Fear is an emotion that Video Games have a hard time driving.

The worst thing that can happen to you in games is being forced to restart after dying. As such, dying rarely matters, and you’re not frightened of it.

Survival Horror games like ‘Alien: Isolation’ try to instill fear by placing save points very far away, to threaten you with having to repeat lengthy sections of the game if you get careless and die.

The Division isn’t a billed as a Survival Horror game. But I can tell you that the Dark Zone has offered some of the truest horror I’ve ever experienced in a video game.

‘The Division’ pits you against an oppressive post-disaster New York

But it’s not just fear of dying. It’s fear of strangers. Fear of the unknown. Fear of what you could become, if left to your own devices in a lawless world. It’s true fear.

And it’s some of the best gaming I’ve ever experienced.

Set in New York some short months after an outbreak of Small Pox, The Division is a ‘shared world shooter.’ It borrows largely from the MMORPGs that have dominated the market over the last decade. You make a character; you do quests to gain Experience Points; get better gear; and ultimately Level Up your character to become stronger.

Many people who don’t play Role Playing Games like this always ask me; ‘To what end?’ If the game is just ‘getting stronger’, then what is it you’re working toward?

In The Division, what you’re working toward is surviving The Dark Zone.

Ominous, four-story walls plastered in tattered tarpaulin covered in bio-hazard symbols, act as a literal division between the deserted streets of winter-time Manhattan (where your only threat are gang-bangers and looters), and The Dark Zone, where the game play is very much akin to the Lawless West.

In The Dark Zone, elite enemies that can murder you in a heartbeat share the stage with other players (like you), who at the mercy of their own whims, can decide to make you their next target practice.

This might not sound very foreboding given that there are countless games where the entire objective is to shoot other players, but what The Division achieves with The Dark Zone is a very real sense of urgency and fear.

You are cut away from the real world. Your comms go down; there are no fast travel options; there are fewer stations to restock your ammunition and medpacks; gangs of high level enemies march through the middle of the street, proclaiming that this is ‘their city’, and you’re locked in here with them.

In The Dark Zone, you are prey to everything you see.

In The Dark Zone, you keep your head down, you move cover-to-cover, you stay out of the street lights and when someone see’s you (and God you hope they don’t), you just pray they don’t put you on their list of shit they want to fuck up today.

So, why go there?

Because we’re stupid. And we’re made stupid by the same thing that drives all people stupid: Greed.

The Dark Zone is littered with high-end and rare gear that will make your character more powerful. It’s the promise of these powerful items that draw you like a lure through the contaminated streets of Manhattan, in search of more guns; better knee-pads; modifications for your back pack; or even cosmetic items likes scarves, sweaters and caps.

Sometimes, you’ll just want to sleuth through a contaminated zone to get to a chest, and then get the hell out of there.

‘The Dark Zone’, where your morality is put to the test

Other times, you and a few friends might team up to clear an abandoned sports store of the enemies who have set up camp, raiding it for the loot the they’ve stockpiled.

And maybe, just sometimes, you’ll let the lawlessness of The Dark Zone get the better of you, and you’ll decide to start hunting people just like you.

Attacking other players causes you to ‘Go Rogue’, which marks you for others to see. Besides the obvious aggressive nature of making that choice, what makes it worse is that Rogue players can loot your body when they kill you, literally robbing you of the hard work you’ve done to get all that gear.

As such, Rogue players are avoided. I’ll sneak between abandoned cars, up snow-coated scaffolding, and zip-wire down a building just to avoid having to cross a street where Rogue players may be loitering.

But it’s not always easy to avoid them.

The loot you acquire in The Dark Zone is contaminated by the same virus that wrecked all of New York. If you want to use it, you need to have it extracted and decontaminated.

To do this, you need to summon a Helicopter at an Extraction Zone.

Firing a flare, you take cover and wait out the timer as the Chopper approaches, all the while hyper-aware that the noise (and the flare), will draw enemies both non-player and player alike.

It was during one of these sequences that I first experienced all the fear The Dark Zone truly offers.

My party (three others) and I, had full packs of loot we’d busted our asses to collect, and we weren’t about to get gunned down only to lose it all.

We’d fired the flare, when an unknown player walked up onto the helipad. I was nervous. My party was twitching.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Are they Rogue?’

‘What’re they doing here?’

We moved out of cover. I drew my shotgun and approach the unknown player, aimed down the sights as my party did the same.

We made it clear that we weren’t about to be fucked with.

A few tense moments passed. The player hadn’t moved. His gun wasn’t drawn like ours were. Suddenly, he raised his arms, wavering defensively, cowering. He’d turned on the ‘surrender’ emote, and slowly we lowered our shotguns.

We’d come to an understanding. We back away (slowly), and returned to cover as the Chopper sounded in the distance.

Small Arms fire came at us from the south.

We panicked. Nearly a full minute had passed with no sign of oppression, when a swathe of Non-Player enemies with Sub-Machine Guns rained hell fire at us out of nowhere.

We re-positioned and buffed our defenses, opened fire on the hoody-clad baseball-bat wielding rioters.

Huddled behind a crate dented with machine gun fire, I was joined by the player we’d threatened. He took up arms and fought with us, downing the NPC’s as they rushed up the stairs.

All was going well. Our healing station was active. Snipers couldn’t see us.

I backed up, firing at the NPC’s over the cover with my shotgun. Stray buckshot spattered into the unknown player at my side.

“YOU HAVE BEEN DISAVOWED.”

The words thundered. I watched the screen shudder, a red halo appeared over my head.

“Your Team is Marked as Rogue.” The words trailed above.

‘What happened?

‘What was that?’

‘I didn’t mean it!’ I said, panicked.

The Chopper was getting closer.

There was no way I could undo what was done.

Watching a player crawling for safety as they die is heady stuff. Do you help or hinder?

The unknown player was wounded by me, physically (and I assume emotionally). I’d betrayed him, and now all four members of my team were marked Rogue; the most oppressive thing a player in The Dark Zone could see.

Non-player characters were still flooding in, firing, trying to kill us so we couldn’t escape with the loot we’d spent hours stockpiling.

The unknown player could start firing back at the Rogue agents that had sprouted up around him, threatening to rob us of the loot as well.

But what I did is what frightened me most.

The unknown player had a bio-hazard sack on his back, presumably full of contaminated, high-end Dark Zone gear. Gear that could be stolen, and easily placed on the incoming helicopter, delivered to my stash back home like a ready-wrapped Christmas gift.

And there I was, inadvertently marked Rogue, a huge target on my back for all to see.

I would be hunted. My team would be hated. Feared.

So I decided, looking down upon the cowering, confused player, that if I were going to be marked as Rogue, there was only one outcome.

‘Fine then.’ I said, and raised my shotgun. ‘Better make the most of it.’