Loud-Quiet-Loud: Dino Crisis & Dynamics of Horror
I love revisiting old survival-horror games. Their obtuse puzzles, constant inventory management and frequent backtracking were unlikely hallmarks of a wildly successful genre in the 1990's. These games didn’t give us open worlds to explore, nor power fantasies to freely indulge in- they shoved us into constricted, threatening spaces and beckoned us towards the unknown, eschewing friendlier design attitudes in favor of what could be described as clunk, terror and tedium. So, what’s the enduring appeal?
Much of it, for me, lies within the deliberate pacing and fine-tuned moment-to-moment progression of those games. The feelings they induce within us once we’ve committed to their journeys and trials.
I’ll make a comparison with music. “Loud-quiet-loud” describes the compositional style of indie or college-rock bands like Pixies and Nirvana, rising to cultural prominence in the 80’s and 90's. A contrast between quietly brooding verses and maximal wall-of-sound choruses (or vice-versa,) kept the music dynamic and dramatic. These bands were often abrasive and emotionally loaded but their songs were broken up by quiet moments. Post-rock acts like Sigur Ros and Mogwai used similar dynamics in longer form through the next decade, building up tension for minutes before flying off the handle into noise. They all understood dynamics well and exploited them in fresh ways that were starker than usual at the time. You can even see it by looking at waveforms of their songs- the sharp cliffs and valleys of noise.
Tension and release are vital elements of both music and horror. A comparison can be drawn towards survival horror, and the pacing of players’ experiences traversing its spaces.
If there were nothing but empty hallways, it would only be quiet. If enemies were present in every room, it would be always-loud and would become more of an action game. No, the thrill is in the back-and-forth, the transitional moments. These games find a sharp contrast in traversal, and they are games made of rooms. Rooms which oscillate between uneasy comfort and fight-or-flight, breaking up the tension and release of play. There’s a hit of urgency that strikes our brains, stepping into that one awful hallway knowing we need to preemptively orient ourselves to haul ass as soon as the game loads, lest we get mauled.
Survival horror games engage us in that sway between action and respite- a chase sequence and a safe place. They use the dichotomy to pull emotion from us, to keep us on our toes and manipulate feelings of safety, triumph and fear.
If it weren’t for those dynamics, they would be more akin to classic adventure games- purely traversing a space and solving puzzles- they differentiate themselves through the introduction of enemies and other horror elements that create the loud/quiet dynamics. Often what reads as constrictive gameplay design is there to substantiate the horror vibes by limiting your options, since a horror game where your character is all-powerful will lose tension.
Core to this design was the basic control scheme and camera-setup. The games I’m talking about- “old school survival horror,” are demarcated by their use of fixed camera angles, usually static pre-rendered backgrounds, and their infamous tank-style character controls. The camera would be fixed to one location- a movie-like, curated angle showing the space, and you controlled your character like a tank, pressing up to move forward, no matter how the camera was oriented.
This style of control was much-debated and derided for how unintuitive it could feel- but it was a blessing and a curse. Tank controls and fixed cameras did confer, by necessity, many of the qualities I still love to these things. An evolution away from them (which happened in a big way with Resident Evil 4 and its over-the-shoulder camera,) was likely inevitable, but it is heartening to see an ongoing critical re-evaluation of the old, fixed camera style.
More people are realizing, now, that those constraints were fundamental to the experience of these games in complex and downstream-flowing ways.
Despite changing the basic camera and movement systems, even the action-packed kung-fu exhibit that is Resident Evil 4 is filled with quiet, exploratory moments. Resident Evil 4’s action hits so well because in addition to feeling great to control and being expertly balanced, its bombastic set-pieces often emerged naturally from moments of calm exploration. It represents a middle ground between the old survival horror designs and what it would go on to become. We prick our ears every time that industrial clanging noise spins up to signify combat- it’s a state-shift that still hits.
Devil May Cry, which famously spun off of Resident Evil, became a “loud-loud-LOUD” character-action series that found dynamism on other axes-in the minutiae of combat and the abilities of the player. The game doesn’t need to be as engaging in its room-by-room tone because we have a far more complex instrument to control in the player character. In DMC we’re thinking about combos, we’re feeling the joyful flow of action and not the fear of it. To compare it to music, it would be more like Jazz with a constant state of improvisation. Dante (from the Devil May Cry series) is possessed of abilities dwarfing every classic survival horror protagonist, who can merely quick turn on the best of days. Tension isn’t really the point, but tension can still be built via challenge within that complex system. All that to say, it’s a spectrum, and different games have different goals.
