The World of Scary Video Games by Bernard Perron

Author:Bernard Perron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

FIGURE 22 The Slender Man in Slender: The Eight Pages (Mark J. Hadley 2012).

One of the pages says, “Don’t look . . . or it takes you.” The Slender Man gets closer once spotted, interfering with the audio-vision and definitely coming to kill a gamer. Slender: The Eight Pages is simple, but really has the intended result. For Grip, “If you just make things vague enough, and allow the player to play based on that vagueness, you can make engaging games of pure horror simulation. In some ways, ‘Slender’ is sort of like the ‘Super Mario Bros’ of horror games, a distillation of what makes the genre work into its purest form” (2015: 52). As a matter of fact, it works so well that the game has been cloned many times, among others by Haunt: The Real Slender (Paranormal Dev, 2012); Slender’s Woods (Zykov Eddy, 2012)—with a story mode; Slender: the Arrival (Blue Isle Studios and Parsec Productions, 2013)—with a narrative and a larger world; and Forest (Lukas Jaeckel, 2012)—with a Japanese white ghost with long hair. Statues (Room710Games, 2015) inverses the mechanic of the gaze. While the usual objectives have to be fulfilled in order to escape seven locations (i.e., a hospital, a shopping mall, an amusement park, or a forest), it’s when a gamer is not looking at statues and mannequins that they teleport toward them. Reminiscent of Night Trap, the short point-and-click Five Nights at Freddy’s (Scott Cawthon, 2014; there are five games in the series currently) exploits the idea of surveillance and proposes a pure form too. A night watch security guard looks at the cameras installed in Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza to watch and track the movements of deadly animatronic robots. Since the amount of electricity is limited and the cameras don’t show the entire restaurant, it is not possible to constantly watch the grainy video images and keep the light on or the doors of the office locked. It is these breaches that enable the animatronic bear Freddy and its four friends to come and jump on the guard (often making a gamer jump out of their skin in the process).

The scary atmosphere well and truly takes precedence over the boots and bullets in this cluster. As we have underlined with Ju-On: The Grudge and The Path, some games are to be related to walking simulators or adventure games with few uncomplicated puzzles. The free, short, and experimental indie SCP-087 (Madis Kase, 2012) is an extreme example.42 A gamer simply walks down stairs for a random number of floors leading toward a dark abyss.43 They are pushed further and left to suffocate and imagine the worst that can happen to them the first time they venture into the depths of this stairwell. The soundscape and creepy happenings (l ike a shadow passing by) are procedurally generated to have some variation in every playthrough. The experience is much more narrative oriented in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (The Chinese Room, 2013). A different dwelling and a

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