Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter 1: Rebirth or plain old neo survival horror?

Look at me, playing a current events game. Aren't I proud. With nearly (exactly) six games knocked off my queue in the past month, I had the "allowance" to grab Shinji Mikami's latest just in time for the pumpkining season. Mikami is perhaps the single most relentlessly visionary and effective director in the past 200 years, so I'm always excited to put in one of his games and see what it has to say. The Evil Within was much hyped in regards to a return to survival horror, but where exactly will it fit in the survhor portmandu?

Survival horror has traditionally been a merging point between adventure and action, where key goals are built around exploration and puzzles but accomplishing those goals requires the utilization of limited means to overcome active opposition. The player is driven not by their need to kill enemies, but by their need to open doors, thus they must press on regardless of their ability to fight. Preparation is meant to trump technical skill.

They say street ball leads to street violence

In the most iconic games, namely the Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill series, that concept manifests as mazes with ammo limits. There are always going to be zombies between you and that hexagonal key, and every bullet spent is one less available for the rest of the game. Exploration and survival feed into each other: evading enemies and taking shortcuts means ammo saved, finding stashes means greater reserves, and better weapons make for high risk/reward. You can choose your fights, but the imprecise action means that you can rarely rely on technical skill to get you out alive - supplies are a necessary fallback, and supplies can only be replenished through further exploration.

In the last decade or so, the progeny of Resident Evil 4 ran with that model until demanding action standards successfully honed out all the adventure/action exploration/combat interplay that defined 'survival'. Tighter controls, mandatory combat, performance-regulated ammo, and structural linearity dragged mainline horror into the greater action portmandu, largely in the name of "improving" visceral feedback and pacing. While fans of the classics might blame the low-brow demands of the conquering casual gamer, it could also be said that this was simply the natural progression of the style - by the fourth (really the eleventh) Resident Evil game, should it be any surprise that the architecture needed a blast of minty freshness? Whomever you want to blame, Resident Evil 5/6, the Dead Space games, and The Last of Us have more in common with straight-up shooters like Lost Planet and Gears of War than with their own origins.

But there was always a second kind of survival game aside the classic scrimp-and-shoots. Going back to Clock Tower (and before) are combatless games wherein the player must rely solely upon running and hiding to survive. Longevity in games like Fatal Frame falls more to knowing the environment than managing supplies; the style trades player-driven variety for elegant simplicity, creating a more "on rails" - but also more spontaneous - experience. While Resident Evil is all growing dread at increasingly dire circumstances, Clock Tower is a histrionic up-and-down roller coaster. Though sometimes described as "adventure horror", these games generally do rely on action techniques like reflexes and stealth, so ultimately they meet the action/adventure quota that defines a survival challenge. It's just a different approach where preparation comes down to knowing escape routes rather than wagering on excursions.

"Riding scissors" is actually the Japanese equivalent of "riding shotgun", thus imbuing this scene from Clock Tower with a humorous pun-infused tone

While the Resident Evil approach has been blending into action games at large, simultaneously there's been a serious reemergence of the run-and-hide haunted house. Just recently we were graced with the AAA release of Alien: Isolation and shortly before that came the acclaimed Outlast. Thanks to indie hits like Radiohead's Amnesiac and The Slendering, type 2 horror is probably at a peak in popularity, bigger and more accessible now than it's ever been. If anything, the on-rails style has taken over and formed a basis for neo-survival horror, while it's the ammo management games that have lost their significance and assimilated.

So that makes it a bit interesting when The Evil Within entrenches itself in hype about a revival of survival horror. Mikami's been totally off the horror wagon for years, his post-Resident Evil resume being more a who's who of deep technical action, from P.N. 03 to God Hand to Vanquish. And of course the game that spearheaded the trajectory into pure action was his own Resident Evil 4. Even his last horror game, the Suda 51 co-created shoot-em-up Shadows of the Damned, seemed to confirm that the father of survival horror had acknowledged its dissolution. But survival gameplay has survived - thanks to those Clock Tower-type games like Alien: Isolation - so one could take the hype to mean Shinji and co. had something else in mind. Most likely that extinct breed of ammo maze games that was absorbed by third-person shooters.

