Happy Spooky Month everyone! It’s finally that time of year again where I get to talk all about horror games and concepts. Normally, I try and pick a theme to follow for the whole month but this time I’m just going to be talking about horror games in general! But to start things off, I wanted to talk about something that can make or break some horror games. And that is how hard it can be to balance difficulty!

While some horror games are more akin to haunted house attractions, by which I mean they are about going from one scary thing to the next without much real threat of a game over, others build tension with actual risk of a game over! Some games do this with straight up combat while others it’ll be about messing up during a chase scene and getting caught. Horror games with these risks are the ones we’re talking about here!

On paper, it makes sense to have some risk of dying or something like that in your horror game. Not only do you not want zombies to rip you apart or getting jump scared by some freaky looking monster, but you’ll also be sent back some ways losing progress in the process. Regardless of what happens to you or how it happens, horror games really need to find a good balance of difficulty! Let’s start by talking about survival horror games first to help explain why.

Survival horror games are, obviously, about surviving! So having some kind of threat is basically required. But unlike other kinds of horror, survival horror doesn’t just get its fears and scares from freaky monsters, but from the tension that comes with managing your resources as well!

Resident Evil is obviously the prime example of this. Managing your ammo and healing items is key to surviving. A zombie popping up isn’t just scary because it’s a zombie trying to kill you, but because it’s yet another thing that may drain your resources. This is the crux of every survival horror! Having to effectively manage your resources, trying to use only what is necessary to survive so you don’t run out when you need them most. Most of the time, difficulty in these games are balanced by how many resources appear and how tough the enemies can be. A lot of times, I usually like to play survival horror games on harder difficulty settings! The tension of needing to pick your fights and really conserve can make encounters that seem harmless on paper into really terrifying interactions!

Sounds pretty simple though, right? Just make sure the player has a little more than enough resources to get through each encounter. Well that is much easier said than done, especially when you have to take the skill of the player into consideration. If a player is good enough, often times they’ll be left with more ammo and health items than they know what to do with! This can often times kill that tension that means so much to survival horror as the player can now be super reckless and kill every enemy they meet rather than having to worry about saving resources. On the flip side though, you don’t want a player to completely back themselves into a corner by making the resources so limited that they have to play perfectly in order to just make it by. Having a playthrough end because you can’t kill the next boss because you have literally no ammo or weapons left would be one of the worst feelings a player could experience. In these instances, the best thing to do is to give the player more resources than less. Sure the game will be less scary when the player realizes just how much ammo is truly around, but that often won’t happen until later into the game, at least it shouldn’t happen until later in the game. This isn’t to say you can’t or shouldn’t make the game difficult by having the resources be more limited, but there should always be some kind of option to conserve ammo. Going back to Resident Evil, just about every game gives the player a knife. It’s weak and has barely any range, but it doesn’t waste ammo! It should be a player’s last option but having that option is important. However, the best way to balance these kinds of games is obviously to have multiple difficulty options!

While this is the case for basically any game, letting the player pick how challenging they want the game to be is truly the best way to balance survival horror. Like I said before, I usually go with one of the harder difficulties when I play something like Resident Evil or Fatal Frame. I really enjoy the tension that comes with conserving ammo and resources and feeling punished for making mistakes. That adds to the horror and anxiety for me and while I feel everyone who plays a survival horror game wants to feel that kind of tension, some people don’t want a couple of mistakes to basically ruin a playthrough.

In terms of balancing difficulty to keep the tension and scares going and make sure the player doesn’t get more frustrated than scared, survival horror has an easier time than most other kinds of horror. Namely hide and seek horror.

Hide and seek horror is the term I usually use to describe horror games that don’t have much in the way of combat and task the player with running and hiding from whatever is chasing them. Think games like Outlast for example! These games don’t usually have much in terms of resource management beyond things like flashlight batteries or stuff like that, which can certainly cause tension, but most of the scares come from the fact you can’t fight back and instead need to hide. As such, balancing the difficulty in these kinds of games is very different from how you do it in a survival horror! Getting a game over in a hide and seek horror is as simple as getting grabbed by whatever is chasing you. Depending on the game you might be given more of a chance to run, taking a couple hits before it’s game over, but regardless a game over can come pretty swiftly in these sorts of games! And this is really where the struggle of balancing these games come from.

