Most video games rely on giving the player a power fantasy, which can be at odds with the ethos of the survival horror genre. Even among the horrific environments of Doom, we want to be able to rip and tear with reckless abandon. While many games like Amnesia or Outlast try to completely de-power the player, there’s something that doesn’t feel completely natural about it. With the new season of Stranger Things on Netflix, I thought it would be a good time to look at how the tone of the TV show can be adapted into the video game medium.
While there is a Stranger Things video game, it seems to mostly be cashing in on the nostalgia factor that so many fans seem to focus on. To me, Stranger Things addresses the power fantasy problem for horror by making the main characters a group of children. So many elements of this kids-on-bikes tone give you the perfect blueprints for a horror game that it’s a shock to me that more horror games don’t utilize it.
Children are immediately more vulnerable than adults, and can believably be denied effective means of defending themselves. It always seemed weird to me that the main character of Outlast wouldn’t arm themselves in some way, but if you cast your main character as a kid, then it’s feasible that they wouldn’t be able to purchase a handgun, much less wield it effectively in a panic. A child could access rudimentary melee weapons or slingshots, providing a good opportunity to make combat less about permanently defeating a monster and more about temporarily stunning or distracting them to create an opportunity for escape.
Using kids as protagonists also gives you an easy in-game reason for investigating something creepy or evil: kids are curious. There’s a natural sense of wonder that we all remember having while wandering as children, and that’s something that could be perfectly captured by giving a game a Stranger Things-esque tone. Would an adult break into the haunted house down the road because they heard chains rattling in the night? No, but the combination of perceived immortality and freedom from consequence that most kids feel creates a perfect storm of motive for your video game protagonist to sneak in.
Even though nostalgia isn’t what I go to Stranger Things for, there are some interesting design opportunities that come from setting a game in the 80s. The decade helps limits technology that would give you easy narrative outs. In the 80s, there are no cell phones for the characters to call the police while they are lost in the creepy government facility. There’s no internet available to look up information about sightings of elongated creatures near the city park. Limiting the technology ratchets up the mystery by not allowing those easy avenues for discovery, forcing your characters to hang out in the park all night to get a glimpse of what lurks there rather than letting them look for pictures online.
One of the strongest elements of Stranger Things is its deep bench of compelling characters. Not only are the kids interesting to follow, but the older siblings and the adults also offer different perspectives on the action unfolding. I’ll always remember someone describing the first season to me as: “The kids are in a Steven Spielberg movie, the teens are in a Stephen King book, and the adults are in a John Carpenter film.”
Horror games often suffer when they get repetitive, so building in multiple sets of character like this gives you the perfect opportunity to mix things up just when the player gets comfortable. Imagine a game set up where the kids are focused on stealth, the teens focused on melee combat and the adults focused on shooting. Each gameplay style offers a different take on the horror genre, keeping things fresh.
Multiple perspectives also gives the option to raise the stakes of the game to life or death by allowing permadeath. This is something a game like Until Dawn excels at. When you have a large set of characters you control, losing some will not derail the story. Often time the only consequence involved in a horror game is being forced to replay a section, so allowing characters to actually die makes every encounter tense and meaningful.
There are some games out there that have taken these kinds of inspirations from Stranger Things. The Blackout Club casts you as a group of mystery-solving kids, Generation Zero drops you in the middle of 1980s Sweden where hostile machines are at war with small-town teenagers, and A Plague Tale: Innocence gives you control of a young girl who has to sneak around in order to survive 1300s Europe. In the tabletop space, Tales from the Loop was met with massive acclaim for capturing the same tone as Stranger Things (with direct inspiration from the gorgeous artwork of Simon Stålenhag) and was met with massive acclaim. As Stranger Things once again rockets back into the cultural zeitgeist, the new season was seen by over 40 million viewers in its first week alone, it’s only a matter of time before a AAA studio starts mining it for ideas.