With Halloween fast approaching there was only one game release to talk about this week: Alan Wake 2. The sequel to Remedy Entertainment’s cult action-adventure promises a chilling next-gen horror experience with the eponymous hero trapped in a nightmarish alternate dimension tied to Bright Falls, Washington, the tiny town from which he disappeared 13 years ago.
The original game was heavily inspired by Stephen King, its troubled horror-writer protagonist providing a cipher for the bestselling author himself and the psychologically damaged heroes of his novels, especially The Shining and The Dark Half. But Alan Wake also slots into a long history of incredibly messed-up horror-game heroes who often manifest the very monsters they’re looking to destroy.
The defining example is, of course, James Sunderland, the everyman hero of Silent Hill 2, who drives to the eponymous town after receiving a letter from his dead wife asking him to visit her there. Searching the foggy streets and abandoned buildings for his spouse (Alan Wake also spends much of the first game looking for his lost wife), he is beset by weirdly sexualised monsters including zombie nurses, mannequins and Pyramid Head, a leather-clad giant with … a head shaped like a pyramid. The whole game is an allegory of Sunderland’s repressed guilt and psychosexual torment, the player living out his mental collapse for him.
The Resident Evil series is filled with similarly warped heroes on hopeless quests to save loved ones. Ethan Winters is drawn to the plantation in Resident Evil 7 by a message from his wife, who has been missing for several years. Special ops super-soldier Leon Kennedy begins the Resident Evil 4 remake afflicted with PTSD and insomnia, but must still fight to locate the president’s missing daughter who has been traced to … yes, a spooky rural village.
The protagonist in Monolith’s 2005 action-horror shooter FEAR is beset with crippling hallucinations as his unit explores an abandoned psychic research facility. In the 1998 point-and-click adventure Sanitarium, a man wakes up after a car accident to find himself trapped in a gothic asylum under the control of an alien entity known as Mother – part of the game is played as the lead character’s dead sister, Sarah. Quite literally, a Freudian nightmare. This plot is echoed later in 2010’s excellent Amnesia: Dark Descent, about a Victorian gentleman who wakes in a castle with his memories erased – with, it turns out, good reason.
What all these games do is subvert the standard archetype of the video game hero – a capable, powerful, self-assured warrior with clear motivations and an easily identifiable nemesis. In Alan Wake, the monsters are literal shadows and the narrative follows the torn pages of a novel he can’t remember writing; in the Silent Hill games there are always questions around how many of the horrors are real or imagined. In this way the best horror games also interrogate our relationship with onscreen characters – the way we’re simultaneously watching and embodying them in an ambiguous partnership where boundaries constantly collapse and reassemble in new forms.
Although Stephen King is often talked about as the major influence on the Alan Wake titles, another inspiration for series writer Sam Lake is much more interesting in this respect – David Lynch. The original title clearly had elements of Twin Peaks – the cold, remote town, the weird characters – but it also shared the over-riding Lynchian idea of reality, fantasy and horror all coexisting in the same spaces, with little logic in terms of how they interact. In Alan Wake 2, you play half the game as Saga Anderson, an FBI agent in the “real” world who is investigating ritualistic murders in Bright Falls. The interplay between her adventure and Alan’s represents what Lake and narrative designer Molly Maloney see as the close, compelling links between detective and horror fiction. They cite David Fincher’s movie Seven as a major influence, another narrative that asks questions about the nature of heroes and horror in a morally bankrupt world.
The best horror games are, at least partly, about video games themselves. They’re about what is going on between the player, the controller and the screen – a strange relationship no matter what you’re playing. There are, after all, creepy moments in even benign titles such as Super Mario, Pokémon or Animal Crossing – the immersive nature of games creating odd images, situations and fears with the lightest of material. A great example of this is Gone Home, the classic indie game about a young woman returning to her family home. It is purposefully designed to resemble a survival horror adventure for its first hour before we begin to realise it’s a relationship drama. A fascinating and well-constructed conceit.
So, yes, make sure you play a horror game this autumn, and think about why it’s scary, what tools it uses and why they work. Because the really frightening thing about horror games is how much they have to tell us.
What to play
Sticking with the horror theme, I somehow missed World of Horror in early access, but the finished game has been launched and I’m all over it. Created by Polish developer Panstasz, it’s a modular role-playing adventure, in which players investigate Lovecraftian monsters in a small Japanese town, with a selection of the available quests shuffled for each separate playthrough. The monochrome art style is crisp and uncanny, and the themes are clearly inspired by horror manga writer Junji Ito. An irresistibly idiosyncratic take on retro-tinged horror.
Available on: PC, PS4/5, Switch
Playtime: 4-30 hours
What to read
There’s a big battle going on to dominate autumn game sales, and it looks like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has beaten Super Mario Bros Wonder in the UK physical sales chart. Apparently the new web-slinging adventure from Sony is not performing quite as well as God of War Ragnarök did, though it’s already the fourth-biggest physical retail release of the year behind Zelda, EA Sports FC 24 and Hogwarts Legacy. Meanwhile, Sonic Superstars entered the chart at No 4 – that’s what you get for going directly up against a Super Mario game in which the titular character can transform into an elephant.
On the subject of Super Mario Bros Wonder, I liked Digital Foundry’s technical review of the game, which looks at how well it utilises the now creaky Switch hardware, and explains its achievements in a readable way.
The BBC has a piece looking at anew programme to encourage game development in the Liverpool City area. The north-west has traditionally been a stronghold of game creation, with studios such as Psygnosis and Bizarre Creations making important contributions. The aim of the initiative, run by Liverpool City Region careers hub, is to forge connections between aspiring young developers and the industry.
I am fascinated by the growing interconnection between video games and high-end fashion brands. The latest example is a new Elden Ring range from luxury streetwear label ARK/8, which includes a faux-fur coat at £1,400. Sadly, there seems to be no attempt to replicate the Prisoner’s iron mask, which I feel would have gone down a storm on the catwalks of Paris and Milan.
What to click
Question Block
This one came in from Stuart Gallop on Twitter/X who asked:
“What is the next real Xbox X exclusive coming after Starfield? Something that may make people buy an Xbox!? I really can’t think of anything!”
Microsoft now has almost 40 studios under its Xbox banner thanks to the conclusion of the Activision Blizzard deal, so this should have been easier to answer than it was. The first games that popped into my head were the Fable reboot and Forza Horizon 6 from Playground Games, and Rare’s next big adventure Everwild, but they’re all a couple of years away. There are a several Xbox console exclusives due for launch in 2024 including Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, Avowed, Dungeons of Hinterberg, South of Midnight, Towerborne and Clockwork Revolution, all of which looked interesting when they were revealed at the Xbox showcase, but I’m not sure any of those are hardware-shifters in themselves. So unless Microsoft pulls out an incredible surprise next year, I’m going to have to go with the next Forza Horizon, which could zoom into 2024, but I suspect will power-drift toward 2025.
If you have a question for Question Block, just hit reply or email pushingbuttons@theguardian.com to send it in.
