(Originally posted 8/12/2022)
Very quick blog post here. I was thinking of a new kind of game genre that could be created if it hasn’t been already created.
Horror games are meant to scare players through means like unsettling atmospheres, uncomfortably life-threatening scenarios, or loud jumpscares. When you think about it, all the strategies that these horror games use to elicit fear in the players can be boiled down to subversion of expectations. This is kind of like how comedy works, where jokes serve to build up tension in their setup, then subvert the audience’s expectations in such a way where it eases that tension via the punchline. The difference is that comedy typically serves to relate to you on a basic level, connecting dots to different subjects in an amusing way. Good horror typically serves to relate to your survival instincts, twisting those connected dots of different subjects into a distortion of reality; an viscerally undesirable one.
Some notable examples of this include most of the Five Nights at Freddy’s series, Doki Doki Literature Club!, and the Silent Hill series.
In July 2020, a special horror game known as Carrion was released where players control a tentacle monster, wreaking havoc across a research facility, killing scientists in its way. This has been described as a “reverse-horror” game, since the player takes control of the monster itself, rather than the scientists that the monster preys on. It is a reverse-horror game because it is not the player being threatened. It is the player that threatens the lives of the fictional characters within the game. A role-reversal, if you will.
The term, “reverse-horror”, made me think about the typical progression of horror games, where it typically starts with a general premise where either everything is normal or there is too little information to work with to be intense. Then, as the game progresses, the plot unfolds to be more and more disturbing with an imminent threat approaching.
Then I got to thinking. If reverse-horror means the reversal of roles between the player and the threat, what would you call it if you reversed the typical progression of horror games? What if the game starts with you being hunted down by an imminent threat and as the game progresses, you realize either that the imminent threat is actually harmless or that the world isn’t that disturbing? What if this game starts from a high-point of tension and fear (really hard to accomplish, if not impossible but worth a shot) and slowly untwists the connected dots that resided in the player’s head at the start of the game, effectively undistorting the game’s reality in the end?
An “inverse-horror” game, if you will. That is all.
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