The best horror stories center around average Joes reluctantly flung into carnage. The less prepared a person is for the darkness awaiting them, the stronger the horror. I need my heroes to be just as helpless as I would be if inserted in their place.
I can’t relate to professional action movie stars. I’m a fat guy from the Internet-maybe you’ve heard of it. A character who has conveniently been equipped with the proper training to handle the exact situation they’re thrown into. Nothing pulls me out of a story faster than a protagonist with super powers. Even moving down a hallway can inspire one’s heart to palpitate. Atmosphere is everything when it comes to horror, and in this house, the atmosphere is thick with dread and paranoia. Without the house, the game loses all sense of fear. The deeper you explore, the more mysterious it becomes and the more implausible an escape sounds. Like all great weird houses (and telephone booths), the interior seems vastly greater in size than what the outside hints at. The house itself serves as one of the creepiest characters found in the game. The majority of Resident Evil 7 takes place in an old house inhabited by a family of murderous lunatics. If they want to escape-if they want to survive-they must stop running and fight their way to freedom. They can’t just jump in a car and drive to the next town and start a new life. What do they all have in common? The characters are trapped and forced to confront the evil harassing them.
Take a look at classics like The Shining, Night of the Living Dead, Alien, and The Thing, along with more modern horror masterpieces like The Descent and The Autopsy of Jane Doe. The rise is natural, allowing us to evolve with the danger.Ī horror story is only as good as its setting, and the trademark of many great spooky tales involves an enclosed space.
The plot continues to outdo itself level after level, each twist raising the stakes higher than the last. What begins as a missing wife situation quickly spirals into a possessed wife clusterfuck. You break her out of the cell and rejoice having her in your arms again, after all these years-except of course she’s gone and gotten herself possessed by some sort of sinister entity convinced you need to be dead. Holy shit, you think, this shouldn’t have been so easy. You explore the wonderfully macabre artifacts decorating the house as you search for your wife, which seems like a mission that will last the entire game, until you almost immediately locate her locked in a cell.
Five minutes into the game and you’re already fully immersed, thanks to mind-blowing graphics and a first-person point-of-view. Except you don’t think of her as Ethan’s wife but your wife. The player is given one mission: locate Ethan’s wife. It seems to be empty, but also incredibly creepy, like most houses found in Louisiana. Ethan Winters receives a video message from his wife, Mia, who has been missing for the last three years, asking him to pick her up at a mysterious residence somewhere in Dulvey, Louisiana. Fear springs from the unexpected, so it makes sense that the more innocent we begin, the bigger an impact later danger will present. If we begin small and gradually work our way higher up the ladder of doom, the easier it will be for the reader/viewer/player to immerse themselves in the story. Resident Evil 7, released only a couple months ago, is the perfect example for pristine horror.Ī story-especially a horror story-must be cautious about starting off too ambitious, otherwise it risks offering ineffective stakes. The horror video game genre is an untapped market of unlimited writing lessons. We love to be scared despite every one of our senses begging to abandon ship. Nothing has scared me more than survival horror games, and I feel the same is true for many horror gamers. It may have inspired my love for horror more than any book or movie ever managed to. I grew up playing the Resident Evil series. And candy is fucking delicious no matter how old you are, so try another excuse, Excusey McExcuserson. Do you know what else is often viewed as “strictly for children”? Candy. So many purveyors of dark fiction miss out on the expansive library of horror video games simply because of the myth that games are strictly for children. In my experience, most novelists tend to limit what they imbibe to films and literature instead of branching out to all forms of media.