Initiate Fluff/Chuffa Decontamination Protocol
The last three points sort of flow nicely into each other, don’t you think? I wonder if that was on purpose.
An excess of fluff, or “chuffa”, as the immortal(?) Bruce Willis would call it, has always been a problem for horror games. This fluff is used by developers to pad the length of their games, and much like the demon that resides within me begging to be freed, it can take multiple forms. Fluff can be an overly complex puzzle, too much backtracking, or a lengthy scavenge hunt to find a key, or a keycard, or a strange object that looks nothing like a key but definitely is one. As Resident Evil 6 made it a point to prove, fluff can even take the form of a boss you’re forced to kill fourteen goddamn times.
Lots of fans were upset when more developers decided to take a page out of the action genre’s book — a picture book, I imagine, complete with lots of browns and greys that are broken up by something exploding — but that actually helped the genre. Since its inception, a handful of things have kept survival horror from escaping its niche appeal. The gradual borrowing of features and ideas from the action genre that led to the rise — and subsequent fall, as some games borrowed too much — of action horror gave us about five years worth of games that were both scary and well-paced. Older horror franchises like Silent Hill may have struggled to adapt to the sea change, but the genre grew as it welcomed exciting new franchises like Dead Space, Condemned, and F.E.A.R..
If The Evil Within and Alien: Isolation live up to our expectations — or even better, surpass them — ushering in a second golden age for survival horror, it’ll be up to the developers to make sure old design habits don’t return with it.
That’s it. I’ve shown you mine, now it’s your turn to show me yours. Your opinion, I mean. If you disagree with something I said or you think I missed something that’s worth mentioning, I suggest you write me a sternly worded message in the comments below.
