Oh, there have been plenty of horror games released of late, it's just that none of them were really particularly scary, regardless of game quality. Take 'Dead Space'. It's a great game, I really enjoyed the 80% of it that I played recently, it is touted as a 'survival horror' title. It's not. What it is, is an action game with generic horror elements integrated into it, and that's fine don't get me wrong, but I found myself to be somewhat disappointed given it never actually scared me. It startled me plenty, but that's easy, I mean, my cat startles me sometimes and she's an idiot who seems to think window condensation is a valuable source of water. Once again let me just say I liked Dead Space alot as an action game, but as horror it just didn't stand up to the big boys. The main reason for this is the arsenal. The weapons you get in Dead Space are all engineering appliances supposedly modified somewhat to become killing tools. They're diverse, interesting and there's plenty of them. Therefore it is an extensive and impressive arsenal, and that's the problem. Think back to say, Silent Hill 2 (a truly frightening game and an old favourite of mine), what did you get in that, weapon-wise? A plank of wood and a few guns with aggressively limited amounts of ammo. Oh and a knife. So you weren't particularly well equipped for dealing with enemies. That was the beauty of it. You weren't supposed to be. Eight times out of ten you'd run your arse away if anything nasty turned up with an eye towards killing you (often they were more interested in raping each other). The effect that crappy limited weaponry gave is one of desperation in which you dread every close encounter, making every level and area a desperate struggle to survive. SURVIVE. SURVIVAL HORROR.
That's Dead Space's chief issue, the other being that most of the scares come from scripted events such as ghostly hallucinations. That's all well and good, but it feels arbitrary to everything else, a last ditch effort to coax a scream out of your jaded voice box. FEAR and FEAR 2 have the same problem, granted their scripted events are much better, but it's still the same issue, luckily for FEAR it can always represent itself as an action shooter first and a horror game second, which I guess it is. Besides, were I Monolith and faced with the accusation that FEAR isn't that scary, I'd simply say it was an action FPS, then point to another game I made, Condemned. Now there is a frightening game.
I started playing Condemned recently and it's the most recent game I've played that's successfully freaked me out good and proper, and it's almost 4 years old. Again, it's about the way it makes you fearful of every encounter waiting around the corner, but it goes beyond that. The combat itself is actually pretty visceral, as you'd expect of a first person game, you spend 90% of your time using hammers, 2x4s, fire axes, bits of pipe and conduit, anything you can get a hand around that hits things effectively. When you tear a door from a locker and slam it into an insane junkie's face as his head twists back and blood spurts from his open mouth, it's weirdly satisfying, but equally, it's incredibly disturbing. You see every cut and bruise you inflict on these homeless and downtrodden assailants, you have no choice but to kill them or they'd kill you, but it's still unsettling, especially the finishing moves. When they're nearly dead sometimes they'll flop down onto their knees and a D-pad map will come up, you can either punch them out, slam them against the ground, snap their necks or ram your forehead into their face. The brutality of this act almost forces you to question yourself, even though you know the particular bum you're bludgeoning would simply get back up and have at you again if you didn't finish him there and then. I remember noticing when I got Condemned that the finishing moves are described in the manual as 'cool' and upon using them, I considered that 'cool' may have been used ironically.
The nastiness of Condemned's combat goes hand in hand with genuinely creepy atmosphere (it's seemingly perpetual night in Shittyville), the bizarre hallucinations you have (being followed by department store dummies to the ominous tune of 'deck the halls' is a good one) and the enemy AI. Enemies will run, only to jump out at you later, try to move around you, pretend to be begging for mercy before striking back (that's a scripted event but I'm counting it anyway) and when you corner them when they're unarmed they'll leap at you and try to chew your face off. The fact that every gun is limited to the amount of ammo it's holding upon collection (normally a minuscule amount) along with the fact you can only carry one weapon means you can't help but get up close and personal, which is a very tense and pulse pounding state of affairs. However, perhaps the most interesting thing about the cretins in Condemned is that often, they'll also fight each other, now that, for my money, is real immersion. Feeling like the sole hero fighting hordes of god knows what is all fine and dandy, but when you're just embroiled in the middle of a massive homeless guy clusterfuck with nothing but a torch and a mannequin arm you start to get sucked in. You're not the centre of the universe, you're just a part of the experience. Bioshock attempted a similar idea but it didn't work quite as well.
It seems then that creating a truly frightening game isn't too difficult of a premise and yet developers continue to create action games marketed as horror that simply aren't scary, Resident Evil 4 was an action game that WAS scary as well and that worked, Resident Evil 5 did almost exactly the same thing and managed to take all the fear away from it. Anything that says it is survival horror through and through seems to be marred by franchise syndrome, Alone in the Dark is little more than a typical 3rd person adventure game littered with poorly executed gaming concepts that they've focused on far too much to even think about the fear factor. Silent Hill Homecoming suffers due to comparison to the previous and far superior 4 Silent Hill games. It seems then that those in need of a proper fright fest may need to stay living in the past for a while, I don't expect any miracles from horror games in the pipeline with the possible exception of that new Silent Hill Wii thing. It just seems a shame that you can get such a brilliant format for horror as gaming and not make the most of it at every turn. My recommendations for anyone seeking good gaming scares are: Condemned, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Silent Hill 2,3 and 4, Eternal Darkness and Penumbra.
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