Best Horror Games That Aren't Horror Games: 999

Huh. That’s weird. Did I make a blog or something? Shit. Guess I have to update it now.

Yeah, sorry for the wait. I’ve (mostly) written up a couple posts since numero uno, and I immediately put them aside because I decided I shouldn’t dive into those subjects right away. They’re coming though. Topics were music in the Mother/Earthbound series and female characters in games, the latter of which is a doozy and, in retrospect, will need a whole lot more than one post.

Also because Sarkeesian-oriented shitstorm.
Not touching that with a ten foot pole.

So what am I going to write about instead? Well, it’s October, and because I’m one hundred percent original all the time and none of my brilliant ideas have ever been conceived by another human ever, I’m going to write about horror games in honor of Halloween.

“Horror games?” I hear you scoff through the monitor. “That’s all anyone will talk about these days. Slender, Amnesia, scare cams, Pewdiepie (don’t even get me started). We all know the drill by now. Just give it a rest.”

You’re right. Talking, writing, or making videos about "scary indie games" is basically an internet cliché at this point, through no fault of the games themselves. To make matters worse, Resident Evil is now effectively dead courtesy of RE6, and Silent Hill hasn’t been good since 2003. Why should anybody care about survival horror right now? Well, I’m going to answer that question by dodging it entirely. Fuck “survival horror;" I’m going to talk about games that are creepy, atmospheric, and psychologically unsettling without necessarily fitting under the umbrella of one genre, games that are some of the best out there, yet sold poorly or flew under the radar. These are the best horror games that aren’t “horror games.”

(Come to think of it, I guess VtM: Bloodlines fits that bill pretty nicely. CONVENIENT.)

Alright, so first up is this little guy:

9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors is a psychological thriller puzzle game/visual novel for the Nintendo DS. WAIT WHERE ARE YOU GOING COME BACK. Ok, yes, it’s a visual novel, but hear me out. 999 essentially alternates between two modes: the “escape the room” sections, where you explore and interact with your surroundings one screen at a time and solve puzzles, a la Myst, and the story sections, which are text-heavy and non-interactive, save for the major decisions which will have an effect on the game’s ending. Assuming I haven’t lost you already, you may have noticed that what I just described sounds like the most boring fucking game in the world. It’s alright. I thought so too. Then I played it.

Normally, I make a habit of avoiding visual novels like the plague, but 999 succeeds in two major ways. First, its puzzles are a major step up from the usual point-and-click adventure game fare, in that they are actually logical and not needlessly obtuse. While the game might be a tad on the easy side overall, the puzzles stay consistently fun, clever, and challenging enough to be rewarding without feeling frustrating or cheap. But more importantly, 999 features good writing, well-rounded and memorable characters, and a story that will grab you from the word go, keeping you glued to your DS until it’s all over. No, seriously, I know how that sounds, but there’s no hyperbole here. When I first got this game I played straight through until I beat it, barring maybe two or three bathroom/food breaks,  then immediately started over to get one of the other endings.

So, what is the story of 999? Imagine David Fincher and the creators of Death Note getting together to rewrite “Saw,” and you have a pretty good idea. You are Junpei, a Japanese college student who wakes up on a sinking cruise ship with eight other people. Your captor, known only as Zero, reveals that you have all been chosen to play the “Nonary Game,” in which you have nine hours to escape the ship. You and your fellow participants must cooperate, conspire, and betray their way through a series of rooms in order to reach a door labeled, you guessed it, 9. And all the while, you slowly discover pieces of a larger puzzle at work, leading you to wonder just what Zero’s true game is.

Zero.

