Putting the “horror” back in “survival horror”

Direct combat doesn’t exist in Shattered Memories. As anxious father and full-time fish-out-of-water Harry Mason, you can bat the franchise’s trademark walking cadavers away when they grab you, deter them with flares, hide from them and block their approach with movable objects, but you’re only delaying the inevitable. An eye for exits, rather than headshots, is crucial to success.

Harry's phone serves the same purpose as Isaac Clarke's holo-projectors: it feeds you maps and objectives without jerking you out of the world.

“Rather than iterating on how combat’s worked in other horror games we kind of said, ‘what is absolutely terrifying, what is pure horror?’,” Barlow goes on. “When you’re a child and you wake up screaming from a nightmare, it’s usually a nightmare involving you being chased and not being able to get away, being alone and vulnerable in the dark, that kind of thing.”

In hindsight, it’s a wonder Konami hasn’t taken this approach in the past. Where Resident Evil arguably leaned towards action gaming from inception, breezily free of undertones and mightily obsessed with blood-and-guts moneyshots, Silent Hill is a thoughtful beast. Its enemies are two parts metaphor to one part in-your-face physicality. Besides basic problems of implementation, the presence of combat systems has always resounded oddly with the franchise’s greyscale ethereality.

It’s important not to take the implications of Climax’s move too far, though. Being alone and vulnerable needn’t be incompatible with being able to defend yourself: horror is more nuanced than that. In his article on the genre’s decline, Sterling makes a rather significant oversight: he neglects to consider Monolith’s excellent F.E.A.R. and Condemned titles, all intensely combat-driven, all utterly, utterly terrifying.

You can run. You can hide. But not forever.

This aside, Shattered Memories may be the quiet revolution the genre needs. And there are other reasons to have faith in the future of spooky entertainment this month: Heavy Rain, though not a survival horror game in itself, is similarly averse to codified models of play, similarly opposed to the rule of the gun. Market phenomena come and go, but there’s something timeless about a good scare.