Summary
Death is a common yet primal fear shared by almost every human being. People ultimately fear the end and everything that comes with it, so naturally, horror games have taken to playing on this fear throughout the genre’s existence. While almost every horror game (and most games for that matter) typically features death in some fashion, it’s never more than the slight inconvenience of pressing restart and losing a little bit of progress.
The truly great horror games will find new ways to prey on a player’s fear of death. This could be through awell-crafted and scary storyor by some clever implementation of mechanics.
Like any good Lovecraftian game,Bloodbornehas a bestiary of tough, creepy enemies, from werewolves to spiders to unexplainable abominations that like to eat or curse unfortunate hunters.
If this wasn’t enough, players will also have to contend with the core mechanic of a Souls-like game; losing all your blood echoes (serving as both experience points and currency) upon death. Naturally, these are retrievable as long as the player collects them before their next death, however, the enemy that killed the player may have picked them up. This can create a tense situation where the player may have to confront the very enemy that killed them to get their precious blood echoes back.
While not overtly horror,Death Strandinghas many staples of the genre, such as wondering about acreepy, barren landscapeand dealing with supernatural enemies in the form of BTs, souls of the deceased who are stranded and will try and kill protagonist Sam. The player must use Sam’s Bridge Baby to detect the BTs to sneak past them, lest they be dragged into a dark inky abyss, losing their precious cargo and creating a voidout, a large explosion that persists in the world after the player dies this way.
Sam is a repatriate, meaning he can come back from death, forcing players to live with the results of their mistakes instead of reloading a checkpoint. While the story is the expected amount of craziness expected from Hideo Kojima, it also has quiet moments where the story makes the player reflect on death, not just in the context of loved ones but the context of the entire human race as a 6th extinction event threatens to wipe out humanity.
While its sequel has a lot of similar elements, the originalDarkest Dungeonis a lot more brutal with death. Much like a campaign inX-COM, ill-prepared players can permanently lose party members they worked hard on to any number of eldritch horrors. To make matters worse, the stress of the dungeons can cause party members to disobey the player or even give said party members a heart attack.
To make any progress inDarkest Dungeon, the player will have to play around these circumstances and find a way to push through, even if it means leaving a party member to a horrible fate…
In terms of facing death, there’s not much closer to it thanfighting literal ghosts.Fatal Framehas the player traversing through a Japanese mansion, encountering supernatural scares and solving puzzles, all while dealing with vengeful spirits who can only be fought by taking their picture with the Camera Obscura, requiring the players to get up close to the ghosts. Much like how other survival horror games have their own ammo types,Fatal Frameuses different types of camera film that function similarly.
The story itself is centered around a character called Miku looking for her brother, Mafuyu, but opens up into a mystery about a sacrificial ritual gone wrong and the protagonist having to confront the spirits of those who died because of it.
Mortis – the Latin word for death. This is the world that appears when John Thomas Ward, the protagonist ofFaith: The Unholy Trinity, dies. It’s a constant reminder for players about how vulnerable their protagonist is, especially because it only takes one hit to kill the player.
As a result, they will have to be on their A-game, playing through each boss perfectly by learning all the attack patterns. There’s even an achievement for beating the game’s marathon mode (all 3 chapters back to back in one sitting) without dying once. This is all wrapped in a compellingstory about the loss of faithand regret about not saving someone from a fate worse than death.
From the creators of the Amnesia franchise,Somais a sci-fi horror game set in an underwater facility in the far future. The game explores death interestingly and philosophically, focusing on transhumanism, consciousness, and whether preserving life by any means necessary is truly worth doing.
These aspects ofSomawill truly make players think about this concept and will play on fears of death from the angle of immortality and how isolating that can be. A truly unique take on this common fear.
There aren’t many games as unrelentingly punishing asFear & Hunger 2: Termina, a unique cross between thesurvival horror and JRPG genres(with a hint of a roguelike). Not only is the combat brutally difficult, requiring careful strategy to beat enemies much stronger than the player, but every single encounter is potentially deadly, and some enemies have insta-kill attacks that require the player to correctly call a coin toss to defend against them.
Even saving is a luxury and comes with its own risk of being attacked, and it advances time, ticking down the clock on the player’s precious three-day time limit. This limited saving means that a player can lose a lot of progress upon death, however, it’s this friction that makesFear & Hunger 2so compelling. Death is also a big factor in the story, where fourteen people are mysteriously thrust into a battle royale where only one can leave alive.
Whether it’s the remake or the original, one ofSilent Hill 2’s most prevalent themes is death, specifically the death of a loved one and the regret of not doing all you could for them. The game sees the protagonist, James Sunderland, journey to the titular town after receiving a letter from his wife Mary, something that should be impossible as she died three years prior.
What follows is a dive into the psychology of James, as the town reflects his inner guilt through its environments andiconic monsters such as Pyramid Head. Players will peel back the layers of intrigue in the town, such as the mystery of why Maria looks a lot like Mary and why Laura can seemingly go about the town unharmed.Silent Hill 2is not so much about the traditional fear of death expected from the genre but more about the emotional fear of losing someone and leaving so much unsaid and undone.