The premise is nothing new, but its execution is so one-of-a-kind that you’ll immediately forget. As stated, the game’s writing is captivating, on the level of a decent thriller novel. This is owed in part to a translation by Aksys Games that remains one of the better translations out there, barring a few quibbles (descriptions can drag on somewhat, and one minor plot point late in the game makes no sense in English). Practically none of the awkwardness of a Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid translation is here; dialogue is crisp, clever, and occasionally hilarious, and the text descriptions of certain events are orders of magnitude more evocative than any million dollar cutscene could ever hope to be. One scene early on describes a character’s death in such a way as to make me physically uncomfortable, while showing none of it onscreen. When is the last time any gratuitous video game scene of heads exploding or limbs getting sawed off evoked any reaction in you other than laughter?

Although I have to admit, it's cathartic as fuck.

That’s not to say 999 doesn’t have solid visuals. Art design is excellent and the pre-rendered backgrounds look great for a DS game. The Myst comparison is appropriate here since the game world is basically presented in slideshow format; however, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The graphics are there to enhance the text, after all, and they do their job nicely. Character portraits are striking and effectively set the characters apart visually, something that anime-styled games often fail to do. In several cases the character designs are practically tailor-made to seem like blatant anime stereotypes (naïve and innocent schoolgirl, big dumb guy, "generously proportioned" lady, etc.), just so the game can set up expectations about the characters that it then gleefully subverts later.

The cast.

Unsurprisingly, 999 excels in the sound department in addition to just about everything else. The soundtrack is both surprisingly varied and highly effective at establishing tone. The puzzle sections are accompanied by appropriately cerebral electronic ambience, while the story sections alternate beautifully between pulsing bass synths, creeping violins, and melancholic pianos. It all feels perfectly appropriate for the situation but somehow never derivative or same-y, which is exactly how a soundtrack should be. Yet the most effective moments of 999 are completely silent, save for the occasional sounds of footsteps or beeping timers. Play it at night, with headphones on, and you’ll see what I mean.

The game has its flaws, to be sure. Being a fairly slow reader, I never had a problem with this, but I've heard people complain about the slow text scrolling speed. Also, while I do think the writing is way above the general standards of most games, in some cases it can devolve into the juvenile and ridiculous. Just try to stick with it, trust me. Finally, I personally enjoyed the uncertainty of not knowing what ending my decisions would result in, but if you don't like the possibility of an unsatisfying ending, I would recommend reading one of the non-spoiler walkthroughs out there. The game does expect you to play through it more than once, but 1) you can scroll through text you've already seen very quickly, 2) you can skip puzzle rooms you've already completed, and 3) you'll more than likely want to anyway.

999 is a game with no shortage of strengths but I have yet to even touch upon its greatest achievement: it is a story that could only have been told as a video game. Without spoiling anything, even the format of the DS hardware itself is tied to the narrative in a twist that will send your jaw crashing to the floor. Instead of trying to be just like a book or a movie, 999 embraces its medium to great effect, and to me, that's the definition of a good video game story. So go play 999. You won’t be disappointed.

Introduction, Immersion, and Bloodlines

Hi. Welcome. Come in, grab a drink, stay awhile.

Why do we play video games? It’s a question all serious gamers should ask themselves at some point. What is it about video games that makes them special? What can we get out of them that we can’t get from any other medium? Are they really just mindless wastes of our time or do they have some real value, artistic or otherwise?

I could be really lazy and answer these questions by linking to a youtube video that explains it better than I can, so I will. But I’ll also try to provide my own explanation, partially to feed my own ego, but also in case you’re as boring as I am and enjoy reading the opinions of some random dude on the internet. Opinions about video games, no less. God, you’re boring.

So. Why do we play video games? There may be as many reasons as there are gamers, but many of those reasons can be boiled down to two schools of thought: ludology and narratology. If you’re genuinely interested in this dichotomy, I will tell you now that this is not the place to be. I am a card-carrying narratologist—in other words, I view games primarily as a blossoming narrative art form. This is not to say that I believe the ludology side of the debate has no merit; quite the contrary. I am simply more interested in using this blog to explore the storytelling possibilities of video games, so most of what you’re going to get here in terms of ludological analysis will be limited and overly generalized.

