How does one make the end of a horror game feel climactic without completely ruining the atmosphere?

[AlternatePFG]

Amnesia's ending sequence was really well, right before the final confrontation with the villain and the actual ending. Then the ending just sucked.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Metroid 2, though technically an action game is creepy as hell, right up to the end, never knowing what grotesque creature lurks around the next corner. I don't think the end boss matters really - they could have dropped a watermelon there and it wouldn't change anything.

This. Specifically the moment when you are down to 1 Metroid left, rolling through some increasingly dark tunnels... and suddenly a sped-up version of the 'Metroid Alarm' jingle plays and the Metroid Counter jumps back up to 10! You're then faced with 9 Metroid Larvae in the Metroid Queen's lair, reminiscent of the NES game's end before facing the source.

As for more conventional horror, it's telling that virtually every Resident Evil game seems to end with you blasting the biggest baddie with a rocket launcher. One theme I've seen that works pretty well beyond introducing something new at the end ('Metroids can reproduce?!') is to knock away a 'crutch' the player has relied on for the majority of the game, such as their light source slowly fading out or something happening to their main weapon.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Make a totally hopeless fight to the death that the player must play through?

 

[Jfswift]

Metroid 2, though technically an action game is creepy as hell, right up to the end, never knowing what grotesque creature lurks around the next corner. I don't think the end boss matters really - they could have dropped a watermelon there and it wouldn't change anything.

This. Specifically the moment when you are down to 1 Metroid left, rolling through some increasingly dark tunnels... and suddenly a sped-up version of the 'Metroid Alarm' jingle plays and the Metroid Counter jumps back up to 10! You're then faced with 9 Metroid Larvae in the Metroid Queen's lair, reminiscent of the NES game's end before facing the source.

As for more conventional horror, it's telling that virtually every Resident Evil game seems to end with you blasting the biggest baddie with a rocket launcher. One theme I've seen that works pretty well beyond introducing something new at the end ('Metroids can reproduce?!') is to knock away a 'crutch' the player has relied on for the majority of the game, such as their light source slowly fading out or something happening to their main weapon.

Speaking of light sources that reminds me of a point in Half Life 2: ep. 1 (?) where your flashlight keeps running out of juice so it only works for a few seconds at a time. The darn thing went dead on me at the end of the tunnel, so I had to wait a horrifying 4 seconds before the elevator doors cracked open, listening to headcrabs slithering ever closer.

Also, that's the exact moment that was creepy in Metroid 2, when the music sped up like that.

 

[Counter_Southpaw]

Metroid 2, though technically an action game is creepy as hell, right up to the end, never knowing what grotesque creature lurks around the next corner. I don't think the end boss matters really - they could have dropped a watermelon there and it wouldn't change anything.

This. Specifically the moment when you are down to 1 Metroid left, rolling through some increasingly dark tunnels... and suddenly a sped-up version of the 'Metroid Alarm' jingle plays and the Metroid Counter jumps back up to 10! You're then faced with 9 Metroid Larvae in the Metroid Queen's lair, reminiscent of the NES game's end before facing the source.

As for more conventional horror, it's telling that virtually every Resident Evil game seems to end with you blasting the biggest baddie with a rocket launcher. One theme I've seen that works pretty well beyond introducing something new at the end ('Metroids can reproduce?!') is to knock away a 'crutch' the player has relied on for the majority of the game, such as their light source slowly fading out or something happening to their main weapon.

Speaking of light sources that reminds me of a point in Half Life 2: ep. 1 (?) where your flashlight keeps running out of juice so it only works for a few seconds at a time. The darn thing went dead on me at the end of the tunnel, so I had to wait a horrifying 4 seconds before the elevator doors cracked open, listening to headcrabs slithering ever closer.

Also, that's the exact moment that was creepy in Metroid 2, when the music sped up like that.

Metroid has always been incredible at establishing a very dark and frightening atmosphere. I remember when I first played Metroid Fusion being absolutely terrified that the SAX would make it's appearance in the next zone. When I finally was given the chance to kill it, and escape the space station, yet another surprise lay in store for me.

Beautiful game. Perhaps my favorite.

 

[Trolldor]

Make a totally hopeless fight to the death that the player must play through?

No.

Horror loses its edge in the face of inevitability.

