While the Resident Evils and Silent Hills will likely always commercially if not critically dominate horror gaming it’s indie games like Outlast, Amnesia, Layers of Fear and Visage whose influence bleeds into the mainstream. It has certainly foundered in the last few years but by-proxy scares thanks to streaming and some well-written stories have kept it alive, if on the back burner, of horror gaming.
Unlike torture porn or splatterpunk this extreme sub-genre of survival horror never really died.
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The Outlast, Penumbra and Amnesia series had their imitators, some better than others, but well designed AI combined with exceptional graphical fidelity made them the Kings of their new sub-genre. The best of them were genuinely scary as well.
Still they were all in first person and unlike Dead Space or the Resident Evil series these characters felt more like blank slates that players could project onto as opposed to well-written trauma banks like Isaac Clarke or good looking dumb asses such as Leon Kennedy. Someone with little combat experience but the legs of an Olympian runner and the arm muscles of a veteran BBC cameraman. With this new version of survival horror you were no longer watching someone flee the axe murderer rather you were fleeing the axe murderer.Īdmittedly in a lot of these games you often played an average white man usually a journalist or workman or student. Games were different however as they relied on their mechanics to bring these extremes to players. A similar fad occurred with films in the mid to late 2000s when Saw and Hostel singlehandedly invented the torture porn genre. It happened with novels in the 90s as a fascination with extreme physical and sexual violence became known as splatterpunk. A point where the ever-increasing nature of their horrors overcome the story it’s trying to tell. And so the various extremes make themselves known from the traditionalist, conservative nightmares of folk horror to the sanity-shattering sprawl of the cosmic and Lovecraftian modes.Įventually these extremes reach a nadir. Eventually you start to want to expand your horizons beyond Stephen King novels and The Conjuring series. If you’re into the genre then it’s middle-ground can start to feel boring after a while. Whereas the likes of DOOM or F.E.A.R try to place survival horror on some kind of even ground the extreme nature of Outlast, Layers of Fear or the Amnesia series smashes that ground out from under your feet. One is liberally defined as action horror and the other as a kind of hardcore survival horror. It’s our most basic, lizard brain function: fight or flight? While many horror games like Resident Evil or Dead Space strike a fine balance between the two others like F.E.A.R or Amnesia: The Dark Descent fall on one side or the other. There has often been a push-and-pull factor in horror gaming just as there is in real life horror. It’s the fact that there is no real defense against them that’s truly terrifying. It’s not the blood-crazed asylum patients or the things that live in the black space between stars that are the real horrors here. Your legs and your sanity are your only defenses against this tide of antediluvian horrors threatening to shred your body and flay your mind but even then they can’t always be trusted.
That flimsy Zippo can do nothing in the face of the demon that lurks in the places the light cannot reach. Your lantern will not help you against an encroaching tide of acidic mould and lurching mutants. That camera is no help against those raving backwoods cultists.