Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place.
Buzz for EA Redwood Shores’ Dead Space has gone from indifference to genuine excitement in the weeks since E3. Now that people have actually played the interactive paean to Cameron-Carpenter-styled horror, they’ve found that its forbidding atmosphere, sound, and HUD-free presentation are hype-worthy and legitimately scary. I haven’t gotten to try it out myself but I’m anxious to get my hands on it. Redwood Shores have taken the essential road to designing quality interactive horror; Dead Space is, at its core, a game about confinement, about being trapped in a hostile environment with limited means of survival. Videogames lend themselves to this method of creating tension and anxiety because their environments are, naturally, closed. System Shock’s dilapidated space station, Resident Evil’s mansion, and even the more expansive town of Silent Hill are perfectly closed spaces, places that simultaneously create dread and a functional goal: how do I get out?
It’s far rarer to see a game take the opposite route. After all, it isn’t easy to make a game that makes you feel lost. If a game forces you to lose yourself in its environment, by way of randomly generated environments or trick passages that lead to incongruous locations (as in Zelda’s Lost Woods), it risks frustrating the player – this is especially bad if the game’s intent is horror, since frustration can easily replace anxiety. It’s equally difficult to create a closed environment that is delicately constructed to confuse the player. The original Metroid and its Game Boy sequel are two of the only games that manage to successfully pull this off thanks to its series of identical hallways and dead ends. Another is Friday the 13th.
LJN’s Friday the 13th for the NES is, as the internet has noted on many occasions, a bad game. The film franchise itself isn’t good, best known twenty-five years after its inception for camp value (forgive the pun) than creating memorable chills. The game has cloying sound, poorly defined goals, terribly inaccurate controls, and inappropriate enemies (bats and endless waves of zombies were not common fixtures in the movies.) But the game’s world, Crystal Lake, and its surrounding caves, cabins, and forests, is remarkable at creating a sense of overwhelming fear through a mixture of mundane graphics and by leading the player off course. 
The manmade structures in particular are sterile, empty, and eerie, even in daylight and the over-the-shoulder perspective and control in these environments cause constant disorientation. During outdoors sidescrolling, Friday the 13th is constantly altering your perception of the environment. If you follow a path down from one forest trail, you will not necessarily see the path leading up in the next. This might be bad design from a playability perspective but it manages to actually affect the feeling of being lost in the woods without directly using trick passages. Your map exacerbates the confusion, only giving a location on paths around the lake proper but not indicating the direction you’re actually moving in. Crystal Lake feels as confounding as any actual place you are only cursorily familiar with. You are being actively pursued by an unpredictable threat, and you are armed with a map you are forced to read on the run and often in the middle of the dark. Friday the 13th fails as a game but its world is a terrible, misleading success.
More Overworld:
Marble Madness
Related links:
For Love of the Game: Metroid II Remakes
Rebuttal - Say What About Metroid: Zero Mission?
Rebuttal Rebuttal – I Stand With Metroid