It makes sense that a show following Amanda’s fight against the xenomorphs stalking around space would be in the works, completing the “Read. Play. Watch.” trifecta that’s been repeatedly teased by the Alien brand for 2019. Alien: Blackout fits the ‘Play’ part (it’s even highlighted in green for the reveal trailer!), and ‘Read’ likely refers to the new Aliens: Resistance (opens in new tab) comic from Dark Horse, where Amanda teams up with ex-Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks to take down the insidious machinations of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s cover-up. That just leaves the ‘Watch’ bit, which would fit for a show that Observer theorizes would live on the official Alien website.

Daughter. Rebel. Hero. Her story deserves to be told… #Whois #AmandaRipley #ReadPlayWatch #Daughter #Rebel #Hero pic.twitter.com/NMwdK60oGUJanuary 5, 2019

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It’s still unknown if the animated series will take place immediately after the cliffhanger ending of Alien: Isolation. Perhaps it would condense and retell the events of Isolation – after all, the survival horror game made its debut back in 2014, which is practically ancient in media years. Axis Animation sounds like the perfect fit for the show, and the studio has a large body of work related to gaming. Its credits include high-quality cutscenes for Destiny 2, League of Legends, The Elder Scrolls Online, Heroes of the Storm, Horizon Zero Dawn, and many more.  

Between the new game, comic, and an animated series, the folks behind the Alien franchise want to be damn sure that by the end of 2019, you know exactly who Amanda Ripley is and what she’s had to struggle through. There’s been no official confirmation for this show as of yet, but we’ll likely get an announcement in the coming months.

Alien: Isolation has a dedicated fanbase for a reason – it’s one of the best horror games (opens in new tab) of all time.

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This concept flies in the face of conventional gaming wisdom. From Mario to Kratos, main characters are typically the most powerful and capable beings in their world. Stomping Goombas feels good. Punching Zeus in the face feels even better. Getting your teeth kicked in by Resident Evil 3’s Nemesis is a miserable, humbling experience. Consider your first encounter with this brute: should you decide to fight it you quickly realize this seven-foot super-zombie moves faster, hits harder, and is generally more aggressive than any enemy you’ve encountered. It’s your superior in nearly every way.

Only when Jill Valentine (your avatar) gets reduced to a coughing, quivering heap, do you appreciate how Resident Evil 3 has played you. The game butters you up with all these slow, mundane zombies, and then – BAM! – knocks you upside the head with this unexpected boss fight. A boss fight you were probably expecting to win because, hey, it’s a video game and that’s what bosses are for. Right? Experiencing this sudden change makes Nemesis appear larger than life, and makes you feel very, very small.

After you encounter Nemesis – or any immortal stalker – for the first time, the threat of another attack looms heavy over the rest of your journey. The key word here is ‘threat’, because once you have them figured out, actually fighting, for example, Pyramid Head isn’t all that terrifying. These stalkers are typically slow, awkward, and easy to evade if you keep your wits about you. It’s that sense of dread, that threat of encountering them, that’s so unsettling.

As they say, knowing is half the battle, but these stalkers won’t let you get that far. You don’t learn much about Slender Man by constantly running away. This is by design. The less you know about something, the more your mind projects its own fears, assumptions, and insecurities onto it. Your imagination may tell you Slender Man is going to pull your heart out through your nostrils if you get too close, and your rational brain wouldn’t have anything to refute it. In order to conquer your fear, you should face it head on, but that simply isn’t an option here since doing anything other than running is a Game Over.

Cowardice is exactly what horror games want, and they’ll pull out all the stops to make sure they get it. When encountering a stalker, your vision may become wildly distorted (Amnesia: The Dark Descent), or the audio may swell suddenly (Alien: Isolation). Survival horror games are generally played slowly and cautiously, so when you’re bombarded with a sudden attack on the senses, your instincts kick in and tell you to book it. This limits your exposure to – and understanding of – the creature. But hey, at least you didn’t get your heart yanked through your nose, right?

Haunting Ground, a 2005 survival horror game from Capcom, does an excellent job of bringing all these elements together. If its main character, Fiona, is exposed to enemies for too long, she’ll panic (like any normal person would). At its most extreme, panicking causes all the sensory overload effects mentioned, as well as the added bonus of forcing Fiona to run constantly. Should she run into something, Fiona will then tumble over and become easy pickings for her foes. This loss of control expertly conveys a tangible feeling of powerlessness, as your avatar is literally running for her life and there’s nothing you can do to help.

