Building dread toward a late reveal in horror games

Question: a short horror game is a walk to a place where the monster appears and a chase back. If the walk is only a walk, the monster arrives from nowhere: nothing hinted at it, so the reveal reads as random. How do well-regarded games and films spend the journey so that the reveal feels inevitable? And what should happen when the player looks straight at the monster, if the usual answer (the screen darkens and then you lose) is not working?

Short answer: the journey is where the monster is built, and it is built in the player's head. Games that do this well start in an ordinary place, then show the monster's traces long before the monster: a warning said once, evidence that gets closer and more personal, a sound that carries further than sight, and the ordinary sounds of the place going missing. They tie the escalation to the player's progress, so nobody outruns it or waits for it. They keep the threat readable, because a threat nobody notices does no work. After the reveal they let the pressure come in waves.

For the gaze, the best documented case is a studio that removed the fail state and found players more frightened without it. Looking can cost the player hearing, sight or information, and it can last after they look away, without ending the game. The picture and the sound that carry that cost have well-worn recipes and one hard limit: a pulse over the whole screen has to stay under three flashes a second.

Thomas Grip of Frictional Games, who made Amnesia and SOMA, lists the habits horror games should drop. Two apply directly. Most games open in a strange situation, yet "much of the good horror in other media starts of very mundane" [1]. And most games start the action as soon as they can, when "sustaining a really high level of terror is only possible shorter bursts" [1]. The quiet opening is not dead time. It is the baseline every later beat is measured against.

Valve reached the same conclusion from the other direction. The pacing system of Left 4 Dead came from watching Counter-Strike, whose natural rhythm is "periods of quiet tension punctuated by unpredictable moments of intense combat". The slides put it in three lines: "Constant, unchanging combat is fatiguing", "Long periods of inactivity are boring", and unpredictable peaks and valleys are what make a game worth replaying [2].

What to take: decide what normal looks and sounds like in the first minutes, make it pleasant, and hold it long enough to be believed.

Grip's narrative design approach asks for a threat that is felt far more often than it is met. "There is something lurking about that constitutes a threat for the player", and it must be "something hiding, only making brief appearances. The idea is for the player to constantly scan the environment for clues that the danger is near and present" [3]. The scanning is the gameplay. Very little of it needs a system behind it.

The limit on this is legibility. On SOMA, Frictional tried creatures whose intent was ambiguous, and playtests split two ways: "Either they ran straight up to the monsters, which triggered this aggressive behavior, or they'd stay away from them and not really notice them at all" [4]. The team gave up the middle ground and made each creature clearly one thing or the other. The same article gives the balance for behaviour: "If it's too mechanical, it's a very uninteresting, systemic feel. And if it's too random, monster interactions will be a haze that the player can't make sense of" [4].

What to take: brief appearances work only if the player registers them. A figure that stands silently at the edge of view and leaves before anyone looks has not appeared.

The Blair Witch Project never shows its witch. It shows a ladder of evidence, and each rung is nearer and more personal than the last: cairns in an old graveyard, sticks snapping at night, three cairns built beside the tent by morning, stick figures hung in the trees, the tent shaken and the group's things gone through, and finally a bundle of twigs tied with a strip of a missing friend's shirt, with teeth and hair inside [5]. The order matters. The evidence starts as something found in the woods and ends as something done to the group.

Half-Life 2 does the short version. Before the level, a companion says of the town ahead that "we don't go there anymore". On arrival the score changes and the first thing in view is a pair of legs hanging from a tree [6]. One line of setup, one image of payoff, and the player has been told what kind of place this is before anything moves.

What to take for a journey with almost no text:

• Pose the question once, early. A notice, a poster or a line of dialogue.
• Lay three to five traces along the way. Each is closer to the path and more clearly about a person than the one before.
• Make the last trace personal. It should belong to whoever the opening named.
• Change something behind the player. If the way back passes the same ground, a trace that has moved since the climb is the strongest one.

Silence in the woods is not only a storytelling habit. A study in the Sierra Nevada, using more than 1,600 recorders, played the picture out at scale: within 10 seconds of a goshawk's call, bird vocal activity dropped across the landscape, and an hour later calling rates were still below normal [7]. Players half-know this already. Birdsong that stops is read as a predator arriving.

Dead Space's audio director, Don Veca, built the game's dread from three ideas [8]:

• Every enemy broadcasts fear. "Every enemy has one of these fear emitters. They are basically broadcasting the amount of fear a player will hear." Proximity drives the music whether or not the enemy is in view.
• The gap is the loud part. Veca cites listeners whose brainwaves were busiest between the movements of a symphony, "because that's when there is nothing there."
• Small sounds with no source. A tool the team called the creepy ambi-patch played short sounds that changed pitch and volume as they moved around the player.

What to take: give the monster one sound of its own that carries much further than sight, let the player hear it early and far away where it can be mistaken for an animal, and bring it nearer at each stage. Cut the ambient life abruptly at least once. Use the monster's sound again at the reveal, so the reveal answers a question the journey asked.

Slender: The Eight Pages has the simplest escalation in the genre. "As the player collects more pages, they encounter Slender Man more frequently and are given less time to escape before losing" [9]. Because the pressure follows progress, a slow player is never left in dead air and a fast one never outruns the build. Its author also randomised the appearances, because he felt that scripting had cost Amnesia some of its horror [9].

