I’m a fan of survival horror games. It’s no secret that Resident Evil 2 is my personal holy grail of survival horror, but I also enjoyed Eternal Darkness, and even Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth had its moments. But as I’ve written before, survival horror as a genre is dying. In the most recent “survival horror” games, the emphasis is on directly confronting the enemies. As such, games like Dead Space and Resident Evil 5 aren’t what I’d categorize as survival horror. They’re great games, but they’re shooters.

Part of the reason for the shift may be that true survival horror games can be frustrating. When I tried to play Resident Evil: Code Veronica X a few years back, I got halfway through the game and had to stop playing because I had no healing supplies and no ammunition, and it was impossible for me to progress. So I restarted the game from the beginning, being more careful this time. I got further, but once more I found myself stuck with no supplies, and so I had to stop playing. I never finished the game, and that’s frustrating.

Scarcity of resources is a big part of traditional survival horror, as is the ability to avoid enemies rather than confronting them directly. In fact, the lack of experience points or loot encourages players to run from enemies, since there’s no reward in defeating them – only the possibity of being injured. And motivating players to flee rather than fight makes the game’s foes feel more frightening.

But one of the ways that games have evolved over the past decade is by better respecting players’ time. Diego Doumecq had an excellent post that explores this: “The games of yesterday were more directly designed for kids…. (They had) …all the time in the world”. I’ll admit – when I was eleven years old, playing Realm of Impossibility and Legacy of the Ancients on my Commodore 64, I had all the time in the world too. Diego writes about the pacing of games: about grinding, and having to repeat challenging tasks over and over until you manage to do it without your character dying.

Ever since video games have existed, the consequence of failure has remained consistent: you die, and you have to retry. Thus, a player finds himself repeating the same section of gameplay over and over, and this can grow extremely frustrating. Either you’re defending Nova Prospekt from an assault by The Combine over and over, reloading your progress each time, or you’re replaying Ghosts and Goblins over and over, starting from level one each time.

The first I’d seen of an alternative was when I played Heavy Rain. It’s the only game of its kind I’ve ever played where there is no Game Over screen as a result of player failure, and where you never have to reload a game as a result of failing. There are certainly consequences, and game characters can certainly die, but you’re never forced to repeat a scene in the game because you failed. As I’ve written before, this makes for a very different type of game experience, and I strongly feel that assigning this kind of irrevocability to a player’s choices and failures makes for a far more engaging game experience. In Heavy Rain, when I was playing through a scene in which my character was fighting for her life, I was anxious. I was sitting bolt upright in my chair and trying my damnest because I knew that if I screwed up and that character died, the character was dead. No reloading and trying again. And that is the sentiment that survival horror games need to capture.

I’m not saying that creating this type of game would be easy. Even if you create a cast of six or ten characters, it’s easily possible that all of them could die, and then what happens? But if the game designer combines an approach where less plot-critical failures carry consequences lighter than death (end up in the hospital, fail to get that really nice shotgun) and where the difficulty is carefully moderated to remain challenging without becoming deadly except during a small number of set pieces, this approach could work very well.

I don’t know whether the makers of survival horror games will latch onto this mechanic, but I’d absolutely love to see it happen.