Welcome to Survival Horror 101, I’m a mildly broke college student who has been playing Survival Horror games since I was 5 and I’m not at all qualified to be giving a lesson like this.
FIRSTLY:
The most important elements of a Survival Horror game are found in the title itself: “survival” and “horror”. That sounds like I’m being a smart ass, but I assure you that the inclusion of both of these things are essential and can very easily be messed up. A game cannot be Survival Horror without having elements of survival (such as inventory management/limited space, some form of enemy that the player comes up against, systemic management such as food, hunger, infection, etc.) and elements of horror (that, for the most part, are founded in true horror that doesn’t rely entirely or even somewhat on cheap scares or thrills such as jumpscares, copious amounts of gore, etc.). There is also a fine line to be struck between these elements— focus too much on the survival side and you end up with a resource management game with little to no investment in the enemies around you or the environment that is against you, or alternatively if you focus too much on horror you run the risk of invoking the tropes of traditional action horror games by letting the survival side fall over the wayside.
SECONDLY:
Speaking of balance, it is also important that the gameplay of your game is also balanced. A balance of gameplay elements is essential— for example, look no further than the original 1999 Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. RE3 took the concept of Mr.X from 1998’s Resident Evil 2 and beefed it up, improving upon the AI and the capabilities of him as a pursuer enemy who comes after you throughout the whole game. In doing so, it struck a fine balance between the calmer, less tense moments of the Resident Evil series and the intense, “oh my god I’m going to die” moments— and it did so by creating more opportunities and moments for the game to legitimately scare you with just Nemesis’ appearance on screen, while maintaining the normal zombie enemy encounter moments as well.
Gameplay is not the only place where balance must be struck. The balance between narrative, environment, and gameplay is also a fine point in the middle of three lines connecting there. In crafting a narrative, you must be careful not to accidentally lean too far in one direction without considering the tone of which you are writing with— don’t ham up your dialogue and acting if you want your game to be taken seriously, and don’t write serious dialogue throughout the story if you want it to be a bit comedic and lighthearted (which, yes, can be done in a Survival Horror game). The environment can tell its own tale outside of the current narrative path of the main story— side stories, notes, memos, these are all things commonly found in Survival Horror games to help build the world they take place in as a real, believable place. We already talked about gameplay, but make sure your game has substance beyond just “it’s a game and you play it”— don’t forget your friends Narrative and Environment. Some people would argue that your game is only as good as its worst element— and though I do no explicitly agree with that, I think that keeping that in mind in terms of balancing these things is helpful to an extent.
THIRDLY, AND FINALLY:
Indecision really doesn’t make the process of creating a game easy. You have to approach the creation of a Survival Horror game with a pretty solid topic in mind— the topic may change, the enemies may change, but coming at it with that solid idea is what gets you through entirely with creating it. Unfocused design hardly leads to productive pathways, especially when creating a game focused on a genre as specific as Survival Horror.
So that’s really all for now. Maybe I’ll do another.
Oh, and camera angle doesn’t matter. Fixed, first person, third person— all of it works for Survival Horror, end of discussion.
C. B. Irby 