In the aftermath of any stalker attack, paranoia takes hold. The beast lurks in the back of your mind every time you empty a clip or use a health kit, because… what if? What if it’s hiding on the other side of that door? What if I need that extra health kit to survive the fight? Just as they haunt your avatars, they also haunt your thoughts. All the fear and tension being stirred up inside you gets channeled into a single, tangible threat: the stalker. They’re the bite the follows the game’s bark.

An interesting contrast to this minimal-exposure style is Alien: Isolation, which actually encourages you to spend some bonding time with the lone Xenomorph. By empowering Ripley through (slightly) better equipment, you’re able to get closer to – and build a more intimate relationship with – the Alien, without making it feel any less terrifying. This is because Isolation knows its main antagonist won’t devolve into the pattern-based, exploitable brawls of other stalker encounters. Having the Alien remain a legitimate, unpredictable threat regardless of how prepared you are only emphasizes its status as the ultimate killing machine. So go ahead and take a good, long look (not that it’ll do you any good).

Famed horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft once wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Gaming’s most memorable stalkers succeed because they do exactly that. They offer a sliver of terror, then let our minds swim in the pool of macabre possibilities that could follow. This takes a great deal of restraint from the developer, but the reward is a truly unsettling experience that will linger in our minds long after any jumps scare or gruesome scenes have faded.

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It’s a fully paid-up bit of horror-game imagery. Zero doubt about that. But does it make Gears of War a horror game? No more than coating a horse with whipped cream turns it into a sundae. From that point on, Gears of War is a big, meaty shooter, and no mistake. Neither the grotesque nature of the Locust nor the odd dalliance with slower-paced jump-scares, Wretches and old, abandoned houses (stock horror environment #2) alters that fact by one iota.

But why isn’t Gears of War a horror game? It gives us bleak environments, thick with a sense of perpetual mourning. It gives us hideous, tough, and highly dangerous monsters to fight off. It delivers gore with the giddy aplomb of a newly graduated fireman on his first day of hose-duty. It wraps all of this in a weighty, all-pervading sense of oppression. All of these things are core tenets of horror gaming. They’re certainly elements which define many easily-recognisable entries in the canon. Resident Evil 4. Dead Space. This month’s The Evil Within (opens in new tab).

So what’s the difference? Why do we say that Gears of War is a shooter, and that the others are horror games? You could argue that the largely one-note ferocity of Gears’ cover-based gameplay removes the fear factor sufficiently to earn the action-label most resoundingly. And you’d have a fairly decent point. Pretty cut-and-dried, right? Well no, I don’t think it is.

You see as a long-time horror aficionado in all media, I don’t find that a convincing argument at all. Because, after decades of immersion in horror, games, and horror-games, I think there’s something else at play, blurring the lines as fast as anyone can define them. Something endemic to horror gaming that, much like great Cthulhu, has been around so long, picking maliciously at the seams of the world, that we’ve long since stopped noticing its presence. Simply, it’s hard to define the boundaries of the horror game because very few video games have ever really delivered horror true experiences. We’ve pretended otherwise for a very long time, but really that’s the ugly truth.

Most horror games, even the really good ones, are games first and foremost, horror second. Strip away the aesthetic, and mechanically they’re just games. Some are actiony, some are stealthy, many dwell somewhere in between, but in truth they’re mostly just stock game mechanics painted with a gory or supernatural surface gloss. And real horror just isn’t like that. A good horror novel isn’t a spy story where all the enemy agents just happen to be zombies. A good horror film isn’t a generic Michael Bay movie, only set at night and full of vampires. Blade is a great, supernaturally-themed, gory action movie, but a great horror film? No.

In real horror–and this statement might sound trite upon first scan, but stick with me–the horror is the focus. In fact more than that, it’s the be-all and end-all. It’s not a tonal or aesthetic garnish for something else. It is the core of the whole experience. It’s the conduit through which all of the statements, thoughts and musings in the author’s mind are filtered in order to–as is the case with all good genre fiction–extrapolate ideas and experiences, and through their amplification, truly explore them.

