Lazy Boy Gaming

While it may have spawned the genre, Resident Evil certainly is not the scariest game in the survival horror field. In fact, barring the first two titles, the series has devolved into more and more straight-up action, making the only “fear” in the game being pulling the trigger too late. It can be hard to blame the game for this shift, though.

Perhaps part of what has dulled the fear element of these titles is how far the characters have come. There’s this disconnect between them and the average gamer that makes it hard to relay the feeling of fear, because RE’s characters are trained professionals, able to hold their own even amidst a zombie apocalypse. The sense of dread that should be there isn’t, because the player recognizes that the character can handle it.

Contrast this with another highly successful survival horror franchise: Silent Hill. The player is always being put in the shoes of someone ordinary and mundane. It could be some guy who lives in some Austin apartments building or a single mother that’s looking for her missing daughter. It really doesn’t matter, as the titular town will find a way to draw them into its web of mist, monsters, and horror. They’re not highly-trained personnel with knowledge of how to use weapons of various sorts. They’re ordinary people caught in an extraordinary situation, making the most of what they have, and either learning on the fly or being monster food.

Another good horror series is Fatal Frame, which focuses more on ghosts than zombies and monsters. However, the games really focus on the general feel of helplessness that a lot of survival horror games don’t always get. There are no guns here, or even reasonable weapons like axes or lead pipes. In this series, all the player gets is a camera that can banish spirits, but only with repeated “shots” and with a rather small maximum range. To top it off, the protagonists of the games tend to play more on the “ordinary person in a terrifying situation” concept. The first game had players play the part of a teenage girl, while the second involved even younger twins, with one of them limping because of an old injury. It is very difficult not to feel a sense of helplessness and creeping dread.

A lot of modern survival horror titles are starting to focus more on the “survival” aspect, forgetting the other half of the equation. Players should feel dread and helplessness and fear when they play these games, which is something that a lot of modern entries in the genre lack. It isn’t about the monsters or the guns. It is about fear.