 

[ReservoirAngel]

Refer to the opening gameplay section of Dead Space 2. Running defenseless as enemies swarm around you. Your only goal is to escape, as any attempt at resistance will be met with your immediate dismemberment or similarly gruesome death.

I dunno if this could destroy atmosphere but for me...this made my heart go fucking nuts for the disappointingly short duration of it.

 

[Solon_Mega]

Make a totally hopeless fight to the death that the player must play through?

I agree with this. But to make it interesting you have to figure out a way to reward players that REALLY put up a good fight. Dunno maybe a different ending that reveals more of the plot. Else people that go for the ending again are just going to put the controller down.

Also this requires that the game has truly enforced emotional bonds with your character. So that you REALLY don't want to see him/her die. Should make the final scenes very special indeed.

 

[AnonymousTipster]

Make a totally hopeless fight to the death that the player must play through?

Not sold on this idea. I like the idea of a tragic, hopeless ending to a horror game, but I'm not sure this would be the exact way to do it.

 

[AnonymousTipster]

Refer to the opening gameplay section of Dead Space 2. Running defenseless as enemies swarm around you. Your only goal is to escape, as any attempt at resistance will be met with your immediate dismemberment or similarly gruesome death.

I dunno if this could destroy atmosphere but for me...this made my heart go fucking nuts for the disappointingly short duration of it.

Not sure exactly what I should glean from that...

 

[lacktheknack]

I think that Silent Hill 3 is a prime example of how NOT to do it. If it had ended with Heather walking out of the room crying and not gone back to the amusement park, it would have been fantastic.

Silent Hill 2 - some endings get it. Although the breaking of the atmosphere of the Leave ending also worked to show that the protagonist was completely successful in his goal.

 

[AnonymousTipster]

I think that Silent Hill 3 is a prime example of how NOT to do it. If it had ended with Heather walking out of the room crying and not gone back to the amusement park, it would have been fantastic.

Silent Hill 2 - some endings get it. Although the breaking of the atmosphere of the Leave ending also worked to show that the protagonist was completely successful in his goal.

I don't exactly mean the literal ending (as in ending cinematic or what have you), but the gameplay finale.

 

[lacktheknack]

I think that Silent Hill 3 is a prime example of how NOT to do it. If it had ended with Heather walking out of the room crying and not gone back to the amusement park, it would have been fantastic.

Silent Hill 2 - some endings get it. Although the breaking of the atmosphere of the Leave ending also worked to show that the protagonist was completely successful in his goal.

I don't exactly mean the literal ending (as in ending cinematic or what have you), but the gameplay finale.

In that case, Silent Hill 3 totally won.

<youtube=o9FJy6hq0Ro>

What better way to introduce the final boss of a blood-n-rust-n-sick game then "2 Girls, 1 Fetus"?

 

[AnonymousTipster]

That video is definitely nice and creepy, but the idea of a final boss that you have to triumph and overcome to conclude the game is, I think, a trope that shouldn't be so widely used in horror games. Or, if there is a final battle, it should be something like just you fighting for survival, to save your own skin, not anything grand or noble.

 

[EHKOS]

The only game that I think got this ok was Manhunt. You spend the final boss (so I've heard)running away from a man in a pig mask or something...prolly I'm not the best to explain this one, but yeah I had the same question.

 

[Therumancer]

I haven't played too many horror games that get this right. Most mainstream horror games tend to devolve into action games, more or less, in their endgames/finale.

The older RE games did this. Hard to keep the tension up when you've got a grenade launcher, magnum, etc and plenty of ammo by the end of the game. And fleeing a secret lab or city or what have you while a self-destruct sequence or a bomb's timer counts down doesn't belong in a horror game, it belongs in a Michael Bay flick.

It doesn't turn into an action game, but even Silent Hill 2 falls flat on its face in its final battle.

I had high hopes for the first Condemned, especially when you get to the farmhouse and you spend the first maybe fifteen or twenty minutes there without even a weapon. But nope, not too long until it craps the bed. And the endgame of Condemned 2 is even worse.

Anyway, don't really have time to go through all the horror games I've played one by one, but the general trend seems to be that developers try to ramp up the action to deliver an exciting finale, but they just end up crapping on what the game had going for it.

your kidding right?

