Fear Factor

Halloween's over, and we're safe from the ghoulies for another year, so let's have a look at how games deal with fear.

It's something that's been rattling around in my head for a while for a few reasons. First, I love horror, whether in film, game, or book format. Second, the majority of horror games are shit. Third, the horror games that actually get it right are some of the most pants-wettingly terrifying things I've ever encountered.

The conclusions I've come to are that for a game to effectively scare a player, it needs to have some combination of the following: helplessness, tension, and the unknown.

It's for these reasons that plenty of games labelled as horror simply don't stack up. Compare Resident Evil (a prime example of both classic survival horror gameplay and classic B-movie horror dialogue) with Resident Evil 4. One gave you precisely sod all ammo and put you into extremely tight confines against enemies that could tear you apart – some of which were giant spiders. Even your ability to save the game was limited, which certainly heightened the tension albeit in a rather artificial way. The other gave you a variety of head-explodingly powerful weapons, checkpoints at least once per screen, and rarely put you against anything that was a threat to you –and even if it was, you'd easily get back any ammo expended. The only scary bits of RE4 were the bits that made you feel helpless.

Then there's the FEAR series. Cheap scares aren't equivalent to genuine creeping dread, and again, you're a ludicrously powerful supersoldier with huge weapons who suffers some unfortunate surprises. It's a fun series, don't get me wrong, but it's nowhere near the trouser-browning greatness of so many other games.

So: helplessness, tension, and the unknown. One game that I, pretentious twat that I am, always bring up in any conversation about horror games is the SNES Clock Tower. The premise is that you're an orphan girl in a mansion on the run from a psychopath. While trying to work out what's going on in a typical point-and-click way, you're avoiding the scissor-wielding lunatic. You can't fight back. If he turns up – and he will, either popping out of the background, or wandering in from offscreen if you hang around too long – your only option is to run and hide, and even then he has a chance of finding you in most hiding places. You have no defences whatsoever, you're being chased by someone who can pop out from anywhere, and until much, much later you've no idea at all what's going on. Helplessness, tension, unknown. It's terrifying.

The other game I inevitably bring up is Fatal Frame, known in the UK as Project Zero. The primary character in this series again tends to be a young girl armed with nothing more than a camera, against an onslaught of genuinely terrifying ghosts. This mixes things up a little by actually putting you in combat against them, with the inversion that they can come out of nowhere, they're unquestionably grotesque (one drops off a building with a scream, re-enacting its death, before dragging itself towards you on shattered ghostly limbs) and you can only really do any damage by letting them get up close, essentially forcing you to confront them at every step. You're not helpless, exactly, but you feel naked, and the terrifying nature of your foes and their ability to appear from anywhere doesn't help. Neither does the fact that the reasons behind the hauntings are usually wince-inducingly gruesome even when you actually do know what's going on.

There is one type of horror which works with the three rules in a different way, though: the mind-screw. Silent Hill is the unequivocal master of this, happily subverting all of the normal laws of reality and messing around with things in a horrible way. Special mention goes to Eversion, an indie title that is one of the most horrifying things I've ever witnessed. Beneath that bright and cuddly 8-bit platform exterior lies the beating heart of an abject monster.

If you're interested in some good, scary games that tie into what we've discussed, Google what's been mentioned. Track down 3D Monster Maze, progenitor of running and hiding. Check out Interactive Fiction piece Anchorhead for a lesson on crafting atmosphere without graphics. And if you're really lucky, try to find a copy of Hellnight on the original PlayStation – a first-person adventure that took plenty of cues from Clock Tower.