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.

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