Summary
Like with any other genre in gaming,horrorhas a long and twistedhistory of development.In the earliest days, horror was barely distinguishable from adventure games, but in the modern day, it is one of the most successful and mechanically diverse genres that gaming has to offer.
To understand the history of how horror came to be the way we know it today, it’s important to look back at thosekey mechanics that came to irreversibly define the horror genre as it continues to evolve to this day.
Amnesia: The Dark Descentis broadly responsible for popularizing the indie horror scene with a wider audience, and it led to a boom in horror gaming as a mass media attraction on the internet. In terms of horror game mechanics, however,Amnesia: The Dark Descentirrefutably popularized the core mechanic of the player being unable to fight the monsters they encounter. Instead, they can only hide.
This wasn’t a new mechanic by any means, but withAmnesia: The Dark Descent’s popularity, it became one of the genre’s key tactics in making a player feel vulnerable and heightening fear, which was seen in later games likeOutlast,Alien: Isolation, andP.T.That makesAmnesiaagreat introduction to modern horror for beginners to the genre.
Horror games are mostly known for being single-player experiences, but that has begun to change in recent years. One of the major reasons isDead by Daylight, a game that takes horror’s greatest villains (plus the wild possibilities that are yet to come) and places them in an asymmetric mechanical zone that has entertained gamers for close to ten years.
In short, asymmetric multiplayer means that one player plays as a monstrous Killer, while other players control normal human Survivors. Again,Dead by Daylightdidn’t invent this idea, but it popularized it as a fun way for players to engage with their friends while still maintaining the sense of fear and horror that is essential to the genre.Dead by Daylightshowed that this mechanic is a great tool for translating horror to the multiplayer space.
Psychological horror is one of horror’s greatest subgenres because it digs deep into the mind and tries to genuinely unnerve through more subtle means than simple blood and guts. Translated to gaming,Silent Hill: Shattered Memorieshelped pioneer the concept of psychologically profiling the player’s choices and subtly shifting the game depending on their choices.
This means that the game feels as if it’s responding to the player’s actions, which is an extremely eerie feeling, particularly if done in subtle ways. The static interface of the game changes, making the foundational notion of what is true completely unreliable. This works to psychologically unnerve the player just as much as the player character.Silent Hill: Shattered Memoriesdefined the psychological horror genre in gaming, and this mechanicremains a key part of the modern remake that influences the game’s many endings.
ThoughEternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiemisn’t well known outside of horror circles (and it’s pretty difficult to actually buy at all), genre fans likely know it well for popularizing the idea of the sanity meter in horror games. Previously, in games such asSilent Hill 2, the protagonist’s sanity was an abstract idea, butEternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiemactually quantified it and turned it into a game mechanic.
That means that players are encouraged to behave and act more in line with their character. They shouldn’t be seeking out monsters just to fight them, because that will drive up their sanity meter, making the game more difficult. The player, like their character, is encouraged to run away or avoid sites of insanity, meaning that the actual threat is left up to their imagination, which is always scarier than reality.
There’s a good argument to be made thatResident Evilis the most important game in the horror genre. It pioneered a lot, but no mechanic defines the game — and the genre to come — as much as the player’s limited inventory, which became a key mechanic in survival horror as a whole.
In short, players have limited inventory space and can only hold a small number of items at a time. That means that item scarcity is always a concern, and the player needs to make tough choices about what to bring along as they plunge deeper into Spencer Mansion. It’s a uniquely stressful mechanic that immediately ups the stakes, and makes the threat of a monster far more terrifying. This mechanic was done so well on the first go-round that the firstResident Evilisstill one of the franchise’s scariest entries.
