Note: List is in random order. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Outlast 2

The first Outlast was an incredibly tense, scare-riddled romp through a mysterious asylum. With no weapons to fight back against the hospitals crazed Denizens, you could do nothing but run, hide, and pray that the creature stalking you wouldn’t look inside the locker that you were hiding in. The upcoming sequel will explore new characters, settings, and events. It will be set in the same universe as the original, so fans of the surprise, horror hit will have much to look forward to.

Zombie Studios may have been garnering headlines with Blacklight Retribution, but its next big game is something a little more…freaky. Daylight, published by Atlus, will see players take on the role of Sarah Gwynn as she navigates the mysterious and suitably creepy Mid Island Bay Hospital. Check out the screenshots below to see exactly what Sarah has gotten herself into.

Also unveiled in the screenshots is the ability to your mobile phone as a map. The developer does point out that the map only functions for areas that you’ve explored and doesn’t really provide too much info besides telling you where you’re going. Could a horrifying beast be around the corner, waiting to ambush you? You’ll need to peek around and see for yourself.

Daylight, like many first person survival horror games released recently, doesn’t give you weapons. You’ll need to run away to survive and eventually escape from the hospital. It will be releasing in Q1 2014 for PS4 and PC.

In a press release, the team revealed that it has “has started work on DLC for Outlast, where players will fill the shoes of a new protagonist and storyline, further exploring the secrets of Mount Massive. More details to come when ready.”

Considering the way Outlast ended, it’s certainly a given that we’d see a new protagonist. For those who haven’t experienced the horror yet, Red Barrels has announced that Outlast is discounted on Steam. Are you willing to return to Mount Massive so soon after the horrors of the campaign? Let us know in the comments below.

Speaking to MCV, Pattison stated that, “We have obviously seen the consumer response and the PR response. There was some great positives out of that, but it was a mixed bag, as we saw from the review scores. We have got to take that on-board, we can’t ignore that, and we have to take that onto the next game when we make the next Resident Evil.

“With Resident Evil 6 specifically, we probably put too much content in there, there were comments from consumers that said it felt bloated. The Leon missions went down very well, and because we did Resident Evil Revelations on 3DS, there was a cry out for us to focus our attention on survival horror, rather than be too many things to all people. You’ll find where we go next will likely be more targeted at our core fanbase.”

Pattison also pointed towards games like The Last of Us as proof that survival horror can still be done well. “A lot is said about the saturation of this zombie, post-apocalyptic survival horror. But it is still alive and well. The Last of Us shows a good direction of what the consumers want. Tomb Raider as well, we spoke to R&D and they looked at that and they enjoyed that experience. I think that proves there is still a strong market for that sort of content.”

As long as we never have any more cover mechanics or awful driving segments again, we’ll be happy.

Outlast follows journalist Miles Upshur as he heads to the Mount Massive Asylum, which has long since been abandoned after rumours of scary experiments, to find out the truth about the facility being re-opened and reportedly still operating. What follows is a mad romp through insanity itself as the in-mates have shown that they are clearly running the asylum now.

Outlast is also scheduled to release for the PlayStation 4 in 2014 along with a smattering of other indie games including The Witness, Transistor and more.

In fact, there are no weapons or means of fighting in Daylight. Players will be exploring an abandoned hospital, which is procedurally generated and changes each time you load up the game – so you’ll never be sure about what lurks around the next corner. You only have a single cell phone providing the light needed to explore surroundings.

And if you encounter any nasty ghosts? Well, run. But you can also work to shake them off. Running is still preferable though.

Daylight is currently set to release in the first quarter of 2014. Stay tuned for more gameplay details in the coming months.

What horror games are you looking forward to in 2013? Let us know in the comments section below. For more of these awesome features, check out here. Stay tuned to GamingBolt.com for more news and updates.

