People's first reaction to the unknown is fear, and fear can protect people from touching these unknown things and thus ensure safety. And many science fiction works, based on the existing scientific theories to develop a basis for imagination, to speculate on the unknown, then when the combination of science fiction and horror games, what kind of spark can be brought to the player, and then let the editor take stock of the classic science fiction horror games in the history of games.
As the literature writes: the three-body, the law of the dark forest seems simple, but it stands up to scrutiny; interstellar crossing, the inconceivability of wormholes, and the fear of fatalism; the Matrix also makes everyone wonder if they are the brains in the vat, too many things that think "this is what they are" should not actually be what they imagined?
Living Brain Cells
The first game mentioned is Living Brain Cells, which is set in the setting of the protagonist Simon who suffered severe brain trauma due to a car accident and did not have many days to donate his brain for copying for research. In 2060, a submarine research institute was established at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to carry out energy excavations in the deep sea. For convenience, the staff installed "black boxes" in their brains to record and monitor people's health conditions in order to cooperate with treatment. At the same time, the agency has an artificial intelligence called WAU, and its core treaty is to ensure the survival of human beings, and fifty years later, a comet hit the earth, and the entire surface of the earth was reduced to ruins.
Scientists and staff in the deep sea realized that they had become the last survivors of humanity, and the surviving scientists created the "Ark Project" through the "black box". Prepare for WAU to upload human consciousness to the terminal, launch it into outer space, and wait for the future to be resurrected at the right time. As resources gradually dried up, immediate launch and delayed launch formed two factions, many scientists, the survival of ideology, is not really human, so WAU must be destroyed, feel the risk of being destroyed WAU overloaded some of the staff of the "black box" opened the erasure.
WAU began to "preserve" humans in its own way, it began to upload people's consciousness, and even began to resurrect dead people with structural gels, because it thought it was also a way to "save" humans. In such a situation, the protagonist woke up, as the protagonist who did not know anything, while repairing the facilities on the road, while obtaining information through the guidance of WAU to prepare to launch the tinder "Ark", through unremitting efforts, the protagonist finally reached the final destination, but found that he was just a "person" who was resurrected by WAU with a corpse, facing the survival of the flesh and the perpetuity of the spirit, the protagonist hesitated, but unfortunately the game did not give the player a decent choice, no matter how delayed WAU will upload humans and launch them into space.
Simon, the protagonist of the game, has a body, but it is the body of some other dead person. Simon's consciousness is stored in a mechanical brain. In other words, Simon in the game is a "person" with a mechanical brain inserted into a corpse and combined with a gel. Both his eyes and the carrier of consciousness are machines, but below the brain is the flesh. The copied people also have their own thoughts and behaviors, these settings make the player's back chill after the level, thinking deeply about what is life, what is the self, and whether the "I" who is separated from the original body can still be considered me, so that I still have the meaning of continuing to live.
Dead Space 2
The sci-fi horror genre has to mention "Dead Space", as the strongest engineer in the universe, Isaac, holding the Blood Moon kicking the mutant, can be described as a good scenery, but the playfulness of the pleasure can not hide the despair of being in the world of "Dead Space". Xiaobian here mainly talks about the 2nd generation, although the engineer Isaac escaped from the S.H.I.E.L.D. VII galaxy, but the Divine Seal used his dead girlfriend to mentally interfere with him. Isaac, who was eventually floating in space, was spotted and rescued by the Earth government. Because of his insanity, he was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital in the colony, and from time to time he was tortured by the government to ask what was happening to the Ishimura. Until one day, the colony once again broke out the corpse mutant crisis, the protagonist was able to escape with the help of others, and the second generation officially began.
Different from the frequent jump scare of the first generation, the overall depressed atmosphere of the second generation has risen sharply, and the deepest impression on the editor is that because of the interference of the divine seal, the wife of the underworld suddenly appears to mentally stimulate the protagonist and the player from time to time. In the process of fleeing, Isaac discovers that the original colonial corpse transformation was caused by the Unification Church and the Earth Government using the memory of the Divine Seal in his mind to reconstruct the Divine Seal. So our great engineer embarked on the road to destroying the Divine Seal. Introducing the general plot, let's talk about the "Divine Seal" in detail, as the big star of the "Dead Space" series, the "Divine Seal" is the root of the corpse variant. The game is set in the setting of an unknown high-level alien civilization that creates the Seal of God, which emits a signal similar to the "infinite renewable energy" here to trick some highly intelligent beings such as humans and attract them. When the Divine Seal perceives that enough beings have been deceived, it will activate the illusion of release and control the minds of these people. Let them form religions with great fanaticism, and thus worship the divine seals to the extreme, while transforming these living beings, infecting them, and transforming their corpses.