And all good horror is about something. John Carpenter’s Halloween is concerned with the progressive, hypocritical isolation of suburbia in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Aliens is about Vietnam. Don’t Look Now is about the fatalistic nature of obsession and mourning. H.P. Lovecraft’s work, which beautifully straddles the line between art and pulp, is dripping with existential terror at arrogant mankind’s tiny pinhole view of reality. Same goes for the work of classic English novelist M.R. James.

But the point is that whatever subject matter or ideology is being filtered through it, the horror is the core. It’s the engine that makes the whole affair work. It’s what wraps up and forms every part of the work. But horror games don’t usually do that. They usually just stick some scary atmospherics next to a stealth, survival or action game, and leave it at that. They’re almost always primarily concerned with servicing their gameplay mechanics, with horror coming a distant second, if at all. The last time a big, mainstream release did the real horror thing was probably during the heyday of Silent Hill.

Although seen at the time as a rival to Resident Evil, in truth Silent Hill couldn’t have been further from its gore-munching genre-buddy. Furthering my points above, while both games are ostensibly third-person survival-horror games with deliberately awkward combat, squiffy, disorienting camera angles, and an emphasis on escape and evasion, it’s not their gameplay mechanics that ultimately matter, but their tones and the narrative content.

Resident Evil, even in its earlier, less action-driven entries, was a surface-level horror rollercoaster, trading on the vital thrill of jump-scares, gore, and b-movie monsters. It was, as is often the case, more focused on gameplay systems and aesthetic than deeper, true horror. Silent Hill though, at its best, has always operated in the inverse, using its gameplay to service a greater aim. The series’ high points have always been about atmosphere, emotion, psychology, and the use of horror’s nightmarish, surreal excesses to explore deeper, more powerful concepts and notions. Its monsters are no mere bitey cannon fodder. Each is designed to evoke and reflect an element of the lead character’s trauma and internal struggle. Its twisting, reality-bending journeys are crafted to disturb in specific ways that also resonate with the above.

It’s no coincidence that the series’ weaker, later entries are the ones that, with lesser or no involvement from early series Producer Akira Yamaoka, lost track of that. Neither is it any coincidence that Yamaoka’s dual role as designer and composer was instrumental in creating a coherent, cohesive, authored, ‘total horror’ production. Silent Hill is a game, but it’s one that has more in common with the legitimate conceits of literary horror than those of its corpse-grinding stablemates.

So are we now screwed for real video game horror? Are we bereft of hope and scrabbling in the dark, with Resi literally sticking to its guns, and Yamaoka seguing toward film, now working with Italian horror master Dario Argento (opens in new tab)? Well no, we’re not. Just as I was starting to give up, and ready to resign my gaming horror activities to the mental folder labelled ‘Fun diversions, but eh’–alongside Fast and Furious films and yo-yoing–a new wave of the real stuff has started to seep insidiously through the cracks in the floorboards.

P.T., with no hyperbole, is the absolute antithesis of game-horror’s failings (opens in new tab), intelligently recognising the detrimental effect of oft-applauded player agency on the power of horrific confrontations. That it also tightly winds its horror around a carefully crafted frame of psychology and significance makes it one of the finest and most insightfully directed interactive horror experiences in years.

Alien: Isolation (opens in new tab), despite being a more player-driven, stealth-horror experience, truly understands the impact and nature of its source material’s make-up. With that at its core, it fearlessly eschews all of gaming’s empowering, protagonist-courting safety nets and ‘necessary’ softened corners to create a savage, uncompromising simulation, made of primal terror and the unpredictability of real survival.

Perhaps ironically, given the arguments I’ve sketched out above, this resurgence is partly down to improved technology. Alien: Isolation just wouldn’t have been possible without the advanced, living, breathing artificial intelligence Creative Assembly created for the titular beast. P.T.’s atmospheric, claustrophobic, pure-horror focus is arguably amplified–and perhaps designed to show off–the near photorealism of Kojima Productions’ new Fox Engine.

