Take Us Somewhere New
There are very few things that I’m sure of, but one thing I know with certainty is that this world has no shortage of terrifying and very real places that would make excellent settings for horror games. I’m so sure of it that I went and dedicated a series to them.
With such a bounty of suitable locations left almost completely untouched, why do we keep returning to the same tired places every year? Cemeteries, sewers, mental hospitals, actual hospitals, space ships that look alarmingly similar to a rusty tin can covered in blood that no one in their right mind would ever volunteer to visit, much less live on. It’s the same environments, the places we’ve been trained to find unsettling. Why aren’t there more horror games set in the ocean or in caves — the few places that remain almost entirely untouched by humans.
The fact that we can boot up what my grandma refers to as “that box with the weird remote” and get transported to anywhere we like whenever we like (following a wait of 15 seconds to 30 minutes, depending on your console of choice) is one of the neatest things about video games. It’s one of the reasons why I’m a gamer and it’s why I tend to shy away from games that strive for realism. Why would I ever want to do stuff real people do as a job in something like Call of Duty when I can explore a colorful alien planet, turning whatever the planet’s version of woodland creatures would be into bright, pink and very dead pincushions with the super cool, pink spike-shooting gun I just found near a tree?
It really has nothing to do with one series being superior to the other, it’s just that I prefer to play games that don’t remind me of the place I’m looking to temporarily escape from. That goes for horror games, too.
