The Worst Kind of Horror

 

I am a big fan off the horror genre as you might be able to guess from the fact that I always do giant 31 game challenges of various horror games every October.  It's not just one of my favorite genres for video games but it's also the first genre I go to for books and movies too.  I'm just can't get enough of all that spooky bullshit.

Horror is a pretty broad term as within "Horror" there's all sorts of different types of horror.  Slasher, supernatural, body horror, psychological, sci-fi and found footage are just a few examples of all the different sub-genres within the giant umbrella that is "horror".  But there is one sub-genre within this niche that has consistently just the absolute worst content known to man and that's Mascot Horror.  If you see a game within this sub genre then I suggest you ignore it and not waste your money (or time, if its free to play) because the only thing you are in for with the majority of games within this genre is a bad experience with maybe a couple of jump scares peppered in between.

I feel like the big jumping off point for Mascot Horror was Five Nights and Freddies, the game that really put the genre on the map.  Now I don't actually hate FNaF all that much, it's not mind-blowing or anything and its tension is quickly ruined by its eagerness to kill you with a jump scare but its a neat little idea for a game.  However the majority of its sequels and all the copycats it spawned are probably some of the worst things to happen to the horror genre in its entire history. 

Poppy's Playtime, Garten of Banban, Baldi's Basics, Amanda the Adventurer, countless examples of just low effort trash shat onto various online platforms for idiots to waste their money on.  Desperately hoping that the game, like FNaF, will be picked up by enough children that think it's being really clever to develop a following and in turn, make a boatload of cash.  Really though, juxtaposing childrens entertainment with horror elements is just a really lame way of generating fear and it's the kind of thing that only a person under the age of maybe 12 might think is effective.  Movies do this too where horror films like to take a childrens song and have it play slowly over some scene of violence and I have never once in my life met a person who thinks that that kind of thing is effective in any way.

The two worst offenders I can think of within the genre are Bendy and the Ink Machine and CASE: Animatronics.  Both games are janky, poorly made pieces of actual shit that fail both as horror properties and as games.  CASE is far worse being a buggy, low effort mess clearly trying to muscle in on some of that FNaF money but Bendy is just as offensive to the senses as that has somehow manage to build itself a little bit of a following.

You aren't being clever by taking something that's "for children" and making it spooky or worse, covering it in gore for shock value.  Take your Unreal Engine horror game template and fuck off, stop wasting time and money by putting this shit to market.  Go and work on something actually interesting instead.

Five Nights at Freddy's

I couldn't have been more late to this party even if I tried.  A game series that's gathered a massive following and that has tons of sequels but only now am I getting around to actually playing it for myself.  The curse of a large backlog I guess.

Five Nights at Freddy's is a horror game where you play as an after hours security guard in a chuck-e-cheese style pizza restaurant.  On your first night you get a message from the guy who worked there before you warning you that the robot mascots will wander the halls at night and if they see you they will attempt to shove you into one of the suits, killing you violently in the process.  Armed with nothing but some security cameras, light switches and a couple of doors, you must survive from 12am to 6am in the restaurant.  It sounds easy on paper but in practice it really isn't.

The game itself consists of not much more than the screen above.  You move the mouse down to the bar to open the camera and click the buttons on the wall to toggle the lights and the doors.  You'd think that you'd just be able to close the doors and just wait it out until 6am but the problem is that pesky little power percentage in the corner.  Turning on a light, closing a door, opening the camera all drain your power supply at an increased rate.  If the power hits zero then the lights go off, the doors fly open and the mascots are free to just walk in and give you a very bad day at work.  The crux of the game is quickly checking the cameras to get the rough positions of the mascots and only closing the doors when absolutely necessary.  Of course, once you get good and know what you're doing there's ways to game the AI to make your life a little easier but the game is pretty heavy on the randomness and sometimes you'll just die because the game wants you to.  It sounds really annoying but considering a night is only about 8 minutes and the restart is pretty much instant it's not so bad.

The horror in FNAF manifests itself almost exclusively as jump scares, which is usually something I hate but here I don't seem to mind it so much.  If a mascot gets into your room the game will leave you unawares for a moment before throwing the 3D model into your face with a loud noise quickly followed by a game over screen.  Kind of like any of those screamer flash games from the early days of the internet.  I think the reason I give it a pass here though is because it's not TRYING to be anything more than a jump scare game and it tells you this in its loading screen before the main menu.  It's not like, let's say, Dead Space, a game claiming to be at atmospheric romp through a derelict ship and then a good deal of it's "horror" coming from having Necromorphs jump out of small holes screaming at you.  While jump scares ARE cheap and I still hate them, at least the developer Scott Cawthon is up front and basically just flat out says to you "I'm going to jump scare you now, have fun!"

The game is cheap on Steam so I'd recommend going to pick it up.  I finished it in a single evening on stream (granted I had some help) but when you finish there's a sort of "hard mode" in the form of 6th Night and when you finish that you get Custom Night which lets you set the AI levels of each mascot to your own liking, so it's got some replayability too.  Even after the jump scares stop making you jump there's something rather compelling about the mechanics of the game that will keep you coming back.  Every afternoon I've been firing it up to attempt to clear a custom night with all the settings turned to max and it really is quite challenging.

If you're looking for a cheap horror experience, Freddy Fazbears Pizzeria is a pretty good place to go.