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How to Get a Good Balance Between Fight & Flight

How to Get a Good Balance Between Fight & Flight

Sometimes, when it comes to horror, it feels like there’s little to no wiggle-room.

What I mean to say is, it feels like every horror game that comes out falls on either extreme of the spectrum. You’ve got horror games that empower you, and horror games that leave you helpless. For example, you’ve got something like Dead Space on one end, and Alien: Isolation on the other. Both are technically horror, but they each accomplish very different things.

While this is all well and good in theory, the reality is that there’s no middle-ground in the genre. You’re either running for your life and hiding in closet after closet, or you’re going toe to toe with hellspawn and shrugging off the damage.

How to Get a Good Balance Between Fight & Flight

Developers on both sides claim that they’re being true to the genre of horror, but are they really? Sure, the spelunkers spend most of The Descent running away from the under-dwellers, but eventually they have to face off against them.

I guess the point that I’m getting to is that brief bits of empowerment in evasion-based games can break up the monotony, and so can bits of dis-empowerment in action-based games. There’s no reason that every game in the genre has to be all or nothing. While I get what the developers are going for with their respective titles, at a certain point it becomes unrealistic given the narrative framework–eventually, even someone terrified out of their mind is going to hit back.

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