Forgetting Your Boomstick at Home: Horror Games Without Weapons

A popular trend that has been rising in popularity lately is horror games without weapons. The concept is simple: a lot of horror games have too much of a focus on shooting and killing, so why not remove that entirely? It’s effective—certainly in games like Amnesia—but unnecessary. Yes, you run from monsters in your nightmares, but don’t you sometimes at least pick something up to try to beat them away?

I feel that running from my enemies is a bit unrealistic when there are so many objects around me that I could use to defend myself. Hell, in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories you even get a knife as a collectible item. You mean to tell me that Harry Mason is so much of a pansy that he never thought to, you know, swing that knife at the abominations chasing him down? He could at least stab at their faces when they latch on to him.

Clock Tower was one of the first games to use this method. Back in the day, action games without weapons were unheard of. You played games to fight things. Clock Tower changed all of that. They said, “No, you can’t fight these ghosts. They’re going to kill you if you try. So you’d better get moving, chief.” It was a pleasant surprise. One of the newer games to do this is Shattered Memories. Hey, Silent Hill had horrible combat anyway, so why not get rid of it? Genius.

If you read my Silent Hill: Shattered Memories review, you know that I felt the game fell flat on a lot of things. See, one thing that Shattered Memories does wrong is that the enemies do virtually no damage to you. It takes more than 10-15 hits to actually be killed, whereas most games will have you dead the instant you’re caught. It adds an extra level of fear knowing that the monsters chasing you will off you in seconds.

But the removal of weapons isn’t necessary to make a game scary. The weapons themselves don’t take the fear out of the monsters; it’s how you design the game. The absolute best kind of horror game is the kind that gives you all the weapons you can ask for—everything from pistols to rocket launchers to lasers that make things explode the instant they hit—and yet still has monsters clever enough to get to you, still scares the hell out of you and makes you dread every encounter. Even with all of that firepower in your hands you’re hopeless, and that’s a truly incredible feeling, isn’t it? I understand that creating AI for video games is incredibly taxing, but if you can do it, you should. It’s been done before.

When Climax was working on Shattered Memories, they claimed that Survival Horror has lost all of its flair because the games now center on action. This is why they removed the weapons—you were used to using them, so without them you felt naked. But then the monsters were still of the stupid, weak, and pitiful variety that makes those other games so boring in the first place. So yes, that’s the point I’m laboriously trying to get to: the problem isn’t with the weapons, it’s with the monsters.

I know I pick on Dead Space a lot, but I couldn’t help but laugh to myself when I read an article in Game Informer promoting Dead Space 2. In it, the creator of the game stated that he wanted to tone down the scariness in the second game because people said the first game was too scary, and that it detracted from the story of the game. So now Dead Space 2 is going to be even less “scary” than its predecessor. How much more sluggish can those monsters really be? Are the well-lit rooms now going to be constant instead of the occasional, actually freaky dark rooms? I’m sure you’ll get to keep all of those shiny, one-shot weapons too. The worst part of it is the fact that I’ll still give them my money to play the game.

But! I will say this: at least the monsters in Dead Space weren’t stupid. Sure, they often spawned across the room and left you with plenty of time to shoot at them until they were dead, but they also came out of the floors and did a hefty amount of damage to you. While playing the game, if you got too close to a monster you knew you were going to get hurt. There was no, “Oh, ow, you slashed me with a claw the size of a small car, that kinda hurt, man.” Dead Space failed on a lot of levels, but it got the monsters right in that regard.

I already talked about Amnesia, so let’s talk a bit about Frictional’s other game: Penumbra. Penumbra had a very… uhm… different weapon system. It uses the same physics engine as Amnesia, with the added bonus that you could pick up sharp things and swing them around like a weapon. Doing this involved moving the mouse almost like a Wii remote to make the swinging action. It was incredibly clumsy, but it did the job. If you wanted something dead, that is. This, to me, is the most realistic setting, because you get a slew of melee weapons that you just pick up off the ground.

The most frantic combat in horror games is the kind that forces you to get up close and personal with the enemy. Doing so can—and should—often result in damage or even death, so it’s a risk you need to calculate before moving in to engage. Fight or flight is the most basic form of defense, and in games where melee weapons run supreme, it is a constant feeling. You see a door down the hallway, and you know that something very important is in that door. Unfortunately, something appears to be standing between you and it. It is moving, though—maybe it’ll turn around and walk past the door and you can try to run for it? Or maybe you should just run and take it out from behind? Better hope it doesn’t hear you.

These are the decisions that make a good horror game, I think. As opposed to weapon-less horror games, where the decision is obvious: you sit there and wait, or you run at the door and see what happens. I mean, is it really so much to ask to at least have a sort of shove move? Or a dodge move of some kind? I don’t expect to be able to roll out of the way, but are these characters really incapable of doing a side step or something? Or at least a juke to try to fake out the monsters? If it were more realistic I’d be kinder to games like this, but for now I find the fight or flight response to be a more effective horror experience.

Of course, horror games are still in an experimental stage. It’s fun to try and think of new ways to scare the hell out of players. As long as the ideas stay fresh, I’ll always keep playing. In fact, even if they don’t stay fresh I’ll keep playing. Why change something that already works, right? I just hope that the horror games that aren’t so good are something that can be used as an example of where things go wrong. Dead Space 2 should work to improve on where the first game lacked, not produce more of the same and tone it down even more. And please, developers, if you’re going to make a game that focuses on being able to kill hundreds of zombies with a single shotgun blast, market it as Action instead of Horror, okay? Thanks.