Top Four Sanity Loss Mechanics in Horror Video Games

Top Four Sanity Loss Mechanics in Horror Video Games

Four survival horror video games with effective ‘Insanity’ gameplay mechanics that simulate madness by twisting the perspectives of players.

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Madness is a powerful tool in horror stories, a way to give the scary events in these tales narrative weight; to simulate this madness, many canny survival horror video game developers have implemented ‘Insanity Mechanics’ in titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, features that mess with the game interface and twist player perception. Four horror games in particular have dramatic, well-implemented “Insanity Mechanics” that’ll make gamers question their sense of reality.

The whispers in the shadows grow louder as the torchlight fades. Things of slime and tendril squirm in the deep. Why is there blood on my hands…? H.P. Lovecraft and other cosmic horror writers love to write passages like these in their stories, descriptions of how the lucidity of their main characters slowly fractures under the weight of the terror they experience. It’s a terrifying thought – the idea that a scary sight or awful truth could break a person’s mind like glass.

Survival horror video games shouldn’t actually drive players insane, so developers do the next best thing and include mechanics that toy with player perception during scary events: by blurring reality with hallucinations and disrupting the user interface, the player gets to see through the eyes of someone going mad. The four horror video games listed below provide excellent examples of this:

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem – This Can’t Be Happening

Released in 2002 for the Nintendo GameCube, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was one of the earlier survival horror games to try and depict the process of going mad, often in ingeniously cruel ways. As the player controlled multiple characters fighting otherworldly evil across different eras of history, an invisible sanity meter would slowly tick down with each horrific encounter, twisting the camera perspective, teasing the player with phantom enemies, and even tricking the player with fake game crashes: the worst of these hallucinations, a fake alert saying that the GameCube’s memory card was being deleted, would be vile enough to drive players crazy in reality.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

The survival horror hit that put Frictional Games on the map, Amnesia: The Dark Descent immerses players in gothic, otherworldly horror as they explore, solve puzzles, search for lantern fuel, and sneak past the flesh-warped horrors that stalk the ancient castle halls. Amnesia’s insanity mechanics are built around the Catch-22 dilemma of light and dark: the main character, Daniel, is nyctophobic, gasping in fear and suffering from hallucinations the longer he’s in the darkness… but if he flaunts his lantern light too much, the monsters will spot and chase him down.

Bloodborne: Eyes On the Inside

The Dark Souls-derived RPG Bloodborne starts out as a gothic-horror game about hunting werewolves, then slowly unveils more elements of cosmic horror – obsessed cults, twisted nightmares, and grotesque alien entities. The PC Hunter’s ability to see these horrors is governed by an attribute called Insight, which grows after using special items or encountering boss enemies. As your Insight grows, the Hunter’s eyes open: previously invisible sights are revealed in all their terribly glory, while certain enemies acquire new, devastating attacks…

Darkest Dungeon: Ruin Has Come to Our Family

A dark horror take on the Dungeon-Crawling RPG genre, Darkest Dungeon puts players in the shoes of an aristocratic heir who must enlist a team of adventurers to seal away the ancient evil their decadent ancestor unleashed. Whenever these adventurers encounter frightful horrors, they acquire Stress, which has a chance of triggering behavior-altering afflictions like “Masochism”, “Irrational”, or “Paranoid”. Hospitals, Asylums and Taverns in the home village can sooth the psyches of your heroes– but limited resources make it tempting to simply abandon damaged adventurers and recruit the next fresh-faced fool…

These four video games only scratch the surface of the many survival horror titles out there – a sea of games that toy with player perception and shake their sense of control. A bottomless well of madness that, once immersed in, cannot be escaped…

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/best-sanity-loss-mechanics-horror-video-games/

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