"Zombie games are dead"
This, apparently, is what one well-known developer was told when they recently pitched a survival horror title at a number of publishers. And while, true enough, the Resident Evil series has seemingly moved away from the undead in favour of diseased Spaniards with pitchforks, surely the excellent Dead Rising suggests there's life in the old dog (or should that be hell hound?) yet.
Then again, perhaps not. Currently, a question mark hangs over the whole horror genre...
Two years ago on this blog, I lamented the fact that many horror games were moving toward an action feel and away from creepy suspense. Even the twitchy psychological horror of the Silent Hill series was watered down somewhat for the forth incarnation in favour of combat and inventory management.
Two years later and little has changed for horror gaming. Like the terrible scary movies Hollywood inflicts on us, which endlessly cannibalise classic shockers (while tearing out any sense of moral ambiguity and peopling the cast with the latest pretty young things), the genre is just going through the motions. Same old transmogrified zombie monsters, same old lank-haired Japanese girl ghosts wavering towards us from the darkness. Has horror run out of shocks?
The next-gen consoles with their sheer graphical muscle, crisp surround sound, and incredible physics should be able to serve up a new order of interactive fear. But we're yet to see much evidence - apart from the aforementioned Dead Rising, which is essentially a satire on zombie horror.
One interesting recent development is the grafting of strategy shooter elements onto horror frameworks. For example, the well-received PC horror shooter F.E.A.R is coming to Xbox 360 and PS3 soon with new levels, weapons and visual elements. This FPS title is based around a specialist squad of solders tasked with investigating and eliminating supernatural foe - sort of X-Files with assault weapons. It's a nicely designed game that uses advanced AI and very subtle lighting to freak the player out and rack up the tension. Nothing new in terms of sheer arse-quaking horror, though.
Next year we'll see Jericho, a fantasy horror yarn from the brain of Clive Barker. It's about a lost Middle Eastern city named Al-Khali terrorised by some form of ancient evil. This really sounds like typical Barker: sort of creepy, but also so removed from real-life it can only really function as a gory Lord of the Rings. The one interesting idea is that, yep, it's a squad-based game, the player controlling a team of soldiers trained in both conventional and magical warfare. Again, grafting traditional strategy shooter elements into a horror universe makes for an interesting shift in gameplay dynamics, but I'd prefer the idea of completely conventional troops being thrust into a weird supernatural horror scenario - an interactive version of movies like Aliens or Dog Soldiers.
Whatever the case, both games show a lack of faith in the olde horror recipe. Similarly, thrillers like Alan Wake and BioShock are being marketed as just that - thrillers - rather than horror adventures. It's almost as though there's an industry-wide attempt to move away - or forward - from horror.
If it's true it would be a shame as there's a huge amount left to explore. Admittedly, we've probably seen enough zombies bursting through doors to last us for several years and possibly, the shock-based gameplay of the survival horror genre was becoming over-familiar (we'll see when Resi 5 arrives..). But there's more to horror than monsters or ghosts. Introversion's strategy title Defcon, for example, presents the once again de rigeur threat of nuclear apocalypse. The Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth is tagged 'The most terrifying film you will ever see' - perhaps climate horror is where videogame developers should be looking.
I said it in 2004 and I'll say it again: horror is all around us. Zombies and monsters are mere escapist lackeys, they rescue us from the worry of what we're really facing. Could we see an age of military horror? Of roadside bombs and charnal house shoot-outs replacing the sterile gadget porn of mainstream stealth shooters? Perhaps it will all be about surburban horror - stalkers and meaningless street violence and the weird boarded up house at the end of the road. Maybe, in rebellion against the sensory opulence of the next-gen era, it will be about unseen horror - madness creeping in from the edge of the screen, heralded by the merest graphical blips, the tiniest sounds tapping away behind us.
Or will the horror genre just slip away, its tricks all run out, its undead shocks too familiar to get at us?
Can horror grow up? Can we?
