Yes, I’ll fess up: I suffer from night terrors. Things in the dark that sneak up on me in the witching hour. When I turn on the light, they’re gone; vanished into the depths of my imagination again. Remarkably, I don’t blame games. Maybe I should. But I’m just so addicted to wandering in the dark with a torch, glow stick, mobile phone or even a night-vision camera while uncovering the fiendish secrets of insane asylums, abandoned hospitals and mouldy sewer tunnels.
And that’s before I pick up my DualShock 4 on an average Friday evening. *Boom-tish*A veritable horror fiend, I’ve consumed nasty fiction as long as I can remember and, just as I wondered if games were leaving the genre behind for the more ‘adult’ scares of The Last Of Us, the medium has skyrocketed back into the mainstream games consciousness with the announcement of Silent Hills. Kojima? Del Toro?
Reedus? Are you ready to wander back into the fog? Of course you are. Deep down, there’s nothing we all want more than to be terrified. For a genre we all have such fond memories of, horror games are the first to be met with scorn. “Yeah,but is it scary?” is the first sneering question. Horror always has something to prove.
When you first wandered into Silent Hill, you weren’t on such a cynical quest. You’d picked up a new game for that big grey box and you were going to play it, end of story. The fact that you’re now unlikely to forget that first visit and your subsequent returns to the static filled town is a thing of terrifying legend and disturbingly moist controllers. Can someone lend me a wet wipe? It’s an experience we can all share and whisper about late at night.
What was your scariest moment in games? Was it retrieving the torch from the mannequin? Or perhaps it’s Pyramid Head looming at the end of that corridor in the Lakeview Hotel? The Borley Mansion? (Poor old Danny.) You don’t like my new Robbie The Rabbit plushie much, do you? He won’t bite…If we take Silent Hills out of the equation for a second, the genre has been ticking along nicely recently.
After a long spate of awfulness Amy, ugh we’ve had the ‘joys’ of Outlast to contend with. Plus, there’s been plenty of The Evil Within to pore over. Daylight is a damp squib, but Alien: Isolation is poised waiting in an air duct. Plus, now that Until Dawn has finally reappeared, we’ve even got my favourite ‘teen cabin bloody slaughter’ genre sorted for PS4.
static shocks
Sony is taking this pleasantly seriously too, with Hollywood horror producers involved and even the acting talents of Hayden Panettiere and Rami Malek. Attractive teenagers being picked off one by one on an eighth generation console? Horror is well and truly back in business, my fright-fest chums.
But it’s that Share button of yours that will ensure the future of the genre on consoles. If you weren’t brave enough to boot up PT on your own, chances are you’ve got a friend like me thanks for the laughs, Robin. You’ve got global streams of people to share the fear with; a connected internet of delighted safe screams. It’s only when you turn everything off for the night that you’re alone to replay the horror in your mind. Can I hear a radio?
There’s no such thing as Pyramid Head. There’s no such thing as Pyr… Wait, what was that noise?