Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 has just released, and the internet is going absolutely crazy over it. Once again, it’s a game where you are trapped in a room, with absolutely nothing you can do other than check for the monsters that are very slowly approaching you. You’ll eventually die if you let them get too close. It’s simple and terrifying, and in many people’s eyes, it’s the best horror game franchise to come out in ages.
That’s really odd if you think about it. The entire internet is in an uproar over this game about opening and closing doors, and it’s absolutely nothing like the horror games we used to know and love. Look at Resident Evil , arguably the grandfather of the modern survival horror genre. In that game you were solving puzzles and shooting zombies. What about Silent Hill , a game that many call the perfection of the horror genre? Once again, shooting things and solving puzzles. Modern horror games like Condemned and Dead Space still follow the formula of “shoot things, solve puzzles.” Sitting in a room while opening and closing doors is pretty much the furthest thing from this well-established horror gameplay.
I’d say that the first game to really futz with this formula was Amnesia: The Dark Descent . This game still took place in first person, and still had you solving puzzles, but didn’t give you the ability to shoot anything. Many people called it one of the scariest games of all time, and that’s when we realized, it’s not what you can do that makes a horror game terrifying, but what you can’t do.
Restricting the gamer’s ability to do things instills a feeling of powerlessness. If you were able to punch Freddy Fazbear in the face, the feeling of horror you get when you see him creeping down a hallway would evaporate. The feeling that you are going to die would go away if, say, you had a health bar. FNAF manages to instill fear in you because it gives you no chance to defend yourself. When an animatronic gets to you, you are dead. It’s as simple as that.
If you think about it, this is inadvertently a throwback to even earlier games in the horror genre. Clocktower for the SNES gave you almost no way to defend yourself other than running. 3D Monster Maze , arguably the first horror game ever, simply had you in a maze trying to avoid a monster which, surely enough, jump scared you. Of course, it was an incredibly low rez jump scare using the technology that was available at the time, but it was a jump scare nonetheless.
7271241_03.jpg)
As time went on, we assumed that allowing our protagonists to do more in horror games would make them better, because it made them more real. However, that’s the same attitude we took with just about every game. It’s why 2D platformers nearly faded out as a genre. Why be in 2D when you can be in 3D?
But these days, we are realizing that it’s limitations that make games interesting. That’s why games like Shovel Knight , which for all intents and purposes was made using 8-bit tools, have gotten such high acclaim. So when we encounter a game like Five Nights at Freddy’s with challenging limitations, we suddenly remember what made earlier games, whose limitations were dictated by hardware, so enthralling.
So I guess what I’m saying is that Five Nights at Freddy’s is the horror genre’s Shovel Knight , a game with self imposed limitations (or perhaps limitations of budget) that use those limitations to great effect. I think when the horror genre realizes that manipulation of these limitations is key to instilling feelings of powerlessness and fear, it will become far more robust.
Or we can just keep firing Guillermo Del Toro and Hideo Kojima from our projects. That might work too, right, Konami?