communism and milkshake

Top 5 games of the year time

Although it’s a tad late, I think I’m still in the window to post a list of the top 5 games of 2011. So in no particular order:

Recently I’ve been playing Demons’ Souls (because I have no money for Dark Souls) and it’s made me think about the emotion of fear in a videogame and how so many try to bring this to the table narratively, yet fail with their mechanics. Now many games have succeeded, notably Silent Hill 2 with both its narrative and mechanics, however recently games such FEAR 3 and a several other horror games have failed to bring this emotion into play in a credible and worthwhile way. And it is this very emotion that Demon’s Souls brings to the player with its design and mechanics.

To begin one has to look at the nature of death within in video games. More so in modern gaming, checkpoints have been more liberally used to reduce the penalty that death poses, creating games that are more a ride as opposed to a challenge complete. Comparing this to the “nintendo hard” days of old, this shows a remarkable shift within videogames, one which arguably can be seen to damage the ability to which games can invoke emotions such as fear to stop frustration from challenge. Looking at FEAR 3 and also FEAR 2 in particular, this poses a challenge to create the atmosphere and fear the games are going for by creating this narrative and mechanical opposition, where the narrative is trying to force you to be afraid of the game, yet the mechanics place the player in a position where they can be described as a “killing machine” with little fear of death from check pointing and features such as bullet time to ease the player in their conflicts.

Demon’s Souls however, creates its sense of fear and atmosphere purely from the mechanics and difficulty. While if you die in the game there is little time penalty as is common in modern games, you do lose souls which are attached to a “bloodspot” located a few feet before where you originally died. Souls are important due to their use in levelling and furthering your character and also due to their status as the currency of Demon’s Souls. However, if you die while trying to return to the blood spot, you lose those souls. It should also be noted that all enemies respawn each time you die or return to a world. This creates tense experiences where the further you go into a level, the more tension rises and therefore your fear at what you’re facing. From personal experience, a sleeping dragon that attacks when you go too near goes from a trivial challenge (were it from another game), to one of the scariest experiences I’ve had playing a video game in recent memory. Add to this the fact that any enemy has the ability to kill you just as easily (or as hard) as you can kill them, from the lowly swordsmen you face to the monoliths you fight later on.

This creates the idea that you aren’t fighting an enemy within the game’s boundaries and narrative (there is little narrative structure to be found within the game), but instead are fighting the very game itself. Reinforcing this is the game’s online mode, where players leave notes to each other, while being unable to have a real impact on other player’s games (except with certain items that allow entry for a short time). This fosters both a group community that works to take down the game in anyway, but also keeps that isolation and tension throughout, as the notes are vague enough to only allow an idea to be grasped at what will happen next, as opposed to a full description.

So maybe more games should take a page out of Demon’s Souls’ book, especially horror games, placing a greater emphasis on the use of mechanics to instil fear and horror into a player, rather than graphic images or pure narrative techniques. However niche the game maybe, I think a lot of games have a lot to learn from its example.

Here’s hoping the new Silent Hill takes notice.

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