Puzzles, meanwhile, mainly feature either as locked doors or a multitude of minigames. The latter serves both to prevent the flow of combat/exploration from getting tedious and to offer the player a bit of pensive respite. It’s no accident then that these quieter moments often end with a crash as monsters flood the scene.
Areas themselves are turned into large-scale puzzles based around the piecing together of which key opens what door and what item is used where. Locked door puzzles often involve the player backtracking over familiar grounds, necessitating navigation of safe or unsafe areas and finding optimum routes to match the player’s needs and resources. Having to pass again through a causeway populated by bandersnatches can be risky and intimidating – it may be best to retread that path as seldom as possible.
Taken all together, the necessity for exploration is impeded by the presence and variety of monsters. Enemies, in turn, can be avoided or combated in accordance with whatever assets are available and the difficulty of navigation. Puzzles are completed to avail of more resources or to open new areas for progression. Exploration and backtracking demands inventory management as the player must juggle items and available space in anticipation of the coming need. Each mechanic interacts with the others, forming a very fulfilling and cohesive system.
The overall effect is to set you on edge by inhibiting your command of the situation. Through restrictive combat mechanics and an emphasis on resource management, enemy encounters are framed as situational problems rather than opportunities.
Unlike RE4 and Operation Raccoon City, where emphasis of combat is on player accuracy, gunplay in Code Veronica asks little by way of player skill. In the more action-inclined games, enjoyment is largely derived from well-placed shots and successful melee attacks. Meanwhile, gratification in Code Veronica is achieved by clearing a room with as little impact on your ammunition stock as possible or by safely weaving in and out of a zombie crowd. Combat is a means to an end.
Evasion of enemies and player survival is therefore achieved through an enactment of strategy – resource management, fight or flight decisions, efficient navigation of maps – all of which are heavily tied in to one another. Interpretation of these mechanics is helped by an aesthetic framing of the virtual world and player abilities (or inabilities) that ingrains player technique as strategic. Switching the camera to a more accommodating perspective would devastate the player’s visual powerlessness, for instance, and render the combat mechanics’ shortcomings far more harmful than is presently the case.
Similarly, an abundance of ammo and health items would strip exploration of all its danger since damage and combat no longer really threaten player progress. Gameplay and aesthetic both direct the player into a particular mindset to establish atmosphere and it is this quality that makes a game survival horror.
Take for example some of the most memorable segments in the RE franchise – those involving Nemesis and Tyrant-103. Against these indomitable forces, the player is forced to flee or expend vast resources in fighting the creatures. Similarly themed segments can be found to various degrees in Clock Tower and Dead Space, as well as in Operation Raccoon City, the original Tomb Raider and Arkham Asylum.
But whereas Birkin, the T-Rex and Killer Croc certainly fit the criteria of placing the player on the back foot, these are nary but novelties in the context of each game’s totality. On the other hand, Dead Space and Clock Tower are structurally designed to elicit such fear all day long (with exceptions, of course – even Resident Evil ends with a rocket launcher).
The first Dead Space employs similar gunplay mechanics to ORC and Uncharted, emphasising combat ability and accuracy as player aptitudes. So too, ultimately, does Project Zero (aka Fatal Frame) wherein the player navigates a haunted house in much the same way as Resident Evil, but relies on first-person perspective combat to photograph and defeat ghosts.
When faced with a mob of necromorphs in Dead Space, however, the player is asked to focus attacks on staving off the hoard while identifying priority threats. Targeting specific limbs and employing stasis and kinesis shapes the tactics by which this goal is achieved. Project Zero grants the player significantly increased damage output by telling him/her to get in close, build up power by keeping the ghost in frame and take the shot at the last possible second. Both Project Zero and Dead Space diverge from their mechanical ilk through a casting of the protagonists as seemingly unequal to the forces against them and encouraging a reliance on strategy to overcome these far more powerful foes.
So although Dead Space and ORC share a mostly similar core mechanic, the gameplay difference lies in the systems’ differing tendencies of narrative. Likewise, Clock Tower and Code Veronica both invoke strategic thinking through their gameplay despite featuring vastly different mechanics. Though the units in each system differ dramatically, the quality that makes each of them so characteristic and so alike takes form when considered teleologically, with the player’s understanding as a final goal.
As with all games, our experience is governed by our ability to interpret the system in place as a bundle of meanings, rather than simply as an available array of actions. Navigation, combat and puzzles in Code Veronica are not three distinctly isolated realms of player activity. Nor are they, as mechanics, removed from the game’s narrative function, contrary to the common nattering of gameplay and narrative being at odds with one another. Only through understanding it in terms of narrative subtext, even subconsciously, is the system at all functional and intelligible.
It’s because tone is utterly essential in survival horrors that the genre is exemplary of videogames as inherently narrativistic experiences. Survival horror demands a game be regarded holistically, as a collection of meaningful systems built towards one unified purpose. Heads generally nod at the analogy of game mechanics and motifs to grammar, yet these same noggins often rally against its extension to systems and language. Nevertheless, even though a game may be delightfully camp and preposterous, it can still make for a terrifying experience on the tonal grounds of gameplay alone.
