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Whether fighting off undead hordes or battling with a deity, players will regularly be faced with choices. Often, even decisions that seem insignificant at the time can hold consequences that ring throughout the rest of the game, if not deeper into the player’s psyche. These are some of the more meaningful decisions in horror games and how the impact they can have on their respective games.
Updated July 17, 2022, by Tom Bowen: Immersion is becoming increasingly important in video games, particularly when it comes to the horror genre. Stunning sound design and engrossing graphics can play a big part in this, but one of the most important tools in any developer’s locker these days is that of player choice. Forcing the player into making a decision effectively places the eventual consequences of their choice squarely on their shoulders. Knowing that a character’s death is entirely their fault can weigh heavily on a player’s conscience and, the sudden nature in which these decisions are thrust upon players is a big part of what makes modern horror games so suspenseful. Not all developers have mastered the practice just yet, but that’s not to say that there aren’t still plenty of great horror games where players’ choices really matter.
12 The Dark Pictures Anthology
The Dark Pictures Anthology is an ongoing series from Supermassive Games, the developer responsible for 2015’s hugely popular interactive drama horror game Until Dawn. At the time of writing, the British studio has released three of the eight planned games, with the fourth, The Devil in Me, expected at some point before the end of 2022. If it’s anything like its predecessors, players can expect yet another fantastic horror game where choices really matter.
For the most part, the games all follow the same formula, with players following a group of people as they venture through some kind of spooky setting. As they explore, they’ll be faced with a series of difficult decisions and quick time events which will invariably determine which members of the in-game group survive until the end of the story. When played consecutively, the games’ formula can start to feel a little stale, but with a full year typically separating releases, this shouldn’t be an issue for most.
11 Clock Tower
Unlike its contemporaries, Silent Hill and Resident Evil, Clock Tower is a ’90s survival horror classic that went without its fair share of attention from studios and audiences alike. Aside from an attempted reboot a few years ago in the form of NightCry, the franchise mainly lives on in the fond memories of retro fanatics.
The main difference with Clock Tower is its point-and-click gameplay, setting it aside from the 3D games that found an easier ride onto next-gen consoles. The series doesn’t lack tension, however, and has several outcomes based on player reactions in its scenarios, which are split up between two characters a lot like classic Resident Evil games.
10 Dead Rising
For as goofy as Dead Rising can be in places, the first game’s survival horror aspects are fantastic. This is because the player must make tough decisions regarding not only their resource management but also their fellow survivors. While balancing various tasks around the Willamette Parkview Mall, the player will often come across survivors trying to secure their positions in various shops and locales.
The player is encouraged to rescue these people and bring them back to the safe house where they can await their eventual rescue. However, this can be a hard task to complete when the player is overrun on all sides and lost in the labyrinthian layouts of the mall. More often than not, players will find themselves unable to save everyone, as the zombie hordes overpower NPCs before they can even be met.
9 Telltale’s The Walking Dead
Another classic zombie survive-em-up, Telltale’s The Walking Dead series is a wonderful look at inevitability, as the player will often be given decisions that seem impossible to choose and will likely end up irrelevant in the end due to a slip-up down the line. The difference in TWD’s decisions is that they’re often built up to devastating ends, with the ever-looming Telltale line “this action will have consequences.”
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While Telltale’s development cycle may have been troubled, gamers were at least given resolution on the part of Clementine and Lee. The Walking Dead quickly became a fan-favorite narrative in the gaming world, on par with the greatest cinematic experiences of the generation.
8 Call Of Cthulhu
Call of Cthulhu is an interesting look at the world of adaptations. It seems as though, in the many years since his passing, Lovecraft himself has cursed every adaptation of his work to either fail miserably or else go under the radar. Between last gen’s Call of Cthulhu and The Sinking City, the cycle remains uninterrupted, as most audiences found themselves horribly disappointed in these titles.
While they didn’t get their deserved reviews on release due to a myriad of bugs and jank, Cyanide’s horror adventure became a bit of an overlooked gem. It presents the player with seemingly impossible odds that change and waver with the slightest decisions throughout the campaign.