That makes it all the weirder that The Evil Within starts with a stealth/evasion sequence that could've come straight out of Amnesia or Metal Gear Solid. The player is being stalked by a chainsaw guy through a mental hospital and has to sneak around behind boxes and in lockers to get through the stage unharmed. It feels downright conservative in its reliance on principles that are all very popular right now. Hopefully this is just a starting point for more evolved gameplay, but over the first hour Evil Within feels kinda like an acknowledgement that Clock Tower was right and Resident Evil was wrong. I just got a gun in chapter 2, so fingers crossed that things open up and some classically resonant (or original) gameplay emerges.

Also, it probably isn't coming through, but the actual reason I care is nothing to do with the hype and everything to do with the fact that I don't particularly like the run-and-hide type of game. It is boring and lacks tension. It is a lot less scary to replay a segment for the sixth time because I keep getting caught than it is to waste all my ammo on a mistake and have to go into the unknown with only 3 bullets. As illustrated by my session last night in which I died like 10 times trying to get past that guy and tension turned into tedium. 

While I'm at it, a chainsaw guy in a mental hospital? Come on. I know everything under the sun has been done, but that is as cliche as cliche gets and is really hard to get excited about. RE4 was a horror pastiche and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: They Took My Baby Away from Me reference fit in both the context and the gameplay, not to mention it was fairly original for its time in gamedom. Seeing it in Evil Within just makes me think Mikami is out of ideas, especially when the death animations are nearly identical to those in RE4. That saw revving sound used to be genuinely scary. Today I respond to it the same way as the sound of some asshole's loud car exhaust. Again, hopefully this is just setup stuff and the content will get more interesting as the game moves on.

Also, moving further along the tangent of things that have nothing to do with anything, why isn't there acceleration on the aiming controls??? Who does that? It feels extremely awkward after having played any video game ever made.

Wild Guns - SNES' answer to Resident Evil 4?

I like Wild Guns. Do you?

WELL THEN GO PLAY IT!

That response worked regardless of whether you said yes or no. Who writes this damn blog? SmarterChild?

Wild Guns, along with Cabal, Blood Bros., and NAM-1975, belongs to a small niche of late-'80s/early-'90s Japanese third-person shooters. They are, to some degree, simply vertical shoot-'em-ups with an inclined viewing angle. Take Galaga, slide the camera back behind the ship to look over its "shoulder", force the player to aim along the Y-axis as well as the X, and you've pretty much got Wild Guns. It's no surprise that the originator of the style appears to be the arcade Contra's variety missions.

There aren't a ton of these games, as their first-person shooting gallery cousins like Operation Wolf and later light gun games like Time Crisis and House of the Dead were far more popular, but they set an interesting precedent for third-person shooters - a precedent which went largely unobserved but for a few modern Japanese games. It's no revelation to learn that arcade-style gallery games have gone out of fashion alongside rail-based shooters of the Star Fox 64 and Panorama Cotton variety in favor of modern Western first- and third-person multiplayer and cover shooters. These days the classic shmup and the twin-axis shooter couldn't be farther apart, but back in the days of Wild Guns they were very nearly the same thing.

One of the perceived flaws of the arcade third-person shooter is that the style is inherently limited and died out simply because it had reached its maximum potential. In accordance with that understanding, such games are often referred to as "Cabal clones", evidencing the opinion that they never evolved past that seminal classic. I say this is bullshit. Beyond a personal distaste for proclaimed limits, there's a very simple response to this defeatist attitude: Sin & Punishment. Not only does Sin & Punishment take over-the-shoulder shooting and dodging to the next level, Sin & Punishment: Star Successor pushes it even further. It comes as no surprise that Treasure would be the ones to wring blood from this stone, but it's asinine to suggest that they're the only developers capable of expanding upon Cabal and Wild Guns' gameplay.

