Survival Horror: Life and Undeath of a Genre (Self Posted) - Videos for the 97.4%

I am absolutely of the mind that Amnesia and Penumbra and SOMA are survival horror games, but I will say that games in the genre are far better off when you can disable enemies in some way. Survival Horror is as nebulous a defining trait as Fantasy Role-Playing Game is, in my opinion. There's Survival Horror action-adventures, regular adventures, puzzle games, shooters both first-person and isometric, strategy games, and simulation games. The only major things they have in common are horrific atmosphere, player disempowerment, and focused resource management.

I like to think of these games as games with a high emphasis on exploration and panic inducing encounters with the ability to fight or flee. Resident Evil is so exemplary still because they made it really hard to kill enemies and also made it hard to just run through them because hallways were so narrow in that game. You could always run back though. But with some exploration and experience you could master the game and come out victorious to later meet even stronger foes. I don't think there can be such thing as a survival horror puzzle game or adventure game because they don't have those panic inducing gameplay possibilities in them. There's definitely a line between an action game and a survival horror game, personally I always thought Dead Space games weren't survival horror games despite what internet says because you don't have an option to flee and come back prepared or learn the routes and the groupings of enemies to plan a daring run. You're always forced to fight. Hence why it's an action game with a haunted spaceship backdrop. And this ubiquitous listing of Dead Space under the "survival horror" umbrella is what makes the classification confusing, in my opinion. As long as it has violin stingers and graffitis written in blood, anything is... survival... horror I guess. Now that I think about it, maybe that's why people have a problem with Amnesia. Because that game goes in another direction and doesn't let you fight back. Meanwhile we had a brilliant example of how it should be done all along since 1996, so we always have this experience we can compare those newer games to.

My take on it is that Survival Horror is actually two descriptions put together, Survival gameplay: there are things that want to kill you, and you can kill them back, but it will never be your reliable primary option of dealing with threats and you have to manage scarce resources to do so and a Horror tone: the game is trying to scare you. To this end, combatless games like Amnesia, SOMA or Outlast are Horror, but not Survival Horror because they lack the Survival gameplay elements (Since the player has no choice when it comes to engaging the threats, you run and you hide). And of course there's numerous Survival games that are not Horror-themed, like half the stuff in Early Access on Steam (I'm being very loose with the idea of "things wanting to kill you" here and basically including the elements as a threat the player must defeat). In short, I basically agree with everything you said, but would add at the end that disincentivised combat is another requirement.

Survival and RPG genres weren't always so nebulous, but over the years they've fallen into gratuitous misuse. Mostly thanks to publishers labeling their games whatever, I'm guessing. Thanks to that "old school RPG" are now the widely accepted term to refer to the specific sort of experience that people used to associate with RPGs. Just searching that reveals multiple well defined lists of such games. Probably we'll see another genre separation like that for classic survival horror if interest keeps up.

A survival game doesn't necessarily need to have killable enemies or even tangible enemies to begin with. Miasmata, for example, infamously has an antagonist that physically cannot be beaten at all, and can only be either escaped from or intimidated into backing down. But it's still a survival game, inching closer to "pure" survival games like Stranded 2 or The Forest. The key trait of Survival, to me, is resource management. The challenge of a Survival game is being given a small amount of resources to help you (health, ammunition, gimmicky tools, even item space), and being forced to make do without having a comfortable amount of anything. Amnesia's resource management is pretty straightforward, with its Laudanum, Oil, and Tinderboxes serving as ways for players to either recover from mistakes or improve their ability to navigate the level. SOMA and Outlast don't QUITE have that, but SOMA's limited-use health restore stations and Outlast's batteries provide a very tiny bit of that kind of gameplay. I'd say that SOMA and Outlast are very poor, shallow examples of Survival Horror mechanics, but Amnesia solidly fits within the genre in every aspect but the ability to kill the monster. Which... to be honest, isn't novel for the genre; remember Penumbra: Black Plague, or Korsakovia, or Hell Night, or Clock Tower 1 & 2?

This is what I was thinking, too. I would comfortably put Amnesia in the "survival horror" category, for the management of its lighting resources (oil and tinderboxes). At least for me, there was a very real anxiety of "do I want to light this torch / pull out my lantern, or save the resources and hope to find an established light source soon?" I would not peg SOMA as a survival horror game, though. It is strictly a horror game - there are no resources to lever toward your advantage. No bullets to balance against shooting, no oil to balance against burning, nothing to your like. Your only options are to wait or run. I can't speak for Outlast, because I didn't play it very much (wasn't a fan of its story or the way it did horror). To echo Bones' and others' sentiments, I would assert that it is indeed resource management that differentiates a run-and-hide horror game from a survival horror game. The resource is often ammunition, but it doesn't have to be - any expendable resource that the player has to choose between using now for an immediate advantage (kill an enemy, get the comfort of light, etc) or saving for a later situation (kill an enemy you can't avoid, strike a light when your sanity is critical) is sufficient, in my book.

I'm actually happy to read the debate about this. It's why I bother making videos in the first place (it's not like make money off of them). I can see how some people would consider Amnesia survival horror but most of the games that were influenced by it (at the ones I played) have no real resources to manage.