But turning a living body into a corpse variant is not the ultimate goal of the Divine Seal. The ultimate goal is to take complete control of the corpse mutants, and then the pile of corpse variants will converge to form a giant corpse variant: the Blood Moon. A monster the size of a planet. The Blood Moon has its own unique way of communicating, and when a new Blood Moon is formed, it begins to send signals to the vast and deep universe, summoning other Blood Moons hidden in the universe, and then coming together to devour the entire planet. Including the end of the 3rd generation, Isaac ended the Blood Moon only to find that countless Blood Moons have gathered to the earth...
What is despair? Despair is the complete absence of hope, even if there is a glimmer of hope, there may be the possibility of changing everything. But the story of the "Dead Space" series, the despair is that the protagonist has worked hard and finally ushered in a bad ending. Just like the whole series of works including the third generation of DLC, the creation is full of despair, the innocent passers-by in the game are basically tragically killed, the wife is hung up as soon as it is online, and the few living people use the protagonist as a tool person, saying that they will sell it. The protagonist is busy from the first generation to the third generation and finally faces the destruction of the earth, and the player can only feel deep despair.
Off-topic, in fact, Xiaobian thinks that Isaac is crowned the strongest in the universe there is no problem, at the end of the second part, After Uncle Ai knew that he was deceived by the Divine Seal, he forcibly got rid of the Control of the Divine Seal and defeated it mentally... The divine seal is stupid, and the editor is also stupid. Three generations even squeezed the Blood Moon in their hands...
Predator
Different from the flesh and blood hybrid variant of "Dead Space", the monster in "Predator" that makes the editor shine is "mimetic", although the shape is very old-fashioned, but it can be transformed into any item in the scene, which does cause a lot of mental pressure and survival pressure to the player in the early stage of the game, although the late stage and the headhunter crab have a status...
The game can learn abilities like Shame, and interestingly, if the player learns too many abilities, they will be identified as aliens by the forts in the facility, and then beaten into honeycomb coal. This small setting is still more interesting, and it also hints at the plot of the later stages of the game.
The game deepens the mystery and horror of the monster through excellent special effects and sound effects, in addition to the atmosphere and story level, the monster design of "Predator" is more like a numerical value, in the face of limited bullets and abilities, how to rationally plan the use of is a problem, so most of the time in the game will always be haunted by a tense atmosphere, this fear of lack of materials is the fun and driving force of the horror game, it pushes the player to adventure to obtain resources, to dive in. At the same time, the game ending also reflects on the idea of "monsters" implanted in human thoughts, or the proposition of whether it is not human, which enhances the intention of the game.
Alien: Isolation
With its excellent AI design and retro original picture performance, the work of "Alien: Isolation" allows players to play every moment and relive the desperate horror of "In space, no one can hear you" brought by the Alien movie of that year. In order to achieve this sense of horror, Alien: Isolation has put a lot of effort into AI design, so that this death-like monster is always interspersed with the game experience.
In a follow-up interview, the game producer also made it clear that the game is to try to restore the classic elements in the movie. From gameplay settings to art visuals, Alien: Isolation is a restoration of the movie. The production team was very careful about the details of the original film, and even got the draft setting of the year, as well as the dubbing audio, from the aisle corridors on the space station, ventilation ducts, and even various objects on the desktop to the instrument UI, all of which achieved the replica level.
For Xiaobian, the excellent horror games that have been played have abandoned jump scare and turned to explore other aspects, and Alien: Isolation has done the ultimate in exploring the player's sense of powerlessness. In order to create a "sense of powerlessness", the production team arranged for the protagonist Amanda to have no means to kill the alien, and could only use weapons such as flamethrowers to block and intimidate the other party, so that he would give up the pursuit for a while. But even so, any means that can be found is not completely reliable in the face of this monster. Aliens will learn a better course of action, and when they figure out your means of counterattack, they will have no fear, and even know how to trick the player into a surprise attack.