More interestingly, I think Wild Guns is a sort of secret predecessor to the arcadey Japanese third-person shooters that we don't see often enough today (if anyone knows another game like Vanquish or P.N.03, please call me on the phone immediately). There's an interesting little detail to Wild Guns that subtly expands the game's sense of realism and helps it leap-frog over other shooters into the true third-person shooting field ("true" in the sense of "not a rail-shooter"): the environment is wider that the screen and the camera is in the player's control. It may seem trivial, but this gives the player the ability to explore - they can choose what to look at, they can miss out on things, and they can strategically position themselves within the enviroment, not just on the screen. Even games like NAM-1975 and Sin & Punishment which introduce humongous contiguous journeys into the arcade over-the-shoulder shooter still rigidly auto-scroll, preserving the notion of the screen as the playing field. By handing camera control to the player and offering just that tiny bit of exploration, Wild Guns creates an experience uncannily reminiscent of a fetal Resident Evil 4 or Vanquish.

If you like scrolling shooters, fast paced over-the-shoulder action, or rail-shmups like Star Fox, I can't strongly enough encourage you to go check out Wild Guns (on Virtual Console or... other platforms). If you haven't played it in a while, give it another go, this time thinking less about Contra, Gradius, and Cabal, and more about Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War. 

Resident Evil Revelations - Early revelations

Ah, Resident Evil, what a popular series to hate. Ever since regaining its steam with RE4, the series seems to have run out of steam. RE5 conservatively repeated the approach of its predecessor while introducing a few superficial interface experiments, all of which miserably failed. If you don't believe a game can be utterly ruined by superficial interface experimentation (a la inventory management), you haven't played Resident Evil 5. Worse yet (per fans), the series was beginning to have completely drifted away from its survival horror roots! Being the not really a fan of the series as I am, THAT I couldn't care less about. So what if it used to be survival horror? It clearly isn't trying to be anymore, so how can you evaluate it on that basis? I guess by being the type of gamer/reviewer who prefers evaluating a work in terms of personal expectations rather than what the creators set out to achieve. 

Anyway, I'm still optimistic about 6, which had a great demo but hasn't yet found its way to my Xbox, so until then I'm occupied with Revelations (which came out on 3DS during the long pause between 5 and 6). I have to be honest - I was not optimistic about Revelations, having been relatively disappointed by the demo and discouraged by reviews that wanted to talk more about context than content (e.g. "this is the best Mature title on 3DS", "makes good use of 3D", "production values"). Also, I don't really like handheld games. Oops. Anyway, I'm glad I gave ResiRev a chance (thanks Golem!), because it's had me locked onto the handheld far more than any other game thus far.

Remember back in RE1 when just ONE zombie was scary?

In direct contrast to series fans, my immediate fear in the first few minutes of ResiRev was that it wasn't going to be a shooter. Or, more appropriately, that it was going to be a poor shooter. Taking RE4/5 expectations into Rev, I was startled by the lumbering enemies that chew up and spit out handgun bullets with barely a shudder. That the enemy count would be lower was predictable - I didn't imagine the 3DS could (or Capcom would dare push it to) handle RE5 mobs of dozens of villagers - but I wasn't ready to have to turn and run from the very first foe. At first I was thinking, what the fuck, this is just plain unfun. Needing to unload two full clips to take down what was apparently the most basic foe didn't bode well for the pacing. Gradually, however, I came to realize that this was a return to the mechanics of the very first Resident Evil. These claustrophobic rooms where just one or two enemies give chase and are bounded by doors are exactly what made up the environment in RE1.

The callback jumps from subtle to overt in the second chapter (about forty-five minutes in) when Jill wakes up in a locked room without a weapon. The subsequent fifteen minutes should be bliss for survival horror purists - a defenseless avatar, monsters bursting from closets to give chase down narrow hallways, racing against time to find that right key or door before they catch you. I call it an overt reference because until that point the game had been set in the dim, steely blue, swaying corridors of an ocean liner - then, just as the gameplay becomes really RE1y, you're transported to opalescent, warmly lit living quarters that, not knowing any better, one might assume comprised an old-world New England mansion (which, for the uninitiated, is where RE1 was set). Frankly, I found this decision downright cool. At this point the series is so far removed from its origins that it was the last thing I was expecting, and it completely recolored the game I'd been playing up til that point. All of a sudden I understood why I had a dodge move to escape monsters at arm's length, why I'd been circling past so many locked doors, and why I could only carry a limited amount of ammo.

