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Formulas for horror games

  • calunio
  • 11/03/2013 03:09 AM
  • 2407 views
Contains minor spoilers.

The theme of RMN’s All Hallow’s Eve Event 2013 was broad enough so that not every game had to be scary. But some developers did tackle this goal, and tried to make something that could really unnerve the player. We all know it’s no easy task, especially when talking RPG Maker. I just reviewed Rust and Blood, which is a game with very polished graphics and elaborate sound effects that work well in creating a scary atmosphere. The God of Crawling Eyes, on the other hand, is a very minimalistic game, both in terms of graphics and sound, but it is at least as scary as Rust and Blood.

What do we make of that?

First of all, let’s talk a little about the game.
You play as max, a school student that is colorblind. He sees in black and white. He’s taking a medication that should help him recover his color sight, but it’s still not working. In the middle of the game, Max starts seeing the color red. It took me a while to realize that this has no story importance whatsoever, it is only an excuse for the developer to make a game that is black & white & red, but it worked well.

Not wanting to spoil the story too much: strange things start to happen in this school, and Max has to find out what’s happening, find his way out, and not die.

The God of Crawling Eyes is an adventure game, which means gameplay is basically fetching items and interacting with the right objects at the right moments. Works well, but some things are really hard to figure out. I needed help from internet spoilers at times.

The game is fairly short, and can be finished in around... say... 40 minutes? There are also unlockable rooms after you beat the game, and more than one ending. I didn’t get to check those, though.
The story of the game is interesting, intriguing, compelling, but not amazing. It’s just enough to make you want to know what happens next. It’s just enough to build a tension towards the end of the game. Dialogs were also minimalistic. There was no real character development, they just said the bare minimum to have the player understand what was going on.

Technically, the game is very crude. The graphics are very simple, but they work, and I always appreciate custom. I was just not a fan of using facesets from that face generator thing that makes everyone look the same.
Sounds, on the other hand, are really good. Music is very tense and fitting. It works well in creating an atmosphere of tension and scare.

Ok, I'm done with stalling. I needed to cover the basics before discussing what I really want to discuss, which is...

INSTAGAMEOVERS AS A STRATEGY FOR MAKING THE PLAYER SCARED

Let me quote the game’s author:

author=Housekeeping
Yeah, when I made the decision to limit saving, I knew that it wouldn't be a popular one, but being able to save everywhere encourages the player to experiment with their surroundings, and I wanted players to be too scared to do that when there were clear signs of danger.


What the designer wanted was for the player to be scared of wandering, and he accomplished that by adding instagameover devices in a few catchy places. Ok, it worked, cause I was scared to wander. “If I go into that room, I could get instakilled and go back to my last save that is not very near”. That got me tense. And I did die, plenty of times, especially when trying to escape from the black thing. You know, it works, but it can backfire. Because at the same time the fear of getting a gameover is a real fear, replaying the same part too many times is a mood breaker. That’s also a problem I had with Rust and Blood. I wonder if it’s possible to make a game that is scary without threatening the player to lose his progress because of a very minor slip? I have made scary games myself, and I admit I have used this strategy. I’m just not sure it’s a good one anymore. Being scared and being frustrated are very close in a continuum of bad feelings, but you don’t want the player to slide too far to the frustration end.

Having said that, I don’t think the gameover rate was that high. Getting lost and not knowing what to do, windowing the game to google for solutions was definitely a bigger mood breaker.

Still, this is really a great game, and the best event entry I played so far. And apparently it has drawn a lot of attention from other sites. So congrats! I’m curious as to what you could accomplish by making a horror game without a time limit.

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About the instagameover issue, Fomar0153 mentioned it here.

author=Fomar0153
Now I have a couple of lists for you, first is the list of games that kill you on touch...
Hide
Rust and Blood
Girl's Graveyard
The Final Sin
The God of Crawling Eyes
I MU
Nocnitsa's Sideshow: Horrific Oddities
When the Bell Tolls
Grandma's House
Kin
Ground
and maybe Dark Mirror but I never got caught.
I can see how that mechanic could (has?) become a cliche in horror games, but the horror genre in all media tends to hinge on the fear of death. There are other themes that get explored in horror--in Don't Look Now, for example, the sadness, fear, and confusion that accompanies losing a child are explored to great effect, but the actual scares from that film come from an immediate fear of death. It's what triggers our fight or flight response, so it's arguably an inescapable aspect of being true to the horror genre (before you start moving into, say, a psychological thriller). So, making that fear of death real, while not inescapable, is a viable option for horror games.

I would say what differentiates the instant death scenes in my game from most of the others in this contest is that a player can die once to one of the instant death moments and then can avoid it a second time (with the exception of the ooze scene). Most of the games that use instant death mechanics that I've seen in this contest tend to have events that wander or chase the player and then kill on touch, making it a death based on lack of timing and reflexes rather than careful thought. These types of chase/instant death mechanics were seen in the first horror game of all time--Pac Man--in which an overweight yellow man is chased by ghosts throughout the endless labyrinth of his own subconscious. I don't know if that makes mine better or worse--just different.

Incorporating a health bar would have been more forgiving--and it works for survival horror games like Resident Evil--but since this is an adventure game, that mechanic wouldn't have really worked, as there aren't "small fears" that whittle you down. I stand by the mechanic given the size, theme, and scope of this game, but I do need to add a save point after the dialogue in the library with Chase. I'm going to do that as soon as I get an "okay" from the judges to update my game (or whenever the contest ends).

Anyway, thanks for the review. I disagree with a few aspects, mainly about the roundness of the characters and the importance of Max's colorblindness, but it's pretty ill form for me to contest those kinds of things. I'm mainly just glad that you enjoyed it.
I'm not offended if you don't agree with me. Please elaborate! I'd love to hear what you had in mind creating different aspects of the game.
Alright; I don't really like when authors/developers explain things, but this is also a forum for talking about the craft, so what the hell. I'm just going to say SPOILERS AHEAD.

About the characters: The game was about perception, so your perception of the characters affects how they treat you at the end of the game. If you treat Lily like a sexual object or victim, for example, then she's going to fulfill that horror cliche in the end. Conversely, if you treat her as a person and encourage her to help, she'll present herself as a real person in the end and show that there's more to her than being a helpless victim. Chase has a similar scale that's affected on whether he's seen as a friend or just an acquaintance that you tolerate. You mentioned only seeing one ending, so you might not have seen these characters rounded out, especially if you got Lily's "bad" ending.

About the use of black, white, and red: as I said, the theme of the game is perception, and Max's colorblindness is, in addition to a characterization, a metaphor that represents the theme of the game. As soon as he starts seeing the color red, he begins seeing other things that he wasn't able to see before--namely, the horrifying aspects of the game. I'm not treading new ground or anything; this is a Lovecraftian theme, just told through my characters and storytelling philosophies. When it comes to gameplay, red acts as an emphatic tool. Many of the usable items are colored red to draw the player's eye, and most of the hazards (the mirror creature, the monster behind the principal's door, and the chlorine gas) are colored red or contain red elements to alert the player of the danger.

At the end of the day, whether or not this was successful is up to the players, but I did want to say that I definitely put thought into these areas. I'll also admit that the entire genesis for this game was justifying using black and white since it would be easier for me to draw.
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