Sinking the Hook into Horror Games

Another trip around the sun and it’s time for the best holiday of the year—the time when we all collectively agree to admit to our absolute love of dressing up in costumes and scaring our loved ones, when we remember our roots by putting offerings to demons on our doorstep, when we all go shopping for plastic skeletons at a store so crummy it doesn’t even have a permanent address. Yes, this is the time of year when we’re willing to suspend regular rules and drink sugary flavored coffee in order to properly respect the season. And it is the only time of the year when they’ll let me use this exceptionally official corporate space to talk about the design of scary horror games.

Back in 2020 I wrote about how VR is the best platform for horror games, in part because it demands absolute attention, and in part because VR is good at getting your blood pumping, which lets a really good horror game get its knife into you and twist. And since then a ton of exciting horror games have shipped for Quest. Just this month we’ve launched Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord and The 7th Guest VR, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice comes out in just a few days. Of course you can’t go wrong with Resident Evil 4, The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners - Chapter 2: Retribution, the creepy Red Matter 2, or the very scary Wraith: The Oblivion - Afterlife. And if you’re less interested in shocking your hair white and more into creepy shoot-em ups, games like INVERSE, Into the Radius, After The Fall®, and Drop Dead: The Cabin might scratch that itch. Crashland and Cosmodread are also intense indie roguelikes for the season.

But this year, I want to talk about a couple of VR horror games that maybe you haven’t heard of, and consider them through a specific lens: sinking the hook.

Horror game designers all face a tough problem: what to show the player in the first 15 or 20 minutes? On the one hand, horror games generally require a lot of narrative. You gotta hear about the cursed village, or the ancient ritual where bad things happened long ago, or the secret government bioweapon conspiracy, or the magic lake that writes novels, and explaining all that backstory takes some time. But on the other hand, you want to hook the player like an escaped psychopath trying to scrape his way into some teenager’s car. If you can get them into the zone and interested, they are much more likely to stick around for the length of your haunted hospital bonanza. You can learn a lot about the way a designer thought about their horror game from the first 15 or 20 minutes of gameplay.

A classic example of the tension between landing the hook and telling the story is the Silent Hill series. The first Silent Hill opens with a short, five-minute gameplay sequence that was, at the time of its release, both technically impressive and absolutely shocking. Story exposition doesn’t really start until that sequence has ended. But Silent Hill 2 took a different approach: It opens with a lengthy monologue cutscene, followed by a very long walk down a foggy hill and a long, slow conversation with a person you meet at the bottom. The weird stuff doesn’t even really start until after this introduction. Silent Hill 2 is widely recognized for its story, but I am sure a lot of potential players never made it to the good parts because it takes a long time for the engine to really turn over. This is probably why Silent Hill 3 abandoned the slow-burn format of its predecessor and instead opened with a dream sequence that drops the protagonist directly into a nightmare carnival realm with an automatic weapon. In fact, a great many horror games begin with action-laden dream sequences, as they give the designer mainline to gameplay, a short stanza to let the player know more is coming before some 20-minute cutscene is invoked to explain the Detailed History of Creepyville.

Actually, horror films struggle with this, too. Are we to sit through a couple of reels of backstory before the knives come out, or jump right into the scares? The scares will be better after the backstory has been delivered, but there’s a problem of timing and boredom. The best horror films, whether you’re talking Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, start with a bang, show you something scary, and then spend the rest of their time letting your imagination do the heavy lifting.

Let’s look at how three Quest games approach this problem: Propagation: Paradise Hotel, a beautiful zombie survival game, The Signifier, a sci-fi thriller, and Killer Frequency, a horror puzzle game set in a small-town radio station.

