A short history of modern horror games – with Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s Thomas Grip
Traversing the decaying, twilit corridors of the Baker residence, we’re lost. We’re yet to find a map for this section of the swampy compound, we’re short on bullets, and we can’t work out what combiney-item thing we’re supposed to do with that clock. We’re confused, frustrated even, but also thrillingly helpless and terrified. It feels almost profound that a game can make us feel this way. Resident Evil, the series that inspired the term ‘survival horror’ yet had long since strayed from its rotten roots, has been reborn, and this year’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard has become the clearest testament to the resurrection of the genre in recent years. But the credit for that return to form doesn’t go to Capcom, or to Sega for the nerve-jangling Alien: Isolation. Back in 2010, while the Resi series was goofing around with co-op and the Aliens licence was being torn a new one by Gearbox and Rebellion, a little-known Swedish developer had caught the gaming world’s imagination with its quiet release of a first-person horror game on the PC.
Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent grew out of a simple idea – that the player needs to flee and hide from, rather than fight, the monstrosities patrolling the dank halls of a forlorn Prussian castle. Its release had very little marketing behind it but that didn’t matter as the game would be championed by the burgeoning Let’s Play community – YouTubers uploading extended game playthroughs with entertaining commentary – and its soon-to-be stars quickly saw the potential of games that scare the pants off players.
Survival horror had been reborn in the first-person perspective, with a new identity that’s yet to be pinned down. Perhaps it could be called ‘helpless horror’, because of its unabashed disempowerment of the player, but it’s known variously as first-person horror, horror simulation, or simply modern survival horror.
There’s no-one better placed to comment on this unholy rebirth than someone who was there in the delivery room. Thomas Grip is co-founder of Frictional Games, one of the lead designers on Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and a true connoisseur of survival horror. We caught up with him to talk about Amnesia, the state of the genre today, and the other games that have defined it.
“When I first started out making horror games in the late ’90s, survival horror didn’t feel like a dying field,” he says. “We were in a golden age, with games like Silent hill 2, Project Zero, and the Clock Towers having the horror experience at the core of their design.”
Dark days
So where did it all go wrong? Grip harmoniously agrees with us that Resident Evil 4 was the culprit. Released in 2005, it was a seminal game, shifting third-person shooting mechanics to an over-the-shoulder perspective and melding the brooding tone of its predecessors with back-against-the-wall action. Its success suggested to Capcom (and publishers at large) that fans weren’t married to the slower, more traditional horror of the previous three games. Resident Evil 4 was, according to Grip, “an action game with horror layers on top of it. That was a big shift, so when it was so successful, everyone went, ‘S***, this is where the market is,’ and they all started to focus there”.
More than five years passed before the release of Amnesia, during which time Dead Space re-affirmed the supremacy of action-horror. Even the haunting Silent hill series was – less successfully – forcing players into more situations where head-on combat was the only option. Publishers assumed that players no longer had a taste for the unique flavour of dread that horror provided.
Grip wasn’t fazed by the direction mainstream horror had taken: “It felt like the perfect opportunity. Our logic wasn’t ‘no one is making horror games, so let’s not make one’. For us, that was a great reason to make them.”
In 2007, Frictional released the first entry in their Penumbra survival horror series. These games had plenty of rough edges – having to kill a tiny but lethal spider by pulling back on your mouse to lift your weapon, then forward on the mouse to strike it was the stuff of arachnophobic nightmares. But they were laying out the mechanics for Amnesia: physics-based interactions with objects, a first-person perspective, representing deteriorating sanity by using distorted vision.
If Amnesia would be Frictional’s Doom, Penumbra was its Wolfenstein 3D, the game that let the studio learn the ropes of a new genre even as it was unwittingly creating it. With three survival horror games behind Frictional by the time they released Amnesia, it was hardly beginners’ luck that the game turned out so good. It successfully warped the familiar, comfortable mechanics we’d come to expect from a first-person shooter into something more involved. The mousebased controls felt intuitive: drag down to pull a door open and drag up to push it, and the same rules of physics applied to perusing drawers, or attaching turnable rusty wheels to pipes.
When you were fleeing one of the game’s jawless Frankensteinian monstrosities, though, the precision of those controls could work against you. Something as simple as slamming a door behind you to stop a monster’s pursuit became a fumbling mess, as in your panic you’d fail to grab the handle. Or a shaky grip might mean that instead of peeking out of a cupboard door, you’d tumble out of it, straight into a creature’s arms.
In terms of the creation of the horror element, the control system fulfilled a similar role to Resident Evil’s tank controls, or Silent hill’s fog. Even though those hallmarks rose out of technical limitations, they had a beneficially unsettling effect, limiting our sense of power over our environment and character. “A big thing in horror is frustration versus lack of control and uncertainty,” Grip says. “The cumbersomeness of opening stuff feels like part of the experience, just as turning slowly feels like part of it in old Resident Evil.” however, where tank controls limit our power over the action, Amnesia puts lots of control in our hands, and ironically that makes it easier for us to mess up when we’re panicking. Just think of a classic horror scene where the girl is fumbling around with a key in a lock while the killer’s bearing down on her.
