Horror Media Analysis
My idea admittedly did not come from a vaccuum, but rather is a mishmash of different horror media that has affected me over the years – as well as a few other elements thrown in. To make the best game I can, I am going to analyse this media, and how to gameify it.
Five Nights at Freddy’s
Five Nights at Freddy’s is an incredibly popular horror game franchise, and I distinctly remember it being unique at the time for its game mechanics. Back then – and even now – most of the “horror” part of horror games came from action: forcing players to do something they really didn’t want to do. (Eg; retrieving a key from the spooky basement to leave the house.) The horror comes from you having to perform the action that will inevitably lead to you being jumpscared, and that creates a feeling of tension. As such, in those horror games you were permitted to walk, and sometimes even run and jump.
Five Nights at Freddy’s, on the other hand, is a different matter. You are trapped inside a tiny office, while animatronic monsters hunt you. So instead of having to go seek out the terror, it comes to you, breeding a sense of panic and stress, and most importantly of all, helplessness. The horror is based around two pillars: the abscence of information (which prevents planning, a source of comfort), and the abscence of action.
Abscence of Information
During gameplay you are given very little information to work with, and the small amout you do have comes at a cost. For instance, you’re given a camera system in order to watch the animatronics and ensure they don’t get too close – but use it too often, and the power runs out, leaving you trapped and vulnerable. The need to keep an eye on the animatronics clashes with the need to keep the power on, creating a stressful, panicked atmosphere.
The more time you spend in the game, the more information you’re able to pick up – most of it comes as audio cues. For instance, the ominous rattling sounds are Chica in the kitchen, which gives you an idea of where she is without having to use the cameras. Another example is that every time Freddy laughs, he moves from room to room – so if you count the number of times he laughs, you’re able to determine how close he is to you.
But there are also red herrings: information you think is useful, but isn’t. A man on the phone will leave a recorded message, and initially his recordings are useful – he gives you the tutorial on how to use the game, tips you off about Foxy in Pirate Cove, and will give small tidbits of the in-game lore. As the nights go on however, his recordings become less and less useful, and even distracting as you find out the animatronics will come for you even when his recording is playing – he will talk over important audio clues, and your attention is divided between him and survival. Information becomes muddied, which contributes to a lingering sense of paranoia.
Absence of Action
During gameplay, you are also prevented from doing a lot of things ordinary horror games would allow, such as running and hiding. The only actions you have in FNaF are checking the cameras, turning on the door lights, and shutting the doors – and two of those will, on ocassion, stop working, which makes the abscence of action even more threatening.
For instance, the camera video and audio are of grainy quality – video feedback is through a fuzz of static and the night’s darkness make it difficult to see the animatronics stalking you. Sometimes they will outright fail. The door lights flicker weakly as your last line of defense. And shutting the door is comforting at first – they are metal, and make a heavy slam sound that reinforces the idea you’re safe – but takes up power. If you’re too slow to close the door in the face of an animatronic, they will fail: instead of a heavy slam, you’ll hear an abrupt, jammy sound. The deviation from what the player is used to fosters panic, because now you have no defense at all. So even the few actions you can take are flawed or limited, heightening the player’s sense of paranoia.
Where FNaF Fails
However, the horror of FNaF fails when the skills start to pick up. As the player begins to recognise patterns, their terror diminishes as they realise what it is they have to do. Using the cameras isn’t even technically a requirement. Apart from to check on Foxy at Pirate Cove, the only thing the player needs to do is check when Bonnie and Chica are at the doors – it becomes a balancing game of pattern recognition, rather than identifying and neutralising threats, which they learn as they become less paranoid about the game, and more competant.
This is what I want to change with my horror game. I want the player to have to CONSISTANTLY use the cameras; they should be an essential part of the game experience. Also, I want more randomness, less identified patterns – humans are naturally good at seeking out patterns, and the next logical step is forming a plan to counteract them. This is not absence of information and action, so is something I should do my best to diminish while still creating a possible win state.
Scruffy (2020). How Audio Enhances the Horror of Five Nights At Freddy’s – YouTube. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yTIhtfgDwY.
Layers of Fear
Layers of Fear is another beloved horror game of mine, and the first proper, psychological horror that really frightened me – because of its unpredictable scare pattern, and the pervasive, creeping feeling that you’re slowly losing your mind. You play as a tortured artist – a painter – who is slowly delving into a schizophrenic madness after losing your wife and art gallery to a fire, intent on recreating both the glory days of your art and your wife in one last portrait of her made of a canvas of her own skin, of paint mixed with her own blood and bone, and of brushes made with her hair.
Throughout the entire game you wander from room to room in your mansion, hitting various story beats. Initially the house has an ordinary structure, but as you continue to lose your mind, rooms start to just… appear. You get stuck in endless loops, reflective of drunken psychosis. This is where I draw the parallel to my own game. If not the person at the cameras (the Watcher) I want the player to also have the option the be the Watched – the person trying to escape down twisting, impossible corridors while avoiding cameras and becoming more and more paranoid while doing so. If they are spotted, the Watcher can change the door layout to put them off track. This would not be dissimilar to the way Layers of Fear demonstartes layout changes, and so is a game to keep in mind.
