Sunday, August 9, 2015

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Threat and Catharsis in Alien: Isolation!

For a horror game to work, each encounter with a threat should be credible: regardless of where you are in the course of the game, a given threat should be able to kill you, effectively resetting your progress, or inconveniencing you, or doing whatever it is that the game has determined is an appropriately devious means of making you fear its reprisals.  A "horror" game, removed from these constraints, is no longer a horror game.  Resident Evil 4 is somewhat notorious for breaking its franchise's pattern and removing players from the exigencies of horror to press them into action hero service against hordes of slobbering Spanish zombies.  It's difficult to feel threatened by enemies when you've spent hours mowing them down with relative impunity.  By the end of Resident Evil 4, I started to see those weird, unfortunate snake villagers not as a threat, but as potential income sources: each villager I killed could drop precious ammo, for killing more villagers, or money, to make it easier to kill more villagers. 

This isn't necessarily a problem: the action-horror genre has been booming since before Left4Dead made it part of our international subconscious (if you'll forgive the pun), and frankly, action-horror games can be tremendously fun, deliberately upscaling player empowerment as they mow down hordes of downright ugly enemies.  But these games often strike a note with horror game enthusiasts, because they fundamentally lack the sort of arc of empowerment that horror games present: Resident Evil 4, the archetypical game of the action-horror genre, begins with you taking on the mantle of a secret agent who, from the get go, can crush a man's skull with his boot heel.  By the end of the game, you're doing some downright insane kung-fu, leaping off walls and punching out robots, which has sort of been the Resident Evil franchise's "thing" for a generation at this point.

Horror games don't necessarily need to eschew arcs of empowerment.  In fact, character arcs, and character growth in general, are pretty necessary in any video game of sufficient length.  Without development, which usually implies some sort of empowerment (though it doesn't have to) games tend to feel flat, and players, in turn, grow disengaged with the systems propelling them through the narrative field of the game.  But they have to be careful with how character development and progression function: if characters grow too strong, the game ceases to be scary.  The tension of being stalked by hostile enemies is replaced by the rush of adrenaline as you cut down your foes.  The Tomb Raider reboot is built on this principle, orienting itself around Lara's progression from terrified waif to death-dealing action hero.  But this progression is what separates the Tomb Raider reboot from horror games: by the end of Tomb Raider, individual enemies are barely a threat, and stealth isn't even an option.  There's a mission where you rush through an exploding village with an assault rifle and attached grenade launcher, blowing up machine gun emplacements.  This is not horror game fare, and that's fine: it's tremendously fun, it's integral to the development of a character, and it's actually part of a pretty remarkable set of mechanics that orient themselves around literalizing a character's evolution.  But it's useful to consider in the context of horror games, because one of the things Tomb Raider realizes so well, specifically character progression, is something that so many horror games fail at quite miserably.

Horror games can fail at character progression in either direction.  They can make players entirely too powerful, giving them the capacity to destroy all but the toughest foes they face with relative ease, or they can keep players locked in to weakness throughout the game, never really providing them with any kind of advancement tree.  The rarest thing is the horror game that simultaneously presents its players with meaningful progression without ever losing a real sense of threat, consistently infusing gameplay with tension.  Alien: Isolation nails this balance.

Alien: Isolation is, at its core, a game about catharsis, a common theme in horror games.  Hell, Silent Hill built an entire series out of exploring catharsis.  It starts off slow, boiling atmospheric in its initial bars.  The first Alien film is quickly summarized, and we are made to understand that this will be a game, first and foremost, about a daughter looking for traces of her mother, to find some sort of closure.  Then we're cast into a world gone to hell, where nearly every single thing can and will kill you.  Alien: Isolation is more than willing to let players die, but never without giving them tools to defend themselves, or evade danger, as needed. 

Even so, players start out weak.  The sense of fear early on in the game is palpable.  Even after players arm themselves with maintenance jack and pistol, violence, while a viable option, is never an easy one: if a player behaves aggressively early on, they're liable to be shot up by the allies of whoever they just killed.  If a player opens fire with a pistol, every gun in the room will open fire in response, and if the first shot doesn't eliminate the threat entirely, it's essentially a coin-flip as to whether or not Ripley will make it out of whatever situation you've gotten her into.  Even after players move past those initial engagements, certain kinds of violence are prone to drawing unwanted attention: there's never a moment where you don't feel vulnerable to attack, from the xenomorph, or from other threats.

