As the feature implies, I play a lot of horror games. I spend much of my gaming time hiding in cupboards or bludgeoning slimy monsters to death with steel pipes or bits of wood with nails in the end. Recently, I’ve been noticing a constant repetition of quirks and features that developers of horror games often include that annoy me, more so than usual I mean, so I thought I can either finally quit gaming and become a ventriloquist or something, or I could write a spiteful article about my three pet hates of the horror genre of video games to vent my frustrations. In case you’re wondering, I chose the second option.

The first common aspect of horror games that I’d like to name and shame is the habit of naming monsters in horror games. It sounds petty, but stick with me. Horror game developers cannot help but give their hideous creatures names like ‘needler’ or ‘blisterer’. Surely everybody knows that if you give something a silly name, it ceases to be frightening. A humanoid creature wrapped in skin, stumbling towards you screaming in a muffled voice with blood dribbling from its concealed mouth sounds scary, but if you then find out it’s called ‘Nigel’, or indeed ‘muffler’, it takes something serious and effective and makes it ridiculous. I understand that in games like Left 4 Dead, naming the monsters is necessary so that when a tank materialises at the end of the alleyway that you and your chummies are sprinting down, you can scream ‘TAAANNNNNKKKKKKK!’ and everybody is instantly aware the gravitas of the situation more than they would be if you screamed ‘big, weird creature thing!’ My problem is when games like Silent Hill: Homecoming name their monsters idiotic things like ‘siam’. The best horror games attempt to make as much as possible ambiguous. A situation becomes a lot more terrifying if the player feels in the dark and ill-informed, and the more understanding the player has of his/her environment and opponents, the less vulnerable he/she feels. There isn’t much that frightens me more than the unknown, and that scare factor that pushes horror games like Silent Hill 2 and Deadly Premonition to the next level is lost when I can think ‘Ah. What’s that? Oh, it’s just a mainliner’. So stop it developers. Stop it.

For my second frustrating cliché, I could just say ‘zombies’ and knock off for lunch. Zombies have become ubiquitous in practically all genres of gaming. Look out for Animal Crossing DLC in which a ghastly infection spreads through the quaint little town and the villagers have to sort shit out and protect their lovingly crafted property from the mean old undead. However, I’m not against using zombies in games, and I often enjoy zombie games quite a lot. I think a zombie apocalypse is strangely a situation we can all relate with and if done well (The Walking Dead, ZombiU) it can brew up devastating tension. So if it’s not zombies that annoy me, then what is it? Get ready for another petty semantic quibble. I detest how zombie games never come out and say ‘you’re fighting zombies’. It’s always ‘be careful, there’s a bunch of infected coming your way’. I hate how Leon Kennedy still doesn’t know what a zombie is after over a decade of fighting them. Listen up developers. Every single member of your audience knows what a zombie is, and if you’re game is set in the present day, in the future or at any point in the previous hundred years, any possible protagonist you could use would also know what a zombie is. Calling them infected doesn’t make them innovative again, they are still zombies. It particularly gets my goat when games like the fantastic ZombiU, which has zombie in the title, still has its characters refer to the undead as ‘infected’. A protagonist would be much more relatable if he said ‘Ah! A zombie!’ and not saying after attempting to converse with ‘What is it? It looks like it’s got some kind of infection!’

My third and final cliché is an incredibly common one, and if you load up practically any horror game ever made, I’m sure you’ll stumble over an example of it. You know in horror games, you’ll be treading softly through a grim environment, whether it’s an apartment block, a sunken city at the bottom of the sea or even space, you’ll look at a random wall and scrolled on the wall in blood will be something along the lines of ‘God has abandoned us’ or ‘We’re doomed!’ I’ve seen so much aggressive wall blood-graffiti now that unless it’s something incredibly thought-provoking and mysterious like ‘There was a hole here. It’s gone now’ of Silent Hill 2 fame, I just dismiss it. Most of it is ridiculous. If it is written by the victims of whatever horror happens to be at work, as is normally implied, are we really supposed to believe that they thought ‘God, I’m going to die aren’t I? I assume everybody else is dead too. I know what I’ll do! I’ll take some of the blood dribbling out of this wound on my leg here and I’ll write something about God on the wall. Yeah, look at me, questioning theology’. Apparently, no one in horror games muses to themselves without smearing whatever they were thinking about all over a nearby surface. Apart from the logistics of it, it’s just overdone and no longer effective, especially when it’s on every other wall. It’s just a lazy and unimaginative way to give a game a scary and effective atmosphere. Get your notepad out again horror game developers. Unless you’ve got something interesting to put on your walls, leave them be.

There are plenty more clichés I could have included, such as having enemies pretend to be dead only to jump up and shout ‘boo’ when the player grows near, a common feature of Dead Space, or beginning the game with an action-packed, completely irrelevant and tedious opening section like Homecoming, but I thought rather than rant on forever, I’d highlight three of the worst offenders. So kids, what have we learned? We’ve learned that horror games are stuck in a rut and that I am an incredibly petty man. So we’ve learned nothing then.

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