ResiRev welcomes you back to the mansion

I'll tell you later (when I get there) how well ResiRev holds to this revelation, but it's a truly exciting prospect. With a modern streamlined inventory (far simpler than RE4's and light beers better than 5's), friendly auto-saving, no ammo-scares, and surprisingly pretty visual presentation (nearly on par with RE5 but for the low resolution and lesser effects), this could be the best traditional Resident Evil out there. Oh right, a major interface advancement I should mention, since it solves one of RE1's worst problems, is a Metroid Prime style universal environment scanner. At first I was all, "ru4srs?", worried that it was dragging down the pace even further, but this tool proves a major boon to the scavenging nature of the Resident Evil quest. There's no longer any excuse to walk straight by a key that you could barely see or a statue that you didn't realize you could interact with - this provides immediate identification of all interactables without resorting to glowy outlines or sparkles.

I've strategically (or just regularly) avoided thus far mentioning that there are intermittent chapters that play completely differently from this main haunted house/boat adventure. The two thus far have been balls to walls shooting action (even arcadier than RE4). These create an excellent pace for the game, allowing it to have its cake, and eat its cake too. Hmm when you read "have your cake" there in the uh Biblical sense, it's a pretty frightening expression.

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.

Whuh-oh, here come the RE6 reviews [The problem with numerical scores]

And they're pretty bad! For a game like that to be getting a bunch of 7s and 8s (and even the occasional 4 or 5) is basically an utter condemnation from the gaming press. Luckily, everyone knows that games that review poorly in the mainstream tend to be those with the best ideas that stand the test of time, versus the forgettable 9s and 10s like God of What and Halo and Unchartable that no one will every play or talk about again a month after release.

NOT that I am passing any judgment on RE6 without having played more than the demo or even pretending I have a clue where the game will stand or how it will look in five or ten years time. I just wanted to remind you all, hey, remember how stupid reviews are? Like, No More Heroes averaged an 82? Knights in the Nightmare a 79? El Shaddai a 76 and Muramasa an 81? These are some of the most visionary and memorable games of the past generation, yet the scores indicate something average and passingly enjoyable. Isn't it the beautiful if strange or flawed works that define an artistic medium, not those that perfectly execute the standard accepted rules? What is it that should be valued higher, ideas or execution? We're probably even verging on a formalism versus realism debate but who fucking cares, there certainly aren't any answers to be found there. That's for every man to decide on his own, or, better yet, not a decision that needs to be made. It IS, however, and should be noted to be, a decision that HAS been made by our current press, and their verdict is that Execution, Execution, Execution is all that matters. So keep that in mind when you make the mistake of caring about GameRankings or Metacritic. 

Hmm maybe this was uncalled for

Ah I don't really give a shit about this philosophy nonsense, especially not when it has to do with numerical scores. Everyone knows I think they're a horrendous idea in the first place and obscure everything it is that allows artwork to flourish. They're an economically-driven stigma that will in our time unfortunately never go away, because the majority of game-players - just like the majority of moviegoers and music listeners - are engaged solely as a means of relieving themselves of time and money. They aren't expecting to take anything away from the experience. They don't pick up a game and ask "is this worth playing?", they ask "is this worth sixty dollars?" And while there's blah blah blah something something something to be said here about bowing to economic pressure and scrutinizing product quality, that's a point that's been addressed a million times by other writers who probably care about it a lot more than I do, and who are still approaching games as a commodity, not an art form. Obviously that's not entirely unfair because probably some X% (not gonna pull a number out of my ass) of releases are developed entirely with this business mindset; you can't cover your ears and pretend it doesn't exist. Perhaps it's not the consumer this marketplace needs, but it's the one it deserves.

And the route that comment was going down is probably a dangerous communist tirade that Newt Gingrich might find and shoot me for, so I'll leave before I have to write a novel about how art has become entertainment and entertainment is a commodity and thus must cost money and therefore art has become currency and this seems, eh,  kinda bad. You don't need me to be that cynical, I think everyone is already. Go yell about it on Friendbook or your local Internet forum community, I'm sure they care. I definitely don't. 

