Frictional Games’ Thomas Grip recently took to the internet and thought it necessary to make his reaction to the upcoming Alien: Isolation public. He said that the game is plagued by two major horror design issues.
The first, he said, was that the fact that in a horror game, gory cutscenes aren’t scary, they’re a relief, and that all horror games should ideally avoid them. He says that if a game does focus on cutscenes too much, it because less intense and relies “more on “will I have to replay the mission?” which is a lot less potent from a horror perspective.’
“I think you need to have proper death at some point,” he said, talking about dying in horror games, “but if the player reach that it should be seen as sort of a failure. Also, this makes one think of the fun question: “What is worse than death?” of which there are way too many answers.””
Thomas also said that horror games shouldn’t reveal their monsters or whatever the perpetrators are, via cutscenes, rather leave them to be revealed in-game for the gamer’s imagination to run wild.
Alien: Isolation is due out some time on October 7 of this year. Stay tuned for more updates.