Outside Your Heaven

Posted: 30 Sep 2019 07:34 AM PDT

When I'm not doing contract narrative design or indie development I teach a part-time class at NYU. This year I'm excited because it's about Horror Video Games, a topic close to my heart. For the past few years I've taught a class on Immersive Sims, which I also love, but horror is probably a notch above it for me. It speaks to my cross-media interest more, what it means for the same genre to exist in a coherent fashion across multiple forms. Horror, among other things, is defined by affect, the emotional experience it gives audiences, and this is the same whether we're taking about books, movies, or video games. That's unusual for a video genre, to have the same definition as its literary or filmic counterparts. This makes any discussion of them naturally extend beyond the boundaries of video game culture, into their filmic or literary inspirations, and how those inspirations shape gameplay.

One thing the class has made me realize so far is how old "stalking" mechanics are. This is one of the lesser known horror game mechanics since it doesn't involve combat, though it is historically important and can be traced through a variety of games. It is in some ways akin to stealth game mechanics, though not quite the same, and in some cases perhaps the reverse of stealth game mechanics -- trying to escape someone who is stalking you from the shadows vs. stalking someone yourself.

I mostly know this mechanic from Clock Tower, the Dario Argento inspired Japanese final girl simulator originally released on the SNES in 1995, but which spawned a small sub-sub-genre of horror video games that ultimately died out in the mid-2000's. In this game, like in any slasher film in the lineage of Halloween and/or Suspiria, you have to escape a slow, cunning, stealthy killer who wields some sort of sharp weapon, which in Clock Tower's cases is a massive scissors. The interesting thing about this, and why Clock Tower is such a formative game, is that the game mechanics truly express the narrative mechanics of the source inspiration: Jennifer, the protagonist, has to manage her own mental state, so that she can think quickly when the killer inevitably appears. The killer is not a series of scripted set pieces or a traditional boss but an A.I. with genuine chance and unpredictability designed into his behavior -- you never know when he'll turn up.

This works great in Clock Tower 1, was repeated in the PS1 sequel Clock Tower 2 (confusingly called simply "Clock Tower" in the U.S. since the SNES original never saw release outside Japan), and sort of atrophied in the PS2 installment Clock Tower 3, which by then was cracking under the pressure to ape the more combat-driven formula of Resident Evil. A workable compromise was reached in what would be the last hurrah of the final girl sim in Haunting Ground, which, while not a Clock Tower game in name, embodied the spirit moreso than Clock Tower 3 by reintroducing a heavy dose of gothic atmosphere, sexual terror, and giallo aesthetics (the original, far better title was "Demento"). Haunting Ground split the difference with mainstream survival horror by offloading combat onto a dog companion, who could attack your stalker (but only if you trained him well), while leaving the protagonist a traditionally underpowered final girl who only has her wits to rely on.

Learning about this whole trajectory is a major part of the class, and one thing I've been doing is filling in some of the blank spots in my own knowledge. This is why I went looking for 3D Monster Maze, a game I've been aware of for a long time but never actually played until preparing this class. I knew it was, well, a game where you tried to escape from a monster in maze. But what I didn't know is that it basically has Clock Tower's mechanics, in a much earlier, purer form, which makes it an interesting lens to look at later stalker mechanics through.

3D Monster Maze is kinda like Jurassic Park -- you somehow pay some circus dude to experience a time travel scenario where you a plopped down in a maze with a hungry T-Rex. This tongue-in-cheek set up is an excuse to experience the tension of being pursued by something you cannot see, which exhibits behavior that shifts and changes based on your actions. As a ZX Spectrum game from 1982, it has no sound and barely any visuals to rely on. The only visual is a grid-based faux-3D maze seen in first-person, which is just a bunch of 2D pictures of a 3D maze that change depending on where you are in the grid (a common work around before the advent of real time 3D). Aside from that, the only feedback is text. Every time you move you are given a text update on what the monster is doing, which seems to roughly correspond to its different A.I. states. "Rex lies in wait." "Rex is looking for you." "Rex has seen you!" "Rex is chasing you!" That's basically it. You just move around this maze, trying to find the exit before this thing eats you.

It's all rather terrifying. The suspense generated just by the text is palpable. The directness and intimacy of it is unlike approximating the same sort of information in visual or audio cues. It immediately reminded me of a cheap, weird horror game I'd played many years ago, but which is unavailable now. It was a web-based Shockwave game called Creep: The Last Tube, which was apparently a movie-tie in for a film of the same name. It was scary as hell -- you are trapped in a London tube station wandering around looking for an exit. Though it was real time 3D the only feedback you got about your stalker was via text. There was this jolt of terror when you're in the dark, holding a match, and suddenly the text appears: "He knows where you are..." Bone chilling. And that's it. I'm not even sure if it was possible to get away. Every time he caught me the game was like "AH! HE GOT YOU! Anyway, see the movie."

