One of my favourite genres of videogame is the ‘survival horror’, which is a fairly odd choice considering that the protagonists of these games are frequently awkward to control, underpowered and die a lot, slowing the games to a crawl, and yet these often have some of the best stories in videogames, Silent Hill 2 showcasing one of the pinnacles of videogame narrative. Ironically, despite the necessarily fantastic horror-elements, survival horror games tend to be among the more realistic videogames, often featuring ordinary people as their main protagonists rather than super-human soldiers, world-class racing drivers or magic-wielding warriors. Being ordinary people, or, at the least, people unprepared for the horrors that await them (as in the Resident Evil series) they are never far from a potential death, and are forced either to make do with what they find lying around (a stick with nails in it and a large iron pipe in Silent Hill, an inordinate amount of progressively more damaging guns, beginning with a pistol and shotgun, all with very limited ammunition in Resident Evil) or run from anything and everything. Consequently, these games are all about caution and pedantic resource management.

Resident Evil, for several years one of the most resolutely archaic of the survival horrors, with its awkward controls that either heightened the tension or made the game unplayable depending on the player, is my favourite survival horror series. I’m not really sure why, the stories are all pretty bad, cliché-ridden and full of pantomime villains, yet there is something intensely satisfying about inching your way through those games, the worlds of which are essentially giant puzzle boxes where doors can only be unlocked in a certain order with keys from other rooms. Something I really like about Resident Evil, and again I can’t say why, is that its time line follows the real world, ie. Resident Evil 1 was released in 1998 and so all the events in that game occur on July 24^th 1998, Resident Evil 4 was released in 2004, and so takes place in that year, etc. The only other franchise I can think of that did this was the X-files, and yet the technique somehow gives a grander sense of story, almost like an alternate history.

Now all this is really an introduction to the main subject of this post: Dead Space. For a long time, in terms of survival horror videogames, there was only really Resident Evil and Silent Hill. There were a couple of other series that achieved some success (though not enough to be made into movies), such as Clock Tower, Alone in the Dark (which actually was made into a universally panned movie by Uwe Boll) and Fatal Frame / Project Zero. Of these I have only played the last: Project Zero 2, which I found to be a disappointment. Not only did it have programming glitches (within the first fifteen minutes I managed to get the protagonist inescapably stuck behind her twin sister and constant companion by wandering into a cupboard-type thing and then not being able to get out because the sister hadn’t been programmed to move when pushed, forcing me to restart), but the general atmosphere was quite uninspiring. Firstly, I took issue with the character designs which were too stylised to maintain any suspension of disbelief. In any other genre stylisation is fine, and can often make a game more aesthetically pleasing by sidestepping the uncanny valley, but for a horror game you need to believe that your avatar is a real person before you can either care or believe what happens to them.

The other big way the game failed for me (though it was the glitches that stopped me playing past the first couple of hours) was the setting. The game takes place in a haunted traditional Japanese village. I’m pretty sure Freud (though I may just again be mindlessly attributing all psychological definition to him since my Google search for the quote turned up no results) defined horror as the ordinary made extraordinary, which is something in my opinion, my favourite horror film, Jacob’s Ladder, does exceptionally well, though for convenience I will take an example from another horror film: The Grudge. In The Grudge there’s that one scene where Buffy’s in the shower washing her hair, and as she reaches up to massage in the shampoo she suddenly feels Kayako’s pale bony hand inside her hair, and it makes everyone jump. That image is so effective because everyone’s used to washing their hair in the shower, and so it immediately terrifies you and stays with you afterwards. The ordinary and the extraordinary.

I’ve never been to a Japanese village, or, for that matter, any part of Japan, and so I don’t feel any connection to the place when I’m pushing my avatar through it, especially since the one in Project Zero 2 never really felt like a place someone could actually live in so much as a stage-set. Silent Hill, conversely, feels instantly familiar because it has that immediate sense of small-town America, with eerily silent rows of houses, apartments, shops, empty diners, a hospital and a school. Same with Raccoon City in Resident Evil 2 and 3 and even that cliché of all horror stories, the haunted mansion of Resident Evil 1 (incidentally, trivia fans, the name puns on the fact that the first game was set in a mansion that was full of evil, ie. evil resided there: Resident Evil, chosen following an internal contest at Capcom when the series had to be renamed for the American market from Biohazard because of copyright issues).

This is kind of the issue I’ve been having with Dead Space, which in many ways is a technically well accomplished game: as the name suggests it is set on a spaceship (in the future obviously), and I’ve never been on a spaceship. For films such as Alien and Event Horizon (which Dead Space has borrowed from almost to the extent of plagiarism) that isn’t particularly a problem, but here it’s just not doing it for me. I guess the place, like Project Zero’s village, just feels like it should have monsters because I’ve never experienced it in any other way, whereas in a mansion, a place of residence, or a town high street one wouldn’t expect to find monsters. Obviously there’s still scary moments, and the whole place is very atmospheric, and the game even does a good job of making you expect a monster to appear and then not producing one, which is somehow more unnerving, but I’ve just not been particularly scared by the game (and games scaring me isn’t particularly hard to do, considering when I was ten, playing the Goosebumps game in broad daylight with my best friend, bearing in mind that this was in the early days of 3D gaming, I was literally incapable of sending my character into the underground tunnels because of the monsters that lived there).

