Tomm Hulett, who served as an associate producer on Silent Hill: Downpour, told MCV Pacific earlier today that the horror genre has been “lucky”. This is something I have been raving about concerning the style of game for years now, and I am extremely happy the industry is starting to act.
“I think the genre was lucky, to an extent, when it started out. A lot of horror elements ‘clicked’ such as clunky combat, confusing cameras, and so on,” said Hulett.
“However, shoddy gameplay can’t be a feature forever, and so everyone fixed the combat – resulting in action games with creepier monsters. If horror games are going to be ‘scary’ in the future, it’s going to take careful game design to do it,” continued the disgruntled developer.
He explained that with Downpour, their company tried to focus on what made horror games good in the first place, and not the gimmicky gameplay we’ve come to see today.
“While many other games have gone the route of more action oriented game design, attempting to appeal to more mainstream audiences, we’ve taken a very careful approach to the pacing of Downpour to make sure it maintains that original ‘slow-burn’ and keeping the player off guard with less predictability,” he said.
“If you have tense, frightening gameplay happening naturally, and then some carefully orchestrated designed-scares, you would have a very memorable horror game,” he stated.
Silent Hill: Downpour is sitting on store shelves as you read this, so go check it out! Maybe the horror genre has made a change for the better!
