FEAR EFFECT

From Crow Country to Resident Evil 9, horror games are still in their ascendancy. But what are the tricks behind making players scared? And can the popularity last?

BY ED SMITH

Thomas Grip, co-founder of Frictional Games and the designer behind genre icons such as Penumbra, Amnesia and Soma, has a peculiar piece of advice for horror game creators: make it boring. “It’s critical it’s not too engaging,” he says, “because then it’s like playing Tetris while you’re in the spooky mansion. The ghost is standing behind you, but you don’t notice because you’re too involved in the game of Tetris. You kind of want gameplay that is dull, repetitive or simplistic.”

Brian Clarke, creator of 2022’s The Mortuary Assistant, and now the in-development Paranormal Activity game, has a similar ethos. Explaining the tactics for building an effective scare, he says the goal is to focus the player on something innocuous and then suddenly break the silence. “The key is that the player has something to do that distracts them from the elephant in the room,” Clarke explains. “‘I know there’s something creepy in here – but I have to make sure that this swipe-card reader works’. The horror is almost secondary to the menial task.”

This approach characterises a certain type of horror game. Think of Slender, where all you do is walk through a (very plain) forest and pick up eight pieces of paper. The Five Nights At Freddy’s series, especially the earlier games, is similarly routine: check the cameras, monitor the power supply and, if you need to, shut the doors. If survival horror dominated the ’90s, then this subgenre, which DreadXP head of operations Henry Hoare calls “blue-collar horror”, is one of the biggest today. “The player develops expectations in their mind,” Hoare says, referencing other examples such as Lethal Company and Repo, “and then you can subvert those expectations.”

Towards the end of the ’00s and during the early years of the ’10s, horror games, in the mainstream at least, fell out of vogue. Beginning with Resident Evil 4, Capcom transformed its flagship horror series into an over-the-shoulder thirdperson shooter. While the ‘action-horror’ hybrid was an exciting prospect in 2005, after the dour responses to both RE6 and Dead Space 3, the subgenre lost some of its power. At the same time, Konami was farming Silent Hill out to thirdparty developers, with varying results – if Shattered Memories and Origins were mild successes, the prestige of Silent Hill was undermined by Downpour, Homecoming and the widely disparaged HD Collection.

But while horror struggled in the world of triple-A, it was gaining new life elsewhere thanks to an emerging cadre of middle-budget and independent developers. Amnesia: The Dark Descent wasn’t the first game to pit players against an invincible monster, with no weapons to defend themselves, but in 2010 it felt like a statement. If horror had swung to one extreme, with too many enemies, guns and explosions, Amnesia dragged it back to the opposite pole: no resources, no combat. This purified subgenre – ‘run-and-hide horror’ – gained further traction thanks to Outlast, Layers Of Fear, Alien: Isolation and dozens more.

More recently, games such as Poppy Playtime and My Friendly Neighborhood – all inspired by the pioneering FNAF – have helped to settle and formalise another type of horror. The mechanics are straightforward; the story is drip-fed, and deliberately ambiguous. If Twitch and YouTube Live also hit their strides during the past decade, ‘mascot horror’ has become the perfect streamer game, simple enough that you can easily talk and perform to the camera while playing, and with plenty of conjecture, lore and ‘theorycrafting’ to discuss with your viewers. Combined with throwback horror games such as Crow Country, Back In 1995 and Signalis, and the sleazy splatterhouse work of developers such as Benedetto ‘Puppet Combo’ Cocuzza and Jordan King, the horror genre in 2025 comprises a rich combination of visual styles, mechanics and conventions – the traditional survival horror that predominated 30 years ago may still exist, but it’s now complemented by several other horror types. The genre’s current popularity is the result of more than just range, however. Crow Country creative director Adam Vian puts it down partly to an inherent ‘guarantee’ that horror provides.