If anything, I’ve found the game mildly annoying, and yet I can’t spot many tangible differences between the gameplay in Dead Space and that in Resident Evil 4 and 5, from which, again, it has borrowed heavily. Perhaps it’s something to do with the frequency, or even the rapidity, of deaths. In Resident Evil, often encounters will very nearly, but not actually, kill your character, leaving them limping along (literally) with the grim feeling that they only just survived that encounter. Dead Space, in my experience, and admittedly playing it on hard mode, since normal seemed too easy after years of Resident Evil, seems far more binary: either you kill the monsters relatively unscathed or you die horribly, forcing a restart. There’s also a few seemingly needless complexities to the combat, like two forms of melee attack and the ability to (without explanation) slow down time in a small area for a limited period, which come on top of the necessities of real-time reloading and healing. In the later Resident Evils, things are a lot simpler, and, as a result, more satisfying: you have standard weapons including pistols, shotguns, machine guns and grenades, you can move or shoot, but not both, if an enemy is stunned you can do a cinematic melee attack such as a pile-driver or a roundhouse, and if anyone gets too close for comfort, as a last resort, you have a combat knife.

Obviously, I hold Resident Evil in high regard, it being, for all its idiosyncrasies, not only my favourite survival horror series, but one of my favourite game series full-stop, not least because of the characters which, though they can often be summed up in single line biographies, such as “young, timid and yet determined female lead,” “smart-talking rookie cop male lead,” “mysterious, authoritative, sunglasses-wearing arch-villain”, they still sit leagues ahead of the characters in Dead Space, the main protagonist of which is a completely mute engineer. For some reason mute protagonists have long been popular in games, with some being more successful than others. It makes sense in games that feature heavy player customisation to not have a character speak in any voice other than the player’s own, and Mario’s certainly never had much need for speaking, while with Half-Life I always felt the game encouraged you to create Gordon Freeman’s dialogue for yourself, since it tries to keep you inside his consciousness in so many other ways, but when you’re playing a named character who inexplicably has a wife who apparently still loves him, it makes sense for him to actually be a character and talk once in a while, especially since he expresses his opinions in his personal log that serves as the player’s objectives screen.

Something I would like to point out however, which doesn’t necessarily work in the game’s favour, is that it really does make you feel like an engineer. Of course the designers needed some mechanic to force the player around the various areas of the ship, but asking you to fix something that goes wrong in every chapter (or at least in the seven that I have played of the twelve) wears pretty thin. Fixing satellite dishes and communications relays may be as arbitrary as any other objective in any other videogame, and yet it somehow feels like actual work, instilling in me the sense of frustration and disinclination that the protagonist, Isaac Clarke, seems incapable of expressing himself.

What I have found interesting about the game, and this is something I doubt the designers either intended or considered, is that I’ve started to question the character of Clarke, or at least of the Clarke I am playing. One of the main mechanics in the game is the strategy of dismembering your enemies in order to kill them. This is fairly unusual as many games usually position the head as the most cost-effective target, as it is in real life, or use glowing weak-points which have to be hit to kill the enemy. In Dead Space the enemies are razor-armed ‘necromorphs’, which are basically all copies of the monsters in John Carpenter’s The Thing, that run at you, claws held high, and the only way to stop them, since they don’t feel pain, is to shoot off either their arms to (ho-ho) disarm them, or their legs to slow them down, in a manner analogous to a child pulling the legs off of spiders or the wings off of dragonflies. That this requires cold precision and coupled with the fact that Clarke is always as completely silent as Michael Myers as well as that years of playing Resident Evil have made me incredibly cautious in any survival horror, to the extent that I lead Clarke to bloodily dismember and behead any dead crewmen he comes across lest they should be mutated and reanimated later, puts me in mind of Nietzsche’s old aphorism: “He who fights monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” Really, regardless of what the situation necessitates, Clarke takes to the violence a little too eagerly for my liking, for someone who’s not a soldier, for someone who has a loving wife one assumes he is desperate to rescue.

Finally, having not yet finished the game, I shall say what I would like to happen, which I am quite certain will not happen, not least because of Clarke’s emotional dissociation disorder: what I would like to happen, which begins to happen in chapter seven, is that Clarke should find his wife and have a chance to rescue her from encroaching monsters (which does happen) but rather than cut to a game over screen when Clarke fails to rescue her, the game should continue and both Clarke and the player would be forced to deal with the guilt and consequence of failing to rescue her. Conversely, should the rescue attempt be successful, Clarke would then be encumbered by his wife, whom he must thenceforth constantly shield from danger… actually, now that I think about it, Silent Hill 2 already basically did that…

(I might update this post, further adding to its already over-lengthy length, but don’t count on it. Also, I might write a post on why Silent Hill 2 has one of the best videogame narratives ever, if I haven’t done that already.)

Tags: Alone in the Dark, Clock Tower, Dead Space, Engineering, Fatal Frame, Fredrich Neitzsche, Gordon Freeman, Isaac Clarke, It's Dangerous to go Alone, Japan, magic-wielding warriors, Mario, Michael Myers, Mosnters, Psychopathy, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Videogames, Violence

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Explanations, Opinions, Videogames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.