Unfettered Blather

Fear is not an emotion I am all that familiar with when it comes to entertainment. Movies and games just generally don’t scare me, though they can gross me out. A lot of times the creators mistake gore as a way of inducing fear. That doesn’t quite work because gore induces nausea at best.

If you want to generate fear you have to have atmosphere. When I say “atmosphere” I don’t mean cheap jump scenes or spring-loaded cats. I mean the type of atmosphere that is so tense that when you do finally see the antagonist, even if it’s in a non-startling manner, you are almost relieved to have them revealed even though it means everyone is now doomed. The tension we want is not from just regular adrenaline though, not the kind of tension you may get because you’re in the final lap of a race and your opponent is less than a second behind you and about to pass. I mean tension like you know there is something bad out there but you don’t know what it is or even where it is. Just some kind of nearby badness that would like nothing better than to tear out your throat just as soon as it thinks the moment is right.

There have been games made intentionally to be scary or creepy that have been effective to me, but rarely are they successful in carrying the atmosphere of fear from beginning to end. Though I do have one example that is actually a mod for the original Half-Life.

They Hunger was a great riff on the classic zombie movie so well defined by the horror genre. They Hunger built up heavy atmosphere and kept you guessing throughout. Your weapons were limited, your ammunition was almost always low, and zombies were in large supply. Like a good zombie movie, despite their limited mobility, the baddies always seemed to show up in the worst possible place. They Hunger was scary, tense, creepy, and tons of fun to play. I rarely find fear entertaining, but I always felt compelled to finish a level and played it through to the (surprising) end.

I always think it says something about a game when it falls outside of the specific genres I like, even is part of a genre I don’t generally care for, and yet I play the game through to the end because I find it so compelling. Fear can be fun.

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