When a game over can be so swift it can quickly because frustrating. If you are stuck on one section long enough, constantly getting caught and killed, the freaky animation that plays when you get killed quickly stops being scary and just becomes annoying as you have to start over again and try and get around whatever is stopping you. This can be a massive problem given that even if the player does finally get past that section, their patience will still be wearing thin meaning the next time they die or get stopped they are going to be that much more frustrated. However, if you just make it so the player can easily get away or they have a ton of lockers to hide in or something, then there’s no real tension when it’s so easy to get away when the threat appears. It won’t take long for players to realize how little threat whatever is hunting them poses once they get a grasp on how to hide and run from them. This can also lead to some frustration as well! But rather than being frustrated with dying over and over, the player is getting frustrated with having to stop whatever they were doing in order to hide and wait for the threat to pass.

So the big problem is this, how do you make a section tense with a real threat of failure without making it too difficult or too easy as both can be a source of frustration for the player. Sadly there’s no one answer to the problem, and often times it can come down to the individual player.

For example, I personally do not like Outlast for these reasons. Once the game play loop of going to a new area, getting chased/hiding from a scary guy while unlocking a door, rinse and repeat became very apparent, I lost interest in the game. For me, I fell in the camp of the game feeling too easy with the solution to each encounter being the same. Some crazy guy chasing me down didn’t feel scary because they were all the same, I knew how to deal with each one. So rather than being scary, it was just frustrating. But here’s the thing, I am very much in the minority on this. Most people love the original Outlast and didn’t really complain about this stuff. This is mostly because the hide and seek kind of horror was somewhat new at the time of Outlast‘s release but still! Clearly people didn’t have as much of an issue with this game play loop as I did and the game remained scary until the very end. However, this doesn’t change the fact that this kind of horror needs balance too. But perhaps not nearly as much as survival horror.

In hide and seek horror, you always need to provide a way for your player to survive. Because they don’t have any means to fight back though, those options are usually limited to running or hiding. Hiding is usually pretty simple in these games. Just provide a locker or closet to hide in, if whatever is chasing the player doesn’t see them get into the hiding spot, they are safe. Simple enough. Having the player need to run away is a bit more difficult though. You need to make sure the player can figure out where to run without making it feel too simple or making it too confusing resulting in the player getting caught. Because if the player is caught repeatedly, they are just going to get frustrated as we’ve already talked about. Because of all this, I feel like survival horror is a bit easier to balance than hide and seek horror.

Making sure players don’t have too much or too little resources can be very tough to nail! Even when you throw in different difficulty settings, it can still be tough to find that satisfying balance, but difficulty settings really are the saving grace for survival horror games. If a player starts complaining about how hard the game is, you can always point to changing the difficulty to help out. This can also be the case in hide and seek horror games, but tweaking the difficulty to have multiple settings can be a bit tough. The easiest way being to give the player more health so getting caught isn’t an instant game over but beyond that? You can make it so the enemies have a harder time noticing the player but tweaking that can be a balancing nightmare as the harder difficulties will make it so whatever is hunting the player sees them from a mile away.

I mainly want to bring up this balancing struggle not to offer a solution, as there is no one single solution, but to highlight the fact that horror games manage to find a good balance between scares and difficulty at all! While it can be glaringly obvious when a game messes up this balance, you don’t really notice when it doesn’t. Which is a good thing, that means the game is doing it’s job, but I wanted to take a moment to give props where it’s due! To shout out games like Amnesia and Resident Evil for accomplishing something this difficult.

And guess what? Resident Evil and Amnesia are two of the games we’ll be talking about during this year’s Spooky Month! And not just about how well they manage to make their games both scary and intense! That being said, those two won’t be the only games we’ll be talking about this month, so please stay tuned to see what games I recommend you check out for this horrifying holiday!

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? Are you a fan of survival horror or hide and seek horror? Ever played a horror game with some particularly bad balance? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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