Combat's place in horror games

I got a lot of flack from a few people for disparaging Dead Space as much as I did and engaging in the typical exalting of the early Silent Hill installments last time I talked about games.  In the first post, the bit about Dead Space was mainly a footnote so I didn't really explain myself.  I never wanted to leave something like that without a good explanation, because that's not fair to the game.  But in seeking to flesh out my stance on Dead Space, I started thinking a lot about combat in general since it tends to be such a contentious aspect of horror games.

For the sake of this exercise let's define combat as your single player-character in a direct, weaponized altercation with one-to-n enemy combatants.  This should be broad enough to encompass everything I want to talk about while excluding squad-based combat and other non-first person forms of combat.

Combat is obviously the core gameplay mechanic in games like Modern Warfare, Call of Duty, God of War, Prototype, and all their forefathers.  Even games like Arkham City and Arkham Asylum where navigation and puzzle-solving often take center stage, combat is a huge mechanic and part of what makes these games notable.  And in all these games the purpose of combat is to serve the emotional engagement of making the player feel like a badass (or in the Arkham games: Batman, the ultimate badass).  That's what they're for.  These games all serve to immerse the player in an environment where they can experience the visceral joy of dominating one's opposition without moral ambiguity.

However, the same sort of combat exists in the survival horror genre in games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Dead Space, etc.  A lot of these games are about that moral ambiguity, they force the player to make uncomfortable decisions or confront uncomfortable reality.  There is no visceral joy to be had here, yet they still involve combat.  So in this genre, combat isn't around to make you feel like a badass but why is it around?  An easy theory is that combat exists in survival games to place a strain on your resources which forces you to ration instead of simply horde.  Without something depleting your supply of ammunition and health restoration items, the game simply doesn't have the stress factor involved with making sure you have enough of everything to make it to the end, which is a significant amount of the point.

While this is true, I think there's deeper engagement.  First, the focus on resource maintenance inherent to these games makes each combat situation you survive a Pyrrhic Victory: You live to fight another day, but at what cost?  Forcing the player to ask that question in any form keeps them in a state of introspection, and makes sure they don't get too cocky.

The combat also feeds you hope.  Survival horror games often have a puzzle solving or key-quest component to go along with their oppressive atmosphere.  Unfortunately this can quickly become demoralizing because if your experience of a game is a constant stream of endless puzzles in similar environments it doesn't feel like you're making any progress.  But the thrill of combat, of facing down the mutated hellbeast zombie creature and emerging victorious gives a sense of accomplishment.  It lifts you up and gives you the feeling that maybe you're capable of making it out of whatever situation you're in alive.  Also, the tense and immediate nature of combat raises the pitch of the game briefly making the experience feel more varied, similar to the rising and falling action in the story structure of a book or movie.

Part of the reason combat is so tense is because of how quickly it happens.  Decisions have to be made and executed so fast that a wayward second being taken aback by a monster will get you killed.  Simply put, you don't have the time to be scared during combat, you just have to react or you probably won't make it out of combat.  In an FPS after the post-combat relief you get congratulated, it's a positive payoff because you're told you've done well.  In survival horror after combat you have to examine your situation and resources, and get to reflect on whatever unholy face-craving scarecrow you've just seen.


Closing thoughts?

The combat in a horror game serves the same basic purpose of tense action with a feeling of victorious exhilaration when its done, but its use and context within a horror game let it evoke a much wider range of emotions.  However, in order for it to evoke the intended emotions it needs to fall into context of a resource-limited survival horror game.  Trying to include long combat scenes or waves of enemies doesn't make sense because it becomes too stressful and gives the scene a Contra-like failure rate which prevents it from making the right impact.

--PXA