 Long story short, we can understand and evaluate video games in one of two basic ways: as an abstract medium, emphasizing “game-ish” qualities, i.e. challenges to overcome, mechanics to learn and master, competitive depth (ludology), or as a burgeoning storytelling form, with gameplay functioning in concert with narrative aspects, i.e. exploration of an environment, dialogue and setting, characterization and motivation through gameplay (narratology). Yes, obviously there are games like Dear Esther where the only thing vaguely resembling "gameplay" is the ability to move around, and there are games like Tetris, with no real story to speak of (although if I were feeling particularly obnoxious I'm pretty sure I could argue that Tetris is one big metaphor for the inevitable prevailing of personal greed in unmonitored self-sufficient communities and dangers of true free-market capitalism, but I won't). And clearly the overwhelming majority of games fall somewhere in between. The distinction between ludology and narratology is not meant to separate games and gamers into two camps, or to say that all games should be a certain way, but is meant to distinguish between two unique yet related approaches regarding video game theory.

You’re not here for a debate, though. You’re here to listen to me rant impotently about stuff. This is the internet, so the most important thing in the world is what I think. And the question of why I think videogames matter can be answered in one word: immersion. Video games have the power to immerse players into their worlds to a degree unachievable by any other medium. They have the power to make the player feel personally involved in the events happening on the screen, to confront the player with dilemmas and force them to think critically about how they would act in a similar scenario, to make the player feel like they have a personal stake in what happens to their avatar. They have the power to make the player forget he’s but a cog in a soulless corporate machine, working 9-5 at some dead-end cubicle grind and watching his liberal arts degree gather dust. And that’s if he’s lucky. #totallynotbitteratall #hatemyselfformakinghashtagjoke

Sure, there are plenty of books and movies that are moving and make you think or whatever, and from a pure consumption standpoint, they’re generally much better at it. But games have the unique advantage of combining those tried-and-true storytelling methods with gameplay, inextricably linking the player’s personality and actions with their virtual worlds. In a video game, a player can be doing nothing more than moving a dot forward, with no dialogue or apparent “story” whatsoever, and still experience things like tragedy and hopelessness. No, seriously, that’s an actual game: look up Freedom Bridge, it’s a free flash game that takes about 2 minutes to play. It features nothing more than a couple sound effects and some crude, MS paint-like drawings and it has made grown men weep.

This is Freedom Bridge.

You probably get the idea by now, but just to waste more of your time I’m going to illustrate my point with an anecdote from a game I recently played for the first time. It’s a 2004 PC action/role-playing game called Vampire: the Masquerade—Bloodlines, and you really ought to play it. And if you do, you really ought to install the unofficial patch first, as it’s admittedly bugged to hell and back in its vanilla form. I promise it’s worth it though—it’s easily one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played, warts and all. Way better than anything Bioware has done in the past 3 years or so, anyway. 

This is Bloodlines.

Alright, so here’s the setup (very minor spoilers incoming). After creating a character, you are immediately thrust into the bloody intrigues of underground vampire society in modern-day Los Angeles. A victim of circumstance and newly “born” vampire yourself, you are almost immediately sentenced to execution for purely bureaucratic reasons, and subsequently spared for purely bureaucratic reasons (don’t worry, this is all in the intro cutscene). Cue lots of political struggle, complex characters, moral ambiguity, supernatural mystery, and good-old-fashioned violence. It’s kind of like Quentin Tarantino and True Blood had a really glitchy baby that was rushed out of the womb about a month early by Dr. Activision. And no, it's not "like Twilight," get out of here with that, come on. It's, like...the anti-Twilight.

So the backdrop isn’t all that different from most modern-day vampire fiction, but there’s one major element unique to Vampire: the Masquerade (both the game and the tabletop RPG that spawned it). It’s called--shocker--the masquerade. The masquerade is the set of laws vampires must follow in order to keep their presence a secret from humans: don’t drink blood with witnesses around, don’t use things like superhuman speed in public, that sort of thing. One law in particular prevents new vampires from making any contact with people they knew in their former lives. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, you are no more. Oh, and if you violate the masquerade enough times, you are executed and the game ends, just like that.

