XCOM: is it survival horror? Hafta think.

Let me note that I'm again referring to Enemy Unknown, though this discussion will also mostly apply to the original UFO Defense, and it is specific to the higher difficulties, though not necessarily Iron Man mode (for those who haven't played the game, Iron Man is a one-file-only auto-saving mode that prevents the practice of "save scumming", i.e. reverting to an earlier save when you're losing).

As usual, we need to start from a definition of survival horror. Seriously, at this point it won't be long before I've defined just about every genre ever, I'm moving at such an annoying rate. Horror is something in which video games can really excel beyond any other medium, because the player has a much more vested stake in the action. They can't look away from the screen, because the character in the horrifying situation is an extension of themselves. Yet that notion is not what makes the genre - that's why there's that whole other word in the title. Horror can show up in action games like RE4 or Devil May Cry, RPGs like Shin Megami Tensei, or shooters like DOOM. Survival is the real gameplay meat here. Survival. What the hell does that mean. Not dying?

That creature you see before you is the antithesis of survival

That's quite the insight, "not dying". But that's common to nearly all games. If all we want to do is survive these games, surely dying must factor in more prominently than it does elsewhere. Constant threat of death? That's closer. Survival horrors are going to go for unexpected kills. Unpredictability is part of it. That's not good enough though. Jumps scares, eh. You can unexpectedly fall into a pit in Super Mario Bros. and it'll make for a hilarious moment rather than a terrifying one. I'm gonna go from my gut here. Forget the semantics. I think... survival horror is gameplay in which every forward progress the player takes raises a lethal threat to his success. A game where everything is always at risk. Because when I think about it, RE4, BioShock, and Dead Space were when the genre started to transcend itself. And why did that happen? What was lost, that made these games no longer about survival? That there were conflicts in which you felt no life-threatening stake.

Whew. That felt good. These definitions aren't always easy, because it has to be simple. If it can't fit in one sentence, you've lost it. I'm happy with this one though. Survival horror means you put your life on the line with every step. I'm not really interested in conventions and all that baggage, that's what I mean when I say the definition has to be short and snappy. We want the heart that drives the classics, so we can look at it in a new light.

XCOM is a good way to do that. Taken through the lens of SRPG, it's still a smashing game, but a familiar one. Units are fragile and expendable, weapons are inaccurate, fog of war. That about covers it. But if we look at it as a survival horror, it's a unique and expansive experiment. Now I know the other Greg out there reading is all riled up right about now and gonna tell me this is completely a writing gimmick, but hear me out. I think the game very much invites this analysis and reflects some interesting ideas back at surv-hor.

The very premise of the game is to operate a military force which ensures the survival of humanity against otherworldly invaders. On the large scale this "survival" is represented as "panic", though clearly the understanding is that if the player loses the game, civilization ceases to exist. So this is kinda like the mother of all survival games! Where the risk/progress core really unveils itself is in the individual battles. Every mission requires you to deploy 4-6 soldiers. Each soldier deployed may not come back.

You can plan and strategize and play it safe as much as you want, but in the end you just never know who might die. The situation can always escalate. This is worked into the turn-based gameplay with simple die-roll statistics. For everything that should happen, you never know that it will. This tension builds up with every move, as you ask yourself whether you want to take that step into the dark.

Yeah. I think the answer to the title is yes. XCOM is survival horror, in its own way. So the genre's not as dead as someone wants you to think you believe. There's Dark Souls too.

Ouchies; Sine Mora revisited

How the motherfuck is it pronounced. Come on. Someone tell me. It's eating me up inside. It's eating a sandwich inside. It made a sandwich from my insides?! That is FUKK'D.

Certainly the game was the belle of the 2.5D ball

Hang on let me invent this thing called a search 'train' engine and then invent this thing called the Internet and go 'on' the Internet thing and post the answer to my question and then rediscover the search brain and wait how did I discover it without having something with which to search oops plot hole well let's just move on because this is Hollywood. It looks like it's Latin(o?) for "ohne Verspaetung", which is German for "without delay(o?)", which is English for "turkey time". My high school Latin experience tells me that there isn't really an official pronunciation of Latin words, so you generally just say all the syllables as if they were phonetic English. I don't know this for a fact. That was like ten years ago and I was never super-sure that I could take my teacher's word for anything. So let's stick with what I've been saying all along, "SEE-nay MORE-ah". Of course, the game was developed and titled by fucking Hungarians, so they probably say it completely differently. OH MY GOD THIS IS ALL SO FUKK'D TO READ ABOUT!

See how hard it is just to pronounce Sine Mora? That sets the tone for the entire game. Not simply because it's hard as FUKK'D. Because it's hard in a way that you can choose to ignore, or choose to tear out your hair over. Just about any player can putz their way through story mode, the same way a four-year-old could get through the title as "Sinnamer". And just like a four-year-old, they can be proud of their work and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. We can think of this as "critic mode". Sine Mora also offers a far more difficult to perfect Arcade mode, which provides extremely punishing piecemeal challenges that force you to constantly use all of those tools that were previously forgotten.

This isn't so original in the world of the console shmup. Yes, Sine Mora actually justifies the presence of Story Mode, but the notion of being able to cruise through, spamming the Insert Coin button, is present (and oft-criticized) in everything from Mushihimesama to Mushihimesama Futari. What makes the challenge more worthwhile and entertaining in Sine is that it's not simply in pursuit of score. The game offers a mode that actually makes survival a challenge, and weirdly enough, it evokes in me a tension very similar to survival horror games.

You know what, it's just a tension similar to tense games. Because the only survival horror example back-flipping across my brain at the moment is Dead Space. What made that game scary was the constant threat of space coming back to life as a zombie. See, in the beginning, your character gets fed up with killing time. He gets bored. So he reads a book that says "time & space are a continuum, that's why they call me Albert and Ernie Einstein", and says, holy shit, if I kill space instead of time, maybe that will give me something different to do while still accomplishing my main goal (kill time). That all happens in the form of a minigame, and then something about a ship which crashed into space's corpse. It's a tense game because you're left wondering, "is space rly dead tho?" Wait none of this sounds right where's my script?

Since when does Space look like THAT?

Another tense game is Dark Souls, which can be shortened to DS if you're brave enough to risk it being mistake for a video game platform or Dead Space. Dark Souls is scary because sometimes your entire game gets ruined because SOME BULLSHIT FROM THE CEILING.