Dino Crisis doesn’t play like that at all- it plies a simpler, slower and older trade. We’re tank-controlling along with only the ability to run and shoot. This kind of survival horror has to be elegantly designed, because it changes things up primarily through linear progression and pacing. Each room is a filmic scene of its own to travel through, with camera angles, soundscapes and feelings, and that’s something I greatly enjoy.
Like scary movies, Dino Crisis and early Resident Evil want us to hang in the tense emotional space between uneasy quiet and sudden stress. Moments of safety give us a cleansing comfort as we perform the grunt work of moving about, solving puzzles and dealing with threats. Each step of progress is satisfyingly earned through our own navigation and growing mastery of the environment.
The game is always concerned with tension- anywhere we want to go must be weighed against the resources we’ll spend getting there. It will complicate this and throw constant wrenches into that calculus- enemies that get back up, or follow you from room-to-room, or simply appear somewhere they previously weren’t. Puzzles that must be solved before we can proceed, puzzles that fling us back into the pits of danger to grab some item.
How do you scare someone who knows that you’re trying to scare them? Does a roller-coaster become boring on its 15th lap? Horror usually works best in shorter form because it wants to surprise us, and games need to work harder or smarter for each subsequent moment of genuine fear.
As much as I’m building up these games’ intentions to subvert or obstruct the player, they’re not so difficult. Dive into one and you’ll find mostly surmountable fears. This era of horror gaming succeeds in the payoff of players learning to swim proficiently in its choppy waters- sometimes it’s nice to feel like you’re travelling upstream. It can be fun to just scrape by, even if the game is giving us more leeway than we realize.
Capcom codified that idea of perfect balance even more deliberately by the time we hit Resident Evil 4. RE4 had a really impressive dynamic ammo system that would give players just enough to keep going via some background-math wizardry that still holds up extremely well.
So, many of us find it thrilling, cathartic and useful to experience the controlled stress and reward of good old survival horror. We learn tricks to put in our back pockets for the next time we encounter that one really scary thing.
“I know there are a lot of enemies in that office, but it’s a more efficient route to the elevator so maybe I’ll chance it.”
“Should I bring this shotgun ammo with me? I might need extra space in my inventory, but I don’t know what enemies are down there…”
A particularly dangerous space between yourself and the exit, a poison gas filling the compound, a bomb about to explode. You reach big moments to expend hard-won resources and blow up the quiet tension. That’s your narrative, too. The games may drop hints, but they don’t outright tell us when to use our best resources- we have to make the call.
“Okay, it’s time to use the shotgun-” you respect an enemy enough to spend your most precious ammo. You’ve been hoarding it, and you do a little rough math in your head. “I know this journey will end, but how soon?”
“Will I regret using these resources now?”
On our first run through, we never quite know. Small mistakes accumulate, ratcheting up the all-important tension. We have to overcome that nagging anxiety in order to progress.
Beyond a first playthrough, we may hit a point where the horrors become dulled, even vaguely comforting. The experience can be transformed as we relish in confidence and tackle challenges- as exercises in efficiency rather than trepidatious ventures into darkness.
Games are aware of diminishing returns on horror, and big genre players lean into goofball stuff post-game. Resident Evil 2 lets you control a sentient block of Tofu for zombies to munch healthily on. Silent Hill 2 has us unlocking a room to discover that a Shiba dog is controlling all the monsters with levers. Horror and comedy are bedfellows, and comedy provides its own stress release. Just like with loud-quiet-loud, there’s another oscillation of tone here. Resident Evil especially tends to swing back and forth between sincerity and ironic goofiness. It’s another “structure of feeling” that keeps things from becoming too one-note.
Dino Crisis was an early iteration on survival horror that mostly plays it straight but has its cute moments. It’s hard not to laugh when Regina sees her first raptor-attack victim and says “…that’s disgusting” with the glib tone of an annoyed cat owner stumbling on a furball.
In particular, Dino Crisis exhibits the loud-quiet-loud contrast more than most of its peers, because so much of the game is so quiet. The lab is deserted and austere, music is subtle, and we’re mostly listening to Regina’s footsteps without another soul present.
