From Silent Hill to Alien: Isolation — What makes a horror game scary?

Games have a seemingly supernatural ability to punt my heart into my mouth. Nothing compares, not the slow burn terror of Ridley Scott’s Alien, nor the sickening dread of watching a Dario Argento film. When games press the right buttons, they spark a physical, innate sense of threat, instantly sending the hard-wired fight or flight reflexes in the brain flaring into action. Run. Hide. Survive.

But why are games so good at unsettling us, and how do developers shape their creations to make them as terrifying as possible? How, in a nutshell, do you translate the concept of fear into programming and lines of code?

(Above: Amnesia: The Dark Descent)

Over the next week, I’ll be tackling these questions, having spoken to a range of leading game developers and experts about games from Alien: Isolation and Amnesia: The Dark Descent to BioShock, Thief and F.E.A.R.

In part one, I’ll be picking apart the building blocks of horror: how sound design and enemy AI go towards terrifying players. Next week, in part two, I’ll be looking at the ways that story and level design are ushering in a new breed of horror game.

The Sound and the (threat of) Fury

Seeing the enemy in a horror game is rarely the most terrifying part of the encounter. Sound, as every good filmmaker, theatre director and haunted house architect will tell you, is one of the most potent tools for creating a sense of tension.

Thomas Grip, creative director at Frictional Games, is behind titles such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the Penumbra series and the recently released Soma. He spoke to me about how crucial sound design is to the development of both horror games, and computer-generated worlds in general.

“Sounds sound a lot more real than how graphics look,” he said. “It is very easy to see flaws in the art, but a lot harder to hear them. So when you hear a monster it feels a lot more real than actually seeing it.

“Sound is a great way to give the world texture. If you hear the sound of wooden boards creaking above, it emphasises the fact the ceiling is indeed made of wood and it feels a lot more real. The images provide more concrete data for the player, like what sort of space it is, but the sounds are what give that extra spice to make it feel real.”

While the visual environment of a game can provide heaps of information to the player, Grips’ comments suggest that sounds that emanate from the things we can’t see are what open our imaginations to all sorts of horrible possibilities. Even for a medium famed for its visual potential, there is a great deal of power in what isn’t shown — in what’s left for us to imagine.

Personally, I can attest to this; hearing the inhuman cries of the hybrid enemies in System Shock 2 before seeing them always sent a jolt down my nervous system. Likewise, the wet ache of BioShock’s Rapture — its rich symphony of dripping water and creaking architecture — created an unforgettably tense atmosphere, as did the intermittent hum and crackle of the radio in Silent Hill. Hearing something waiting in the dark is so often far scarier than seeing it in the light.

Stealth games — with their atmospheric, generally slow, gameplay — tend to pay specific attention to sound design. The Thief series, while technically not horror titles, have provided some of the most unsettling gaming experiences ever devised. Perhaps the most iconic of these is “Robbing the Cradle” in Thief: Deadly Shadows (or Thief 3), a masterclass in level design spanning a vast building, which, as you learn over the course of your time there, was both an orphanage and an insane asylum at the same time. This ominous environment is perfectly complimented by a haunting sound design.

Jordan Thomas, the man behind Robbing the Cradle, lead designer on all three of the BioShock games, and architect of the recent The Magic Circle, explained what made it so terrifying: “The first half of Robbing the Cradle is a little exotic for a Thief mission in that there are no AI enemies to hunt you. You are just being hunted by sounds. You’re hunted by what you imagine coming after you — the more the environment can suggest than state, the more scares you have to mentally scare yourself. People would imagine whatever they found to be the most menacing.”

(Above: Thief 3)

Letting the player’s imagination run riot is, as Grip and Thomas suggest, one way of approaching the monsters in a game. The most terrifying adversary is what we build with our own minds — the nagging feeling that something unseen is lurking just behind us. Our worst nightmares lurking close by.

But what about the thing that actually is coming after you?

Originally published at www.alphr.com.