User:10ryawoo/sandbox

User:10ryawoo/sandbox

Survival Horror is a video game sub-genre that focuses on frightening the player through the use of graphic violence and unsettling ambience. The feeling of control and power is actively taken away from the player through scarcity of resources, such as ammunition, healing items or utility items and inventory space is often limited, forcing players to carry only a few items at a time. In addition to this, the player character is typically very weak in combat, with low health and movement speed, so games emphasise avoiding danger rather than confronting it.

Design Elements
Survival Horror typically has a greater focus on puzzle-solving and out-thinking enemies rather than facing them in combat. Enemies are often significantly stronger than the player and require copious amounts of ammunition to take down while the player character is significantly weaker than in typical action games, with the player dying after only a few hits. In addition to this, weapons and other resources such as healing items are scarce, encouraging the player to save their limited resources for emergencies. Players will often be forced to face off against unkillable enemies that stalk the player and they'll have to solve puzzles in order to escape.

History
The Origins of Survival Horror in games can be traced back to Project Firestart, released in 1989 by Dynamix for the Commodore 64, the game featured many of the design elements that would become standards of the genre in the years to come. The player character was all alone in an unfamiliar environment, with only a weak handgun that had limited ammunition while facing off against monsters that were tough to kill and would kill the player instantly if they got too. The story of the game was told through journals that the player could find at various points on the map. All of these design elements would become defining aspects of the survival horror genre down the line.

In 1992, Infrogrames released Alone in the Dark for the PC and it continued to innovate features that would later become standards for survival horror, leading to it being widely referred to as the forefather of survival horror. The game introduced features such as, enemies that can't be killed, forcing the player to solve puzzles or flee in order to avoid them. The game also used static cameras, which allowed the perspective of the game to be altered however the designers wished, allowing for greater use of classic horror techniques, such as jump scares.

The term "survival horror" was first used in 1996 to describe Capcom's Resident Evil which used all of the design elements seen in its predecessors, such as limited resources, fixed camera angles and a story told through diary entries while adding new features of its own, including multiple different character paths and a tank control scheme that was widely praised and used in the survival genre for years to come. It also set a standard for enemy designs in the genre, focusing on disturbing and horrific-looking foes instead of the traditional humanoid killers of the action horror genre. The game was a critical success, averaging 91 out of 100 of review aggregator Metacrtic, and led to the Resident Evil series of films.

In the wake of Resident Evil's success, a lot more games started to be released that also marketed themselves as survival horror, many of these games came to be known as "Resident Evil Clones" including, Clock Tower(1996) and The Guardian of Darkness(1999). The most successful of these games was 1999's Silent Hill. Developed and Published by Konami, Silent Hill took the formula Resident Evil had created and gave it a unique spin. Instead of attempting to scare the player purely through horrifying imagery and intimidating monsters, Silent Hill focused on creating a tense and disturbing atmosphere, creating a sense of psychological horror, commonly seen in Japanese horror films. In previous games in the genre, the player character was often a military or police person with formal training, however, Silent Hill protagonist, Harry Mason, was a regular man with no combat training of any kind, amplifying the sense of vulnerability. The game moved away from using diary entries and recordings as its primary method of telling its story to the player, choosing to use cutscenes as the main method of telling the story instead, allowing it to create a story that was heavily praised by critics, with Travis Fahs of IGN claiming that it "...echoed some of Steven King's work...".

In 2005, Capcom released Resident Evil 4, which attempted to widen the survival horror genre by putting a greater focus on combat while largely keeping the limitations on ammunition and resources, encouraging players to find enemies' weak points and shoot with precision in order to use as few bullets as possible. The game was as much of a critical success as the original, with both the GameCube and PlayStation 2 versions scoring an average 96 out of 100 on Metacritic. However, many critics stated that the heavier focus on combat meant that the game was more of an action horror game than survival horror, this was a trend that continued with later installments in the franchise as both Resident Evil 5(2009) and Resident Evil 6(2012) marketed themselves as third-person shooters instead of survival horror games.

In the early 2010s, several independent developers made a mark on the genre, with several high profile titles. These included Amnesia: The Dark Descent(2010) developed by Frictional Games and Slender: The Eight Pages(2012) by Team Psykskallar, who's popularity was aided by independent content on platforms such as YouTube spotlighting them and bringing the survival horror genre back into the mainstream.

In the mid-late 2010s, survival horror entered a renaissance, with several of the world's largest publsihers, including Sony Computer Entertainment and Bethesda Softworks released new survival horror franchises in Until Dawn(2015) and The Evil Within(2014) respectively, both of which were critically acclaimed and had second intallments released a few years later. In addition to this, Resident Evil 7:Biohazard released in 2017, which according to most critics, took the franchise back to its survival horror roots, utilising a first-peron perspective and emphasising exploration and puzzle-solving over combat.