My partner and I enter the derelict ship, responding to a distress signal we picked up not long ago. The creatures have infested all of the scrap floating out here, turning it into an orbiting graveyard; The cabin is no different. We make our way further in, dispatching the former crew members, now turned hideous undead guardians, along the way. Upon entering one of this ship's engine rooms, my comm. system starts up.
We must've jump started something on this old craft, and with that some new audio logs begin playing. It's a boy calling out to his father. Touching, yet tragic - these ships are hundreds of years old and the boy who sent this message is long gone. Yet, even knowing that, it chills me to think that the boy never got to know what happened to his old man. Part of me thinks that no matter what pain he felt from not knowing, as I look at a recently re-killed monstrosity with pieces of a face sprinkled liberally here in the engine room, I know the truth would've been far more hurtful.
My partner's been pretty quiet, maybe that last log struck a nerve with him too. Calling out to him, I ask what he thought of that last log transmission.
"What? You heard a transmission? Did you pick something up or turn something on?"
He asks me, disappointed that he might've missed out on some verbal piece of the bigger puzzle. I tell him to check his comms and sweep the room again, make sure he didn't miss anything.
We move ahead after he comes up empty handed, and just like that a new audio signal begins playing. Its the kid again, pleading to his Dad, asking him why he stopped loving him, to call him back. I turn to my companion while its playing this time, checking if he hears the boy's voice. Even with the full helmet our RIGS have equipped, I knew the face he was making at me.
I can barely hear his response over the kid languishing to his father. My partner's answer was more horrific than the boy's cries could ever be.
"Um, I don't know what you're talking about. I can't hear anything."
For gamers, I think the reason we love defending the almost sacred pillars of the Survival Horror genre and the titles that it generates is because of the emotional reaction they conjure. Think about it, developers have been chasing the holy grail of making software that can make you cry for decades, but sadness is just one emotion on a spectrum. Fear on the other hand is far easier to derive from an audience, and depending on the illicit-or, far more memorable. I guess that's why fans can be so fearful of things that challenge our understood machinations of what makes this particular genre work so well. However, things have to evolve or else we run the risk of stagnation, and that is something that survival horror has done on the 'survival' and gameplay side, but not so much on the horror side. That is, until Dead Space 3.
Dead Space 3 is an interesting title for survival horror because it went through the same media machine all games in the genre go through when they change the formula in major ways. This time around, the big sticking points fans and journalists had were the emphasis on combat the game had from earlier entries and the addition of co-op potentially undermining the atmosphere the genre and this series is known for. While many have their opinions on the former argument, the latter is something that hasn't been touched on enough in my opinion.
Asymmetrical design is a topic that I could create a series of posts exploring, but let's just focus on Dead Space 3 for the moment. Survival Horror games have mostly focused on isolating the player and having them exploring a setting or characterization in varying contexts. No matter what the situation, the design goal almost all survival horror games have done was to find a way to isolate the player and its character.
Player isolation works when attempting to create empathy between the player & the character, as well as establish a sort of base level of dread in the game's tone, and for good reason. Isolation is a feeling human beings are terrified of, the simple act of isolating a person against their will for even a moderate amount of time is enough to psychologically scar a person, so isolation is an effective tool when attempting to craft horror. This explains why the industry has done horror, and done it well, for 20 years. But game design is a creative field, and we have to shake-up the established status quo to see what comes out from time to time.
Resident Evil 5 tried to implement co-op into its survival horror brand, it just approached it from the wrong angle. By allowing 2 players to occupy the same space and tackle the same challenges with the same capabilities, they just undermined the elements RE would ordinarily use to raise tension. i.e. Low Ammo with the weapons you have in your too few inventory slots? Not to worry, your partner got ya covered!
Where Dead Space 3 sidesteps the pitfalls outlined in RE5's design was by allowing both players to experience separate things in the same space. Go ahead and spend some time with someone who thinks they are seeing or hearing something you aren't, see how freaked out you get. Visceral managed to make a game that delivers that experience regularly. To be fair, they have some shortcomings as well - due to the way the co-op and SP campaigns were setup, it made drop-in play impossible in the scenario, which is a terrible shame. Starting a game with a random co-op buddy can be particularly difficult. By having the co-op experience in a separate mode, it made particularly difficult to change your mind mid-play session. Also, with a random buddy, you run the risk of playing with someone who has experienced all the narrative has to offer and will run past things - an even greater deal breaker considering the design's execution is relying on both players following a set pacing. Still though, some restructuring of the player experience fixes almost all of these problems.
Visceral Games, for all intents and purposes, nailed asymmetrical cooperative design in a modern survival horror game. Much of what is outlined in Dead Space 3 is the foundation that future co-op horror games will be built on. What they built taps the potential of asymmetrical design and what it can provide to our already understood design formulas for all kinds of genres. In common-talk, what they did was utilize the equivalent of a new cooking spice, and I hope you enjoyed the taste cause we're gonna be getting a lot of it in the coming years.
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