Goodbye survival horror. You will be missed.
However, this wasn’t a natural death. No, survival horror didn’t just die of natural causes like point-and-click adventure games. It was murdered, struck down by some of the very franchises that made it so successful to begin with. But more on that in a moment.
First up, every half-baked piece of pretentious writing will define their subject matter with a cut-and-paste definition in a thinly veiled attempt to fill out the word count. This article will be no different (I'm only up to 150, by the way). Wikipedia defines survival horror as “a video game genre inspired by horror films in which the player's primary objective is to survive and/or escape a threat typical of horror fiction, usually zombies or supernatural beings of some sort”. Other sources note some common elements in survival horror, including a general lack of powerful weapons, scarcity of ammunition, and the player being relatively weak in comparison to the typical action hero.
Despite claims to the contrary, the Energizer Bunny did eventually stop going and going.
T'was a dark and stormy night
Some may argue the exact origins of the survival horror genre. It most likely hit its commercial straps with Alone in the Dark released in 1992. However, for me, it began with Resident Evil in 1996. Now I can’t claim to remember the intricacies of the plot of the original and I couldn’t be bothered looking it up and pretending that I do. But, there was something about a virus, an evil research corporation named Umbrella, a mansion and some zombies. Actually, that was probably all there was to it. What I do remember is moments of glorious horror, jump-out-at-you scares, some cool and obtuse puzzles, and a live movie intro! Yes, that’s right, a real movie intro with real actors (sort of)! Kiddies, forget your computer generated, ultra-realistic, la-de-bloody-da cut-scenes pumped full of a billion pixels, and check this out!
Then along came the Silent Hill series, the creepy cousin in the survival horror family. The sort of cousin that when he shakes your hand, holds on for that little bit too long, while his twitchy eyes tries unsuccessfully to focus on you and dollops of spittle glisten on the corners of his mouth. Whereas Resident Evil played it more for B-grade thrills, Silent Hill introduced psychological horror. If Resident Evil was a 60s monster movie, Silent Hill was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - and definitely not the remake. If Resident Evil was Marilyn Manson, Silent Hill was Charles Manson. If Resident Evil was chocolate ice-cream, Silent Hill was triple chocolate ice-cream covered in chocolate fudge. See where I’m going here? Me neither. Let’s move on.
I got chills, they’re multiplyin’
So what made survival horror games so scary and successful? In early Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, you had bugger all ammo and health which made even the most common enemies a threat. You couldn’t just blast everything that moved and then duck behind some cover to regenerate health (or buy it ala Resident Evil 5). Often you had to decide whether you could shoot the monster in front of you at all. If you did, you had to hope that you would find more ammo soon after. If you decided not to shoot it, you had to hope the monster didn’t damage your equally precious health. This added a layer of strategy that is absent from modern shooting games as you needed to plan carefully for future encounters rather than to go in gung-ho.
Resident Evil 5 - least scary game in the world ever?
Another of the traits of survival horror was that there generally wasn’t a monster to fight every three metres, and when you saw one - particularly one you hadn’t encountered before - you were right on the edge of your seat. In Silent Hill, the best course of action was often to turn off your flashlight and tiptoe past monsters and hope they wouldn’t spot you, while not being able to see anything yourself. So thick was the tension that if you successfully made it past one monster, only to bump into another one around the next corner, you would launch your controller into the air and go running through your house screaming hysterically. Stop it, I can feel you judging me.
The dark and the ‘fog’ in Silent Hill were largely impenetrable even with your flashlight turned on, the monsters made your skin crawl, and the sound effects would make you want to look over your shoulder even though it was just the speakers. So brutal, freaky and confusing were the early Silent Hill games that many people found they were unable to finish them. Resident Evil also featured a ‘limited’ saving device where you had a certain number of ‘ribbons’ that could be used in typewriters to save your game. So there would be times where you’d be left with a) bugger all ammo b) bugger all health and c) bugger all ribbons to save your game. Now that’s tension.
