Imagine you’re standing in a hallway in a game – what does the scene need in order to make it scary? Should we turn the lights off? Should we have a door where you can’t see what’s behind it, but you can something behind it? Should there be a threat somewhere, lurking nearby? Is music important? And at what point is it okay to spring a noisy surprise on the player? In other words, what are the rules of fear?
I’ve been thinking about how games scare people ever since lo-fi horror game Faith: The Unholy Trilogy scared me a few years ago, which isn’t a remarkable feat because I’m a scaredy cat. But what surprised me about Faith was it achieved that feeling, and how little it achieved it with. Here was more or less an 8-bit game, with tiny wriggling sprites and a handful of colours, and it evoked in me the same kind of fear other blockbuster games sometimes struggle to. How was it doing it?
It mystified me enough that I asked Little Nightmares creator Tarsier about fear shortly afterwards, but though the conversation was good, a broader explanation still eluded me. Scaring people remained a magic I couldn’t quite understand, which is when, coincidentally, an answer of sorts came to me.
Magic: just as I’d once asked bright minds from games what magic meant to them, so I would ask scary-game makers how they scared people. Is there a science to it, a formula for fear, and does it change according to the game you’re making? What is the anatomy of a scare?
I sent my ravens out and here are the answers that came cawing back.
Silent Hill creator and Slitterhead director Keiichirō ToyamaTo see this content please enable targeting cookies. Watch on YouTube
Silent Hill is one of the founding series of survival horror, so there are few people who have done more for it, arguably, than Toyama. He also directed the Siren series of horror games, before co-founding studio Bokeh, which recently released Slitterhead.