I want to open this article by saying, “preparation for these countdowns is always an interesting and/or difficult experience”, but that would imply that I ever actually do any preparation at all. Which, I do not. The farthest along I get is maybe having a short list of vague ideas before we start, but no actual work goes into any given article until the day I’m supposed to post it. And even then, more often then not, any ideas I might’ve thought of in advance get put on the perpetual back burner because some other thing popped into my malformed brain at the very last second.
Take today, for example. I had originally planned on doing a bit of art today, as I like to put out at least one piece for the countdown (maybe more). I’ve planned to hopefully do Sound Breakdown Paradise entries on G Darius and Drakengard/Drag-On Dragoon sometime this month, and thought about giving those a try. Talking about Candyman, one of my favourite horror films of all time, also occurred to me.
But, see, a couple of days ago, I caught a playthrough of a little indie title called FAITH, and it got me thinking about something. Specifically, it got me thinking about how retro video game aesthetics, from sound to visuals, can be used within a horror framework, and how/why they can work to scare us.
First, to give a bit of context, let’s talk about FAITH. It’s a fairly short affair developed primarily as a passion project, and takes heavy inspiration from two sources; The Exorcist, and the aesthetic qualities of platforms like the Atari 2600, Apple II, and MS-DOS. The former is reflected in the story; you take on the role of a Priest, returning to a now-abandoned house out in the sticks where exactly one year ago, he was involved in the exorcism of a demon-possessed 17 year old girl that went horrifically wrong. Haunted by his failures, which cost the girl’s family their lives, he seeks to finish what he started by whatever means necessary- and to hell with what the Vatican has to say about it. The latter is, well, fairly evident; it’s graphics are extremely pixilated and simple, music is for the most part quite sparse and rendered using extremely primitive sound hardware (or software emulating it), and the gameplay requires directional keys and a single context-sensitive button. Throw in some devious difficulty in what few enemy encounters there are and practically non-existent guidance on what exactly you need to do, and the only real indicator of the game being made in 2017 instead of 1982 is the odd bit of rotoscoped animation used here or there.
Yet, something about the mood an ambiance of the piece really struck a chord with me in ways that a lot of modern horror titles simply don’t. And it’s entirely because the game uses that framework of a long-lost Atari 2600 title in the first place.
I know I’m not alone in finding retro aesthetics unnerving in certain contexts; the rise of the Video Game Creepypasta, in all it’s hyper-realistic-gore-y glory, is proof enough of that on it’s own. But there are other examples; titles like Sweet Home and Splatterhouse are both cult favourites amongst some gamers, and titles like Nanashi no Game actively build half their experience on an in-universe haunted video game with an 8-bit slant. Why is that, exactly? Well, I’ve got a couple of ideas.
The most obvious one, and the one at the very heart of the aforementioned Creepypastas, is the active corruption of something nostalgic; re-framing something that provided a certain generation with a lot of joy- old NES games, for example- as something far more sinister. Actively dangerous, even. It’s not exactly a fresh idea in horror- you could make the argument that the “Haunted Doll/Toy/Puppet etc.” category of Spook Stories makes use of that very same idea. But it’s well worn ground for a reason, and that reason is because it can work spectacularly well in the hands of a capable storyteller. I think, though, there’s a factor at play that runs a lot deeper then that; something purely cerebral, that draws on a core rule of scaring people that’s been at the heart of horror since before the written word was a thing, I’d wager;
The mind of the audience an invaluable weapon in the arsenal of a horror writer, for their imagination will run wild with what you give them, thereby scaring themselves.
Allow me to explain further, because it makes use of this rule in a way that’s not immediately obvious, but makes all the sense in the world when you think about it.