The weird thing about Creep, that's subtly different from 3D Monster Maze, is how the text tells you information you could not know. 3D Monster Maze is a little generous by giving you a hint of clairvoyance -- you just kinda get a feeling like something is watching you, and of course it makes sense that you'd sense a T-Rex coming because you'd hear its footsteps, which the game specifically mentions. In Creep there is literally no explanation for how you know this completely silent, invisible, human stalker knows you're there. But there's also something unnerving about what amounts to an omniscient narrator whispering updates about your impending death into your ear.

It's interesting to view 3D Monster Maze as a kind of proto-Clock Tower, or conversely to see Clock Tower as an update of 3D Monster Maze with the text swapped out for visuals, sound effects, and music. One of the great things about Clock Tower, and where you really see its Argento inspiration, is in its use of music to communicate the nearness of the killer. When you are safe there is no music. When the killer is coming after you, but he is far away, the music is faint. When he bursts into the same room as you the volume spikes, and you can hear the sound of his giant scissors. It's adrenaline music, which mirrors your state of panic, very much like the bombastic, brain-fucking ruthlessness of Goblin's score for Suspiria. It made me wonder what it would be like to "score" 3D Monster Maze with Goblin, where layers of the track appear or disappeared depending on the A.I. state.

There's something about the poetic, expressive quality of music that feels more analogous to the use of text to achieve the same effect, something that simply showing literally what you see or hear fails to capture. Perhaps it's the fact that this sort of stalker mechanic isn't a literal expression of what is happening but rather a subjective expression of how it feels to be stalked. It's not about realism, the same way Suspiria isn't about realism. It's like the music is the killer.

Though what we might called the "pure" final girl sim is dead, its spirit lives on as secondary aspects of more mainstream games. The most notable modern instance is Mr. X from Capcom's superb Resident Evil 2 remake. Mr. X in the remake, unlike the original, is a true Clock Tower / 3D Monster Maze-esque opponent, because he is an A.I. The original Mr. X, as well as his gross-out cousin Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, was not an A.I. but a series of static set-pieces. You always encounter him the same way and at the same place each playthrough. But Mr. X 2019 is a proper procedural terror, a music-driven agent of death with its own decision-making that stomps toward you like a T-Rex. The most direct reference for Mr. X is actually The Terminator, as evidence by the way his mechanical THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP music virtually quotes the original 1984 film score. The Terminator isn't exactly a slasher film, but as an 80s sci-fi film with strong horror elements it draws heavily from slasher films with their unstoppable stalkers and plucky final girls, only putting them in the context of a literal killing machine.

This was one of the most memorable aspects of the Resident Evil 2 remake, and shows the concept pioneered so long ago in 3D Monster Maze, and expanded and kept alive via Clock Tower and its sequels, has genuine longevity. As a mechanic, the proposition of being hunted and surviving through your own intelligence and self-control is as old as humanity -- it is literally one of our most primal scenarios. Identifying the essence of it gives us a road map for expanding it in new ways and reminds us why horror is still the deepest, most human of genres in games.

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How dare I talk about modern stalker mechanics and *not* mention Alien: Isolation? It's a good question. I think it's because Alien: Isolation, in spite of being clearly in the algorithm-driven monster lineage of 3D Monster Maze and Clock Tower, feels in a lot of ways like a conventional stealth game, one that just happens to have a single super-powered enemy. The best stalker games are about being stalked, which means the stalker knows where you are and is coming for you. The main tension of these games is about running away from a slower enemy, having the time to develop an escape plan as you run, and having that tension gradually increase to a crescendo as you run out of options and he closes in, resulting in some final, panicked moment of improvisation. The alien is so fast and lethal that there is basically zero distance between it being aware of you and you being dead, which means your "encounters" with it are more about you being aware of it as it wanders around nearby and then you trying to sneak away. Alien: Isolation also doesn't use music or expressive subjectivity via overt stylization the way these other games do, and -- probably most importantly -- it doesn't model fear as a mechanic. There is something about expressing the interior psychological state of the protagonist that feels key to really capturing the essence of what it means to be a final girl. Alien: Isolation is good -- and I don't think it's wrong to call it a stalker game or even a final girl sim -- but it feels like it's leaving behind one of the secret ingredients of the genre that has animated its best historical examples. The alien is scary, but it is also a completely rational, exterior problem. The real challenge should be yourself.

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