As much as I’m a big chicken, I love horror games. I played through Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Outlast, Alien: Isolation, and of course Silent Hill 2. For a lot of these games, they all fit in the same genre: survival horror. This genre aims to take the player away from their comfortable home environment and drop them into a world or scenario where they have nothing to defend themselves with. There’s many different ways to make a player feel this dread and insecurity, and the games industry knows this. One of the many ways that game developers pull us into a world of horror and make us truly feel immersed is through audio design.
I’m no audiophile, but I know what I like, and that’s good audio. I love a good set of headphones to listen to the soundscape the developers made. Take Amnesia: The Dark Descent as an example. As you wander around Castle Brennenburg, you hear everything you’d expect to hear in an abandoned and crumbling edifice: wind howls through the broken windows and gaps in the walls, mice can be heard scurrying back and forth, and the strange groaning sound of some unknown creature that feels way too close for comfort. The whole place feels alive, and it shouldn’t. You know you’re in a horror game, you know you’re in control, but you really need that creature behind you to stop breathing on your neck. It’s getting weird.Â
A lot of these games employ a mechanic to track the sanity of the player character. In some cases, if you even look at a monster for too long, you start to go insane. In others, staying in the dark for too long will make the character literally fall to the ground — the view blurs or swirls and the character begins to die slowly. This whole experience of taking sound design, atmospheric storytelling (such as a crumbling, dank building), and then adding in the psychological aspect of going insane — perhaps not having a weapon or tool of defense — creates a true marvel of game design and merger of technologies. It seems mundane now, but it can still bring you kicking and screaming into the game’s world.
These games encourage you to light up the environment with torches or your flashlight to make your way through the castle, and since you go insane if you stay in the dark too long, you really want to do that. You end up having to choose between the safety of light and being seen by the monsters or sitting quietly in the dark, listening to the monsters close in on you, slowly, with little hope of escape. If you don’t go out this Halloween, pick up one of these marvels of game technology and have a good time getting spooked.
