A week or two ago I was watching someone play through the first Silent Hill game, and I was thinking about the role that combat plays in horror games. In many cases, the entire idea of combat has been phased out of the genre: Helplessness, so the logic goes, is far more terrifying than struggle, running is scarier than fighting, so many horror games now are built around the idea of running and hiding.
I’m starting to wonder, now, if that’s why I’ve been so uninterested in playing most new horror games.
It’s not that that’s a bad line of logic, it just has a narrow conception of what horror is and why we come to it. What’s interesting about making it necessary to run away is it makes the monsters other, alien, distant and unknowable… On the other hand, what’s interesting about making it necessary to fight back is it makes the monsters intimate, similar to us, makes us engage with them on the same terms with which they engage with us.
If you look at the actions portrayed in an old horror game, one with combat, you see a massacre. You see weird creatures react to an intruder with aggression, and see them mercilessly mowed down. You see a lone human cutting a bloody swathe through crowds of creatures which, though they seem grotesque and outlandish, will apparently just stand in place until the player comes and finds them. The player’s character is the one who seems out of place – and, though the narrative casts them as weak and vulnerable, in the reality of the game they are tremendously powerful, nigh-unstoppable killing machines.
I think a lot of very clever designers saw this and felt that it was a contradiction, that the games were undermining themselves. And, certainly, from the perspective of creating an experience in the player of being weak, hunted, of having their world attacked by something outside and unknowable, that’s a fair assessment.
Personally, though, I like the other experience. I like being part of the hellscape, part of the calamity that is consuming the world, not just being there but belonging there – perhaps well-intentioned but, in the end, no less monstrous than the monsters I fight. The game that I think has captured this sensation best is, I think, Vampire, The Masquerade: Bloodlines, a horror-themed RPG in which you play a vampire. Bloodlines is, in turns, goofy, melodramatic, and genuinely unnerving. In Bloodlines, you undeniably and literally play as a monster – but a monster who lives in a world full of bigger, meaner, scarier monsters, ghosts which cannot be fought against and beasts which cannot be reckoned with. The contradiction has been resolved, but in a completely different way than by removing combat: By couching that combat in a story where we are both mighty and insignificant, truly monstrous but still trying to cling to humanity, a story where we are not a mere victim of happenstance, but where the horror is within us and a part of us, is created.
And, as much as I love the surrealism of horror, sometimes that realism is appealing as well. The terror of power mixed with the terror of powerlessness – the awful awareness of the harm that we can cause with a moment of anger or carelessness. Otherworldly horror begins to seem very worldly indeed.