Horror games have always had a damaged relationship with combat. For the longest time, developers would purposefully design weak characters who weren’t particularly capable of defending themselves. The reasoning was that it would heighten the suspense, and for a long time, it did. Silent Hill would be nigh unrecognizable if Harry had been able to clear those foggy streets of monsters with nothing but a crowbar and a radio, the latter of which I assume he’d use as a backup in case he broke his crowbar on the skull of a wandering Grey Child.
I’ll admit that sounds like a good time, but it doesn’t sound very scary.
Without a constant threat of a horrific death looming over you, many of the carefully constructed scary stuff falls apart. This is the difference between Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 6. Both games feature a number of weapons that are capable of dealing varying degrees of pain so we can use these weapons to rid entire cities of their undead problems.
My point is you should never have a rocket launcher in a horror game, unless you had to beat that game on the hardest difficulty with a limited number of lives. The foam finger from Dead Space 2 is only acceptable because you had to dive into hell to get it, then successfully climb out with it. In other words, you had to earn it.
When I play a horror game, I’m usually doing it for the adrenaline rush. I love the spooky atmosphere, the monsters and the gore, but the challenge these games offer is unique to the genre. It’s one of the things that makes playing classic survival horror games so rewarding, because you leave it feeling like you accomplished something. It’s like you passed a really geeky test where the reward is even more gaming.
It’s also fragile. That unsteady balance can be lost if I accrue enough weapons that I start to unconsciously assume the role of the hunter.
I could use Resident Evil as an example of how to do combat correctly, as well as how to get it so unbelievably wrong, and then how to fix that and get it right again, only to get it wrong one more time, then maybe get it right one last time, etc. This series has spent the last two decades hopping all over the damn place. The original plays entirely unlike its remake, which feels like a completely different game when compared to Resident Evil 4, and that game shows little resemblance to Revelations — I could go on.
Despite their stumbles, I’ve always admired Capcom’s willingness to introduce changes to Resident Evil in order to keep it from feeling like the rickety old horror franchise it actually is. They haven’t always been successful in that endeavor, but I can respect them for trying when so many developers have proven content with letting their games gradually wither away.
Modern horror games are under more pressure now than they ever have to find unique takes on combat. Dead Space introduced us to the concept of “strategic dismemberment” — a term I’ll never get sick of using — Condemned took getting up close and personal to a whole new level with its melee-based combat, and Alan Wake pitted us against enemies that used darkness itself as an impenetrable shield.
When it comes to the few horror games that have successfully elevated the situations that involve combat without sacrificing the scare factor, these are the titles that first come to mind.
Among them, Alan Wake stands out. The weapons Wake uses to vanquish evil are literal weapons of light: Flashlights, flares, bigger flashlights, light grenades — or wait, that was Blade II, wasn’t it? — and even the odd concert stadium that’s armed with potentially deadly pyrotechnics and absolutely no supervision. Guns still play a pivotal role in the combat, but they’ve been elevated by the scary stuff, which has been woven into the design of the game to make it more interesting.
Very few horror games have been genuinely frightening while at the same time offering a creative twist on the combat, and considerably fewer manage to accomplish this by cleverly forming a symbiotic relationship between the two seemingly disparate elements.
All of the above is my incredibly long-winded way of trying to explain why the folks at Remedy are worthy of our admiration, because they can leave this invisible box that limits so many of our imaginations. More than that, they can find strange and creative ideas outside this box, which they find inventive ways to bring over here so the rest of us can appreciate them. Thanks, Remedy.