7 Vampire: Coteries Of New York
Unlike its predecessors, Coteries of New York takes a more traditional narrative approach to the Vampire: The Masquerade universe. It places the player in a vampire’s shoes in the midst of a power struggle between two of the biggest vampiric factions in New York.
The special part of this visual novel is that it’s not only immersive but feels almost like a tabletop narrative unwinding at the player’s fingertips. The decisions are important in their own right, but also change the attitude of the character, making them more likely to react to situations depending on the player’s previous input. It’s a lot more like a DM deciding how situations will play out for players based on their alignments and personalities, and it’s a perfect adaptation for the TTRPG.
6 The Shrouded Isle
The Shrouded Isle is a lot like its sister game, Cultist Simulator, in that it brings players into a morally grey area in which they must manage their respective cultish organizations. In turn, this ends up managing the return of the Great Ones and their subsequent response to the way the cult is being handled.
Every season, players must pick sacrifices for their higher beings, meaning cult resources can be endangered if the wrong choices are made. Stemming from this, there’s also an action/reaction system put into place by the player as their cult leader must punish or reward cultists’ behaviors and make decisions based on their productivity and personalities.
5 Resident Evil
Not only is this classic horror game remake known for its tense resource management, but Resident Evil is also praised for the consequences that come from brash gameplay. Like a grand puzzle, every item and consumable has its place, and the misuse of a single bullet can make a world of difference when staving off the undead monstrosities stalking the Spencer Mansion.
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The real treat of the HD remake is that it adds quite a few more twists to the survival horror classic, including Crimson Heads that, if not dispatched properly, can be a real nuisance later in the game. These creatures and the terrifying boss fights that punctuate some of the game’s key moments consume precious health and ammo at twice the speed of their counterparts.
4 Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma
Much like its peer, Danganronpa, the Zero Escape series places players in a dangerous game with deadly reactions and devastating twists. Alongside Phoenix Wright, Zero Escape is considered one of the greatest visual novel narrative games out there.
Where this differs from other titles, however, is in its much stronger narrative devices and more abstract storytelling relative to Danganronpa’slimited breadth of narrative impact. The characters all get their moments to shine, and players find themselves invested in their stories equally by the game’s end. While the Zero Escape titles have been overshadowed by the more popular modern visual novels, they’re all worth a look, and fans of the genre won’t be disappointed with what they find here.
3 World Of Horror
World of Horror is an instant classic, regardless of its early-access banner. Taking inspiration from old PC RPGs and combining the low-bit aesthetic with modern addictive roguelike gameplay and convoluted cosmic horror, World of Horror is a gem for fans of the genre.
There are several mysteries in World of Horror that all have different endings based on how the player approaches gameplay decisions throughout the storyline. Every playthrough brings players a fresh delivery regardless of how many times a campaign has been experienced.
2 Pathologic 2
In a lot of ways, Pathologic 2 is a modern Majora’s Mask, where every choice matters in the short span of time before inevitable doom. Returning to their hometown in the midst of a terrible plague, the player must make their own choices as to how they’ll handle the sickness, either saving their friends and family or taking survival into their own hands with organ harvesting and antidotal studies.
Be warned, this game is for a niche audience, and likely won’t be appreciated to its full extent if players go in looking for a big bold triple-A experience. Pathologic 2 is all doom and gloom, and expects, even wants players to quit playing the game midway through out of frustration. The game takes pleasure in its required calculations, and subsequent hopelessness upon realizing making an impact on the events of the game is unlikely at best.
1 The Quarry
Much like Until Dawn and Supermassive Games’ Dark Pictures Anthology series, The Quarry is a horror game in which just about every decision counts. What a player does or doesn’t do can have huge repercussions in-game, with death and despair lurking around just about every corner. This can lead to an awful lot of tension during a playthrough, while also providing plenty of reasons to replay the game to check out some of the other possible endings.
So numerous are the branching pathways in The Quarrythat it’s highly unlikely that anyone will ever see all 186 different endings. To be fair, many of them feature only minor differences, but the sheer number available should at least give players some indication as to how much of a bearing their choices can have on the game’s narrative. Supermassive Games are masters when it comes to this style of immersive storytelling, and, being the newest and most ambitious title from the studio, The Quarry is perhaps the best example of this to date.
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