It’s Survival Week at TheGamer, and I’ve been thinking about battle royale games. They’re not survival games proper, but they combine a lot of the scavenging, crafting and exploration mechanics of survival games with what are essentially deathmatches in an ever-shrinking safe space. Battle royale games are part of the legacy of survival games, but I’m more interested in the genre’s namesake.
As part of TheGamer’sSurvival Weekcoverage, I ruminated on the question of whetherAnimal Crossingcounts as a survival game. Without rehashing that argument again in full, what it came down to was that Animal Crossing features a lot of the survival game trappings - heavy reliance on crafting, progression through utilisation of resources, but no actual survival. But then for so many survival horrors, the ‘survival’ seems to be strictly an optional requirement too.
Notall horror games are survival horrors. While most video games in general are about survival in the basic ‘don’t get a game over’ sense, what separates survival horror from the rest is usually a matter of scarcity. Bullets will be hard to come by, arsenal upgrades and checkpoints will be rare and must be earned, and fleeing most combat encounters is the best way to stay alive. These all imbue you with a spirit of survival - of doing enough to barely get by, of breathlessly racing to the next save game location with just a sliver of health left. But they’re not actually about surviving.
Note:Resident Evil VillageorDead Spacewould be a survival horror, whileDying LightorScornwould be regular ol’ horror games.
Most survival games have additional needs beyond linear progression. You’ll always need to stay warm, or stave off hunger, or avoid radiation. In survival horror games, this has always been less of a factor, but there has been another issue not measured by in-game gauges but by your own heartbeat: dread.
Unfortunately, dread often stems from confusion as much as from fear, but games these days don’t like to confuse us because, even if it’s deliberate and effective, many will mistake this for bad game design. They also prefer to give us more cinematic sequences that we can fight our way through, as the recent (and largely poorly received)combat trailer for Silent Hill 2 shows.
I know there are plenty of survival games with more of a horror angle that fit this bill. One of the most famous uses of radiation in video games is Stalker, which uses a literal additional resource rather than just cultivating player fear. Meanwhile, Resident Evil 4 Remake upped the action from the original, and I loved the improvements it offered to a game I already thought was one of horror’s scariest soldiers.
But survival horrors are quietly becoming a dominant force in gaming, and going unnoticed largely due to how little they care about actually being survival games. It would be a bit rich to look at a game with the technical prowess, nihilistic tendencies, and landscape shifting narrative ideas ofThe Last of Usand complain about gaming having its edges sanded off, but I’m going to do it anyway. The Last of Us is bold in many ways, but the recently released Lost Levels show (both in their content itself and how polished they are) that Naughty Dog wants to push limits while pleasing all of the people all of the time.
The ‘yellow paint’ debate has exploded in gaming again, but it’s not really about yellow paint. It’s about modern gaming’s obsession with hand-holding, with studio managers fearing that someone might play their game and not know exactly what to do at every single moment. Survival horror cannot continue to evoke feelings of helplessness if they continue to stray further from the idea of survival as a whole.
If more survival horrors become focussed entirely on linear, action-adventure progression, or give us a shotgun instead of shiver up our spine, the idea of ‘survival’ in these games will continue to erode until the genre rules the world on a throne of ashes, with no trace of what made the old gods legends. This genre has flown too close to the sun before, with Resident Evil almost collapsing through 5 and 6 and Dino Crisis succeeding with 3.
Action games are fun, shooting guns in video games is fun, not having to worry about how many bullets you have as you obliterate a room full of zombies is fun. But survival horror games aren’t fun, or they aren’t meant to be. They’re something else, something the Germans probably have a word for. This genre is about allowing us to enjoy being scared, being helpless, being stuck. Take that away, and you’re not a survival horror anymore.
Survival Week
Welcome to the home of TheGamer’s Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you’ll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