Wow hey I managed to drone that long for a post where I originally came to say: fucking reviews are pissing me off acting like Resident Evil 6 is taking the series in a new direction with its divided campaign. Did any of you assholes play a little game called RESIDENT FUCKING EVIL? OR THE FIRST LIKE EIGHT GAMES IN THE SERIES (anything numbered less than 4)? They all start with a character select screen that provides for (at least) two separate and intertwining stories. 

Factual inaccuracies or oversights like that bug me because beyond the fact that it means writers aren't doing their homework, it indicates they have absolutely no clue of the context in which they're reviewing. This would be okay if they were making a clear point to review without context - some people think a game should be evaluated as a standalone piece regardless of the number at the end of the title (I myself think that some days, but other days I completely disagree) - but they AREN'T, they're referencing the old games in the series and talking about how Resident Evil isn't survival horror anymore and so on. If you're going to do that, try to get at least the most basic facts right. Or actually, don't, because every single review that called the split campaign a "new" element, I knew to immediately disregard.

RE4 Revelations: A FanFiction Revisited [EDIT: MY GIRLFRIEND SAYS I NEED TO TELL YOU IDIOTS THAT RE4 MEANS RESIDENT EVIL 4. DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT AC/DC STANDS FOR TOO?]

Everyone here that doesn't know what a huge RE4 fan I am knows that I am a HUUUUUUGE RE4 fan. The game was a major influence on my life. It was the game that allowed me to become self-aware as a gamer, to realize that beyond choices present in the text of the game were choices present in the text of the play. That the player is a co-author.

So somebody at some point stupidly said I would play RE4 100 times in my life. Play through it. It should be noted that it's a game that takes a normal player around 20 hours to beat, and that after getting all the secret guns and committing everything to memory, I could do it in about 6. I somehow reasoned with myself that 6 hours meant three 2-hour sessions, spaced across a month, which was pretty reasonable. And with a rate of one playthrough a month, having already done about ten runs at age 17, I would zip through it in just eight years. EIGHT YEARS???? SERIOUSLY???? I can't believe that when I was 17, basically a fucking adult, I thought I'd want to suffer through eight years of ruining this brilliant milestone in game design and culture.

I never did play RE4 1000 times, if you can believe it. Because what happened is that RE5 came out. And it was awful and left a terrible taste in my mouth and made me doubt that RE4 had actually been any good. That's actually not the real story - the REAL story is that my GCN memory card died so I lost the record of my first dozen runs and said fuck it. It was all about seeing the counter hit 100, without that it was meaningless. Then I got the Wii version when I was a year or two older and I said, alright, let's go in fresh, forget the memory card debacle and maybe we can work up to 100 from scratch.

I was stillllllll pretending that goal was anywhere closer than the sun?!  Seriously?! WeweweweweweweweeeWeeewoooWeooowooo. Sound effects.

TURN ON THE SOUND EFFECTS!You ever listen to the Cows? Go check 'em out. As soon as you think they're a great band you'll realize they are like eight completely different great bands, depending on the album and the track.

So I got onto the Wii version and said, dear god, these controls are awesome, I'll never be able to go back to dual analog. And I never really have been able to go back to dual analog, because I never found it a particularly successful substitute for mouse and keyboard anyway. Well, it works for them ol' third person games, so let's let it be. RE4 is like DOOM 2, that's why it's so fun. It's like you're a magnet and there's no shelter and you stand and shoot. No, hang on to your butts for one more second, I think I'm onto something here.

Is RE4 the final re-emergence of Robotron 64? The top-down shooter, Total Carnage, Smash TV? We learned a long time ago that DOOM 2 Kicks Ass because it's a shmup, an honest-to-god born-and-bred Gradius Batsugun Ikaruga shmup. Maybe with a little bit of Gauntlet tossed in and then kicked into a dungeon. But it's a SHMUP. You minimalistically navigate through an enemy threat pattern managing your and their damage trajectories and momentum. Your concentration is divided between two points: controlling them through fire and protecting yourself through avoidance.

Man I'm really worried this is starting to sound like the ravings of a crazy person. I'll get back to you later.