Is "horror" a legitimate game genre?

I assume it's generally agreed that game genres should be classified by the core mechanics that define them. Beat 'em ups are action titles where players fight through hordes of enemies to progress, platformers have players running and jumping across obstacles and platforms to advance, etc.

One of the things that's confused me is the classification of the horror/survival-horror genre. Is horror really a descriptor of a game mechanics, or is it just a theme taken by games. Lots of games have horror theming, but more often than not doesn't contribute to the design of its systems. One aspect of some games do with their mechanics that actually goes contribute to some feeling of horror is that they usually given less responsiveness or immediate control over things in the game to make things less certain for the player. However, it's often pretty easy to adapt to those sorts of control and, being that games are just computer programs, they're mostly predictable in their behavior, thus removing that feeling of uncertainty that fuels horror.

Are survival-horror games just survival games with a horror theme, or is there something I'm missing to this "horror" genre?

Slow paced, stiff combat, limited health, healing and fighting ability, emphasis on loneliness, riddles out the ass. That's your genre, not the fact that it aims to be scary.

Its all just semantics.

Is horror the only acceptable medium for a walking simulator? I mean in terms of being powerless and not able to do anything.
Then again, not being able to do anything makes for a pretty shitty game, just a movie where you control the camera.

I guess a good horror game like a good anything is hard to do right. You'd have to toy with player expectations and have things happen where they shouldn't. FPS where your character's screen turns red for 10 seconds and he starts executing your teammates in the back of the head, out of your control. Crafting an expensive ultimate weapon in an rpg only to have it break against the boss, or have it be unknowingly cursed where it erases your save file if you die.


sorry dick, this is gonna hurt

Actually I want to elaborate. The point of diving games up by genre is to make it easier to catalog certain types of games. If someone is a "fan of survival horror" then they are looking for a specific type of game. Silent Hill and Corpse party don't have a lot in common mechanically speaking, but Corpse Party is more similar to Silent Hill than a game like Gears of War.

It's the same thing with rouge likes. Final Fantasy 6 has more in common mechanically with the original Rouge than something like Risk of Rain but I would recommend a fan of Rouge play Risk of Rain before Final Fantasy 6.

A horror game is based on the idea that the player is prey in that game. Things like survival can be toned down to be realistic or weaker in the combat department.

perhaps the payout isn't even that good when it comes to killing enemies. (paying for every mistake that gets you hurt, lack of HP items)

The horror genre works best with atmosphere, confusion, and enemy and stage/level design. Most of these are old tricks since the genre works against human instinct. Such as unknown areas, fog, low visibility, disturbing predators, the unexplainable, hallucinations, lack of resources, little to no people, and finally loneliness.

In order for a horror game to be good it has to illicit a response of uneasiness to its audience.

I think this is actually a pretty good point. Horror does often seem more like a setting or mood for a game than a genre.

Like, just about every good stealth game relies on the player being afraid of getting caught. It always has a degree of fear and tension. But we call them stealth games, not horror games. The horror is an atmosphere thing, not a game genre thing.

Pretty much this OP.


At least for survival-horror.
Holy fuck my dick look at all the Jills.

Recommend me some horror games Holla Forums

The horror genre has many subgenres within, the most prominent being survival horror.

RE3 Jill or bust

REmake, Silent Hill 1-3, RE2, Penumbra, The Suffering & Ties That Bind, Clocktower 1-3, Fatal Frame 1-4, Condemned: Criminal Origins, and Corpse Party.

this one looks the best between those. it looks very similair to Outlast

Think about how horror can actually be conveyed in a video game. It's not enough to just rely on the themes of the story, or the art direction; if the player is an effective combatant, scary things stop being scary. Horror games rely on the player feeling underpowered and under-equipped. You're not a one-man-army, you're not the biggest fish in the pond, and every encounter could very well kill you, or at least cripple you. Hell, some horror games don't have combat at all. It all serves to drive the point home that you're very much out of your depth. If you hear something rattling around in the vents, or screeching behind the next door, it's supposed to make you feel apprehensive and uneasy. It's not supposed to be a cue to pull out your shotgun and wade into the carnage - that's a different genre.

