The Vineyards

I am not a fan of scary games and movies. I do not see the appeal in being scared, derive no fun from any hypothetical adrenaline rush, and hate looking over my shoulder and turning on all the lights in the house at night because the most primitive part of my brain insists there is “something” in the darkness. The only reason I can think of for anyone to enjoy this is some form of masochism.

I have had more contact with scary games than movies, perhaps because there is more to a game than just the story. A scary movie may have a good story and be interesting because of that; a scary game may have a good story, fun mechanics, compelling system, rewarding exploration, etc… and be interesting because of all that. In my opinion, the game has more going for it.

And that is why I played System Shock 2 so much (but not nearly enough). I liked the story, liked the enemies, the weapons I had access to  and the leveling and upgrading system. I liked the ship’s design and the vending machines that said “Please make a selection”, and the voice of the doctor and then SHODAN talking to me. On the other hand, this game gave me a silly fear of monkeys (specifically, of monkey-like noises in the distance – or at a low volume on TV) and I keep quotes like “Little ones need lots of care”, “Your flesh betrays you” and “Hurry! Run!” in an unexpectedly warm spot in my heart.

Unfortunately, System Shock 2, which I often see cited as the scariest game ever made, saw me going no further than its first few levels. I gave up shortly before leaving the first ship. I was very interested in the story and having a lot of fun, but there were just more monkeys in the distance than I could handle. It stopped being fun. Granted, I am a terrible FPS player and had made some awful choices in my character, which probably contributed greatly to my decision to stop playing – I am sure the monkeys would seem less scary if I had rifles and grenade launchers instead of a pistol and minor pyrokinesis. Much like it happens in Resident Evil 4 and 5. I recently came across mods that are supposed to improve System Shock 2, so I might play again eventually. I intend to, in fact – it just is not a gaming priority (and gaming itself is not a priority lately… growing up is not nearly as fun as I was told).

In any case, I should mention the scary game by definition, Silent Hill. Although I only played the first one, and only about one fifth of it, really, I really like the mythology behind the series, and I can see how nearly everything in that first game was built around scaring the player: the difficulty in finding and using weapons, the foreboding radio static, the awkward camera angles. And one thing that is mentioned often but deserves it just the same is how a shortcoming of the system was used in favor of the game – the processor could not handle drawing further than a few meters, so they filled everything with fog. That in itself nearly defined the series, and was a brilliant solution.

But one thing I find very funny when discussing scary games is how I am generally held as someone averse to them, when in fact I was there long before most people even knew “scary” was a genre. Resident Evil and Silent Hill get all the praise, but I was in Derceto looking for Jeremy Hartwood’s suicide letter (and then looking for a way out of Derceto) in Alone in the Dark years before Racoon City and Umbrella were conceived. And, heck, I finished it, but the ghost in the armchair scares me to this day. I always look suspiciously at any empty armchair, expecting a translucent polygonal figure to stand up from it, make the ground shake and chase me to the end of the world and back. I suppose it is the price I pay for wanting to see how the story ended. And I believe it could be made into a great movie. Edward Carnby and Emily Hartwood fighting their way out of the mansion, with camera angles similar to the game’s originals, and eventual flashbacks of Jeremy Hartwood fighting whatever had taken over the mansion – for the ultimate bonus, these flashbacks could use the original narration from his letters in the game.

Speaking of which, the voiced books in Alone in the Dark taught me how to say “Cthulhu”. “Kathoolu.” It differs from how most people say it (something like “Kuhtuloo”), but I think it just sounds better that way. Which reminds me: Call of Cthulhu and Dark Seed both had issues and refused to run on my computer at the time (coincidence?). I remember Shadow of the Comet, another game based on that mythology, ran fine, and I believe I finished it, but I recall nothing of the story. I suppose point’n'click adventure games are simply not scary enough to be traumatic.

More recently, I have been stuck in the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3, and one event deserves mentioning. One of the vaults I (“my character”, actually, but you know what I mean) explored had been used for testing airborne hallucinogens. The first few scenes involving that were completely lost to me: the screen turns pinkish and, supposedly, “things” appear and start happening, but when my screen turned pinkish I just thought it was a graphical glitch and stepped back out of the room, which cancelled the scenes…

One scene, however, does not occur right when entering the room, so I could not cancel it by accident, and I was entirely unprepared for it, as I had not seen any before. I was in the middle of a room, the screen turned pinkish and old friends from my original vault came rushing to attack me. From the player’s third-person perspective, the rational point of view, my game not only was having a graphical glitch, it was so bugged it was spawning random characters near me and they were turning hostile for no reason. From my point of view in first person, as the character, I was alone in a nightmarish place where hundreds of people had died, no one was coming to help me, my sight suddenly was messed up and ghosts had appeared and were attacking me. It was funny how the first-person interpretation prevailed. I stepped backwards in a hurry all the way to a corner, bumped into crates and shelves (and surely would have tripped over if the game’s engine was advanced enough), and unloaded all my weapon’s ammo in the general direction of those ghosts (and did it manually, instead of using the VATS aiming system, with which I would not miss), and kept clicking even with no bullets left. It was a rather cinematic scene, I am sure. Then the “glitch” disappeared, I realized it was only part of the game, and noticed what had just happened, what I had done, and found it quite amazing. I disliked the experience, the moment of despair, but seeing how something like that may happen was very interesting.

I suppose this kind of moment is what fans of scary games are after. I will keep playing with lights on, for the story and the fun.