Video Games are still an incredibly young medium; give or take, they’re only around 40 years old, which is nothing compared to the history of, say, painting or writing. It’s only within perhaps the last decade or so that we’ve really begun to create games with such stunning graphical fidelity and gameplay complexity that they feel like true simulations of real life- or, at least, fantastical scenarios rendered as realistically as possible. The further back you go into gaming’s history, games gradually turn from realistic to cartoonish, and then from cartoonish to downright abstract. Technology simply wasn’t powerful enough to create experiences that felt “real” in the way we would use the term now, and as a result they often had to rely on the imagination of the players to take the simplified or highly stylised graphics to paint a more intimate picture of what they were experiencing. How “real” or personal a video game felt depended far more on how willing a player was to invest themselves in the experience you were trying to sell them, because you couldn’t give them the grand picture you’d built in your head within the game itself; you were forced to comprise and give them just enough to understand, but leave it vague enough that it would actually run on whatever hardware you were using (and, by proxy, leave it vague enough for players to fill in the gaps in their heads). You could help them along with incredible cover artwork and by filling out the details of the story and world building through manuals, of course, but even those still left your audience plenty of room to imagine.
Let’s jump back to FAITH for a minute and look at it closer.
What does that white thing that stalks your player character in the forest look like, exactly? There isn’t really a wrong or right answer to that question; the creator of the game obviously had a specific idea (and the text in one of the game’s endings does communicate that idea to the player), but based solely on that shuffling sprite, babbling out garbled, digitised text-to-speech soundbytes that can’t possibly be deciphered as it kills you in a single hit, a reference pool of even just five different people will give you five different interpretations.
Whether or not that’s a failing on the developer’s part to communicate their idea with very limited resources is a discussion for another time, but it is absolutely crucial to my point; the abstract nature of that thing’s sprite is precisely why it’s so unsettling, and may for some individuals (myself included) read as creepier and far more terrifying then anything you may encounter in, say, The Evil Within 2.
Not being able to fully realise your terrifying tale in full detail will initially seem like a roadblock that’s impossible to overcome, but in my opinion, it creates the perfect conditions to truly get under the player’s skin. As outlined above, the audience’s imagination holds a considerable sway over how much your story will affect them on an emotional level. When you give the player just enough of a visual clue to understand that their surroundings and the residents within are hostile and deadly, but withhold enough that there simply isn’t a clear picture laid out before their eyes, you’ll do more then merely give their amygdala a cheeky tickle. By using your limitations creatively and giving your audience just enough of an idea of what’s going on, they’ll fill in all the blanks for you. They’ll create things horrifying in ways and to degrees that never would have occurred to you in the design process, and their experience will be all the more memorable for it.
Older video games are so good at having this effect on the people playing them, that a lot of the time this kind of thing happens entirely by accident, in games that were never meant to be scary in the first place. My go to example is a game that I was exposed to only relatively recently, but that stands out as an incredibly unnerving experience to such a degree I wonder how in gods name the individual or team responsible failed to notice they’d accidentally made a horror classic: Punchy, for the ZX Spectrum.
Barely understandable visuals? Check. Far too loud and slightly detuned music? Check. Utterly incomprehensible voice clips? Check. The entire experience is really offputting, but special mention must go to what happens when the player loses a life- skip to 2:43 in the video above to bare witness to it yourselves. Needless to say, I have never felt more incentivised to 1cc a game then I have knowing that if I fail, that is my punishment.
It almost goes without saying that all of this is entirely subjective, of course. Horror, like most things, isn’t something that can be narrowly defined in one or two points; what is scary to one, is not to another. This is by no means a bad thing; it’s through that fluidity that many people from all walks of life have been able to connect with one another, and discuss the merits and failings of the genre as they see it. Think of this article as less of a objective analysis, so much as it is my own interpretation of how this one aspect of Horror might work on a psychological level.
~ Decon Theed, 13/10/17
images sourced from giantbomb.com, thegamersnotebook.blogspot.com, ocdgamer.dk, creepypasta.wikia.com, videogamecritic.com, i-mockery.com
the NES Godzilla Creepypasta screenshot was created and doctored by Cosbydaf