Other genres can have horror elements without being a horror game. Take Left 4 Dead as an example: it's got zombies, darkness, and various twisted creatures that exist solely to fuck your shit up, but the player is an effective combatant. It's just not scary. It has horror elements, but it's not a horror game; the player is much more likely to respond with aggression than fear. I'd use F.E.A.R. as an example as well, but I haven't played much of it, so I can't really comment on it.

While the horror genre has a wider range of game mechanics, the games themselves all offer the same thing to the player: horror. You go into an FPS expecting to shoot some guys from a first-person perspective, you go into a platformer expecting to do a lot of jumping and running around, and you go into a horror game expecting to be scared. Genres are just convenient categories of things that offer similar experiences. They don't have to play the same, it's about how the player experiences the game. Besides, if you consider horror to just be a setting, or a theme, think about how it can be used in an "actual" genre. There's many genres that can't effectively use a horror setting, simply because the gameplay doesn't allow it to be sufficiently scary. I thought about using "horror flight sim" as an example for this, but now that I think about it, it could be interesting.

Most of those just seem like aspects of survival games, not really horror specific. I especially don't see how riddles are a contributing factor to horror. Maybe contributing to that feeling of uncertainty, but I never felt like puzzles were really scary.

But is that something that can be facilitated by game design? Despite how ambiguous a game tries to be, they're still predictable in their behavior. What isn't exactly is as predictable is how the player's would react, which is why I'm skeptical as to how people would be able to define game systems and categorize them based on that.

So how would you define the horror genre?

It isn't the best on the list, it's too wonky. But regardless a good game.

What's with all the shit taste on Holla Forums lately? People want games like fucking walking simulators.

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how is it horror if you can fight back.

You're triggering me here user

How many horror movies where the protag doesn't kill/heavily fight back at the end?

By being spooky. In almost all threads on Holla Forums with "List a scary ass thing in vidya" we get enemies that can be defeated

It can feel that way, but I think there are ways to make it feel more horror than survival. REmake did that well: Punishing players who actively killed every zombie they found by then turning them into Crimson Heads.

And, to be fair, survival as a theme is a pretty common theme in many games anyway. What's usually meant by survival is "limited resources, decision making, and dangerous environments".

How many horror movies where the protag doesn't fix a god damn thing/is lucky to escape with their life at the end?

Games where you can't fight back aren't scary. You play Amnesia? You get seen, you might as well sit there and let them kill you.
Outlast? Piss easy to get away every time.

There's no fear or tension when you're not managing a dwindling supply of ammo and health items.

He's baiting

See, those former two descriptions seem to describe how the game is played. The latter is an expectation based on the whole package of the game - the things in the game will scare you.
No, genre's in any medium describe the conventions shared by types of media. In games, it describes the core mechanical design of a game, not specific implementation, which is why games will play differently despite being in the same genre. I mean RPGs are about character building/management, and yet there are dozens of different systems created for that with different ways of handling attributes, experience, skills, etc. I believe it's even possible to represent that character building without displaying those PnP styled stats.

FUEL IS LOW

This thread reminds me of how Shinji Mikami referred to Amnesia: The Dark Descent as "pure horror", since there's no real way to defend yourself whilst he called games like Resident Evil and The Evil Within "survival horror" because they focus more on the player defending themselves.

If he's this out of touch no wonder TEW was a shitty game.

Does postal 1 count as horror?

TEW suffered more from the fact that Mikami lacked the money and manpower he had over at Capcom.

No user, Postal isn't a horror game.

Literally everything suffered in that game, down to the very core of it's gameplay and story.

Is DMC 1 a horror game?

How the fuck do you even figure that? Nothing in it implies low budget were a consideration for the game mechanics, world and story being so shit.