All of this exists within a framework of progression where players are still accumulating new toys and tricks.  Some of that progression is related to an exploratory layer that allows players to uncover narrative, the most prominent driving force in Alien: Isolation.  The mechanical layer of progression is more subtly manifested.  Players acquire tools that allow them to survive encounters that they could not have lived through previously.  The stun baton lets Ripley covertly dispatch human opponents without alerting the alien to their location, and gives her a panic button when facing down lone androids, but it's no good in a stand-up fight against people, and if you're fighting multiple androids, you're still more than a bit screwed.  You can build EMPs and flashbangs to help you out in situations where you're fighting multiple foes, but if you EMP a group of androids you'll still have to beat them into submission if you don't want to face them again, which requires some quick action and is still liable to draw attention.  If you flashbang some people, you'll either have to kill them, which, again, will draw attention, or run, which means you've still got to deal with the patrols that you're already struggling to evade.  Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs give you an advantage against the patrolling alien, giving you a chance to set up traps to make it flee, or remove it from your path for a few seconds, but persistent use of those items will draw the xenomorph's attention and force further engagements.  What's more, you can only use them three or four times before you're out of them, and they require quite a bit of prep time to be used safely.  You're better off hiding in a closet than trying to scare the alien away.  When the flamethrower comes in to play, you've finally got a tool that can be used to get you out of tight xenomorph related situations, but with limited fuel on hand there's only so much flame to be thrown, and the threat of the alien, temporarily removed by each judicious burst of fire, always returns.

When you do finally get rid of the alien, about halfway through the game, players are finally given more breathing room to play around with the toys they've spent the game acquiring; they can finally fire a gun without bringing an unstoppable death machine down on their head.  That's a real source of catharsis: tools that once had serious consequences attached to their use can now be operated with relative impunity, from improvised explosives to firearms.  But even without the threat of the xenomorph, Ripley remains frail, and use of these tools has to be governed with cunning, careful positioning, and more of the stealthiness that you'll have spent the first twelve or so hours of play acquiring.

However adept you might become at dispatching your foes, the threat they represent always remains very real.  This is what separates Alien: Isolation from other horror-stealth games with steep power curves: the tools you acquire, the tools you're eventually permitted to use, never transform you into a godlike figure.  The catharsis they offer is not one related to absolute power, but one allowing a vulnerable person to turn the tools that have been used against them back upon their enemies.  The first time I drilled a Seegson security goon with a revolver while he tried to fire on me downrange with a shotgun, I felt great, but the threat of being killed by those shotgun rounds was still real.  I still had to cower behind cover as I carefully aimed each shot.  Shorting out six androids with one EMP was, likewise, rewardingly tense: it gave me time to work over four of them with my maintenance jack, but before I had a chance to finish two of them recovered, leaving me to decide if I'd use another precious EMP, or fall back on my shotgun.

And this feeling of power is short-lived: as the joy of catharsis fades, Ripley is stripped of many of the tools she's acquired, specifically her firearms, and then forced to face androids ingeniously outfitted in rubber suits, which protect them from the effects of EMPs and stun batons, the two most effective tools for removing androids from a fight.  Pressed into a confined space, with limited resources, explosives, and incendiary devices, a new set of exigencies prompt a new struggle for survival.

That boom-bust pattern never stops.  By the time you do finally get your guns back, and the waves of rubber-suited androids become more annoyance than threat, they're quickly supplanted by about half a dozen xenomorph drones, who have inexplicably set up shop on the station.  By this point, the tools you need to navigate these threats are well established, as are the patterns for resolving them.  Instead of muttering "oh shit" while Seegson security raiders die to a xenomorph attack, Ripley grits her teeth, climbs into a vent, and doing her best to circumvent the whole struggle.  The vulnerability never leaves her, but she gets better, both at dealing with those moments and using the tools that resolve them.  Threats remain plausible: there's nothing in the game that you can "kill" that won't try to kill you back twice as hard.  You are, and forever will be, the least dangerous thing on Seegson Station, but by game's end it's less about creeping about subtly, and more about rationing flamethrower fuel so you can scare xenomorphs away enough times during your madcap final push to escape.

All of this layers over Amanda Ripley's character development, as she finally finds a sort of closure with her mother, and hardens significantly as a human being, abandoning her lofty hopes of evacuating the station in favor of fleeing it alone on what, in the end, may very well be a ghost ship.  By the end of Isolation, we have a real sense that Ripley has changed, and that while she's a highly capable character, she's also still very alone, and very vulnerable in that solitude.  That rare mix of empowerment and vulnerability is something that horror games have trouble nailing down, something that Isolation does with relative ease, not by building in newer and tougher opponents, but by giving players an ever expanding set of tools for resolving various threats without ever compromising on the severity of those threats.

That's the core of strong horror design: Alien: Isolation isn't about hunting and killing an alien.  It isn't about realizing a power fantasy.  It's about telling a story, a story that unfolds slowly, through exploration, and surviving a myriad of threats along the way.  That's the core of the horror genre: it's never about overcoming foes, about emerging "victorious" over whatever you're fighting.  It's about that most fundamental and harrowing of experiences, that most universal of human struggles: trying to stay alive in a world that seems hostile to our daily state of being.

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