Thursday, February 2, 2012
There comes a critical juncture, after you’ve amassed enough electronic entertainments to last you through nuclear winter and beyond, where you look upon your backlog and decide to chip away at it. I’ve always pictured this far-off time, post-retirement, when I’d finally start playing all the video games I’ve purchased. This is a ridiculous notion, obviously, because by then, I’ll have slightly more important concerns, never mind the fact that electricity, decades later, may not be the most optimal way to power home appliances. Accordingly, I’ve started appreciating what I own now, with the side benefit of increased savings as I hold off on grabbing, like, every new release.
The last time I dug into horror was back in June. It’s not a genre I overtly crave. I find it stressful, in fact. But nerve-wracking as it may be, horror certainly generates some memorable moments. I fired up the F.E.A.R. series a few days ago, starting with the first episode, which was published back in 2006. While its age shows, graphically, I’ve been savoring its texture.
Like Dead Space, this game reminds me how screen horror is naught but a deft weave of sound, lighting, and timing. I’ve been paying attention especially to that last element–how fear is dispensed, essentially. You’ve got your jump scares, of course, on one end of the spectrum: a corpse lunging at you from a pool of blood, for example–I ain’t making this shit up, incidentally–or a gnarled face flashing across the screen. These scares are brutish, subtle as a hammer, and effective.
When you start moving beyond jump scares, however, that’s when things get interesting. Jump scares are instantaneous. A wider time horizon, on the other hand, affords the game space to prolong the terror. You’re negotiating a narrow ventilation shaft, for instance, with naught but your flashlight illuminating the way, and you see a creepy girl crawling toward you. Or you see a silhouette of a man through an opaque office window, about 200 feet away, only to discover an empty room. But perhaps the cleverest conceit the game employs is when it does nothing. There are stretches when you expect something to drop from the ceiling, or some other classic horror trope to rear its head, but instead you are greeted with silence. I’m hooked–and I’m dreading every moment of it.