FEAR EFFECT

From Crow Country to Resident Evil 9, horror games are still in their ascendancy. But what are the tricks behind making players scared? And can the popularity last?

- ED SMITH

Thomas Grip, co-founder of Frictional Games and the designer behind genre icons such as Penumbra, Amnesia and Soma, has a peculiar piece of advice for horror game creators: make it boring. “It’s critical it’s not too engaging,” he says, “because then it’s like playing Tetris while you’re in the spooky mansion. The ghost is standing behind you, but you don’t notice because you’re too involved in the game of Tetris. You kind of want gameplay that is dull, repetitive or simplistic.”

Brian Clarke, creator of 2022’s The Mortuary Assistant, and now the in-development Paranormal Activity game, has a similar ethos. Explaining the tactics for building an effective scare, he says the goal is to focus the player on something innocuous and then suddenly break the silence. “The key is that the player has something to do that distracts them from the elephant in the room,” Clarke explains. “’I know there’s something creepy in here – but I have to make sure that this swipe-card reader works’. The horror is almost secondary to the menial task.”

This approach characterises a certain type of horror game. Think of Slender, where all you do is walk through a (very plain) forest and pick up eight pieces of paper. The Five Nights At Freddy’s series, especially the earlier games, is similarly routine: check the cameras, monitor the power supply and, if you need to, shut the doors. If survival horror dominated the ’90s, then this subgenre, which DreadXP head of operations Henry Hoare calls “blue-collar horror”, is one of the biggest today. “The player develops expectations in their mind,” Hoare says, referencing other examples such as Lethal Company and Repo, “and then you can subvert those expectations.”