A sequel took my baby
Let’s not beat around the bush here. The death of survival horror is all Resident Evil 4’s fault.
Now before all the fanboys and girls start to prattle on about the game being "a sublime blend of action and horror presented within a realistic setting with top-notch pacing and yada yada yada”, let me make one thing clear – Resident Evil 4 was a good game. It was fun. But it wasn’t survival horror. Instead, the change in gameplay felt like an attempt to modernise the franchise and attract some of people who enjoy fast-paced action shooters without the need to think too much about it. Gone were most of the brain twisting puzzles, the exploration, and the need to conserve your ammo and health. But also gone was 95% of the game’s tension.
However, the game was lauded by critics and gamers alike and it sold truckloads. While some may argue with me here, all it really succeeded in doing was to make itself more like every other shooting game on the market, while keeping the one thing from the old games that was no longer relevant – the clunky controls. This has now been taken a step further with Resident Evil 5, which is easily the least scary game in the franchise, and while I'm prone to exaggerate, I'm confident in saying it's also the least scary game in the history of the world forever and ever. This game even gives players the default option of using Gears of War-type controls. Blah. Just call it ‘Residents of War’ and be done with it. Hey that’s actually not a bad name – hands off, Capcom.
Monkeys...have absolutely nothing to do with this article.
Alternatively, Silent Hill: Homecoming, the fifth game in the series, actually tried to stay pretty true to the series’ roots. However, they picked the worst possible change to make – that is, to make the main character a powerful fighter with excellent melee attacks skills, including the ability to dodge, counter attack and take down enemies with knives and metal pipes. I'm sure that this looked good on Konami's media releases, but in reality it changed the entire way players approached the game. Rather than having to avoid enemies and strategically use the flashlight, you could now take them down head-on and often without using the precious ammunition which you could instead horde for the boss battles, making them much, much easier. What this did was entirely sap away any tension that the game might have created. In a nutshell, what these games did was to ignore the 'survival' part of survival horror. The characters in Resident Evil 4, 5 and Silent Hill: Homecoming are not merely trying to survive a horrific situation. Instead, they are well-prepared killing machines able to kick deformed zombie butts like seasoned pros.
To summarise this in a 'what was the message of this edition' kind of way, old gameplay techniques and genres aren’t necessarily bad, and trying to update a tried and true formula will not always improve it.
For me, turning Resident Evil into a action-oriented game is akin to turning Gran Turismo into an arcade racer, or turning Street Fighter it into a full 3D fighting game. The change is so significant that it’s hardly the same game and it misses much of what was great about the original. Similarly with Silent Hill, they made a character far too strong for the situation he was in and effectively changed the entire way the player could approach the game and its inhabitants.
But wait, I hear some scratching from inside the coffin…
But perhaps all is not lost and not every horror game will become a generic shoot-em-up. Whether you found them scary or not, Dead Space and F.E.A.R. were pretty decent attempts at combining action with survival horror. Dead Space can be compared to Resident Evil in regards to its love of B-grade horror, its slot inventory system, the jump-out-at-you scares, the exploration and puzzles. It also featured an enemy you could only slow down and not kill, which harks back to the Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 and Pyramid Head from Silent Hill. While you rarely run out of ammo, it still keeps a good sense of tension throughout. F.E.A.R., and to a lesser extent the sequel, also have comparisons to earlier games in the Silent Hill franchise. This includes good psychological scares that go back to Japanese horror movies, creepy kids and freaky-as-hell visuals and sound effects.
While it's nice to see some games successfully implementing some elements of survival games of old, it’s hard to think that we'll ever see a 'traditional' survival horror game ever made again for the current gaming market. And be damned if the gaming world is not a worse place for it.
If you’d like to suggest an idea for a future article, please fell free to PM me or post a message below. It can be about almost anything. Let me know!
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