Why I really like innocuous settings in horror video games

Some horror video games are set in spooky castles, deserted psychological asylums, derelict spaceships, or circuses with an unwise hiring coverage relating to murderclowns. Others are set in much less outlandish places, like suburban streets, procuring malls, hospitals, colleges, or atypical properties. I discover the second form have probably the most affect, haunting my ideas lengthy after they’re over like an image I should not have checked out on the web.

The Silent Hill video games are particularly good at this, and have made me really feel much more ambivalent about hospitals than I already did. Hospitals are nerve-racking locations to start with, however Silent Hill 2 additionally visits locations as comfortably mundane as condominium buildings, a nightclub, a historic society, and even a bowling alley, all of which it imbues with terror. A quick scene in a cemetery seems to be a uncommon second of security. Although finally Silent Hill 2 descends right into a darkish underground jail, its horrifying finale is saved for elsewhere: a vacation resort on a lake.

The scariest issues in Silent Hill 2, whether or not geometry-faced butchers or mindblowing revelations, are accentuated by the ordinariness of their backdrops. We anticipate creepy stuff occurring in gothic mansions, that is the entire level of them, however the worst factor you count on to come across in a bowling alley is a 7–10 break up. Silent Hill takes innocuous locations and peels their pores and skin again till the partitions bleed with rust and the flooring flake away to disclose fragile chainlink over bottomless pits. 

What the chuck?

I used to stay in an condominium constructing with an evacuation map on the wall similar to the maps in Silent Hill and it freaked me out each time I noticed it, however there is a threat when horror video games select innocuous settings. If gamers aren’t personally acquainted with them, they will not have that aspect of recognition. 

I wasn’t frightened by the animatronic mascots in 5 Nights At Freddy’s not as a result of I am so very courageous, however as a result of I did not develop up in a rustic the place quick meals eating places have mechanical hosts. There isn’t any Chuck E Cheese in Australia—they tried within the Nineteen Eighties below the identify Charlie’s Cheese as a result of “chuck” means vomit right here, however even with the identify modified it did not catch on. Freddy’s is as unique as any Transylvanian fortress to me, and would not encourage lasting dread.

As a rule it is an efficient method, although. Essentially the most horrifying locations in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Name of Cthulhu: Darkish Corners of the Earth are common outdated accommodations. Each lull you right into a false sense of safety. In Darkish Corners you possibly can lock the doorways of your lodge room earlier than mattress, however nothing will cease the locals from kicking their means in to kill you in your sleep, forcing you right into a heart-hammering rooftop escape that culminates in probably the most horrifying factor videogames can throw at you: exact first-person leaping.

In the meantime, Bloodlines makes you a vampire with superpowers, so that you count on to don’t have anything to worry from an empty lodge, even when it is haunted. However once you get there the well-paced scares—popping lightbulbs, a distant kid’s laughter, figures operating previous you down corridors however disappearing once you not far away—mix with the mechanical fear of your blood meter slowly emptying as a result of there’s no one round to feed on to create a singular second of conventional horror. In a sport that is in any other case about confronting the non-public horror of your personal monstrous nature, it is fairly the achievement. 

Alienation station

That is to not say extra apparent places haven’t got their place in horror video games. The Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Lethal Shadows is an ideal instance: a psychological asylum that can also be a haunted orphanage, one cliché draped on one other like a sheet over a corpse. It nonetheless manages to be memorable by means of a mixture of claustrophobia, glorious enemy design—these twitching, cage-headed lunatics—and a command of sunshine and darkness that advantages it each as a stealth sport and an engine designed to freeze your blood stable.

But even in additional typical horror settings, a dose of normality helps. The grisly spaceship Ishimura from Useless House is horrifying at first, however after a number of hours there I learnt to count on necromorphs bursting from its blood-soaked vents. Although Sevastopol Station from Alien: Isolation was additionally floating helplessly in house and an alien was simply as more likely to slither out of the ceiling in a corridor stuffed with graffiti, it by no means stopped being scary. Its rooms had been slightly much less stuffed with corpses and rust, typically antiseptically well-lit, with atypical desks, outdated computer systems, and government toys. It felt like an workplace for a paper provide firm, all sq. edges and low cups, accentuating the modern, gangling silhouette of the alien and its elemental wrongness.

They are saying familiarity breeds contempt, however in horror contempt is helpful. Acquainted places trick us into pondering we all know what to anticipate, and there is energy in yanking these expectations out from below our toes to disclose the skinny chains separating us from the abyss.