In A Location
Recently successful horror games have a distinct sense of place, as can be seen in OutLast and the Amnesia series. Even looking ahead a little bit to Alien: Isolation, the trend in horror gaming is returning to a more small-scale environment for players to roam around in while being scared witless. As mentioned above, Resident Evil is capable of such sinister claustrophobia. For their respective times, the first three games were atmospherically terrifying, while RE4 still managed to have several notable, chainsaw-related jump scares.
Perhaps the developers (in my estimation, wrongly) assumed that players were tired of the constraints of space prominent in the first games, but one of the problems with later RE titles is that they confuse place with places. I will call this the Uncharted problem. Games of the middle aughts became, for lack of a better term, action-y, so the pressure to stay current forced (or inspired) devs to create a world composed of a variety of settings and weapon types. Because of this, every location was a giant gaming set-piece, a spectacle, rather than an environment where players could feel a story unfolding around them.
What is great about the here and now is that really excellent horror games are creating interesting, morbid, unsettling worlds in very tight spaces, so there is less pressure to create giant, tentpole situations set on summer movie locations. If the AAA fear of not being able to reach a wide enough audience is a concern, then consider the response to a severely action-heavy Resident Evil 6. The market is fractured enough that not everyone has to be pleased for a game to be successful, and perhaps Resident Evil just doesn’t work as a big budget thriller franchise.
