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.
Read More...