The Scary Secrets of Horror Design From Silent Hill 4

What a 17-year-old game can teach us about horror design

Ihave begun writing my fourth book on horror design which has meant spending a lot of time with horror games old and new. Revisiting Silent Hill 4: The Room has given me a greater appreciation for it and the series. Today, I’m going to talk about how modern horror (especially from the indie scene) forgets some of the big lessons from the classic franchise.

Pacing

I have written extensively about pacing when it comes to horror, and it will be a major part of my design book. When it comes to horror games today, they tend to mess up when it comes to properly pacing out their terror. Either the horror is too slow — leading to the player becoming bored and lowering the tension — or it’s too fast, with the player constantly having to deal with the terror and staying in a constant state of tension.

Part of this problem has been the over-reliance on jump scares and basic event triggers used by horror designers. At this point, I’ve come to expect a jump scare happening at any time in any horror game. So, it was to my surprise while playing Silent Hill 4 that I didn’t run into a jump scare for almost the entire length of the playthrough.