I’ve been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead lately. It’s really an amazingly fun game. My friend brought it over a few months ago when he crashed at my place and got me hooked on it. A little late to the party on this one, but that’s how it goes when you’re busy finishing up a game. So most of my spare moments have been spent online blasting zombies.

Actually, when Left 4 Dead came out last November, I was in the UK reviewing the Vertical Slice build of Silent Hill at Climax. The Vertical Slice is a small section of the game (a slice, if you will) where all the elements of the game have been polished to final quality. This lets everyone see what the game will be like, and figure out how long it will really take to make, and a bunch of other really important things. It also is the last chance to make huge sweeping changes to the gameplay, how things work, design, etc. The Vertical Slice for Shattered Memories was really, really good (it actually morphed into the E3 demo build). So, while Valve was releasing their thesis on zombie horror, I was seeing proof that our new direction for the genre would actually work.

It’s interesting to look at the two games, though they seem exact opposites on the surface. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is an attempt to boil the genre down to its key points and then expand on those in appropriate directions. We’ve decided combat is empowering, for example, so instead of making clumsy combat that isn’t fun, we’ve created an action system that doesn’t require direct combat at all. That way enemy encounters are scary, and the player fears for his or her life. But you’ve heard me say all this before. When you get down to it, Shattered Memories throws out all the “survival horror rules” and creates a scary, atmospheric, experience.

Left 4 Dead is scary too. Left 4 Dead also ignores all the “survival horror rules” and instead aspires to be a compelling multiplayer action game. Yeah, it has a whole lot of zombies in it, but it’s scary because it doesn’t “try to be scary.” A lot of scary games create a lot of rules to make things scarier – you get ammo but not a LOT of ammo. Health will be waiting for you but not a LOT of health. It turns into a very structured experience and once you learn the system, you can out-think the game and you’re not scared anymore. In L4D you have nigh-unlimited ammunition, but you can only carry one good gun at a time. You also only have one health pack at a time, and even though the game will magically spawn health if you suck… you feel like you’re inches from death at all times. That forces you to really rely on your companions and, just like that, you feel like you’re in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and all that entails.

The simplicity is what makes it work.

Really, there are only four weapons, maybe five “items,” and what? 6 enemies? On paper it sounds really small and uninteresting, but the secret about Left 4 Dead is that it’s an old-school 2D arcade game from the late 80’s wrapped in the skin of a modern big-budget action title. It’s really the child of Robotron and Gauntlet. I remember being a kid and getting to the final stage of an NES title I’d been playing for weeks. I would start to feel my heart beating out of my chest…even though it was just a game. It’s rare to get that tension and stress from a game these days. …yet every time I hear a Witch crying in L4D I turn off my flashlight and feel a quick burst of terror before forcing myself to continue.

There’s a lot of things modern games could learn from the 8-bit classics. We sometimes forget what those games were like because we look at the primitive graphics, tinny music, and silly storylines. We forget how they felt, though. So it’s interesting when games like Left 4 Dead take an 8-bit experience and sneak it into what you might think was an ordinary FPS about zombies. All I know, is a lot more games scared me back then, before the Survival Horror genre even existed, than have scared me lately. Another really moody, atmospheric genre? Point-and-click Adventures.

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

-Tomm

source: SHSM Blog – Blog 4 Silent Hill | 10/20/2009