Once the monster is loose, constant pressure flattens. Alien: Isolation keeps a "menace gauge" that rises when the creature is within a short walk of the player, when the player has line of sight to it, or when it is close on the motion tracker. When the gauge peaks, "the director backs off and sends the alien elsewhere" [10]. The game also holds parts of the creature's behaviour back and unlocks them over time [10], so it seems to learn.

Left 4 Dead runs the same idea as a four-state cycle: full threat until the players' intensity peaks, three to five seconds more, a fade while the fight plays out, then a relax period of 30 to 45 seconds or a set distance travelled [2].

What to take: the climb's sightings should grow closer and more frequent with distance covered. The chase should ease off after each close call and then return.

Friends talking will puncture a mood, and the games that succeed in co-op use the talk instead of fighting it. In Lethal Company voice chat "is proximity-limited by default: you can only talk to others in your lobby when they're near you", and its designer calls it "a game about laughing at death", where "moments of actual fear and isolation" are "usually followed right up with laughter from your friends" [11]. The laughter is the release phase of the pacing curve, supplied by the players.

The second tool is asymmetry. Lethal Company's Ghost Girl "only haunts one player at a time"; nobody else can see her, and among her warning signs "the target player's audio and hearing become muffled" [12]. One player has evidence the rest cannot check, which turns the voice channel into an argument about whether anything is there.

What to take: effects that belong to one player's screen and ears are cheap, need nothing sent between players, and create doubt in the group.

Three shipped answers to "what happens when I look at it" are worth comparing.

• Looking kills. In Slender, "looking at him for too long causes a game over" [9]. The rule has a side benefit its author used on purpose: players must look away, so a rough model is never studied.
• Looking costs clarity. In SOMA the screen distorts as a creature nears, "which makes the monster indistinct and thus impossible to define visually" [13]. The player who looks learns less, not more.
• A glance is useful, a stare is not. Lethal Company's Bracken backs off after a look of one to two seconds and turns hostile if stared at for more than three or four [14].

The best evidence on the fail state comes from Amnesia: The Dark Descent, where the player "would lose sanity from seeing monsters" [15]. In development, low sanity also drained health. Frictional found a punishing version close to impossible to balance and took the punishment out: "we removed all challenge from the sanity system and it just became a feature with few gameplay implications." The result surprised them. "Because of the vague and random nature of the system, players made up their own theories of how it worked, and the lack of information made them more frightened about it." Grip's summary: "Sometimes, making something game-y just destroys the feeling that you're after" [15].

What to take: a gaze mechanic can lose its death and gain fear, provided the look still costs something the player feels. The costs with precedent are hearing [12], a clear view of the monster [13], and a difference between a glance and a stare [14]. Keep the numbers off the screen.

The picture. The convention from shooters is that the screen's edges pulse in a colour and that the effect "intensifies and takes up more space on the screen" as the player's state worsens; Epic's own tutorial builds exactly that [16]. Uncharted drains colour instead, and its developers describe the drain as the hero's luck running out [17]. A version for dread rather than injury changes three things: black in place of red; an uneven edge, warped by slow noise and heavier on the monster's side, so it never looks like a lens; and a pulse shaped like a heartbeat (two quick swells and a rest) in place of a sine wave.

The sound. Three layers do most of the work: a heartbeat that the picture's pulse follows, the world's sound muffled and turned down, and whispers. For whispers the reference is Hellblade, whose voices are recorded on a head-shaped binaural microphone with performers moving around it so that they seem to pass through the listener's head. Its audio director warns against a constant wash; he wants them to rise and fall as music does. "Sometimes they grow, sometimes they're quiet so you don't feel constantly tired or overwhelmed" [18]. A browser can approximate the placement with a few whisper loops, each on its own head-related panner, circling the listener at different speeds.

The limit. A pulse that darkens most of the screen is a flash in the accessibility sense: "a pair of opposing changes in relative luminance of 10% or more", and content must show "no more than three general flashes" in any one second unless the flashing area is small [19]. A heartbeat is two flashes a beat, so a full-screen pulse stays safe only up to about 90 beats a minute. Past that, let the audio speed up and hold the picture's rate, or pulse how far the darkness reaches more than how dark it is.

1. Pose the question at the start. One poster, notice or line.
2. Hold a pleasant normal for the first minutes: full ambient life, nothing wrong.
3. Give the monster a sound that outranges sight. First heard far off and easy to mistake, nearer at each stage, and heard again at the reveal.
4. Cut the ambient life abruptly the first time the monster shows itself, then thin it as the journey goes on.
5. Lay a ladder of traces, each closer and more personal, the last one belonging to whoever the opening named.
6. Make the first sightings unmissable, then let them become glimpses. Key their frequency and closeness to progress, never to a clock.
7. Make the look cost hearing and sight, not the game. Let it build over seconds and linger after.
8. Stage the reveal: silence first, then the monster's own sound, close.
9. Run the chase in waves: ease off after each close call.
10. Keep per-player effects local, so one player can be sure and the others cannot.

Items 2, 3, 4, 7 and 8 are sound and code alone. Item 5 needs props. Items 6 and 9 need the monster's behaviour to change.

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