Cosmicism!

Fatal Frame is probably the scariest game I’ve ever played.

The basic plot of the game is pretty silly. You are a young Japanese girl investigating a haunted mansion for your lost brother. A magic camera allows you to shoot the ghosts that attack you. As the game progresses, you discover the provenance of all of these ghosts and it is spectacularly creepy, lemme tell ya. What I found so upsetting about the game is the basic premise is that there are all of these forces out there in the universe that are actively malicious and they seriously want to do bad things to as many people as they possibly can… and the only thing you have at your disposal to fight against these malicious entities is a camera.

Taking a step back, there are two basic categories to the horror games: The Resident Evils and the Silent Hills.

The Resident Evils (which include games like Dead Space) rely primarily on the gross-out. They throw zombies at you, and midget zombies, and dog zombies, and penguin zombies, and you’re shooting these awful things as they come at you in a horde. The fight/flight reflex automatically falls well within “fight” territory. The more scarce the ammo is makes for a more harrowing game… but the scariest part of the game is the “cat scare” rather than the actual monsters. You can’t do anything about cat scares, after all.

The Silent Hills (which include such games as the Fatal Frames, and, to a lesser extent, Alan Wake) give a completely different experience: Dread. There are many things going on and you are just this guy and running away is most likely the best option before you. You’ll get eaten later rather than sooner, anyway. DensityDuck, in the Amygdalae! thread, pointed out the following:

“…many studies have shown that people who feel like they’re in control of the situation experience significantly less stress, despite circumstances and events which cause severe stress responses in others. Pilots of aircraft show much lower levels of stress hormones and other indicators than crewmembers or passengers, even though everyone’s in the same situation.”

The Silent Hilly games do everything they can to make the player feel like they are not, absolutely not, in control of the situation. They make the room dark… then give you a flashlight. A poorly functioning flashlight. You see a bare glimpse of something awful and then your brain starts filling in all sorts of little details and something that, in broad daylight, would be merely grotesque turns into something downright nightmarish. Maybe you have a board to fight the bad guys with. Maybe a handgun. The main point is that whatever you have does not feel like it will do you much good at all.

The Saw game that I’m playing is mostly a puzzler kind of game but the horror portions fit squarely in the Silent Hill category. Jigsaw is pulling your strings and pushing you down a path and, really, the main thing you want to do is run away.

Of course, the irony is that the game *IS* beatable and it is possible to fight off the nightmarish demonic creatures with something as silly as a camera or a stick or, if you’re lucky, a handgun. (I mean, why else would you play? Catharsis feels soooo much better when you have to work for it.) The horror is mitigated and, if you’re lucky, all is right in the world. Or, at least, you can put off being eaten for another couple of days.

I still can’t watch splat films, though.