Forget me not
Sales of Amnesia were initially slow, but the game quickly entered a symbiotic relationship with the pioneers of Let’s Play, becoming its poster-game just as Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg and Mark ‘Markiplier’ Fischbach became its poster-children. Both Kjellberg and Fischbach started their channels soon after the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and both chose the game as one of their first Let’s Plays. Countless other YouTubers followed suit, building a brand by cowering before Amnesia and playing up their giddy fear in a way that was entertaining enough to keep people watching.
Grip acknowledges that the rise of these videos definitely helped. “horror games work well on YouTube because of the visceral way players react to scary situations,” he says. “It’s interesting to watch. Seeing their suspense when they don’t want to continue down the hallway because it’s scary – it’s a personal investment in ways that other games aren’t.” By mid-2011, Amnesia was a hit on YouTube and a hot topic on Reddit. People would even arrange Amnesia nights at each others’ houses, taking turns exploring its chilling world.
Other developers were inspired, and 2012 and 2013 saw the releases of Slender: The Eight Pages and Outlast. Grip describes Amnesia as “distilled” horror, and on that basis the freeware Slender was triple-distilled, like a sharp, intense shot of clean spooky spirit. Its gimmick was simple but effective: the knowledge that the faceless Slender Man could appear anywhere, any time without having to chase you. It meant the very process of turning left and right made your spine tingle.
Outlast was more like a ghost train – heavily scripted and involving frantic chases down corridors (the option to turn your head around while being chased by a madman was a neat, immersive touch). It harnessed the feel of found-footage movies by using a grainy night-vision camera with a fast-depleting battery. The glossy, trailer-friendly presentation allowed it to build a bridge for survival horror to cross over from indie to triple-A publishing. Within a month of Outlast’s release, the news leaked that the next entry in Sega’s ailing Aliens series would be a more intimate experience that evoked the horror of the original movie.
When we ask Grip whether he felt a sense of pride when Alien: Isolation was announced, given it was building on a formula that Amnesia had started, he modestly diverts the conversation to the game’s quality. “Alien: Isolation wasn’t just a sheep. Its goal was to make an experience where the player was stalked by an alien, and Creative Assembly based all their design decisions around that,” he says. “They stuck to that incentive even more than something like Silent hill, which was still combat-based and to an extent a Resident Evil clone. Isolation goes all the way back to something like Clock Tower for the SNES – not about action or combat, but simulating being inside a horror movie.”
While Alien: Isolation was getting the whole of the industry talking about the re-invigorated power of horror, Grip and Frictional were already examining how to stay ahead of the curve. “By that point, Slender, Outlast, and Alien: Isolation were out, and we didn’t just want to build everything on what we had achieved with Amnesia,” he recalls. So they began making Soma, a horror game set in a mysterious research station at the bottom of the sea. With relatively few jump-scares and a profound plot that explored the nature of identity and artificial intelligence, it took the rare step in modern survival horror of pushing the narrative to the foreground – something Grip was eager to do because he felt that the story of Amnesia had been largely overlooked by gamers.
Fear the future
We suggest to Grip that we could be entering a second golden age of gaming horror, but he’s cautious: “No, not in the same way. There’s still a lack of the innovation that you had back then,” he says. “Silent hill had the whole otherworld stuff running through everything. hellnight for PS1 was first-person, and had a different monster on each level and a serial killer you could recruit. And later, in 2008, Siren: Blood Curse had this thing where you could see from the viewpoint of the zombies chasing you.”
Today’s horror games have a tendency to sideline compelling story in favour of the moment-to-moment experience. The genre’s now flooded with imitators all attempting to cash in on the market’s eternal demand for cheap scares, and even the best games coming out now tend to be of the ‘haunted house’ variety, often making up in mechanics and atmosphere for what they lack in originality.
So how can the genre progress? “What I’d personally like to see is a rethinking of basic horror assumptions, such as there always needing to be monsters hunting the player,” Grip says. “how about removing monsters, or rethinking them, like a videogame version of The Exorcist – but not necessarily with demons and priests.”
To build on The Exorcist’s focus on a very domestic kind of horror, we suggest a game set in a single home or family that deteriorates from domestic comfort and familiarity into something ghoulish and ‘other’. “Totally!” says Grip. “There’s a ton of different directions that could go in, and it all starts with rethinking the monsters.”
The Resident Evil series’ elliptical journey from its survival horror days, through the ‘action horror’ years, and back to its roots for its seventh entry is enough to warm the dark heart of any horror fan. But RE7’s success makes now the perfect time to totally refresh the established horror gaming formula.
We’ve learned in the years since Amnesia that videogame horror is here to stay, but it must keep progressing, and it could once again fall to indie developers to lead the way. Robert Zak