If you follow the horror genere, which I do to a crazy degree, you'll notice that that's how things are. See in most horror stories it's done in such a way so as to explain how someone would know what happened, and oftentimes to explain why we aren't all dead as a result of whatever was going on. In the writings of most horror novelists, as well as in horror movies, the stories usually end with things being tied up, and the surviving victim(s) turning the tables on whatever the horrific threat is. It's one of the defining elements of the genere.

What actually diffrentiates Horror from a lot of other generes is that it's the ending that really sells the premise and seperates the garbage from the good stuff. Anyone can come up with a creepy setting (it's a simple as a basement or attic at times), and the rationale for a haunting or monster. Even easier is the middle section where strange stuff happens, since as "Lost" demonstrated, you can keep interest in almost anything by firing off an endless stream of non-sequitors. The ending however is where you have to explain everything that actually occured in connection to the premise, and bring things to a resolution that explains how someone could be either telling this story secondhand or telling the story themselves from their own perspective... as well as again, usually a justification as to why it "could have happened" even as fiction, and we're not all monster chow or whatever.

The whole "now we've got guns, it's payback time" or "fleeing the bomb that was just set to destroy it" things very much belong in the genere because that *IS* how most of these stories end. The Wolfman eats a silver bullet, the vampire gets staked, the zombies get shot in the head, the blob gets frozen, the gate to hell gets collapsed by a bomb, etc... You can't say it doesn't fit because it does. Even in the very atmospheric stuff by HP Lovecraft, with it's sense of cosmic dread, a lot of the little guys do some very impressive things either in the course of the story or at the very end. You've seen Mythos stories with guys running over aquatic horrosrs with steamship, or electrifying them using modified roller coaster tracks (if I remember) and similar things.

To be honest, in the end a lot of time the climax doesn't seem to match the rest of the story and is lacking, and THAT is why Horror for all of it's bad reputation as "trash" is so bloody hard to write, since everything relies on that ending far more than other generes of fiction. What your talking about are largely failures where they did the right things, but didn't do them well enough to sell you on it fitting. Probably because the writers just didn't do a good job with the games (and let's face it, both horror movies and books suffer from the same problem, you can read dozens of books or watch dozens of movies without finding one that is genuinely good).

Now, I'll also say that a lot of the better horror writers tend to mix things up a bit with endings. HP Lovecraft/Mythos Writers, Steven King, and others are known to play with the genere tropes by NOT having any survivors making it so nobody could possibly have told this story. You also see it in movies like "In The Mouth Of Madness" (John Carpenter) where the movie your watching is arguably the one that the character is seeing made of himself (trippy, you'll have to see the movie to really get it), and similar things. Of course this tends to not work so well if it's expected. Steven King for example can keep you guessing at whether or not the protaganists (or anyone at all) will survive, despite all the criticisms you can make of him as a writer. HOWEVER even in cases where the bad guys win, there is typically a point where the victims fight back, or try to, and usually a point where they think they've won or have the oppertunity to do so. A few video games have done this in the past with mixed results, the original "Alone In the Dark" is an example (the hero gets into a car driven by death) although it's continuation as a series kind of retconned it.

I'll be honest in saying that I do not consider a good horror story to be one where a bunch of wierd stuff happens without any explanation, largely because anyone can do that, and if I want to wonder about things like that I can find plenty of examples in real life. Heck, it's sort of like the horror equivilent of the Insane Clown Posse song "Miracles" (the one that spawned the Magnets meme). Anyone with a halfway decent imagination can be strange and random.

I will also say that I think another key to a good horror story is reasonable reactions. Like it or not, humans are VERY adaptive and can do crazy things in order to survive. It's how we've managed to dominate the planet. There are plenty of stories about people who have managed to wind up in ridiculously adverse conditions and survive. This is an important thing to consider when it comes to fiction. When your dealing with surprise, or a lot of things happening over a very short period, a lack of reacting effectively makes sense. However as things progress, the people remaining static and not even trying to adapt to their circumstances does not make sense. Typically the story is told from the perspective of someone who does not die immediatly, for obvious reasons, the people that do, typically fill out the scenery and a lot of the horror comes from showing what could have happened, or what would have happened to you (not being the protaganist) if you were there. Truthfully I do not consider weapon-free horror games to be a good way of doing things. Unless there are no weapons in the enviroment it makes no sense at all in a lot of these situations that nobody would try and fight (it being effective or not is another question depending on the storyline). One of my criticisms of games like "Amnesia" is that the atmosphere is interesting but I also feel like a special olympian when I come accross something I feel I could do something with (just static stuff around the enviroment) and can't because you know "it would ruin all this horrific atmosphere" which is again exactly why any reasonable person would do it.