But beyond technology, the human, creative factor remains all important. That mention of the studio behind Metal Gear resonates beyond the power of its shiny new toys. Horror like P.T. (and the in-production Silent Hills) requires the kind of deeper-thinking, more experimental auteurship that someone like Hideo Kojima–alongside collaborator Guillerno Del Toro–brings to a project. In fact his spiralling, fourth-wall-breaking, creative playground approach to direction will probably be far more at home on Yamaoka’s turf than it even was in MGS. Besides, a series as unique and artistic as Silent Hill needs a director with that sort of unchallengeable clout. Someone with vision and power, who can stand up for his ideas in the same way Yamaoka once did.

Similarly, if Isolation hadn’t been made by a team as dedicated to Alien detail as Creative Assembly–not just in terms of aesthetic, but also the tone, mood, and subtextual fears fundamental to Alien’s world and its violence–then it would merely be a beautiful sci-fi stealth game with a very dangerous monster.

So I suppose we come full circle. The future of video game horror simply cannot be about surface gloss, and gore, and overcoming the monstrous hordes. However much incoming visual fidelity affords us the ability to create more realistic dismemberment, and great numbers of the undead, we cannot allow horror to remain so external, a thing to be overcome with gameplay, weapons and agency.

To both the player and the creator, video game horror must, as it does in all other media, excel by becoming an internal experience, authored with thought, intent and craft, and experienced with personal resonance and uncomfortable meaning. I don’t want to jinx it. I don’t want to speak too soon. But it seems like technology, ambition, and (very probably) the more open creative climate brought about by the newfound prominence of indie gaming, might just be about to combine to create a bold new era. Horror fans, cross everything you have.

The post Why most scary games fail as real horror, and why they always have appeared first on Game News.

Sure, fighting off zombies was fun. Pushing away their gnashing teeth and showing their faces the business end of a shotgun was a blast (get it). There was amazing four-player co-op in Left 4 Dead, great storytelling in The Last of Us, and tons of indie zombie titles that totally infested the top-down shooter genre. But now there are a bajillion zombie-related games out there. The gaming market is completely saturated with exploded, rotting guts. And it’s time to move on to bigger, better, and not-so-dumb enemies to eviscerate.

Why the change, and why now? In years past, it was a huge game development hurdle to get lots of enemies and objects on screen all at once, which made dumb enemies like zombies a prime candidate for uncomplicated mob programming. Now the challenge will be making monsters (and enemies) smart, and since the undead typically just make a beeline towards your fleshy food parts, aliens are perfect for the next monster fad.

You have to be equally brain-dead for a zombie to sink its teeth into your noggin, but aliens are intergalactic travelers/monsters that have thoughts and instincts, which make them perfect for more intelligent enemy encounters–like facing off against Halo’s Elites. Smarter enemies are definitely something I expect to see more of in next-gen games, and aliens fit the “smart enemy” bill quite nicely. The upcoming Alien: Isolation already has a smart monster in the works–one with such advanced AI that makes it feel “alive” (or so the developers claim). To me, having a single alien skulking in the shadows, hunting me until it could shove its tail blade through my torso, would be infinitely more terrifying and engaging than chainsawing my way through a crowd of stumbling undead.

With smarter enemies, encounters with your foes will also become more horrifying. I’ve sent a bullet through more zombie brains than I care to count, and while zombies make great targets for fish-in-a-barrel gameplay, they really aren’t scary anymore. At least, not as scary as aliens could be. These extraterrestrials can be made to actually strategically kill you through intelligent movement patterns and reactionary tactics. Based on our early impressions of upcoming games like Evolve and Alien: Isolation, aliens are definitely more terrifying than a shambling dead person. Why? Zombies are slow (most of the time), they moan so loud that you know exactly where they are, and they’re really easy to kill. Aliens, on the other hand, don’t have any of those stipulations.

Aliens can basically be anything the game developers want–not like traditional zombies. Bug aliens, Predator aliens, Alien aliens, or little grey men aliens all have different behaviors, origins, and methods for impaling, vaporizing, or cocooning human heroes to death. The sky’s the limit in terms of variety. And with the potential of the next-generation hardware, it’d be interesting to see what kind of horror, shooter, and co-op experiences game makers could come up with using next-gen aliens.

With Call of Duty: Ghosts making the zombies-to-aliens change with its Extinction mode, the Left 4 Dead developers creating Evolve, and Alien: Isolation making such an impressive early showing, I can already see the alien monster fad materializing for next-gen. Now, I’m just hoping we’re not drowning in alien games by the time we start gearing up for the next, next-generation consoles.

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