Sorry. I should've said it was an assumption, given that it's kind of a pervasive trend in Japanese game development.

the assumption has to come from somewhere though and nowhere in the game does the assumption take any form of reality

DMC isn't a horror game either.


I know where my assumptions on the game's quality come from Besides actually playing. 2nd pic related

and you've yet to mention anything that would indicate budget

IDs man, I'm the one implying Beth had a hand in this garbage as a publisher. 0c7f04 is the budget user.

yeah but you're kinda implying that… oh fuck it who cares

Are there any horror games where the protagonist's mission is to die?

If not, then horror = spooky survival

why aren't walking sims just called interactive VNs or 3d point n clicks?

because the aim of walking simulators is to subvert the medium and destroy it like how modern art destroyed art

because the aim of walking simulators is to subvert the medium and destroy it like how modern art destroyed art

that… Publishers have a significant influence over the game.

That would be an insult to VNs and point and click games.

no need to be so bitter

I don't know user, you seem pretty bitter here:

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In what way? They're both minimal interaction interactive videos

Really now?

One doesn't pretend to be a game, it's an established medium of it's own.
The other has a hell of a lot more depth than a game where you literally hold down the W key the whole time. Point and clicks can be excellent puzzle games.

Horror is as much a genre as Action is.

While Platformer and Adventure give clear descriptions describing what the gameplay is like: Horror and Action are more vague as descriptors.

"Horror" implies that it will evoke feelings of dread, fear, and horror and occasionally scare you while "Action" indicates that it contains action (ie. violence) but neither of them give clear descriptions as to what sort of gameplay entails because there can be platformers that are horror games (Limbo) and action games that are also adventure games (Zelda).

So really, a typical game simultaneously belongs to two genres at once: a thematic genre and a gameplay genre.


No, it's a car.

So basically The Langoliers but in video game format?

Not this batshit retarded argument again, its just isn't true.

I get it that there where people, for who early survival horror games were scary because of the shit controls, and they couldn't get the same feeling from newer once, but the reason for that lies more that they grew up, than the fact that the protagonist of the game is a effective combatant.

The protagonist of the first Resident Evil were a elite SWAT Unit, Edward Carnby from Alone in the Dark was such a cold mutherfucker, that he had the nickname Reptile and the list goes on. The reason they didn't fight better, was because this was the best the developers could create for their game, it wasn't intended or planned.

There are several games that proof a game can be scary despite the fact that the protagonist if a effective combatant, be it Clive Bakers Undying, The Suffering, Nosferatu: Wraith of Malachi, Cry of Fear or even Vampires The Masquerade: Bloodlines, that manages to be scary despite the protagonist being a Vampire with superpowers. Hell the Fatal Frame series decks you out with a Ghost killing Camera and unlimited ammo for it, that relays on the skill of the Player to how good it is.

There are several kinds of horror that relay on the fact that you survive scary situations. You can't be scared of something if you are dead because you couldn't fight back.

There is a German say: Ein Ende mit Schrecken ist besser, als ein endloser Schrecken. A terrible Ending is better, than a endless Terror.

Only if you survive terrible and scary encounters can true horror grow, as you start more and more to fear that it will happen again and that it could get worse.

No, Action is just a broad "super genre" that has many more specific sub-genres (beat em up, platformer, fighting, etc) - similar to the comedy genre in film and the sub-genres like rom-com, slapstick, spoof, etc. Action games are defined by mechanics that test reflexes, motor-skills, and tactile skills. This is also similar to "Strategy" and "Role-Playing" genres.

THANK YOU!

FUCKING THIS!

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I don't believe this shit for a second. Especially considering some of the other games from this generation.

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Isn't that what I said?

I'd also add pic related to that list.

Pretty much. That's why horror games are usually described with an adjective( e.g. Action Horror for Castlevania, Survival Horror for Fatal Frame).

Horror is just a Thematic Genera instead of a Technical Genera (Platformer, FPS, RPG, etc.)

truly a fantastic game with a shitty final boss

Tsk, Tsk.