So, I've been thinking a bit about the things I'm scared of in real life, and how the emphasis of what I experience in a horror themed video game is typically a bit different, and how that colors the gaming horror experience. As I think it through, one issue that often isn't well represented in games is fragility.

I think back on some of my favorites. Aliens vs. Predator 2. Clive Barker's Undying. Clive Barker's Jericho. System Shock 2. Wow, what great games! How visual! How atmospheric!

But out of all of those games, which was the scariest to me? I'd actually have to say I was the most freaked out by the face-huggers in AvP 2, because they could one-shot you.

What makes for an entertaining FPS game but which isn't particularly horrific is where you have hitpoints and armor and this and that, and there's these really horrific looking enemies except that instead of horrifically ripping off your arm or what have you instantly, they touch you and then you lose some portion of abstract health that doesn't really affect your gameplay.

In real life, if I do some perilous physical activity like climb on some hazardous boulders, or spar with blunt steel longswords, what am I scared of? That I'll fall off the boulders, get injured, and basically die horribly of exposure because I'm out in the jungle alone and became simultaneously disabled to some degree and stuck somewhere. Or that the impact delivered by the blunt steel under some circumstances would be sufficient to crush an important finger and thereby cause a long term degree of disability.

I wonder if scary, atmospheric games would be scarier if instead of having hitpoints and armor or whatever if something caught you, you would see some horrific cinematic of it disemboweling you, eating you, or whatever. Or else for peripheral hits or touches you'd get disabled limbs that would affect your gameplay, and your vision would start to go white and you'd start to hear things in a distorted way due to exsanguination. Plus, if in the context of the game, you wouldn't be able to regain health till after the level or till certain points in the story.

Maybe it was Dark Corners of the Earth that came closest to doing this. But I am thinking of an experiment in which the protagonist would be even more fragile, perhaps realistically so. I can sort of see a glass cannon dynamic existing in such a game.

Just to expand on the thought a little, the issue of cumulative injuries creating a very negative result, and career ending injuries, seems to be a concern for real-life professional combatants.


Also, purely for entertainment/ironic humor, here's some footage I found on YouTube featuring a bunch of "fragile hero" bad endings from a Japanese horror adventure game called Clock Tower: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dp7dWqvtpo

I have to disagree.

Being fragile isn't fun. It's godawful frustrating. Metro 2033 and Dead Space 1/2 were plenty horrific, even though the main character is capable of absorbing superhuman amounts of damage. On the other hand, Mirror's Edge, a game where the main character is very fragile compared to the normal FPS protagonist (though still near-superhuman by reality's standards,) wasn't made more atmospheric by that, it was just made more and more frustrating.

Ha ha, I remember Mirrors Edge! I actually enjoyed it. The dystopian future owned by Ikea! That was one of those games I didn't think I'd like but ended up enjoying a great deal.

Deus had an interesting "realistic" damage system, where you had to patch up your wounds with your medkit (if you still had enough in there). You could end up having to saw off a limb to stay alive. But in that case you were better off loading a saved game, which is the problem of such a system: if being injured is too complicated and there's a way to reload until you can survive without being injured.

Iron-man / permadeath and similar mechanism are good to make games more immersive and thrilling, but I don't think that it helps for horror.

I think that what's important is not that the character is fragile but that he is helpless against the horror. In Necrovision, the main character wasn't that tough (he was still able to survive more than a normal man could), but he had all the firepower he needed to kill the zombies and monsters. Doom with instakill enemies wouldn't be an horrific experience, it would just be more tense (and frustrating).

But when the character has no control over the horror, when he can't fight back and when the player himself can't figure out how things work (how the monster AI reacts, where the safe zone is, etc.), then you've got a good ground for horror.

But as often, the best way to get horror is to let the player's brain do the work. All you need to do is put elements in place for the player to expect something horrific to happen and then play with these expectations. Pathologic do it greatly: during the beginning of the game you hear very disturbing rumors about one of the city's building. Later in the game, you have to enter it. All you've heard before about this place makes you very uneasy, and the level design play with this masterfully. AvP does it with the motion sensor, the sound of aliens and the expectation that there are facehuggers lurking in all wrong places.