RE: ADSactly Game Review - Until Dawn

To me, horror movies are about as terrifying as a hamster with a hat on. The act of changing where the camera is looking explicitly to “scare” often feels shallow and manipulative; what is “seen” and what's not seen often seems too deliberate. The only horror movie that remotely nears scaring me is the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even then it’s just the hollowness, the lack of humanity, the acute and rasping nihilism that creates the looming dread. And I’m not even sure that’s scary—it’s more like someone just puking half-digested rare steak on you for an hour.

But horror video games? They create a hostile space for the player to exist in and move around in. The player is in control of how they negotiate the environment, making any identification with the character on screen necessarily intense. It’s your role to choose how to negotiate the horror.

This relationship to your character becomes demanding. The “manipulation” that happens is often not connected to what the camera is forcing you to see, but comes from what happens in the space where your character is situated—the sounds and scripted events, such as things orchestrated to drop from shelves. Spatial awareness becomes paramount, whereas, in horror films, the viewer is often confused about the characters’ use of space.

In the virtual video game environment, your ability to control your character actively and responsively is your only hope of surviving anything that happens to them: you have to pay attention. And the explicit threat of the video game, that you might end your entertainment by “dying," becomes a real thing—like it does in paintball. That’s where the rush comes from: from escaping “death.” And not just a movie death, but a video game death, where you have to negotiate the horror again and again. That’s where the real strength of video game horror lies: in the promise of another ritual rinsing of all your nerves.
I would like to have that game in particular.