While not my favorite author (though he does some decent stuff) Steven King tends to be fairly good at managing to spin a horror yarn where you get into the heads of a large number of characters (even if it drags on for this) and see how they adapt, or try to. The bodycount from people trying things and failing (or doing the wrong thing) can be pretty substantial in his stories, but the point is that they at least try things that make sense.

Truthfully I think the best horror comes from the desperation of trying things, and meeting with mixed reactions. Failed attempts to respond being scarier than walking around going "durrrr", which is strangely what a lot of people seem to want from horror games. Being pretty familiar with the genere I'll be honest in saying games are really the ONLY medium where people seem to want to encourage that from horror.

These are just my opinions of course.

I'll also say that in a lot of cases the reasons why things aren't scary to a gamer is because such a person is usually a science fiction/fantasy/horror fan. As such, your jaded, and it takes something VERY intense to get a reaction out of you nowadays. What's more the things that helped to render you jaded leave fond memories in your mind, but can never recapture that kind of thing because you assimilated. Catering to a jaded audience is difficult because of concerns over ratings and the easily offended. I'm sure most media producers could make stuff for the most jaded horror-philles out there, but in the course of doing it (even with decent sales from a subtantial group of consumers) would wind up being roasted by a lot of mainstream society.

While I think a lot of it was bunk, look at the whole "Your Mom Hates This Game" ad. I think jaded horror fans tend to not consider how things come accross to the non-genere savvy. For jaded gamers something like "Dead Space" is a by the numbers action game with a bunch of gore and dismemberment. To someone who doesn't routinely play games like that though well... they see it through an entirely differant pair of eyes. They probably wouldn't take the same "it's another shoot the baddie" game if they were doing it. The problem being that it's directed at Jaded genere fans and as such lacks the nessicary impact.

 

[AnonymousTipster]

Uh...I think you've misunderstood me for the most part.

I'm not saying you should never be able to fight back against whatever the horrific threat happens to be. In fact I greatly prefer having at least some option of self preservation other than run and hide. But it should still be a desperate, terrifying struggle for survival.

To use some examples from classic horror films *SPOILERS BTW*: in the original Halloween, when the psychologist (can't remember his name) comes to the aide of Jamie Lee Curtis' character and shoots Michael Myers, it is still scary and there is still tension. And in Alien, even after Ridley fights back and blows up the Nostromo(sp?), there is tension throughout. Yes, she does eventually vanquish the monster, but the movie never becomes a god-damn action movie. It retains the horror/sci-fi atmosphere and tension throughout.

What I'm essentially talking about is the destruction of a horror game's atmosphere and tension by an overemphasis on its action elements. Of course people are adaptable and will find ways to survive, that's not the point. The point is, if you've reached the level where you're a one man army (or one woman army, as the case may be) it's just not a horror game anymore. And that's bad.

But what's also bad is blindly following genre tropes.

 

[Spinyking]

Add something crazy, like a sharktopus. No, wait, two sharktopi!

 

[Trolldor]

If you follow the horror genere, which I do to a crazy degree, you'll notice that that's how things are. See in most horror stories it's done in such a way so as to explain how someone would know what happened, and oftentimes to explain why we aren't all dead as a result of whatever was going on. In the writings of most horror novelists, as well as in horror movies, the stories usually end with things being tied up, and the surviving victim(s) turning the tables on whatever the horrific threat is. It's one of the defining elements of the genere.

No, victory is not one of the defining elements of the genre. Traditional 'horror' almost always left a lingering dread, or downright defeat of our protagonist. This 'victorious' trend primarily came during the World War/Cold War eras, where the monsters become allegories.
True horror has no 'bright side'.

 

[badgersprite]

Not to be overly simplistic, but what about a chase sequence instead of a 'combat' sequence? I guess it wouldn't work in a game built around them (eg Shattered Memories, or even Amnesia), but if you suddenly have to deal with an evil you can't beat and instead have to run the fuck away from, that would feel pretty pulse-pounding and terrifying at the same time.

If it were in every game it would lose its edge, but it's just the first thing that came to mind.