Conversely- when it does get loud, raptors are faster than traditional zombies and take you down harder. Regina can tranquilize them to buy a few moments, but committing to a fight is never ideal. Their nap is painfully brief, and they’ll be back to flinging us around like a ragdoll before we know it.
Our cretaceous foes do the classic thing where they’ll fall over but aren’t really dead until you see the blood pooling. There are multiple levels of messing-with-you involved in foolishly engaging with them. Evasion is a more compelling option but not an ironclad one, since they can pursue us room-to-room.
Several hours in we may be startled by a raptor breaking into a room that was previously empty- spiking the music into freak-out mode and forcing us to make a quick fight or flight decision. I especially love the pterosaurs which lift Regina into the air in a way that makes one feel especially screwed.
Ultimately, dinosaurs are fun things to run away from. They’re cool to look at and physically imposing in how they move.
In between encounters, the game is stuffed with understated beauty. It uses fully 3D environments rather than flat backgrounds- so the camera can move and pan with Regina as she flees, but it's always directed. Every second of gameplay contains some kind of deliberate scene-blocking or cinematography, and that’s an interesting, understated quality for a game to have. The lab’s aesthetic is built on turn-of-the-millennium computer terminals, stark colored lights cast onto sheer metal, bloodstained utilitarian beige and silver corridors.
I especially love the audio of the lab’s interfaces- computer terminals with unique menus and bespoke bloops created for specific puzzles are a treat. The environment is well-realized as a time-bound place infested with creatures out of time. All the 1999-action-movie-lookin’ computer tech goes some ways to establish the vibe.
Whereas prominent, giant-budgeted modern AAA games still aspire to be like films, Dino Crisis feels more naturally and effortlessly cinematic by virtue of its basic building blocks- camera angles present curated shots of every space as its digestible runtime and linearly escalating narrative ferry us along. It feels more like a movie that I am playing than many other games which seem to be trying harder to do that. It works here, for me, where it feels like a relatively strain-free side-effect of the games’ overall design and influences rather than an affected and bombastic desire to one-up the movies.
There are in fact a few branching choices in Dino Crisis, but they effect small parts of the journey and post-game outcomes rather than transforming any broader arc. These choices are cool- they develop our small cast of characters and bring a sense of agency to the story, encouraging another playthrough.
For all its charms, Dino Crisis inhabits a quiet corner of gaming these days. I love its subtle quirks, mood moments and details. The time I spent getting lost in its corridors, the little shocks the raptors gave me, moments I almost burst out laughing at something so ridiculous as a pterosaur attack. It’s memorable against the canvas of intervening years because it was just different enough from the things it derived from. Its bones were a known quantity, but they supported a plainly exciting and well-executed idea.
This specific kind of traditional survival horror had its big moment in the mid-to-late 90’s before slipping back underground to mutate into something else- but it has not gone extinct or become less beloved.
No, nowadays these “classic-style” survival horrors are emerging from the indie space- with great games like 2022's Signalis, which exhibits nearly everything I love about the genre in a reasonably modernized package. Capcom themselves are still iterating- their newer, sleeker games draw heavily upon roots that were planted back in the heyday by Resident Evil, Sweet Home, or Alone in The Dark, and iterated on by games like Dino Crisis, Silent Hill, and others.
There’s a value to this type of game- a directed experience we can have in a day or two, a camera angle for each room and hallway. The charm of small environmental touches and simple-but-effective oscillations of tone. These are things you can do more easily in a tightly controlled design environment- directed and confined spaces rather than expansive ones. I’m a sucker for the “weirdos stuck in a confined space” genre that we see in movies like The Thing or Alien, and these games draw on that appeal.
Electronic entertainment has only become larger and more ambitious since the time of Dino Crisis- but you can plop me into a defunct, creepy little lab to survive and explore, do-it-up with little details and puzzles, and I’ll be more than happy with any kind of shorter runtime.
So, if you’re burned out on too many quests and too much gear, if you’re tiring of battle passes or 100-hour pseudo-RPG’s and forever-games, you may enjoy dipping your toes into some refreshing old-school survival horror. This stuff holds up in its own surprising ways, even as it may drag on modern sensibilities. Once you sink into its rhythm and step into its time, Dino Crisis still does everything it was designed to do.
I wanted to say, “I’m waiting for another crisis,” but what I mean is that I’d like to play more games like this, and I’m so glad they’re still being made.
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