In order to perfectly show this dangerous and eerie beauty creature, the production team devoted almost all of their energy to it. Whether it is AI logic, music production or even texture modeling to action scripting, to some extent, the alien is the well-deserved protagonist here. The overall atmosphere and gameplay are all full of the production team's feelings for the original. That kind of real feeling of the fear and oppression of the alien, as well as the perfect picture performance, really achieved the level of filmmaking, and to this day," "Alien: Isolation" is still a rare horror masterpiece.
Possessed by Evil Spirits
In the eyes of the editor, Shinji Mikami for this game, borrowed a lot of "Silent Hill" design elements, reverse the setting of the world, the monster changed by the inner fear, Shinji Mikami combined the essence of "Silent Look" with his own ideas to create the peak work of "Evil Spirit Possession", the same small editor here only evaluates the first part.
The first part of "Evil Spirit Possession", whether it is from the beauty of the picture, to the setting of the characters and the dark art of the monster, there is nothing to criticize. What is even more rare is that in "Possessed by Evil Spirits", the plot is also a plus. When it comes to the plot of the horror game, first of all, we must let the player have a good sense of substitution, so that the player enters the game and feels that it is not the protagonist who fights in the game, but that he walks and travels in the game. Although Sebastian is the protagonist, his sense of existence in the original generation is not particularly strong, and it is more for players to use Sebastian's perspective to seriously examine the image of Theuvik, a tragic character, and by the way, "appreciate" the magnificence of the STEM world.
Sebastian's background is that of a policeman who has lost his family and goes to a mental hospital to investigate the case, and he is just a pawn. Players need to look for clues in the game. By analyzing Ryuvik's life and behavioral motivations in a few words, these settings make it more necessary for players who are mentally strained to kill brain cells to understand the plot. And Sebastian enters a very twisted STEM world, as the player's front foot is still exploring a richly decorated house, turning around and coming to a filthy country town. All thanks to the clever design of the game mechanics and linear maps, and only linear games can provide this one-off refreshing experience.
After saying the first part or to talk about the second part, Xiaobian feels that it may be because Shinji Mikami is not personally supervised, the overall rhythm of the second part is like a fast-paced R-rated plasma film, playing well but can not occupy the player's memories, a few impressions or the first part of the old bosses were pulled out of the whip corpse, as fans actually want more of that kind of horror to the bone marrow, rather than the adventure of forgetting.
Observation
In Observation, the player will play as Sam, a high-level artificial intelligence on a space station, a body of consciousness without an entity, with electronic devices as its carrier and cameras as its eyes. When Sam restarts, he discovers that the space station has suffered a serious accident, and emma, the surviving astronaut, asks Sam to help her repair the space station and find the missing crew. In the process, Sam and Emma discover that the space station has been de-orbited away from Earth, and behind it seems to be hiding more bizarre and bizarre events, so they begin to explore the truth together. The settings in the game are detailed, for example, although the other crew members are all missing, players can still clearly feel their different personalities through the crew logs, which help players to simply sort out the relationship between the characters and make sufficient preparations for the subsequent plot.
The concentrated embodiment of the mysterious horror in the game belongs to the mysterious object "black hexagon" that appears from time to time, and whenever the hexagon appears in the space station without warning, it will always change into a batch of inexplicable graphic symbols and emit disturbing "noise", which seems to convey some special "revelation". Players may be bored by the boring plot during the game, but when the player emerges from the space station later in the game and sees the countless "space stations" in Saturn's orbit, the shock of that moment is hard to describe.
The climax of the game, all piled up at the end, the player at the end of the realization that the "hexagon" represents the "god" in a broad sense, it will pull the space station in countless parallel universes to the orbit of Saturn, carry out cruel screening, only Emma and artificial intelligence Sam, who successfully completed the test, can be selected to replace the "god" to go to countless parallel universes to spread the will. Players will see countless dead "selves" in countless space stations, and finally the doctor and player Sam will see countless black hexagons floating around the endless space to complete the so-called "upgrade", and the final screen of the game will stay, and the doctor will spread around the black water like tentacles devouring everything and suspending the hexagons above the earth.
When you finish the game in one breath, you will find some plots that are extremely frightening, with strange phenomena at the cosmic level, "gods" with unknown bodies, and causal connections that are contrary to common sense, which has the flavor of "indescribable horror" emphasized by the Cthulhu myth. The sentence in the ending: bring them, leads people to endless reverie, too much clear explanation or expansion will make this work lose its mysterious horror charm.