five friends. Last year they released the superb, horror-tinged, Lovecraftian puzzler The Room. And Meade’s pretty damning of the system he escaped.

Loading “On the one hand, the games industry is run by a bunch of lemmings; when any one or two games go really big,” observes Meade, “publishers all over the world start altering their dev plans to accommodate mechanics, themes and stylings from those blockbuster games. They do this even in genres that have no business with those mechanics or themes. Horror games really suffered from this.”

“ Whereas Resident Evil and Dead Space have expanded their arsenals over the years, Outlast stripped out explicit combat, forcing the player to run, hide, and cower instead."

Whereas Resident Evil and Dead Space have expanded their arsenals over the years, Outlast stripped out explicit combat, forcing the player to run, hide, and cower instead. It makes its players feel helpless and ill-prepared, and that’s an intentional design decision. “I guess maybe because we all worked on shooters before, or sword games, we felt like it would be a nice challenge to have a character who didn’t have any combat abilities,” says Morin, whose experience on Uncharted may have been partly responsible for this new strain of combat fatigue.

An oft-heard interpretation (or perhaps justification) of modern blockbuster games is that they’re an empowerment fantasy, a frothy reprieve from the banality of everyday life. In this sense, effective horror is at odds with most current trends. “That’s something we heard often in big studios,” Morin told me. “How are you going to make the player feel like a badass? Actually, I think players are ready for something else. That doesn’t mean that you don’t want to play a game now and again that makes you feel like a badass, but it doesn’t have to be like that in every game.

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“The way we approached it is ‘how can we put the player in a position where he’s going back to when he was a child, when he felt powerless, alone in your room in the dark with the feeling that there’s something under the bed or something in the closet?’ That feeling of vulnerability, that whatever happens, you’re not going to be able to react to it. That was our approach. That’s what guided all our design decisions.”

Morin is extremely open about the influence Amnesia: The Dark Descent had on Outlast. But it’s interesting to learn just how and why the decision to remove combat from Amnesia came about. Thomas Grip was one of its main developers at Frictional Games, an independent company based in Sweden specialising in dark and disturbing subject matter. In fact, Frictional’s earlier works did contain weapons. “When we made the first Penumbra we wanted weapons, because that’s a good horror trope, like in the Friday the 13th movies for instance. You always had the protagonist, or the characters who would eventually die, taking up whatever means possible to defend themselves. They’d find a wooden plank and try to stop Jason with that or whatever. But that puts players in a different mindset.

“When we went to Black Plague, the second Penumbra game, we dropped combat altogether. It sort of came about because we wanted to increase the horror, but it was mostly because the combat sucked. We didn’t have the resources to make it better. Condemned and games like that had come out at the time – this was 2008 – and we were like, ‘S***, that’s great first-person combat. We can’t compete with that’. So we dropped it instead. And all these avenues opened up.”

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It was one of those fortunate accidents, but I firmly believe that limited budgets and tight resources provide a strong framework for producing good horror. When Frictional had to remove combat because it just wasn’t good enough to compete, it was something of an epiphany; it transformed the way players interacted with the environment.

“ Limited resources produce this increasingly rare and strange effect: the player is invited to use their imagination."

“Unsure what elements can be to your advantage and what stuff you have to avoid, you become very aware of your surroundings, every little noise. Even if it’s just background noises, which in normal games you don’t care about at all. ‘Is there something behind the wall? Could there be someone there? Is he dragging his feet? Does that mean he’s slow?’”

Limited resources produce this increasingly rare and strange effect: the player is invited to use their imagination. “You build up all this awesome mental imagery. It’s a very powerful way to go about creating a game. If we had weapons, those tools would be available. Suddenly you’re just looking for ammo. I see a monster. I shoot it.”

If co-op and killstreaks are design elements increasingly adopted because they supposedly guarantee profit, it’s refreshing to learn that non-combative protagonists – an emerging trope in the new wave of horror games – was born out of financial hardship and necessity.

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Grip speaks wonderfully about how limited budgets have really elevated the games he’s made in a way that a fat budget never could. “In Amnesia, I think our most successful encounter in the game is water creature that’s invisible. It just splashes on the surface. The way that started out, in the design document, is that I had this feeling that we should have some water in the basement. And then we should have something like the monster from Star Wars, in the trash compactor.

“If we’d had a budget there, there would have been tentacles coming out. They’d grab the player when he was jumping on the boxes, and it probably would have been worse. But we didn’t have money or time for all that, so we just kept with those splashes and the imagination that was invoked in the player instead. It worked so much better. I think that’s something that you can see when you go to big budgets. You expand on the ideas too much. You add too much to the player’s experience and leave too little to the player’s imagination.”

“ 'You’re constantly thinking, ‘If I work this in, there’s going to be someone down the line that’s going to say we can’t have a penis here.’"

Working outside of the publisher system, beyond the reach of its meddling, has allowed horror to develop unmolested. Furthermore, the actual means of production – tight budgets, small teams – have often improved the experience or taken it in new directions, rather than restricted it. But there’s another reason that I think horror has really found a new lease of life here. It’s because horror, at its very best, touches upon taboos; it offers up challenging, unpalatable material and wants to disturb its audiences. Again, it’s easy to see how all this could be very scary for a major publisher that wishes to appeal to a broad demographic.

But when you’re independent and selling your games over the Internet rather than in shops, it’s easier to ignore issues of censorship or what isn’t acceptable. “I’d say that one of the big things I’ve noticed is that since we’ve gone off retail and just gone to online, where the restrictions are much fewer… You don’t worry so much about, say, graphical content or disturbing content when you’re designing creatures and things like that,” says Grip.

“For Amnesia, we had lots of naked dudes. I’m not sure if anyone feels like the experience is necessary enhanced by that, but I think the sort of primal fear comes out better with naked dudes than dudes wandering around in shorts. With a big publisher, its going to be hard to get those kinds of things across.

“In Black Plague, we had these dudes with these strange tentacle things on their bodies. Then the ESRB thought, ‘Is this a penis they’re showing?’ We had to them that, no, this was an umbilical cord. You’re constantly thinking, ‘If I work this in, there’s going to be someone down the line that’s going to say we can’t have a penis here.’

“Every time you make a decision like that, it has to go up the hierarchy. That kills a bit of the creative spirit. When we made Amnesia, we just didn’t give a s*** about stuff like that. We were always going to be online. We didn’t have to worry about ratings.”

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And that’s the power of being independent, in having the final cut. Agustín Cordes, the director of the successful Kickstater project Asylum, a psychological horror tale set in a decaying metal institute, speaks very eloquently about the power of working outside of the system. “Horror should be more challenging to be effective, and that’s where the indies come in. They’re unrestrained and daring to bend the rules. Whereas in mainstream horror you nearly always know what to expect, you are never sure what an indie developer might have in store for you. And that’s what horror is all about in my opinion: fear of the unexpected, fear of the unknown.”