When the alien appears to lie in wait or hunt you through spaceship corridors, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re at the mercy of a perceptive monster. Things like allowing the Alien to escape into vents and designing levels with blind corners and obstructions means you can keep the tension high without forcing the Alien to expose itself too much.”Īrtificial intelligence, much like real intelligence, is convincing until the person wielding it does something stupid.
If the AI does something stupid, it breaks the horror illusion and the enemy isn’t scary any more.
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“Creative Assembly understood how to use level and sound design to support an AI character like the alien, to cover up its weaknesses. Convincing the player that the AI is better than it actually is, he explained to me, is a crucial element of what makes Alien: Isolation so terrifying. He also runs PROCJAM, a game jam focused on procedural generation. Cook is an AI expert and senior research fellow at Falmouth University, and has spent several years working on automated game design, including a project to develop an AI system that can intelligently design its own videogames.
“ Alien: Isolation is one game that completely nails the use of AI for horror,” Michael Cook explained. What scared me wasn’t the look of the alien, but how intelligent it was. I pelted across the room to an air vent and there it was, toying with me. The beep of my sensor told me the alien was close. Later, alone in the dark, I clasped the controller with what I can only describe as religious penance. “Look at that bony prat,” I shouted, pointing at the gangly xenomorph while my friend cowered behind a box. The first time I played Alien: Isolation I was with a group of friends. Our worst nightmares lurking close by.īut what about the thing that actually is coming after you? Intelligent Monsters The most terrifying adversary is what we build with our own minds – the nagging feeling that something unseen is lurking just behind us. Letting the player’s imagination run riot is, as Grip and Thomas suggest, one way of approaching the monsters in a game. People would imagine whatever they found to be the most menacing.” You’re hunted by what you imagine coming after you – the more the environment can suggest than state, the more spare cycles you have to mentally scare yourself. Jordan Thomas, the man behind Robbing the Cradle, designer on BioShock, director on BioShock 2 and writer on BioShock Infinite (and architect of the superb The Magic Circle) explained what made it so terrifying: “The first half of Robbing the Cradle is a little exotic for a Thief mission in that there are no AI enemies to hunt you. This ominous environment is perfectly complimented by a haunting sound design. Perhaps the most iconic of these is “Robbing the Cradle” in Thief: Deadly Shadows (or Thief 3), a masterclass in level design spanning a vast building, which, as you learn over the course of your time there, was both an orphanage and an insane asylum at the same time. The Thief series, while technically not horror titles, have provided some of the most unsettling gaming experiences ever devised. Stealth games – with their atmospheric, generally slow, gameplay – tend to pay specific attention to sound design. Hearing something waiting in the dark is so often far scarier than seeing it in the light. Likewise, the wet ache of BioShock ’s Rapture – its rich symphony of dripping water and creaking architecture – created an unforgettably tense atmosphere, as did the intermittent hum and crackle of the radio in Silent Hill. Personally, I can attest to this hearing the inhuman cries of the hybrid enemies in System Shock 2 before seeing them always sent a jolt down my nervous system. Even for a medium famed for its visual potential, there is a great deal of power in what isn’t shown – in what’s left for us to imagine. While the visual environment of a game can provide heaps of information to the player, Grips’ comments suggest that sounds that emanate from the things we can’t see are what open our imaginations to all sorts of horrible possibilities. The images provide more concrete data for the player, like what sort of space it is, but the sounds are what give that extra spice to make it feel real.” If you hear the sound of wooden boards creaking above, it emphasises the fact the ceiling is indeed made of wood and it feels a lot more real. “Sound is a great way to give the world texture.
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