It should start off ”very mundane” in setting to give us normalcy so we can ”draw close parallels” to our own lives. Let the horror elements take a while to build to so it hits better.
Overall the studio feels too many treat horror as if it were action; the two don’t occupy the same space. For it to be genuinely scaring you need to scale back ‘action’.
True horror comes from what our own minds project on the environment around us, notes Fractional, and that should be leveraged a lot more. Did you hear that? Did something just move over there? These are questions you want plaguing a gamer as they turn corners and creep through doorways.
”Around 10 years ago, a lot of very interesting and ground breaking horror games were released. These include Silent Hill (1999), Fatal Frame (2001), Forbidden Siren (2003) and a few more. Since then not much has happened in the video-game horror genre and little has evolved,” blogged Fractional Games.
”So what exactly can be done to push horror in video-games further?”
The highlighted points are Normality, Long Build-up, Doubt, Minimal Combat, No Enemies, Open world, Agency, Reflection, Implications and Human interaction. The 10 point list makes for good reading.
Resident Evil fans have been complaining to Capcom over the years that too much of the series is now action focused, but the Japanese publisher has said they’re responding to what people expect of the horror genre these days - which is apparently a lot more action in the formula. Maybe Capcom should let Fractional have a crack at it?
