The Unfathomable Horror of the Unknowable

As the spookiest season passes us and Remedy has seen fit to bless (or perhaps curse) the world with the continuation of Alan Wake, it got me thinking about the horror genre in gaming as a whole. At its core, horror attempts to stir up the primal part of our neural networks, the prototypical fight or flight response. It gives us the unsettling, the unnerving, the visceral. It is media that attempts to flood the system with adrenaline and keep all of your senses disoriented, while you are in a constant heightened state that just ends up making you more susceptible to what future horrors are just around the corner. 

But of course, horror is a word that encompasses such a wide range of experiences. Sometimes, it manifests in the slow shattering of the psyche like Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Other times, it is hordes of undead and unlife swarming the city and country like with Resident Evil. Conventional slashers as supernatural (or conventional) killers stalk and hunt prey in Dead by Daylight. Perhaps, it is a place itself is full to the brim with malignant energy, a persistent unease in every creaky door and obscuring fog with the Silent Hill franchise.

My favorite brand of horror though operates on a slightly different axis. A fair number of examples listed above are pure malevolence grounded in human morality and further are affixed upon our mere mortality. Death is scary as it is the termination of what we understand of our experience as humans. However, I…