Written 14.10.2008 - Uploaded 14.10.2008
Continuing with the horror problems article series we move on to another subject. Last time we talked about foreshadowing which clearly plays an important part in creating the horror in horror games. This time, we are going to dive into a somewhat related area: threat. Threat is what makes foreshadowing effective as was discussed earlier and now it's about time to take a closer look.
The obvious kind of threat in most horror games are the monsters once again and we went on about them for quite a while. The threat however is not often the fighting itself but what the player stands to lose – in most games this is some kind of health and ultimately game over when that health drops to zero. Typically there's a duality in encounters: the player can choose to use his better equipment but in doing so risks not having them later in the game, or he can fight with basic equipment, risking health as the encounter becomes more difficult. This choice has significant weight on the threat level and the amount of available better equipment can swing the threat balance drastically. Say, you have been saving ammunition for your best weapons throughout the game and then at some point you just realize you are getting more and more of it, and then suddenly it becomes clear to you that it's actually possible to blast most things into oblivion without cutting back on your arsenal. Turns out threat is not just a question of monsters but also available resources.
Taking damage is a huge part of the feeling of threat. Damage on the other should never be just chunks off your health bar, no, rather it should also have a repulsive graphic effect that makes you want to avoid taking that hit again not matter how strong or weak it was. Of course, the size of the chunk taken off the health bar should be relative to how bad the attack looks like or the game quickly loses credibility. Naturally the best way to deal with this would be to completely take off the whole health bar thing and display damage on the character model somehow, assuming 3rd person view where it's possible to see the player character. I have yet to see this kind of damage system (at least in horror games) though and all horror games I've played so far have some sort of a health bar, whether it's an actual bar or something else. More important than the presence of a health bar is showing that the protagonist is hurt somehow in order to get some sort of empathic response from the player. This works rather variously in games and mostly not that well. The best so far has been Project Zero and even that game is not doing this too well. A game mechanical way around this is once again linked to resources: the availability of healing (items). Abundance of available healing is a problem as it takes away threat even more than the abundance of better equipment. Scarcity on the other hand makes even small chunks of health bar very valuable.
The way resources are handled in most games is actually quite problematic as they are usually items that are carried around. It is therefore possible to accumulate ample supplies by using them sparingly at the beginning of the game and reloading a lot. I don't typically do this because I know where it leads, I just load the game when I get a game over and try to avoid it as much as possible. On the other hand, if these are too scarce, it will lead the player to this reload cycle in order to spare the few that are left, and this has happened to me as well. The reload thing was especially interesting in System Shock 2 with its rebirth terminals and relatively scarce healing items leading to situations where the player would just not heal at all but go with what little health was left from the rebirth (it didn't give full life), die and be reborn again until the situation was cleared. In some ways though, because of the setting, this was still acceptable and at least what it did was avoid player frustration (and we're still not going into it, bear with me for a while longer). The resource balance is troublesome: on one hand the player can only avoid game overs if he has the resources but on the other hand if it becomes too easy via abundance of resources, tension is lost. This statement clearly assumes that game overs cut tension by forcing repetition which is yet another problem with introducing threat to the game and one of the hardest to solve; a game over punishes the player but at the same time works against the game. Of course without punishment, threat does not work.
Sometimes it is actually a good idea to include ultimate threats into the game. This is similar to discussion about indestructible monsters in the last article, only this time we are talking about one-hit killer monsters. These work, and are often combined with the indestructible. If done well and used sparingly, encounters with such monsters work very well for the game. Typically it's a good idea to signal to the player about the nature of the situation. A prime example can be found from Project Zero 2 where at some point in the game, the protagonist is chased by a ghost that is both indestructible and kills with one touch. In this particular situation it's been made clear to the player that there's no fighting: the protagonist dropped her weapon a while ago. Another signal in the series in the presence of indestructible monsters is to make the screen go black-and-white and all shifting. This kind of threat works to the level where, once escaped, the player is very reluctant to visit that particular area again (but is of course forced to). This can also be done rather badly if the monster is too hard to avoid or the scene gets dull. A prime bad example is from Silent Hill 2 where the player has to dodge big bad's attacks in a small room for a freaking long time on harder difficulties which gets very repetitive and very annoying. Basically you just have to run in circles around the big bad until he decides to take off.
I guess the article ended up being more about resources than originally intended but either way, we've nailed down another set of problems in horror games we should work to solve in the future. I have planned at least one more article to the series so far, so stay tuned once again.