The Magnus Archives
The Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill, and licensed under a Creative Commons attribution non-commerical sharealike 4.0 International License. It is a very appealing horror podcast because of its approach to different kinds of horror: in this world, there are specific Entities that feed and perpetuate different fears – entities that come from the same force, Fear, but are unique in the way they cause Fear. In this way, there will be at least one Fear that scares you, and so at least one episode that horrifies you beyond belief, even if a couple don’t personally work for you. There are around 13 total that come from various human fears – some old, like fear of the Dark and the Hunt coming from our base animal instincts – and some new, like the Web (fear of being controlled or trapped, and especially being unaware of it), and the Spiral (fear of madness).
The Eye
The Eye contains fears of being watched, followed, exposed, and of knowing things that will destroy you. It is a major theme of the entire podcast, but frequently appears as themes to specific episodes too.
A particular inspiration is MAG-148: Extended Surveillence – in my opinion one of the best Eye episodes, following the story of two security guards positioned at a shopping mall, Sunil Maraj and Samson Stiller. Samson becomes obsessed with the old security system, particularly the camera system, insisting on getting it working again using an old, yellowed manual – yet Sunil describes, when he glances at the manual, that he could have sworn he saw a black-and-white picture of himself inside. From there, Samson grows more obsessed, and Sunil describes feeling watched inside the shopping centre, as though the cameras are always trained on him, though they are supposed to be static cameras. When he grows frustrated and throws a soda can at one of the cameras, the next day Samson is wearing sunglasses. Then one day, Samson disappears, and Sunil gets a call from another coworker Dave, who is incoherant, and keeps repeating, “what do we do with his eyes?” and “he won’t stop, we can’t get rid of his face.” When Sunil goes back to work, both Samson, Dave, and a few other coworkers are gone; the only thing left the manual wrapped in Samson’s shirt.
This is a particular inspiration, because like Samson, I also want the Watcher to have a connection with the monitors.
The Spiral
The spiral contains the fears of madness, that the world isn’t right, or that you are being persistently lied to, and deals with deception of the mind and senses. It is one of my personal favourites, with episodes and characters’ being centralised around randomness and desperation.
The first Spiral-influenced inspiration for my game is MAG-47: The New Door. Helen Richardson, an estate agent, tells the story of a new door she found while on a house viewing for a msyerious, inhuman man. She doesn’t remember going through the door, but vividly tells of what was inside: a corridor with green wallpaper, black rug, and pale yellow carpets, that curved just ever so slightly to the left. Helen begins to explore the corridor looking for a way out, and finds its layout endless and impossible – only the decoration changes, but so slowly that it’s almost imperceptible when the walls change from green to yellow. She spends 3 days in the corridors, until she encounters an approaching, distorted humanoid with pointed hands; the pictures around her and the mirrors all change to reflect this creature, and when she pushes up against the last unchanged mirror, Helen falls through and ends up miles away from the location of the house she was in.
However, my favourite episode of the Spiral is MAG-65: Binary – one of the best The Magnus Archives episodes that horrified me beyond belief. Tessa Winters makes a statement about an urban legend chatbot she downloaded from the internet about Sergey Ushenka, a man who uploaded his brain into a computer – the urban legend lists various methods from writing code in blood to cramming his brain in a monitor – but found out it wasn’t what he thought. When Tessa Winters opens the chatbot, it starts doing strange things to her computer, and eventually settles on a grainy, 2000s-era video of a man sitting at his desk, slowly eating his entire computer. The video follows her through all her technology until she sits down and watches the entire 17-hour long video. By far it is one of the most popular episodes through the language alone, and the idea of having to think through numbers and code instead of a brain.
Through these two episodes, there’s again this idea of being connected to monitors, and of twisting, spiralling corridors that seem to watch you – more inspiration for my game going forward.
The Stanley Parable
The Stanley Parable is, notably, not a horror game. It is a choice-based story game following a man and the disembodied voice of the “Narrator” attempting to guide him: you as the player can ignore his instructions, and doing so will result in different endings. Yet, for some reason, there was something that always scared me about the Stanley Parable game. Something about the endless yellow corridors stretching on, contributing to the idea that I’m trapped in this world, and the feeling of being constantly controlled and… percieved by something.
The Stanley Parable holds many different philosophical conversations in its endings about existentialism. A few go in deth to explore the relationship between Stanley and the Narrator in the game. Because while you can disregard the Narrator, you are intimitely tied to him, as he is to the player Stanley – without each other, the game starts to break down. When the Narrator is without Stanley, he has no purpose, and begs for Stanley to return to him. When Stanley is without the Narrator, he has no goal or objective, and the player is left to wander empty corridors that slowly grow more and more broken.
And most importantly, no matter how many endings you explore, and no matter whether you listen or not to the Narrator, in the end the game will always reset to the beginning – your progress will be lost, and you – or, rather, Stanley – is trapped here, forever.
Munt Chunk (2022). The Existential Fear of The Stanley Parable. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZNH7mJZuQU [Accessed 30 Oct. 2024].
Yellow Zone
Yellow Zone is an animation by Sad-ist on Youtube that is hevaily inspired by the Stanley Parable game, and heavily features some of the surveillence ideas that I want in my game – particularly the idea that you might be able to destroy cameras and outsmart the Watcher.
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