Scared Stiff: Turning a horror trope into a treasure
If it’s horror, Colette Bennett knows it. ‘Scared Stiff’ is a column dedicated to everything frightening gaming has to offer, from ghostly little Japanese girls to flesh eating zombie dogs.
Whether you’ve spent the last two years foraging through horror games, or the last twenty, by now you may have noticed that they have a few things in common. I was recently playing a “scary” game that will go unnamed, and as I progressed, I recognized that I felt that needling desire to get up and go do something else, anything else, even though I was supposed to be relaxing and enjoying myself. It was that sense of weariness that can only come with drudgery, the frustration that says, “This could have been so much better, if only!”
If I had one of those handy checklists by my side that you can use to make sure you haven’t forgotten something crucial, I would have been able to tick off each of the following:
Who am I? Welp, it looks like I got amnesia Oh no! I’ve lost my girlfriend/wife/daughter/mother/dog Blood, but you don’t know where it came from (could be yours though) Scrawled notes, preferably with directions Wow, I’m in an abandoned [enter facility type here]Every genre has tropes. It’s a part of what makes the formula work, whether you’re an androgynous pretty boy leading a pack of rag-and-tag scoundrels in an RPG or flexing your overly-significant muscles at your opponent in a fighting game before you land that dazzling finishing move. Dissolve these tropes, and the genre in question becomes murky. Use them every time, and people get sick of the same old, same old. What to do? Why do video games and their consumers have to be so demanding?Continue reading Scared Stiff: Turning a horror trope into a treasureScared Stiff: Turning a horror trope into a treasure originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 27 Jul 2012 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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