Tension, stress and suspense are the 3 pillars of the horror game. The best games of this genre slowly heat up the situation in the game to the limit and then release the tension in several stages. To some extent, it is precisely due to this that the effect of extreme involvement is achieved: when a player is so passionate about the game that he experiences physical stress.



Good horror games always have a deliberate intrigue, and it is much deeper than low-level bullying in the style of “house with ghosts”. The goal of horror design is to bring the involvement of the player and his emotional return to the maximum. But keep in mind: the best games of the genre use the engaging effect of horror content just to communicate more closely with the player. Horror games can affect topics that are not available to any other genre. The point is not just to scare the player, but to make him receptive to what you want to convey to him.

Of course, most of the frightening content in games is not a game design product, but rather a storytelling. The setting, the atmosphere and the characters are the basis of the basics necessary to hook the player and make him goosebumps on the back. But games also have other tools, such as game mechanics and player interaction. The problem of building the atmosphere of fear in the game is not limited only to the narrative: it affects every aspect of game design. That is why creating tension in games is a very difficult and interesting task for designers.
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This article focuses on the mechanics of horror games. It is not about the plot or narrative, but about the design of the game systems needed to make the game more dynamic. You can take this article as a kind of review of all the patterns we experimented with during the development of our Mystery / Horror game called Dead Secret, which was released last October for Gear VR and will be released soon for Steam and PlayStation. This is not a guide to the design of horror games - rather a list of ideas using game mechanics to create tension in the game.

Note!

The main objective of all the patterns below is to involve the user in the gameplay so that he forgot about everything around. Thomas Grip, designer of games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA, calls the state of total immersion in the game "sense of presence." These patterns are also needed to constantly unbalance the player. Game mechanics are often built on the recognition by the player of a repeating pattern.

They have a similar structure and are easily recognized. This is convenient because it allows you to develop a habit. If you want to scare the player, you need to make him believe that he does not control the situation, that the rules can change at any time, and that he is not able to fully comprehend everything that happens inside the game world. In horror games, a delicate balance of vulnerability and helplessness should be maintained, but one should not allow feelings of total confusion and confusion.

Think in context

As a designer of horror games, it is very important for you to focus the player’s attention on the narrative context of the game, and not on its mechanics. You need the player to identify with his character in the game, and not to act as an independent person performing tasks in a game form. Many of the ideas presented here are aimed at changing the player’s way of thinking from a systematic way of solving problems (analyzing statistics, minimum and maximum indicators, thinking about design patterns or action tactics) to contextual (“Who sent this hint?” Or “How get out of here? "). Some of these patterns are not entirely successful for other game genres, as they do not allow the player to calculate the game as a Rubik's Cube. But after all, collecting a Rubik's cube is not as scary as, say, deciding which ancient artifact is better suited as a weapon against Togo, Who Has Many Names.

Significance of the loss

One of the ways to cause the player to have a sense of belonging with the game content is to make the loss meaningful both for the player and for his character. Game over usually means the death of the character, but how to make the player feel the loss too?

This is usually achieved by placing savepoints at regular intervals so that in the event of a character’s death a player loses all game progress. This works effectively, especially if the save points are interesting in their own right (see the save points system in Alien: Isolation). But the very concept of points of conservation has long gone out of fashion. The game Dark Souls, for example, uses a more modern system of creating tension in the game due to the fear of losing progress.



Another option is to make stressful loss itself. In such indie horror games like Five Nights at Freddy's and Slender, in case of failure, all frightening creatures jump on you. We chose the latest option for Dead Secret to realize the ability to save anywhere in the game. This model uses the fear of a sudden event to make the player nervous at the thought of failure.

Hidden rules

Hiding from the player a variety of numbers and indicators that accompany the game, you position it to the contextual way of thinking. “How much health do I have? Does the enemy see me? Do I go in the right direction? How many shots are needed to defeat this boss? ”. In any other genre, giving players access to all of this data is considered good form. But in horror games, it's best to give information only by some kind of contextual abstraction.

For example, in Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, traditionally very approximate categories were used to display the level of health (Fine, Caution, Danger) - even though under the hood all the same calculations are made in the same way as in any other the game. In addition, Resident Evil uses animation to indicate the level of health: you may not know for sure when you die, but when your character bends, holding his stomach, things are clearly bad.

By hiding information and rules of the game, you do not leave the user the ability to search for safe ways and use a minimax strategy. This also brings a share of uncertainty into the game. When the user is not completely confident in the principles of the system, he is forced to rely on the environment and the plot for decision-making.

In Dead Secret, I tried to achieve the effect of uncertainty due to the abandonment of the "safe zone" principle. In other words, there is not a single place in the game where the player could feel completely safe: an insidious enemy in the hood and with a mask. But on the face can trap you anywhere and deliver a fatal blow. At the very least, I would like our players to believe this.

Cardiopalmus

There is quite a serious medical study suggesting that people are more likely to experience fear in a state of physiological arousal. In psychology, this phenomenon is called erroneous attribution of arousal . To do this, the player must be in a state where his pulse quickens, adrenaline is released into the blood, and he begins to sweat. If, however, add to all this terrible game content, the user becomes predisposed to "false" emotions: there is a chance that the brain will incorrectly respond to the stimulus, as a result of which the player is really scared.

Erroneous attribution is a very powerful form of emotional control. But she has one important caveat: she works only when the subject is not aware that she is in a state of excitement. Psychologists have proved this with the help of one experiment: they selectively injected adrenaline to the subjects, and as a result, they managed to cause false emotions only in those cases when the subjects did not know about the injections. It turns out that you as a designer need to jack up the player so that he does not even understand it.



Stimulus: a terrible grizzly bear approaches
Arousal : rapid heartbeat, trembling, sweating, flight
Cognitive label: “What a terrible bear! I'm afraid of him!"
Emotion: Fear

Shechter-Singer's two-factor theory of emotion states that emotions arise under the influence of physiological arousal and contextual interpretation of this arousal. Erroneous attribution may occur when our brain uses a ready-made context to justify our physiological arousal.

Usually, in order to quietly bring the user to a state of physiological arousal, complex and unpredictable gaming systems are used. It can be a rough and difficult battle system, as in a Condemned game, when an opponent of even the lowest level can kill a player if he hesitates. Or, for example, the constant lack of resources and inconvenient management, as in Resident Evil, where any meeting with the enemy turns into a serious ordeal. And in Siren, the player is so weak that any battle also risks becoming the last.

Complicated physical activity like some kind of hardcore battle on buttons is also great. However, sometimes this option takes the most unexpected forms. So, Night of Sacrifice, a very mediocre game in the spirit of a "haunted house", seems worse than it actually is, because in it the player needs to walk using the Wii Balance Board, which contributes to the increase in heartbeat.

The next time you play a difficult game, stop for a moment and see if you have wet hands. Ask yourself if you haven’t squeezed the joystick a bit more than what it cost? Do you have a heart out? If so, it is likely that in this state everything happening on the screen seems more impressive to you than it actually is.