Also avaible in Portuguese (Portugal)

 

(contains minor spoilers for Silent Hill 2, 3 and Resident Evil Zero)

It is difficult to tell what does not count as a defining element of survival horror, to distinguish perifery from focus. The genre has tried to sell horror in a playable context over the years; as such, its play mechanics and themes have been reinvestigated successively, but not always successfully. For all the virtuoso explorations of psychological and body horror that inhabit it, there are also plenty of mistakes. The most disappointing of all might be the notion of what a survival horror game “should” be. This is not endemic to the format but, with the exception of role-playing games, has probably affected it more than it should; a genre that welcomes Dead Space and excludes System Shock is pointless at best.

So, what is the horror imperative at work here? As the term suggests, it combines aspects of survival (sparse resource management, difficulty) and horror (which can go from a pervading sense of unease to disorientation or outright fear). But just as StarCraft II is not survival horror because it urges players to manage resources, neither is Dead Island simply because it presents players with crowds of zombies to deal with. These artificial taxonomies obscure other potentially important elements in the structure of horror, and where the genre can look to for inspirations.

In particular, those of one old Atari game.

In 1985, designer Ed Logg offered players a proxy of Dungeons and Dragons in electronic format – at a time when the d20 fantasy universe’s popularity wasn’t free falling, and when it was about the thrill of adventure rather than dressing up spreadsheets in chainmail. Under Atari’s supervision, Gauntlet was released in arcades to high acclaim. As it would happen in the future, many were enthralled by the recognizable elements it shared with D&D – the large dungeons, the archetypical creatures, the character classes, even the narrator that harkened to a Dungeon Master. Logg, who had given the company other hits, devised a few noteworthy play mechanisms, such as the four-player cooperative and competitive framework. Another, more polarizing feature was the use of time: every second spent in Gauntlet would eat away one unit of the player character’s health. This served two purposes. One, and the most obvious, was to make players spend more money on the game (which proved to be quite successful). Second, the passage of time gave players a reason to keep moving forward at all costs, since points were scored per coin, rather than per average.

The quarter munching was par for the course for arcade game design; games were built to kill players at alarming rates. In Gauntlet, however, each coin (a “credit”) could be seen as a record of a player’s adventurer, carrying along with it mistakes and achievements, and thus intimately tied to the player’s experience. Because of this, players struggled to keep alive for as long as possible – the longer they survived, the higher they scored. If they lost, all they had experienced would be gone except the previous score, a reminder of a past adventure.

 

To hold Gauntlet as proto-survival horror might seem a stretch, until one considers all the hierarchies of oppression at work in Logg’s game. Time’s influence is pervasive and irreversible, lending dread to the entire journey. Some supplies can be inadvertedly destroyed. Monster generators continuously spawn enemies. Breakable walls can be an escape or a trap. Resource management is meticulous. Logg doesn’t provide a background to these tensions; he simply explores their negative impact on the player’s psyche, producing a game space mired in decay. The player must plan ahead, map out territory, trace contingency plans in infinite detail. And unlike traditional survival horror, these elements are not terrifying because they are hidden from sight; it’s precisely because the player can see everything that tension runs free.

Take enemies, for instance. All characters have short (“Fight”) and long (“Shot”) range attacks. Shooting an enemy from a distance provides safety at the penalty of less points, while fighting an enemy rewards more points but puts characters right in the middle of danger. Meanwhile, potions come in several forms: some are bombs that clear the screen of enemies, while others give permanent bonuses. But these can also be destroyed, accidentally or intentionally, and in this case work as weaker bombs. But bombs occupy the same slot space as keys, so it’s up to players to decide – do they sacrifice a bomb for a key to keep moving forward, or keep it as a last resort when they find themselves overwhelmed?

Gauntlet’s design, from mechanics to play space, are about survival in a way survival horror usually does not allow itself to be. Logg’s game is about survival, though ultimately it’s also about the very real prospect of failure and death. Therefore, everything the player does happens in the context of those goals; the actions performed by the player are the same that tell the story the designer created. Compare with Fatal Frame 3, where failure is a lie: you may receive a “Game Over” screen after being savaged by a ghost, but the game isn’t over until the designer’s story is over. Hence, you continue, overcome the obstacle, and play until you reach one of the possible endings. Often in videogames, the player’s goals and the designer’s goals are not the same, and survival horror illustrates this all too well.

