Both games each ask the players to suspend their disbelief enough to believe that they control the outcome of cinema-inspired horror scenes, whether by pressing a single button in The quarry or by participating in direct, timing-based combat as one of Evil death‘s survivors or demons. And both use in their own way different understandings of game design to capture the experience of watching a horror movie.
Games decades earlier tried to achieve this goal in various ways. Survival horror releases of the kind made famous by Resident Evil and Quiet hill in the 90s used a deliberately awkward control scheme (the so-called tank controls) and a lack of ammunition and healing items to model the fear of being subdued and overwhelmed by monsters. This, combined with the stunned sense of maneuvering a character into position to run away from or fight an enemy, worked to replicate the nightmarish helplessness of a horror film. Amnesia: The Dark Descent took a different approach to modeling powerlessness, forcing the player to explore scary locations and hide from danger without access to any weapons at all.
In short, designers have always been interested in finding ways to make the alternate thrill of watching a horror movie more intimate – to make players feel as if they are not just watching, but actually taking part in the experience.
Both of the above designos maintain popularity, but they are joined The quarry and the more passive genre it belongs to as well as games like Evil deaththe latest in the “asymmetric multiplayer” horror subgenre that also includes Death by daylight and Friday the 13th customization. The pervasive line that connects these horror releases is their use of role-playing as the means by which audiences get lost in various aspects of the horror film experience.
Something interesting is happening while you are playing The quarry, for example: The player does not make decisions as if they are the character involved, but instead acts from the perspective of an instructor – or perhaps more precisely from the point of view of a plot-influencing supervisor, if the scream at the TV does not go away alone to investigate a strange sound can actually change the course of events. An understanding of genre tropes is the basis for these decisions. When a cast member has been attacked by a bizarre monster and develops a strange infection from a leg ulcer, another character’s suggestion to amputate the limb moments after discovering black fluid along the edges of the wound makes more sense than it should. The player knows that something bad is inevitable because of the story they are witnessing, but because of their knowledge of horror movie logic, which dictates how a mysterious damage inflicted by a monster causes its sufferer to turn into a monster on shift, they can try to save the injured player by assessing the situation on the basis of generational. The quarry encourages its audience to role-play a horror movie viewer instead of a horror movie character.
IN Evil Dead: The Game, players take on roles on the screen more directly. Like the demon, they are forced to think like a supernatural predator and do everything to kill the other players. Like the survivors, they are forced to prioritize saving their lives and their companions. The abstraction of the genre is removed to favor the fight-or-flight behavior that slasher movies try to capture in the first place. A layer of signifier is removed, leaving something closer to the real emotions that a slasher wants its viewer – or in this case the player – to feel.
That Evil death films, and horror films in general, consist of more than the aesthetics of suspense, fear and violence. The quarry and Evil Dead: The Game both understand this in their own way and model the vicarious pity and guilt that comes from watching events unfold in slasher movies. Their approaches to design can take different forms, but they work toward a similar goal: to take movie monsters and the ones they scare a few steps off the screen so that their destinies can be placed, no matter what degree, in our hands.