Condemned: The Criminal Origins of Modern Horror Gaming

Modern AAA horror is in a good place right now. Outlast, Resident Evil 7 and Alien Isolation are among some of the best first-person horror experiences that are out there on modern machines. It’s safe to say that the genre has experienced something of a revival since the dark, gloomy days of the Xbox 360.

In the generation prior, horror games seemed to fall by the wayside, in favour of more bombastic experiences. Everybody can remember the heavy action and set pieces of Resident Evil 5 and its much-maligned sequel. It was rare to find a popular horror game in the previous generation that wasn’t laced with a heavy dose of action to up the playability; even Alan Wake, one of the best horror-thrillers out there, was heavily based on action and the implausible gunplay of a novelist main character.

To find a relatively ‘true’ horror game, one would have had to turn to the indies to get their fix. We all remember last generation as being the one where Let’s Players really started to gather steam, and with this came the popularity of horror indie titles such as Slender: The Eight Pages. Because, let’s face it, the prospect of experiencing horror is made a lot more consumable by watching someone else suffer it and laughing at the comedy that arises from a good entertainer. It is in part thanks to Let’s Plays that we saw the popularity of good gaming horror arise, such as Amnesia and its sequel. As we moved to the current generation, there was a plentiful supply of horror games of all kinds, becoming somewhat of a mainstay genre for independent developers who all hoped that their game would be able to ride the coat-tails of a popular Let’s Player to becoming a sales success. Nowadays, even the AAA studios can’t help but stick their profitable noses in for a quick sniff of horror and we were treated to some new classics such as Alien Isolation and Resident Evil 7, which benefited not only from higher production values but also from lessons taught by the older indie titles on how to craft claustrophobic and terrifying games in first person with a gritty, horrifying surrounding environment.

Amidst all this, I realised that one game seems to have gone forgotten, and yet could largely be seen as a missing link between the poor, action shoot-em-up horror that we saw in the previous generation and the more carefully-crafted gems we are seeing today. Condemned: Criminal Origins was an excellent, early Xbox 360 game that seems to hold a lot of fitting comparisons to modern horror titles as they are even in the modern market.

While looking understandably dated as an early seventh-generation game, Condemned’s graphics is not without merit. Careful design went into the locales experienced in the game, which were gruesome and scary in their own right. Despite being traditionally cliché areas for a horror setting, such as abandoned department stores, dilapidated schools and the dark recesses of the subway, Condemned’s levels proved that sometimes clichés exist for a reason; there is something just horribly creepy about old, rotten mannequins in a quiet, desolate department store long since left to ruin.

The overall design of the game, however, is a masterclass in horror design, something that seems to inspire what I consider the scariest part of Resident Evil 7: the approach to Evelyn’s room. The knot in my stomach as I continued my slow pace into the darkness, that overwhelming feeling that I was going somewhere I really should not have been going shows just how masterful Resident Evil 7 can be in its quieter, more psychologically-scary moments. At the same time, Condemned is equally as inspired in just how it could make the player feel terrified of their own progress.

The devil here is in the details; the way that the ambient sounds seem to attack you from all sides; hearing a tin can drop onto the floor to your left, making you wonder whether a terrifying enemy was just out of your view, and at the same time dreading the inevitability of having to investigate the source of the sound. Condemned makes masterful use of this with the shadows in the game, using them to play with the player’s mind to create illusions of would-be murderers just around the corner. Many parallels here can be found between this and the Evelyn sequence; the bouncing of the ball from a location of screen, the rocking chair, the slow fading out of light until the player seems surrounded by a thick, impenetrable black fog. Both examples show expertise in making the player dread what they’re going to have to do to progress.

Where Condemned does better than most modern games, however, is in the late stages of the game. It is very rare that a horror game feels as scary at the last level as it does in the introduction, but here, Condemned surpasses Resident Evil 7, which was somewhat of a disappointment in its latter stages. I remember strongly that feeling of fear as I went about and investigated an abandoned house out in the sticks. There was this incredibly spooky feeling of claustrophobia as destroyed furniture blocked my progress, making me carefully plan my route. I never felt quite so unsafe as I did in that level (which soon branched off into a run through a farm area and some barns culminating in a strange boss fight), and it is to Condemned’s credit that my growing skill at the game never hit the point that I felt truly safe or even able to tackle what it was throwing at me. On the other hand, Resident Evil 7 suffers from being still at its core a game where a player picks up a gradually-more powerful arsenal and soon is able to face head-on the hordes shambling toward them.

An honourable mention goes to the minute-by-minute gameplay of Condemned. It is interesting to note that Condemned was a first-person atmospheric horror games long before their current popularity. This makes the comparison to modern games like Resident Evil 7 more striking. Guns are scarce and typically over-powered when used, making them invaluable to the game, but they are never the central focus. Instead, combat is focused on taking improvised weapons to the enemies you face, be they drug-addicted madmen or strange creatures impaled with metal rods. Investigation using a series of interesting tools forms a good mechanic, and serves to intensify the atmospherics of the locations in which the investigations themselves take place. There is one scene in a locker room which is particularly chilling, and many horror gamers that picked up Condemned will understand what I mean when I say this. Condemned is a quieter experience than the likes of Resident Evil 7 and Alien Isolation, and this only enhances the scariness of the title, allowing the narrative and the scares to really soak into the player.

Condemned: Criminal Origins represents a missing link between the decline of horror in the past generation and the current resurrection that we are seeing in the modern day. Although understandably dated, its comparisons hold up favourably to modern horror, and while its sequel was a big disappointment, the original game still deserves a lot of credit for being a potential inspiration for how to do horror right in the modern games industry.