Propagation: Paradise Hotel has a simple premise: The zombie apocalypse has happened, everybody is (un)dead, and you’ve got to get to the roof of a luxury hotel and hopefully find your sister in the process. This setup is straightforward and the story frame is familiar, so up-front exposition isn’t really necessary. Propagation smartly eschews a lengthy introduction and instead pairs you with a well-armed NPC right out of the gate. The first few minutes are fun and exhilarating, but not very scary. Of course, all too quickly you find yourself alone, running out of ammo, and with only a flickery flashlight to guide you, and the designer has their hook in deep. Losing your safety net means all of a sudden the threat is real and the tension is significantly increased. This is actually a pretty neat trick: By starting off in a position of relative power, the game has time to get you interested before it yanks the rug out from under your feet. Call it the Symphony of the Night maneuver.

The Signifier pulls a different but related trick. In this game, you must delve into the memories of a dead woman to uncover the true nature of her suspicious end. The memories look like bad photogrammetry models, bits of mesh and texture melted together into blobs, with the kinds of errors that computers trying to reconstruct spaces from point clouds tend to produce. As you progress deeper into the mind of the dead woman—first through the “objective state” of her mind and then into the much weirder “subjective state”—the world becomes increasingly deranged. For this game to work, the backstory is critical. If you booted up this game and dropped directly into a bad photogrammetry representation of an apartment, you’d assume it was a potato-quality video game and just turn it off. The Signifier needs you to understand that this representation is an intentional, even critical, aspect of the game. To do that, they pull a change detection trick: Before you can neurodive into the deceased’s mind, you’re forced to visit her actual apartment and inspect the scene of the crime. Ostensibly this is part of your investigation, but the real reason this scene exists is to give you a mental frame of reference for this apartment, so that the next time you see it as a photogrammetry blob in her memories, you understand that the visual representation is itself part of the story. The developer only really needs to do this one time: Once you’ve accepted that the reconstructed memories are a representation of a real place, they can throw you into new memories in new places with no context. The first 30 minutes of The Signifier sets the stage for the entire rest of the game.

Killer Frequency is perhaps the best example of a classic approach to an early horror design hook in this list. In this game, you play as a radio disc jockey who unexpectedly becomes a small town’s only hope as a psycho serial killer named The Whistler terrorizes its populace. Most of the game is played in the radio station, standing in front of the mic, getting would-be victims out of jams over the phone, and searching for clues to help them stay alive. And little by little, the history of The Whistler and his mysterious disappearance 30 years earlier is slowly revealed. Now, a VR game where you stand in one place is a hard sell for some customers. Although there is of course more going on in Killer Frequency, it takes a while to build up to the point where you really start to explore the radio station. The designers of this title had to ensure that they hook the player early enough, and get that hook in deep enough, that they’ll stick around long enough to find out what this game is really about. Killer Frequency opens with a creepy walk down a dark alley. There are a few tutorials, and the visual design (which has a distinct cel shaded look) really gets a moment to shine. And then the tension sets in, culminating in a scary event a minute or two into the game. This is the “appetite whetter” approach, similar to the hellscape carnival dream sequence from Silent Hill 3: It gets our blood pumping and gives us a hint what gameplay a few hours in is going to look like. Though this approach is a common one, getting the pacing, balancing, and scare factor right is tough, and Killer Frequency makes it look easy.

The opening moments of a horror game are perhaps the most important of the entire experience. It must hook the player early, drag them kicking and screaming through the introductory story scaffolding that holds up the rest of the game, and keep them interested long enough to get to the really scary bits. Good horror can’t be served up in just a few minutes: It requires a continual burn of tension, a steady increase in pressure, and a slow ratcheting up of the stakes. Keeping the player interested long enough to achieve all this is a challenge for all horror games, but in VR, where you have unprecedented freedom of movement and expect to be able to wield it, the challenge is doubled.

This evening, take my advice and give a new horror game a shot. Pay special attention to the first few minutes. If your interest is piqued and you can’t wait to see what will happen next, chances are the designer has their hook embedded well into your flesh, and is just waiting for a chance to give it a tug.