Welcome to Bloodlines.

About halfway through the game, the player character is sent to Hollywood by his or her superior to do detective things and stuff. By this point, the character has become proficient in their vampire abilities, fully embracing their vampiric nature. What’s important here is that the increase in the character’s abilities as a vampire is mirrored by the player having learned the mechanics of the game and growing comfortable in the character’s shoes. Both player and character have spent half the game adjusting to being a vampire, and both are now quite used to it, comfortable with it, good at it.

Hollywood.

Anyway, while walking through the streets of Hollywood, you encounter a woman named Samantha, who claims to recognize you (she doesn’t know you’re a vampire though). She tells you that your friends and family had given up hope—when you disappeared completely for so long without contacting anyone, they thought you had died. If your character is persuasive enough, he or she can convince Samantha that she has the wrong person; if not, as in my case, Samantha tells you that everything’s going to be ok, and asks you to wait while she makes a phone call, letting another former friend of yours  know you’re alive and well. 

Samantha.

At this point, the player can either let Samantha make the call, which results in a masquerade violation, or physically stop her from doing so. The only way for my character to do this was to kill her. I had violated the masquerade a few times already, and I knew I would be in deep shit if I let her make that call. So I panicked, I acted on instinct.

I ran the hell away.

I ran away from Samantha, I ran away from the masquerade, mostly I just ran. In pure gameplay terms, what I did made no sense. Another violation wasn’t going to end my game, but it would put me on extremely thin ice. Killing her, on the other hand, would have had practically nothing in the way of gameplay consequences. But I couldn’t. She was nothing but a piece of code, and I couldn’t bring myself to kill her. I knew she was a friend to my character once, and that was all I needed. At the same time, I couldn’t stay around her any longer. No catching up, no coffee, nothing. That life was over. I was something else now, and Samantha would never see me again.

After ditching Samantha, I wandered the streets of Hollywood for a time, trying to decide where to go next. All around me were garish advertisements, trashy strip clubs, run-down motels, neon lights, hobos, punks, hookers, goths, dropouts, yuppies, weirdos. Everything, everywhere was a monument to the humanity that I was running from, that I would never again know. And throughout this whole sequence, I heard this:

And people say video games can’t be art.

So yeah, I really, really like Bloodlines (and yes I’m a pretentious ass, thanks for asking). But this sequence is far from being unique in its immersion, or even one of the better examples I could think of. In fact, I could name several other moments from the same game alone which, while more scripted, are even better. A journey through a condemned oceanside hotel comes to mind, or an encounter with a dying girl in a hospital, or Jeanette…well, just…Jeanette. 

There's a reason she's on the cover,
and it's not (entirely) what you think it is.

I guess my point in all this is that gaming is absolutely full of these kinds of experiences, and to me, that’s why video games matter. Also play Bloodlines. It's fun, deep, clever, terrifying, brilliantly written, dripping with atmosphere, and it's one of the few truly adult games out there. And I don't just mean what normally passes for "mature" in games, AKA blood and tits, although it certainly has plenty of both to go around (to be fair, I mean...vampires). Oh, and if you don't mind the game spoiling its own plot for you, or constant absurdist humor, play as a Malkavian. It's one of the most bizarre, insane, and hilarious video game experiences you'll ever have, right up there with Portal and Psychonauts.

Alright, so I’m not going to make any promises about updating this blog regularly, because I’m really lazy, and the last time I tried this it fell flat on its face. But assuming I can motivate myself to do so, the next few posts will deal with other immersion-related topics. Probably. I may also talk about music on here, since that’s what I do, or movies or whatever, but for the time being this is primarily a blog centered around video games, and the analysis, theory, and appreciation thereof. Because I like to sound smart or something.

It’s finally starting to feel like fall. Woooo.