But the passage of time in Gauntlet offers more than play mechanics that create tension without the use of a traditional narrative; it’s also an answer to the dilemma of modern survival horror. The genre’s design takes into account the gamer’s desire for challenge and the horror enthusiast’s craving for suspense. While these elements can operate together, they are not the same and can work against each other. What is “scary” – the possibility that one might lose, or losing? The fear of death, or death? If a player repeatedly fails to overcome an obstacle and is constantly presented with a “Game Over” screen, this becomes frustrating. Death in videogames is usually a minor inconvenience, and tension is hard to achieve because failure is often designed to be fatal, not suspenseful. However, if a player is constantly challenged to think death is a very real possibility, fear is a much likely factor.

 

Which provides an interesting contradiction: death in videogames is only scary when players don’t die. Gauntlet nails this paradox perfectly. The longer a player survives, the more he has to lose – not just in terms of score, but also in terms of confidence and determination. And the longer he avoids getting killed, the more failure becomes a pressing concern, especially when the game gives him the means to avoid it. Can we say the same of survival horror? Not quite, although there are exceptions. At various points in Silent Hill 3, the main character, Heather, is confronted with events – such as a locked room suddenly bursting with black tendrils, or a subway train heading her way at full speed – that suggest death, but never kill her. This is interesting because some of these events take place a long time after the player saves his game: not only is there the tendency to think something might happen, as there is the chance that failure comes swift and without warning. Meanwhile, one of the most famous sequences of Silent Hill 2 sees lead character James escorting a character through narrow corridors while running away from Pyramid Head, an executioner. If the escorted character dies, it’s Game Over. Escort the character successfully to an elevator… And the character dies anyway. So yes, a studio can get survival horror very well and very badly. Yet, these are specific moments in games – not necessarily their mood from beginning to end.

There are many ways to create a horror mood and present death as more than an abrupt fail state – recently, Parasite Eve The 3rd Birthday and Driver San Francisco allowed players to possess other character’s bodies in order to survive or to perform otherwise impossible actions by a single character, but these are variations of mechanisms already seen in the past, such as in Omikron: The Nomad Soul, and not always associated with the act of surviving – and I plan to explore some at a later time. My main point is that Gauntlet, indeed, is a great starting point for survival horror as conveyed through mechanics alone, and mechanics not often associated with the genre. But that doesn’t mean the genre hasn’t done something similar.

Which is a roundabout way of saying Dead Rising might be the most progressive example the genre has seen in years (*). Suffice to say, Capcom’s zombie fest is Gauntlet with a clown hat on – dead serious about being fun, deliciously fun about being serious. Photojournalist Frank West is trapped in a shopping mall where a zombie outbreak has occured. Dressing up as a woman, hitting zombies with frying pans and taking pictures of the surrounding chaos has garnered Dead Rising the moniker of “survival comedy”, though this is a classification that only serves those who want the genre to remain frozen in time, walled against change. The game works as survival horror because it captures the same cycle of tension and relief as Logg’s game. Its structure is perhaps more generous (**) than Gauntlet – a Groundhog Day effect that lets players replay the same day over and over while gaining new abilities, a global timer that only affects the amount of things players can do before the game ends – but even moreso than Atari’s coin-op, its goal is to recapture what is fun about videogames in general, and survival horror in particular, by not being insular; it stays true to the genre without feeling the need to replicate its more tedious aspects.

In the past, some people have tried to outdo each other in proclaiming to know who killed the adventure game genre. Erik Wolpaw, one half of Old Man Murray before he went on to write Portal for Valve, was smart enough to pinpoint the culprit – both the designers who developed convoluted puzzles and the players who fetishized that kind of design. Pause to reflect on how in similar debates concerning the would-be death of survival horror, gamers are eager to defend Resident Evil Zero, wherein its lead characters are about to die in a train accident (“narrative”) but the only way to stop this is to indefinitely hunt for levers spread across the train (“gameplay”) as particularly adequate to represent said genre, but dismiss Resident Evil 5 because surviving (“narrative”) is actually related to shooting zombies (“gameplay”, also known as what you do to survive). Apparently, lounging in the bar of a train forever on a colision course is more horrific than defending against a swarm of tentacled beasts who can rip one in half.

And I don’t know about you, but that scares me a hell of a lot more than using a grenade launcher against giant, apathetic centipedes.

 

 

(*) There’s also Left 4 Dead, which is quite similar to Gauntlet and even reappropriates the four player cooperative framework; though it’s predominantly online and is only fun if you’re playing with friends. I don’t have friends.

(*) Generous as Dead Rising may be, Gauntlet IV, released for the Sega Genesis, also included a Quest Mode – in essence an RPG mode, and one that smartly lets players upgrade or downgrade abilities according to their needs, years before every “journalist” claimed Gauntlet Legends was the first to introduce light role-playing elements to the series – in addition to the original Arcade and Versus Modes. This version is the definitive version of Ed Logg’s game. Every other title in the series after it, and almost everything before it, is a disaster.