It’s been a while since we had a blog update hasn’t it? Sorry about that! Let’s blame jetlag. Has everyone had a chance to check out the new and improved Konami.com? Hopefully, since you’re here reading the blog. But enough intro-ing, let’s get down to business.

For a while now, people have been interested to learn more about our combat system. More specifically, that it’s not a combat system—Harry Mason can’t kill his foes with a shotgun, or a crowbar, or a hatchet, or a knife. When Silent Hill plunges Harry into a Nightmare, he’s pretty defenseless, and he’s got to use his wits to outsmart and outrun the hideous Creatures that pursue him. This has led to a lot of interviews where I’m asked “So you really took combat out?”

I’ve said it over and over by this point, but you shouldn’t look at this like we REMOVED anything. That would imply at some point Shattered Memories featured combat, and we took it out of the game. We planned this game from day 1 to have a different kind of action element – one that didn’t empower the player with an arsenal of weapons and health items. Because if you feel capable, you can’t be very scared. We’ve been thinking of ways to encounter monsters without direct combat over the course of the entire project.

So why did we end up with the system featured in Shattered Memories? Well as I (and Mark, and Sam) have said in these blogs, our goal was to re-invent Survival Horror as a genre. If we were asked to make a horror game in a world where the horror genre didn’t have 15 years of history, what would that game look like? And so we looked at the same sources of inspiration that were drawn from a decade and a half ago: horror films.

This was a critical moment for Shattered Memories. If you look at the pacing of most survival horror games, they are absolutely nothing like horror films. Imagine sitting in the theater watching a hypothetical horror movie. The protagonist starts at a new school where SOMETHING IS WRONG. After gym class, a demon appears and the protagonist finds a baseball bat nearby and kills it. Then the protagonist has a lunch period and meets their first friend—the conversation is interrupted by a demon appearing, who is then again killed with the baseball bat. After class, they go to the new friend’s house, killing two demons on the way. It turns out, the friend’s dad is a cop, and so the protagonist tries out the .45 pistol sitting nearby… when an even tougher demon shows up!

You can see, there’s no time to establish tension because plot points are just being interrupted by “scary things” that as a result aren’t very scary. With Shattered Memories, we took a look at how actual films ARE structured. There are long stretches of non-scary stuff, then short to medium stretches of tense, scary action. Running from a killer, a ghost, hiding, etc. These are tense SEQUENCES, not moments. Shattered Memories’ Nightmares are patterned to be tense, frightening sequences rather than simple monster encounters. The idea is to get your adrenaline really flowing for a few minutes rather than just making you jump for a split second. In a good horror film it actually feels like you, the viewer, are stuck in these sequences and can’t escape. You’re hoping the protagonist escapes because it means you finally get to rest. That’s the feeling we want our Nightmares to replicate.

How scary would The Grudge film (either version) have been if the “apartment level” had been “crawling with cat boys”? Instead, we had an amazing sequence where the tension build from seeing glimpses of the curse stalking the protagonist until it snuck into her room to attack. This isn’t to say that the “normal” way of doing things in games is bad. There are plenty of horror films (zombie movies mostly) that follow the exact same structure: uh oh, monsters! Do something! However, we felt there were other ways of bringing horror into gaming, and Shattered Memories is exploring that avenue.

So the real fear creeps in when you learn how dangerous the Nightmares are… but realize you never know when they’re coming. All you know is when the ice DOES freeze over everything you see… you’re trapped in there. You don’t know for how long. Now that’s scary.

Silent Hill is a mysterious place; maybe this will all make sense one day!

-Tomm

source: SHSM Blog – Horror Movies and Pacing | 11/26/2009