As a video game system deprived youth (my first owned console, aside from always-outdated PCs, was a Nintendo Gamecube), this was my first experience with a variant of a survival horror game, outside of a few glimpses of Silent Hill or Resident Evil 2 at a friend’s or cousin’s house.  As such, the experience stuck with me. Lacking anything useful, we had to prowl the halls looking for alternate routes or bypass switches, harvest our resources greedily, conserve ammunition and try to avoid open combat. To me, this kind of gameplay was incredibly new, and incredibly scary. I was used to running around shooting everything I saw, and damn the low ammo count. In System Shock 2, that was a good way to get you dead. I had a hard time sleeping that night, with the death-groans of the zombified crewmen at the back of my thoughts.

But try as I might, I’ve found that recent games don’t exactly live up to the experience. Much of this can be blamed on the fact that I was twelve, and, being honest, System Shock 2 is much more an RPG than it is a survival horror (much like its recent counterpart, Bioshock). Still, there is a pervasive and continuous horror element alive in both games. Bioshock starts with an excellent beginning, and the first time I was stuck in the bathysphere with a spider slicer intent on getting in and disemboweling me I remember being very tense. The first two hours, in fact, had me on edge. The same can be said for the newest incarnations of Resident Evil: the first two hours, the time your brain is acclimating to the setting, defining patterns and determining what is a bigger threat, are truly scary and memorable. But after a while, with few exceptions, every horror game made in recent years tends to devolve after a while into just another shooter, but with a creepy setting.

And after about two hours, you get used to it. The enemies and their creepy chanting, while affecting at first, no longer creep you out, because you’re used to them. You start to recognize patterns in the game, begin to tell when a quick-time event might come up, or a mini-boss battle will come up, and it’s no longer scary.

The point here is, after a while, you can’t introduce any more splicers, or any more zombified villagers, and still make the game both playable and frightening. New enemies, like the admittedly creepy spiky, shambling, health-regenerating gray dude in Resident Evil 4 only scare until the pattern of their destruction is found. And then? They’re just another obstacle. And when those obstacles can be met with endless gun upgrades and plentiful ammunition, it’s not much of an obstacle at all. So the game ramps itself up, and falls into the trap of throwing tentacles at you in lieu of actually being spooky.

The problem with the idea of “survival horror” is that the name is hypocritical to begin with. Like most story-driven games, in order to experience the game, you must complete it. And if you must complete it, “survival” doesn’t exist. As creepy and soul-crushing as the death scene in RE4 was, all it really did was magically pop you back into place five minutes in the past, and you could do the whole thing again. Bioshock was even more egregious; the vita-chambers almost guaranteed that at some point, the player will decide that Yes, He can defeat the Big Daddy with three pistol bullets, one health pack and his slightly enhanced wrench. And after being drilled into a wall and left to die in a pool of his own blood, vomit and tears, he returns to the game instantly twenty feet away, with a brand new body and no lasting injuries. In effect, there is no penalty for dying.

People are affected by horror movies because good ones are able to make the audience care for a character. We want to see them get through it safe, and we don’t want to see anything horrible happen to them. With games, not only is it more difficult to immerse a person into because of the fact that the environment must be interactive to a point of reasonable expectation (bugs, glitches and the like severely effect immersion, and immersion is a primary element of horror), but the player is a part of the story. But if that player is basically invulnerable, there is nothing to drive the horror.

There are innovative games that have come out that attempt to rectify this, but more often than not a stiff penalty for dying becomes aggravating rather than scary. In order for a huge death penalty to work right, everything in the game must function absolutely perfectly. If a player dies because he gets caught on terrain, it’s annoying. If they die because a door glitches and won’t open or close, annoying. Actually, most deaths when put next to a stiff penalty would most likely result in a cry of “bullshit!” and anger at the game, unless the game is so well made that the player knows it is his own mistake. There are few games out there that can handle this. In fact, one horror game that seemed to go overlooked had some truly unique horror elements: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth not only had a superbly creepy tone, but there were action set-pieces, boss fights, and hints at the protagonists failing grasp of sanity that were very well done. Throw in doses of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and the path is set to horror gold. Unfortunately, because the game was so badly designed it becomes near impossible to play most of the time.

So this begs the question: does survival horror exist any more? Horror seems to be more prevalent in other genres, like RPG, First person shooter, action-RPG and the like, but where’s the survival element? Let me know in the comments.