BOO! Welcome to the spooktacular Halloween edition of StarLevelUp. Look, I know that Malaysia doesn’t really celebrate this spooky holiday, mostly because the country doesn’t have pumpkins, has a lack of cute ghosts, and has a surplus of terrifying hantu (I once had to explain what a penanggalan is to my British friends, and they wouldn’t stop screaming), but I couldn’t resist pitching a Halloween-themed gaming article to my editor. This may turn out to be a strategic mistake, though, because I forgot that I’m a massive coward and that scary games scare the living daylights out of me. However! This does give me a perfect excuse to talk about a really good Japanese horror game that I’ve been playing – Yomawari: Lost In The Dark from Nippon Ichi Software – and perhaps understand the elements that make for a good horror game. So, put on your Halloween costume and/or hide under your most secure blanket, because things are about to get terrifying!
Yomawari: Lost in the Dark (aka Yomawari 3) puts you in the teeny-tiny shoes of an adorable young girl who finds herself not only in a horror story but in an extra-terrifying Japanese horror story. Playing as Yuzu, you’re armed with only a flashlight as you explore your small Japanese hometown in the dead of night, searching for your lost memories and trying to uncover the identity of a mysterious girl you keep seeing. You only have one night to find your answers, however, as a curse will take you when dawn breaks, and the strange spirits that flit in the shadows of the town won’t make your journey easy.
Like the previous two titles in the series – Yomawari: Night Alone and Yomawari: Midnight Shadows – Lost In The Dark is one of those rare video games that shines based on aesthetics and narrative execution alone. The gameplay is mechanically simple: you’re mostly just walking around, picking up objects, solving some light puzzles, and avoiding ghosts. However, the visuals, sounds and writing do so much of the heavy lifting. The gorgeous hand-painted graphics; the haunting “small town” Japanese atmosphere; the imaginative and terrifying supernatural spooks that hint at the town’s dark secrets – they all work together to pull you into Yomawari’s darkly beautiful world and make you engage with the story’s central mystery.
Now, while I’m fully inclined to spend the rest of this article heaping praise on this game, I think it’d be more interesting for all of us if we started examining why Yomawari 3 is such a good, if imperfect, horror game. After all, horror games function very differently from horror movies/comics/novels, and also very differently from non-horror video games. So what are the elements that make a horror game properly frightful yet engaging to play?
Attraction, anticipation, surprise
Unlike a horror movie/comic/novel, a horror game has to account for player agency. Game developers can’t just write, “Yuzu walked into the spooky mansion even though it seemed like a bad idea”. The game has to compel players to press the buttons that make Yuzu enter the spooky mansion without them feeling they’ve been railroaded into doing so. As such, the first element of a good horror game is to have a good balance between attraction (things that draw you into and make you want to stay in a horror setting) and repulsion (scary things that make you want to run away). A good mystery is a classic way to lure characters, players, or future victims into the horror plot (for example, the Scooby gang can never resist exploring the spooky mansion to uncover the secret of the Pumpkin Ghost), but games can get more creative. Yomawari 3, for example, has a bunch of random collectible items spread across the town, so I’m often rewarded for exploring the various shadowy corners of the game’s twisting, labyrinthine map. However, these rewards are a clever trap exploiting my gamer’s impulse to collect things, because as I foolishly explore quiet alleyways, empty school corridors, or a gloomy library, I’m also being set up for – BOO!
Playing as Yuzu, you’re armed with only a flashlight as you explore your small Japanese hometown in the dead of night, searching for your lost memories and trying to uncover the identity of a mysterious girl you keep seeing. Ha, didn’t expect a jump scare there, did you? The next element is surprise, and this is something plenty of horror games have learned from horror films, and Yomawari too has its share of sudden, shocking scares. However, surprise can’t work without its sister element: anticipation. In Yomawari, as mentioned before, I’d often find myself wandering quiet alleyways or abandoned school corridors, and often … nothing happens. There’s no music, just the ambient sound of streetlights and crickets and the sound of my tiny footsteps as I get absorbed in the eerie beauty of this small town. And then suddenly, I’d hear a strange noise in the distance. And then the controllers start vibrating in time with the increasing pace of Yuzu’s audible heartbeat. And then what I thought was just a shadow in the corner starts moving and then approaching, and then I see its face … and then … boo! Anticipation and surprise have to work together like the setup and payoff for a joke; if a horror game has a lot of jump scares without any moments of quiet to build up the tension, then that’s just shocking without actually being frightening.
Feeling of danger
Unlike most video games, a horror game isn’t about player empowerment or allowing them to become more skilled or stronger. If Yuzu avoids ghosts, she doesn’t gain 100XP and unlock a child-sized shotgun that she can use to blast Japanese Cthulhu. (Actually, note to self: that sounds like an awesome mod for this game.) Nope, a good horror game has to give players a palpable sense of danger, and a common way that many video games do this is by introducing fragility (for example, dying in one hit), resource scarcity (for instance, limited ammo), and save/checkpoint rarity (for example, safe rooms and bonfires are few and far between). When you’re playing an easily-murdered child whose only moves are (1) running and (2) crying, then you’ll approach the game very, very differently than if you were playing a space marine with fifteen rocket launchers and regenerating health.
Caution becomes the order of the day because, at the back of your head, you realise that death can easily set you back to a save point from half an hour ago. However, there’s a problem here, because if the developers make the game too dangerous, then it stops being scary and instead becomes frustrating. (Mild spoilers incoming!) Take, for example, Yomawari’s boss fights, which are often extended chase sequences. The first time Yuzu has to flee from a Big Frightening Ghost (BFG), it’s terrifying! All the quiet exploration is replaced by heart-pounding flight as a gruesome monster lunges towards you. You turn to flee, but your path of escape is blocked, forcing you to think fast. But, gasp, you’re running out of stamina to run, and then – help!
However, the problem is that only the threat of death is scary – not the death itself. Because this is a video game, and when your character dies, you just … restart at the nearest checkpoint. This can strip away the illusion of horror to reveal the game mechanics underneath. As noted when I died my umpteenth death…
