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Fear Itself

F.E.A.R for the PS3
© Sierra

David Jaffe, one of the few designers to receive legendary status based on one game, God of War, recently asked if a video game could make you cry. This thought isn’t new. Will Wright and other softies posed the same question years ago, but you tend to take it seriously when it comes from a man who creates lead characters with cast-iron chains soldered to their arms and retractable blades spinning from said appendages. You might cry for Zelda, sure, but not for Kratos. Who cares what happened to his family? You don’t while attempting to murder Medusa. 

On the eve of the new game systems, a more important, more pertinent question is if a video game can actually scare you. The industry has yet to produce its The Ring, or even its Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the blocky Atari 2600 version notwithstanding). There is yet to be a game that makes the player involuntarily drop his or her joystick in pure shock. No title has everyone running out of the room in horror or hiding their face, behind-bars style, watching the monitor. Will Blu-Ray technology and other high-tech buzzwords finally give us the willies? I’m not so sure. 

Case in point: Late summer I was invited up to Vivendi Universal to preview F.E.A.R. on the Playstation 3. Not unlike Half-Life a few years ago, this first-person shooter racked up dozens of 2005 PC Game of the Year awards. F.E.A.R., or First Encounter Assault Recon, is a shoot-‘em-up with X-Files-inspired enemies: grotesque aliens, invisible monsters and flesh-eating ghosts. The ringleader is a raven-haired girl who favors Samara from The Ring. She flashes onscreen at random intervals just to **fuck** with you. F.E.A.R. provides few twists to the genre, and the PS3 version, frankly, just looked prettier, but it’s still a worthwhile game. 

The real twist was, as I played in a dark room for almost two hours straight, I never flinched. Sure, watching my teammate lose all his outer skin made me virtually gag (the PS3 does have good graphics!) and there was a foreboding sense some monster could appear at any second. However, I felt much queasier watching, say, the intestine scene from The Cell, or even walking into the bathroom area of the last Silent Hill game, and the acute sense of impending doom has been the first-person shooter m.o. since, well, Doom. And what we’re talking about here are bloody scenes and suspense. We’re not talking about fear. 

This isn’t Vivendi’s fault. It is our age. Movies have had more than a century to learn scare tactics. Creepy tales grew drastically after the beginnings of recorded sound in the mid-1800’s, but even before phonographs town griots and history keepers could give locals an excellent fright. Video games are hardly older than the average video game player. (The Electronic Software Association recently pegged 30 years of age average.) Other art forms are passive. You sit there, you get scared. Video games are different. We haven’t had time to figure out what really scares people in a fully-interactive medium. 

There have been several good attempts within gaming history. The 2002 Nintendo thriller Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem would fudge controls, blank the screen and do other psychological tricks to mess with the player’s mind. Unfortunately, like Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts and similar mind-bending games, no one bought the damn thing. Konami’s aforementioned Silent Hill series definitely has a scary atmosphere, but its gameplay plods along so slowly, an actual enemy attack is less trauma and more relief. Ditto for Clock Tower, Fatal Frame, and other Japanese survival horror games – protect a school girl with time-traveling powers! protect a school girl with a magic ghost camera! – which seem to be the exact same game with different sprites. Atlus’ Rule of Rose, which I haven’t had an opportunity to play in its final version, looks a bit different, probably because the two lead characters look mildly psychotic and there is some strange sexual undercurrent to the whole adventure. At least it’s something different. 

The decade-old Resident Evil series arguably began the whole “survival horror” genre and established the clichéd storyline: innocent victim becomes unlikely hero against unspeakable terror, forced to wander nonsensical arenas, often backtracking, to find odd items for even odder uses, not unlike a TRS-80 text adventure. And there will be blood. In Resident Evil’s case, a malicious corporation’s experiments go awry, creating a mutant army only you can stop. There are nearly a dozen Resident Evil games. Even RE fanboys would have a difficult time defending all the shoddy sequels, except for perhaps Resident Evil Code: Veronica and, of course, last year’s Resident Evil 4. 

Resident Evil 4 was a wonderful instance of a game company starting from scratch. Capcom knew the Resident Evil series was getting ripe. That’s why they scrapped the formula. Unlike the prequels, the puzzles were logical, the horror intense and the Nintendo GameCube graphics, quite honestly, rivaled anything seen yet on the Wii. Aside from the main characters, Capcom could have slapped the name Evil Empire on it and no one would have known it was part of the same series. Resident Evil 4 definitely had its moments, but honestly, it still doesn’t match a good horror flick. 

Resident Evil 4 does make gamers much more hopeful for Capcom’s just announced Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. Insiders expect this exclusive Nintendo Wii game to be an abbreviated compilation of all official Resident Evil sequels (RE1, RE2, etc.). There will be two key differences. First, it will use the Wii-mote. Shooting a shotgun, wielding a knife and other fun activities will be done with your arm. Second, it will purportedly use the same first-person perspective as Resident Evil 4. (Every other Resident Evil game used a distant, oblique third-person camera angle.) Zombies, sea creatures and who knows what else will be in your face. It’s part of what made Resident Evil 4 work and, coupled with the physical interactivity, may propel us into a new era of digital fear.