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Maybe it's because I keep ending up playing mediocre RPGs these days instead of getting to the good ones, or because I HATE playing Grandia Extreme so very much (but I will finish it, gall durn it. That game will not beat me). But I'm finding myself a bit... tired of RPGs lately. I feel the need to step over to something else for a while, to change up the pace. And, since we're entering into that delightfully spooky month of October, it seems a perfect time to take a little break from RPGs to return to my secondly discovered, but first loved game genre: horror.
There is no gaming experience I savor more than a good horror game. I never really expected it to be a genre I could be good at, or ever even get into. I was going through that "Everything Japanese related is AWESOME!" phase when I grabbed up Fatal Frame. I couldn't even play the first hour by myself; I had to get my dad to come in and stay with me because I was so creeped out. But I loved being scared; I found it to be loads of fun. And survival horror is the genre that really taught one of the more important strategies in most gaming: item/ammo conservation and management. And let's face it, one of the things I was frightened of more than anything else in Fatal Frame was facing a ghost with absolutely no film to my name.
One of the things I love best in horror games is the scenery. A lot of the scare factor in these games is based on the mood your surroundings set. The Fatal Frame games give the option to go into camera mode (or first person) at anytime and just really just take in and enjoy the Japanese architecture and surroundings. And Lord knows Silent Hill uses it's scenery to the utmost. From red walls that seem to be crawling to reality literally rotting away around you, your world is often changed without warning to something out of a nightmare. I look forward to the locales in these horror games. Abandoned houses, gothic mansions, insane asylums, run-down hospitals, dark caverns buried deep within the earth, ghost towns, dank prisons; these are my playgrounds, and I love to explore them. Let's face it, many horror games can be finished within a day's time if you wanted. But they must be taken slowly to be truly appreciated. Watching the environment for any unnatural changes, listening for sounds that could either be the game screwing with you or something that you should be already running away from, and just soaking up the atmosphere in general. It's an experience to be taken bit by bit, slowly letting everything seep in.
I've run through quite the gamut of horror games. The Fatal Frame series, the Silent Hill series, the Resident Evil games, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and whatever less than great title that is available when I'm feeling really desperate for something scary (I could enjoy Haunting Ground more if it weren't so irritating). I still have probably twenty RPGs I don't own that I need to get, and there are dozens more that seem to come out each week. But I usually have nothing but a few trailers and screen shots to sate me for the months between horror game releases (one more month until Silent Hill: Origins!). But I have yet to get tired of replaying my older ones. So for a while, I think I'll trade ogres, imps, and other such things for ghosts, thousand year old demons born from chaos and insanity, and zombies. And maybe some Pyramid Head too.
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