Some horror games are set in spooky castles, abandoned mental hospitals, derelict spaceships, or circuses with unwise hiring policies regarding murder clowns. Some are set in less outlandish locations such as suburban streets, shopping malls, hospitals, schools, and residential homes. The second type is the most influential and, like the photos I shouldn’t have seen on the internet, stay with me long after it’s over.
why i love
In Why I Love, PC Gamer writers pick one thing they love about PC gaming and why it’s great. This week, Jody appreciates homely horror.
The Silent Hill games are especially good at this, leaving me more ambivalent about hospitals than ever before. Hospitals are stressful places to begin with, but Silent Hill 2 takes you to comfortable and mundane places like apartments, nightclubs, historic societies, and even bowling alleys, all filled with terror. A brief scene at a cemetery turns out to be a rare safe moment. Silent Hill 2 ultimately bursts into a dark underground prison, but its terrifying finale is saved elsewhere: at a lake resort.
The scariest things about Silent Hill 2, whether it’s the geometric-faced butcher or the surprising revelation, are accentuated by the blandness of the background. We expect spooky happenings at the Gothic mansion, and that’s their point, but the worst thing you can expect to encounter at a bowling alley is a 7-on-10 split. . Silent Hill visits harmless places and skins them until rust runs off the walls, the floors flake off, and a fragile wire mesh appears over a bottomless pit.
What is chuck?
I used to live in an apartment with an evacuation map on the wall that looked like a map from Silent Hill, and it freaked me out every time I saw it, but I’m not sure if the horror game chooses a harmless setting. there are risks involved. If the player is personally unfamiliar, there is no element of recognition.
The reason I wasn’t scared of the animatronic mascot of Five Nights at Freddy’s is not because I’m so brave, but because I didn’t grow up in a country with machine hosts in fast food restaurants. There is no Chuck E. Cheese in Australia. In Australia, “chuck” means vomit, so in the 1980s it was tried under the name Charlie’s Cheese, but even with the name change it did not become popular. Freddie’s Castle to me is as exotic as any castle in Transylvania without inducing lasting terror.
However, in many cases this is an effective technique. The scariest places in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth are regular old hotels. Both give you a false sense of security. In Dark Corners, you can lock your hotel room door before you go to bed, but that doesn’t stop locals from breaking in and trying to kill you while you sleep. You’ll be forced into a heart-wrenching rooftop escape that culminates in some of the scariest things in video games. It can be thrown at you with an accurate first person jump.
In Bloodlines, on the other hand, you can be a vampire with supernatural powers, so you can expect nothing to fear in an empty hotel, even if it’s haunted. But when you get there, the sound of a light bulb cracking, a child’s laughter in the distance, a figure running through the hallway but disappearing as you turn a corner, you’ll find yourself in a fast-paced terror with no one around to feed you. combined with the mechanical anxiety that the hemometer slowly empties because of To create singular moments of traditional horror. In a game aimed at confronting personal fears of one’s own monstrous nature, this is quite an accomplishment.
alienation station
That’s not to say that more obvious locations aren’t suitable for horror games. The Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows is a perfect example. It’s part psychiatric hospital and part haunted orphanage, where one cliché is superimposed on another like a sheet over a corpse. The game is claustrophobic, good enemy designs: lunatics with twitching cage heads, and a combination of light and dark that serves both as a stealth game and as an engine designed to freeze your blood. As a result, it is still a memorable work.
But even in a more typical horror setting, a certain amount of normality is useful. Dead Space’s terrifying Ishimura starship was terrifying at first, but after a few hours of staying there, you could expect Necromorphs popping out of the blood-soaked vents. The Sevastopol train station in Alien: Isolation was also helplessly floating in space, and although there was a hint that aliens were about to slide down from the graffiti-covered ceiling of the hall, it was still terrifying. The room had few dead bodies or rust, was brightly lit for disinfection, and contained a regular desk, an old computer, and executive toys. It felt like a paper supply company’s office, all with squared edges and coffee cups, emphasizing the alien’s sleek, jerky silhouette and its basic mistakes.
Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and contempt is useful in horror. Familiar places trick us into thinking we know what to expect. And there is power in pulling that expectation out from under our feet, revealing the thin chains that separate us from the abyss.
