Survival Horror Doesn’t Need Combat
Or, Is There a Fate Worse Than Death?
Survival Horror as a gaming genre often attributes Alone In the Dark from 1992 (developed by Infrogames) as it’s starting point. Going further back, Sweet Home from 1989 (developed by Capcom) has retroactively been considered a progenitor to the genre and one of the founding titles in the Horror genre of games as a whole. This slight difference brings into question the designation between what is a horror or survival horror game despite both largely overlapping when it comes to discussions. That’s why we have two separate but equally considered titles for origin points of the horror game genre.
Survival Horror doesn’t exactly have set rules as a means of categorization. Games such as Signalis (rose-engine 2022), Gloomwood (Dillon Rogers, David Szymanski 2022) , World of Horror (panstasz 2023), and classics such as the Resident Evil Franchise (Capcom 1996 — ongoing) are all considered survival horror. While Signalis and Resident Evil have very similar structure, item management, combat mechanics, and progression systems, Gloomwood takes more inspiration from first person immersive sims akin to the Deus Ex franchise, while World of Horror takes more from old school computer based roleplaying games and works from Junji Ito.
If the genre isn’t tied to a specific ruleset, then what exactly qualifies a game as “survival horror?” If there isn’t a set criteria that a work has to follow, then the only summation that I can come to is the feeling the game evokes. For a game to be considered Survival Horror, it then has to evoke a dreaded sense of survival. Survival games are typically categorized as such due to mechanics used to simulate survival through the necessity to eat, drink, rest, and craft resources. A lot of the focus when it comes to these games is placed on resource management as well as sustaining one’s self long enough to accomplish goals (extrinsic and/or intrinsic).
What causes a survival game to not be considered a horror game often is determined by the game’s tone, or the punishment for failing to sustain yourself. In survival games, the biggest penalty tends to be the loss of your personal inventory (items carried on your person) at the place you fell. This means that recovering your items after spawning at a safe place is the punishment. For survival games, the worst thing to happen to the player is a loss of resources. In survival horror games, the worst thing to happen to the player is often death.
Death in a survival horror title often results in the player needing to be spawned either from a fixed checkpoint or needing to load a previous save file to continue. There’s a decision often made between your limited resources and your time: Use highly valuable resources to ensure survival and continue, or risk a tougher challenge with a higher chance of a death that could send you back either minutes or potentially hours? This actually means that the fear that many attribute to death in survival horror stems more from decision making rather than the consequences for immediate failure.
Through this lens, we can examine some of the core systems from survival horror games and reevaluate them. Tank Controls is a control scheme largely tied to and associated with survival horror games. Turning left or right changes the direction your character is facing but you still need to press forward to move in that direction you are now facing. It changes movement from something more “natural” into an action that requires more thought and deliberate intent. Turning a blind corner into an enemy becomes more dangerous when it takes longer to correct yourself despite recognizing the threat almost instantly.
Item management requires making decisions between what is useful and what is necessary due to limited inventory. Combat is often a choice between use of limited resources, recovery items, hostile management, and character maneuverability. These are all choices the player must frequently make under pressure to ensure survival to prevent a loss of progress. This is why limited saves (or saves as a resource) are often used as well. The choice is between securing the progress you have made or risk losing more to get further without the security of a recent save should you make a mistake.
The dread of survival horror is the fear of making the wrong decision but not realizing that until it is too late. I believe this interpretation can be backed up by how survival horror traditionally handles healing. Healing in survival horror games is a conscious decision the players need to constantly make. Healing in these games usually relies on a resource that can be improved when combined with another resource or additional healing item. This results in the player needing to assess the damage they take and choose between using a smaller/less effective healing item to recover some health they currently lost or saving it (using up an inventory slot) to use with another item to increase its potency for when you’re lower on health. However, should a player feel confident in their survivability, they can forgo the healing item and use that limited inventory for either additional weapons or necessary key items.
Fear is subjective by it’s very nature. What could be one person’s phobia could be another’s euphoria, so designing a game to prey upon a specific fear isn’t an assured way to engage players. If the game was designed purely to scare you in a very direct sense, then there would be little reason to replay the game once you’ve completed it once. Horror games tend to have the players overcoming the direct cause of distress or monster by the end of the game as a symbol of overcoming the fear that the player was initially still trying to comprehend. This frequently manifests in the game’s unlockable extra’s after completion. The most common and notable of these unlocks comes in the form of New Game+ modes.
New Game+ is another means of going through a horror game as they allow you to typically carry over weapons, upgrades, and items from the end of your first game to the start of another playthrough. If the intent was purely to disempower and frighten the player, then why would New Game+ still be consistently added into these games? Unless there are significant changes to the game on repeat runs, New Game+ does little more than allow the player to experience the game again with a lower sense of danger/threat due to the knowledge and resources carried over from a previously completed run.
I believe that New Game+ allows these games to be experienced in a more diverse manner. If the enemies pose little threat, then the experience shifts to an enjoyment of the exploration, discovery, and other aspects of the game that one might not have been able to enjoy as thoroughly if they were too focused on simply needing to survive. Sometimes, the atmosphere is more than enough to be the source of enjoyment itself. It’s similar to a feeling of a haunted house where you, as the customer, are guaranteed to be safe in your experience, but you’re still able to feel that atmosphere of danger and engage with concepts/stories that other forms of media (or just genres) often don’t or can’t.
If NewGame+ can be viewed as an alternative playstyle, then Surivival Horror and Horror games in general can be made with such differing playstyles in mind. We can broaden our definition of what fits a “survival horror” game while allowing developers room to experiment and innovate upon these genres while not being held to the self-imposed standards from well over 30 years ago.
I’ve been a lifelong fan of the mainline Resident Evil titles and each entry has established itself as its own entity with unique ideas that differentiates them from not only one another but the larger gaming landscape as a whole. As gaming grows and more developers experiment with this interactive medium, our understanding and definitions for games should be willing to be subject to change. Not only as a means to better understand these definitions we ourselves have coined, but to push past those established conventions and see what lies beyond long established formulas in unique and divergent ways.
