Pitfalls & Powerups – Survival Horror

Survival horror games seem to be limited recently, with every AAA title and their dog adding way too much action to their new releases in series that were almost exclusively survival horror – Resident Evil and Dead Space immediately spring to mind. In the days of yore where survival horror was a staple for every shelf, which titles hit that crap-your-pants sweet spot and which just made you think that crapping your pants was probably a better way to spend your time?

There is rarely an entire genre of gaming that a whole generation chooses to ignore. The only time FMV (full motion video) games are normally even acknowledged are when they’re being mocked – un-fucking-believable, right? Night Trap was originally released on the Sega CD and is essentially a B-movie. In fact, the front of the game is even advertised as having “OVER 1 ½ HOURS OF REAL VIDEO” which is only a real selling point if teenage girls being picked off one by one by vampiric ‘Augers’ – also known as overacting bit-part actors – is your type of motion picture. The gameplay is just watching the ‘horror’ movie as it pans out as part of the “Sega Control Attack Team” which sounds way more exciting than it actually is – you just view the events of the game via a series of 8 cameras in the house and then at certain points you can set traps to avoid the untimely deaths of the girls attending a slumber party.

Not only is it poorly acted, it’s more surviving the tediousness of having to switch cameras in time to catch the intruders rather than having to survive any kind of remotely scary horror story. The worst thing is that there is barely any skill to the game, pretty much the only way to ‘win’ – by not letting any of the girls die in a series of the least scary deaths known to gaming – is to play through time after time just to learn which camera the vampires will be on at each point in the film just to trap them. This cult FMV game was also one of several games including Doom and Mortal Kombat that led to the introduction of the ERSB rating, mainly due to a scene in which one of the girls is dressed in a tiny nightgown and has her blood sucked by a neck clamp used by the Augers. The scene – and the game itself – was described in a video game violence hearing as ‘sick’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘ultra-violent’. Clearly Senators Lieberman and Kohl were playing a very different game to everybody else.

Unless you are a frequenter of the import scene, it’s doubtful you would’ve played the Japan-only Famicom release, Sweet Home. But, by all means, import it, emulate it, steal it (don’t steal it) just so you can play the pinnacle of the modern survival horror genre. Released on the same day as the film of the same name and plot, this essentially makes it one of the best licensed/tie-in games ever released – and for good reason. Its lack of release outside of Japan could be because of the lack of appeal a tie-in for a Japanese film would have had in the Western market but I’d like to bet that it was perhaps due to the huge amount of gruesome, horrific and psychological horror used for a game released in the late 80s – just maybe. Taking place in a haunted mansion – because where else? – this RPG involves five characters each with a specific item e.g. a lighter, first-aid kit, camera etc and the ability to each hold a limited number of other items found around the house.

The ability to swap around items and the fact that each character’s special item can be used whenever may not seem so difficult, until you learn that you have to control two separate parties – one with three members of your party and one with the other two. This means you’ll have to use much more strategy than you may have expected to ensure you have the right items in each party for the path each of your parties will take – otherwise you’re going to need to go and find the other party to swap items. As if that wasn’t enough, you’ve got permadeath. If one of your party members dies during one of the many randomly encountered battles, there is no way to revive them, so you get to watch their gruesome demise – leading to one of five different endings depending on how many members of your party died. Sweet Home has heavily influenced the big hitters in survival horror – most notably Resident Evil – with its inclusion of using notes and diary entries as story mechanics, multiple endings, limited item management and its emphasis on atmosphere – so don’t despair if you haven’t played the grandaddy of survival horror because you’ve played with its babies…

I hope you enjoyed the first edition of Pitfalls and Powerups and just remember, if someone assures you that you need to set up hidden cameras in a house full of teenage girls as part of the “Sega Control Attack Team” in real life, just walk away.