The Opening Hour of Outlast is a Lesson in Horror Pacing

In the wake of the release of Outlast 2, I thought it would be a good time to make a start on one of the games that has been languishing in my Steam backlog, the original Outlast, released in 2013. Having played for the first hour or so, I thought that the opening was a great example of pacing in modern horror games.

Entering Mount Massive Asylum was one of the most nerve-wracking, tension building experiences I’ve had in a horror game. 

From the first moment, the tension builds as I drove up an abandoned-looking road at night, the radio playing ominous news announcements as I drew in closer. The signpost to Mount Massive Asylum passes by on your left and I arrived at the edge of an empty courtyard.

It is here I was able to first control my character. After reading a note detailing my reasoning for entering the asylum (to expose some kind of inhumane experimentation by a big evil corporation), the first thing I noted was the sense of atmosphere. As I have previously stated in blog posts, the sense of place is one of the most important aspects of a horror game, as it gives you the backdrop and the context for the horror. 

A mental asylum may be a cliché place to set a horror title, but here, it definitely works. The setting and environment looks ominous, the choice of night-time for the story obviously a deliberate choice. Shadows dance in a sinister way in the dark, and I am already on edge as I am looking for any movement, which, thanks to poor visibility because of the darkness, could sneak up on me any second.

Another thing I noted was how vulnerable my character was. Being told that I could not fight, only run and hide to survive, this was another deliberate choice by the designers. An important element of fear is the feeling of vulnerability, of fearing what could happen. I then learn that my mission as a journalist is to capture everything on tape, meaning I have to spend most of the game with a camera glued to my face, further reducing visibility. 

Experimentation with the controls reveals the game’s night-vision mode, which overlays the grim scenery with a green-tint, and, as I found later on, a creepy glow in the empty, lifeless eyes of the dead corpses I walk past. On top of this, when night-vision is active, while you can see somewhat in the dark, my vision of anything long-distance is drastically-reduced, and the overall blurry quality of the camera makes it harder to see. 

Given the inability to fight, the player’s only option being to run or hide, the fact that an enemy can so easily sneak up on me, given how limited my vision is, only makes that feeling of vulnerability worse.

The tension only continues to build, the music proving a dramatic masterstroke as I slowly make my way into the facility, every footstep an echoing boom as my over-sensitive ears desperately listen to the surroundings for anything that could be out of place. 

As I climb some scaffolding to get into the asylum through an open window upstairs (my character, Miles Upshur, seems oddly determined given how terrifying the game’s atmosphere is), the tension is at risk of swallowing me whole, thanks to a buildup of nerve-wracking noise from the music; that familiar building screech of any good horror film as the sound engineers give you a sense that something horrible is about to jump at any minute.

Then, as I enter the asylum proper, a horrible loud burst of static from the nearby TV, sounding like the shrill scream of an unspoken horror, startles me into alertness. I am not normally for jumpscares, but here, the jump serves only to terrify me more and build up that sense of foreboding, that overwhelming feeling in my gut that I shouldn’t be here, as I reluctantly gather my wits and continue.

As I delve deeper into the asylum, the horror in my surroundings notches the terror back up to a peak, thanks to the grim atmosphere of a broken-down facility, my imagination is wild wondering just what happened here, and seeing bodies moving just in the corner of my vision only serves to ratchet up that paranoia again.

Following this, I stumble through a dark room full of disembodied heads staring at me with pained, terrified expressions, and I’m jumpscared again, this time by a man impaled on a spike sticking out of the ground. He warns me of the horrible creatures I am due to encounter before he dies in agonising pain. 

This jumpscare was enough to scare the wits out of me and put my every sense on high alert, as I continue onward, squeezing myself through a gap until I hear a gruff voice mutter ‘Little pig’ at me from behind. 

Miles Upshur is just as horrified as I am, as he is thrown through a wall and onto the ground floor of the asylum below, as this nerve-wracking introduction draws to a close.

What I think makes this introduction so effective is the atmosphere. The developers of Outlast may have been aware that the setting for their iconic horror game, a broken-down mental asylum, is among the most cliché of locations. However, this doesn’t matter, as here the scares are done so effectively. Your surroundings all serve to build up the tension. Abandoned military vehicles and a locked front door hint at something sinister going on, but what exactly is happening here? 

The messy interior of the asylum itself, complete with nightmare inducing scenery and messages, hints at something horrible coming for you, allowing your imagination to dream up all kinds of horrific fates to befall the character. The sound is perfectly-paced, the intensity ramping up and down with expert pace as the game develops and you slowly unravel, and the fake-out jumpscares are well-timed, enough to let you build up that fear just enough to let the scares feel more real and visceral.

It is clear that many lessons can be learned from Outlast as to the pacing of an introduction section. So much has to be done in the introduction of a horror game; setting up the sense of place, leaving enough breadcrumbs of mystery behind for the player to be drawn in by the plot, and setting up the atmosphere so that the player feels horror in their surroundings. 

In just one hour, Outlast has done all of those things so expertly well, and it is clear how this title has influenced later survival horrors - with one sideways glance at Resident Evil 7, I can clearly see the lessons learned by the latter on how to introduce a horror story to the audience.

So far, my impression of Outlast as a horror game has been good; I do find issue with the part immediately after the introduction, however, as I found the enemies themselves somewhat lacking in effectiveness. The expert pacing of the introduction seems to have died down as the game has gone on. However, from the introduction alone, Outlast has been a terrifying treat that has gotten my adrenaline pumping and I am eager to delve back in for more.

I’m just going to wait until daylight before I play again.