Controls Don't Have to be Scary!

I’ve been slowly working my way through Dead Space over the last five days, hence the lack of updates. I can’t play horror games that quickly, they keep me on edge the entire time I’m playing and after an hour or two I need a break. I suppose that means they are doing their job. I still have about a third of the way to go, but I think I’ve played enough to make an observation. That observation is the survival horror genre is nowhere near dead!

Everyone has been ranting recently about how survival horror is gone and has essentially been replaced by action games with freaky settings. One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about these changes is modern horror games no longer use shoddy controls to create scares. Somehow, by allowing the player the means to control their avatar well diminishes potential scares. Dead Space does control quite well, but it does not feel anywhere near as smooth as something like Gears of War, nor is it trying too.

Dead Space, like RE4 before it, has a much more action oriented control scheme than older horror games, but still creates suspense through urgency and scarcity. Sure you can move, shoot accurately, and melee, but your character still feels far from agile. You are a bulky engineer whose animations take time when you don’t have it to spare. Dead Space is scary from a control point of view not because the controls suck like in the past, but because they are thoughtfully limited. You can move and shoot at the same time, but not very fast. You can melee, but it’s fairly weak against the giant bladed creatures you are fighting and was obviously intended as a last resort in order to escape and shoot from afar. Aiming is easy and intuitive, but in order to take out an enemy quickly and efficiently your shots have to count. Shooting off limbs is the surefire way to accomplish this, but blowing the arm off a charging monster is far from relaxing or simple. Emptying an entire clip into the monster would probably do the trick just as well, but after two or three encounters you’ll find yourself fairly short on bullets. These limitations ensure every encounter is intense and dire, while still controlling like every video game should.

All of these are tricks from the past, just retooled to not control terribly. Why can’t horror games be scary and control well? I think Dead Space does a great job proving that they can. Sure there are a lot of cool new things that make it so successful as well, but saying survival horror is being replaced by action games with monsters is crazy. If tight controls are the biggest worry for this genre, I don’t think we have anything to worry about.