Trick VR Treat
By all accounts, Halloween is pretty much cancelled this year. No trick-or-treating, no haunted houses, and definitely no bobbing for apples. But the best holiday of the season is still a great time to curl up with a horror game, which you can do on just about every platform since the Nintendo Entertainment System. Alone in the Dark was released for the FM Towns, D came out for 3DO, and I actually own a copy of Clock Tower: The First Fear for Wonderswan. Fire up your Saturn if you want to play Deep Fear, or haul your old PowerPC Mac out of the closet and play all seven discs of Phantasmagoria. Your Wii Balance Board only needs four AAs before you can start running in place from ghosts in Night of Sacrifice. Horror is a ubiquitous genre across all platforms, and there are gems from every console era. But after spending the last 20 years cataloging and playing every horror game I can get my hands on, I’ve come to a startling conclusion: The best platform for horror games is a virtual reality headset.
Now, you might reasonably accuse me of bias, as I’ve spent the last six years working on VR at Oculus. But a big part of the reason I joined Oculus was that I played a VR demo of Alien: Isolation at E3 in 2014 and it blew my mind. I went home, pivoted the horror game I was building with my game studio to VR, and was immediately sold on the potential. Sure, those early days of modern VR had a lot of technical jank, but even so, it was clear that VR could afford horror with a degree of effortlessness that traditional “flat” video games struggle to achieve. Over half a decade later, I think VR is the canonical platform for horror video games.
The goal of nearly every horror game is to make you forget that you’re playing a video game. Other genres encourage a systemic mode of thinking: As you play, you’re considering your timing, your loadout, the RNG driving the enemy spawner, the next button in your combo, or the rhythm required to hit the next beat. In this mode, you look through the surface-level presentation of a game to discern the systems that drive it under the hood. But horror games want to scare you, and to do that they need you to shift modes, to stop thinking about systems and start focusing on the narrative. They need to remove every element that might be a reminder that you’re playing a game and obfuscate information that you might try to use to strategize. This is why many horror games, from Resident Evil and Silent Hill to Slender and Until Dawn, omit any sort of on-screen HUD, eschew explicit hit points or experience levels, and never compute a high score.
Thomas Grip, the designer of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, has long described this mental mode shift as a “sense of presence.” To believe you are in the world strongly enough to be frightened by it, Grip argues, you have to drop the strategic mode of thinking that decomposes games into systems and immerse yourself in the narrative. Horror games go to great lengths to achieve this effect, from the Silent Hill series’ fake film grain to scenes of near total darkness in Detention to the sound design in Siren to the facial animation in The Last of Us Part II. Huge development effort is expended with the singular purpose of reverse-Ringuing you through the TV screen and convincing you of the authenticity of the game world so that when the boogeyman appears, he’s real.
Here’s the thing: In VR, this “sense of presence” is almost automatic. VR advocates even use the word “presence” to describe the minimum bar for VR immersion, the feeling of forgetting that you are in a virtual world and unconsciously accepting it as real. The feeling that horror games work so hard to achieve on flat screens is the default operating mode for good VR.
This makes VR horror games incredibly powerful. A trip down a dark hallway that might have been ho-hum on a TV monitor becomes incredibly terrifying in VR. Crouching behind a couch while an insane hillbilly destroys his house looking for you in Resident Evil 7 is scary when you see it on a screen, but it is outright panic-inducing in VR. Other common aspects of VR design, such as accurately spatialized three-dimensional sound, amplify the immersive effect. VR delivers the mental mode shift horror games strive to achieve right out of the box.
On a traditional game console it’s easy to mediate your anxiety by just looking away from the screen. In 2010, a study using computer vision technology to process Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly play through footage determined that players were using the pause menu to control the pacing of the game, to temporarily exit the world and release some of the built-up tension and suspense. This is a specific behavior that players do all the time: It’s easy to reduce your stress level by looking away from the TV or getting up for a drink. But in VR, there’s no screen to look away from. Casual reaffirmations of the real world are a lot harder to come by. When you’re in, you’re in.
VR is so convincing that developers have actually had to tone down some of the tension-inducing gimmicks common to horror game design. Startling pop-out scares in particular are exhausting in VR, and titles that try to throw a screaming skull in your face every few minutes are an unfun chore. Then again, simple elements are often much more effective: Flashlights are staples of the horror genre, but actually holding one in your hand as you creep down a dark corridor feels dramatically different than thumbing an R-Stick. And the threat of a scary, startling event as a method of increasing tension is tremendously viable in VR. Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted includes a VR recreation of the original Five Nights at Freddy’s that is dramatically more suspenseful, even though it’s very faithful to its source material.
But immersion is only one of the reasons VR is so compatible with horror. Another important aspect is the physicality of body movement common to modern VR games.
One way to increase the scariness of a horror game is to get the player’s blood pumping. Perceptual scientists have shown that it’s possible to synthesize emotion using a fascinating brain hack called misattribution of arousal, in which the brain mistakes a physiological response (increased heart rate, release of adrenaline, etc.) for an emotional reaction. There’s a lot to read on this subject if you’re interested, but the summary is that a demanding task (such as a difficult skill challenge) that gets your heart pumping may allow a game to pull some emotional sleight-of-hand and convince you that your blood is up because you’re scared. The crushing difficulty of Catherine’s block puzzles, or the visceral, high-stakes combat in Condemned, are examples of stressful game systems that may increase the emotional punch those games deliver. Night of Sacrifice, the Wii Balance Board game that requires the player to walk in place, is probably more frightening than it should be because the physical exertion required to play increases the chances that you feel fear when encountering an eyeless ghost in an abandoned lodge.
Body movement has emerged, somewhat surprisingly, as a core characteristic of modern VR games. Whether you’re cutting blocks in Beat Saber or stabbing zombies in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, moving your body is a common interaction, and it’s easy to break a sweat. That means that games in VR have the chance to increase the player’s physiological state naturally, through normal movement, and therefore may be able to put the player into a state receptive to fear without relying on crushing difficulty or fitness peripherals.
Of course, VR games aren’t about to replace horror games on traditional platforms. There are a few aspects of conventional horror game design that are difficult to pull off in VR, like cinematic cutscenes. Still, the power of a well-made VR experience is so strong that I think the medium is likely to host some of the best titles in the genre in the next few years. These won’t be the simplistic virtual haunted houses that were common in the early days of VR, nor do I expect the screaming skull jump scare games to survive long term. Horror games built from the ground up with VR in mind wield incredible power, and as the medium matures we should expect titles wholly unlike anything on traditional platforms today.
You can play horror games on just about any game console ever released. But if you’re interested in playing a video game that is totally immersive and can maybe hack your emotions, in finding a nuanced, thought-provoking way to quicken your pulse and exercise your brain, in exploring that dilapidated hospital yourself rather than looking at it on a screen, VR horror games might just be for you.
Here are a few recommendations for some of the best horror games in VR today:
Get your zombie fix: The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and Arizona Sunshine
Test your mettle: Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted
Welcome to hell: Resident Evil 7, Lies Beneath, and Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition
Something bad happened here: Layers of Fear VR and The Exorcist: Legion VR
Spooky puzzles: The Room VR: A Dark Matter and Red Matter
They cancelled Halloween, but I still want a haunted house: AFFECTED: The Manor and Dreadhalls
High brow: Here They Lie and Narcosis
