I bought my very first video game, Silent Hill 4: The Room, in order to see what a “horror” video game is like. I set it up and started playing and immediately realized this game was going to be scary. After playing Halo 3, I was used to pretty amazing graphics; however, Silent Hill was made in 2004 and does not look as realistic. If the game was re-made today I don’t think anyone could play the game through because of how scary it is. For the first half hour, your character has no weapons or any idea what is going on. He has to explore all over his apartment and the gamer has to become acquainted with his apartment. You feel like you are the player during this stage and don’t see your character except for the short cinematic sequences that often play. One of the first happenings is our character thinking something on the wall looks like a face. The game switches to a short clip that the gamer cannot skip of the creepiest thing crawling out of the wall looking terribly bloody.
After you explore for quite some time, the phone rings and you hear “Help me” from a woman’s voice. The character then discovers the phone is unplugged. Several notes are found that were not there before. The game essentially decides when you have explored the apartment enough to move to the next level. After the computer decides you are ready for the next level, we find a hole in the bathroom (that was not there in the beginning of the game) that we have to climb through. This is where the game gets much more scarier.
The reason it is so much scarier in this level is because you now see your character’s full body but only from the angle the computer decides. So, there are many times where you are looking at your character front-on, so the gamer cannot see what is in front of the character, or what feels like actually “behind” the gamer. Also, this is the point of the game where you meet enemies and have to defeat them. Barely any enemies actually stay dead once you kill them. In fact, you have to kill them three or four times before they don’t get up any more.
There is also a huge feeling of loneliness in the game. Nobody can hear you, you have no other people to talk to really. A woman keeps asking for your help and once you find her she doesn’t talk for an extremely long time, just follows you wherever you go.
In short, I played this game with experienced gamers, with non-gamers, and alone and just having anyone, whether experienced or not, was much more welcomed. I hated playing this game by myself because it was just too scary. It was almost scarier than a movie because I felt like I was the one almost in the movie. It was a slower game than I would have liked, which absolutely adds to the fear factor. I have not beaten the game at all and will continue playing and add updates later!
It's interesting that the first half-hour of this game features a character simply walking around and looking at a typical apartment. What kind of gameplay features take place here? Is it like a tutorial of some sort, where (I'm just guessing) you learn to open doors and drawers, activate objects, etc? Or is it really just observatory, with cutscenes activating as you look at them?
ReplyDeleteBasically, what's the 'draw' here? It sounds like this game has a couple drastically different styles of gameplay in it.
It would be interesting to play a game where all the player does is look at things. The Path is a little like this-- in order to interact with any object, the player must STOP playing and let the avatar enter an ambience act. While in this act, the avatar will lock onto nearby things all by itself and then interact with them. It gets a little creepy because you have no idea what the avatar is going to do with the object-- so there's tension and horror in just looking at things, in that game.
When you mentioned that the camera angle changes at some points and shows you the face of your character, so that you cannot see what is in front of them (in back of you), do you think that this separates you from your character. Technically your character would be able to see what's in front of him, you are the one who cannot see. So in this moment, do you feel like you are the character or you are yourself? I just think this is interesting, the effect the camera has on the gamers sense of self in the video game.
ReplyDeleteI just started playing video games myself (Left 4 Dead so I can write my paper on a game) and it is SO MUCH SCARIER playing alone!! L4D is most known for it's great use of cooperative play, but I'm a little anxious, especially as a beginner, to play the game online with other players so I play the single player mode in my room, often before I'm about to go to bed- not a good idea. Even just having other people in the room makes me feel more at ease. When you're alone, it just feels likes you're totally vulnerable and there's no one who you can turn to if it gets really bad. Obviously, someone who is just sitting in the room with you can't help your character, but at least they can be there if you just can't play anymore.
ReplyDeleteLaura, one of the gamespecs that Kent and I were considering making was a horror game based on dreams. Instead of playing a character during their normal waking hours, you would take control over the protagonist during her dreams (starting with normal ones moving to nightmares). The difficulty we had is that we couldn't come up with gameplay considering the vastly different nature of our dreams. One possibility however, was having the character simply observe the absurdity through passive interactions with the environment. The dream would play you, not the other way around. However, the passivity of these dreams would start to fade once the player gets clues that something is causing these nightmares: guilt. The climax of the gameplay would be a moment during the waking hours of the protagonist where she goes into the basement and sees a tied-up man. At this point, the player would lose control and they would be forced to watch (from a first-person perspective) your protagonist brutally murder that person. We felt that having to watch your character do something that you were entirely uncomfortable with would be unbelievably scary and engaging.
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