During the second quarter of this year, 6 of my drabbles (stories told in exactly 100 words) were published at SpeckLit, a site devoted to drabbles. Now, 4 more of my drabbles have been accepted for the months ahead.
Look for them at SpeckLit on the following dates:
I’ll keep you updated!
Psst… don’t forget to check out the new trailer for Dai Gyakuten Saiban!
Following our look at The Haunting of Hill House, we turn to another tale of a haunted house, Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel Hell House. (Yes, we went from Hill House to Hell House.)
As with Hill House, the history of Hell House has a direct bearing on its present, haunted condition. It’s told to us in one long conversation. I prefer horror stories where the history is revealed more gradually, but I’ll overlook it due to the book’s age. The condensed version of Hell House’s history is that the owner of the house, Emeric Belasco, was pretty much a psychopath from the time he was a child. Belasco, who “never felt a twinge of guilt in his life” (Matheson 56), set up a group called Les Aphrodites. They’d all do drugs, have sex, participate in every excess they could think of, and eventually mutilate and murder one another. Belasco wanted to conduct “a study of evil,” so he lured people in and tried to corrupt them as much as possible.
He also boarded up all the windows, which gives the house an immediate physical sense of danger.
Our story begins when a dying man commissions three people to study Hell House for proof as to whether or not spirits really linger after death. One is Dr. Lionel Barrett, who believes hauntings are caused more by evil energy residue and other non-personified events. At the opposite end is Spiritualist Florence Tanner, who absolutely believes in ghosts and wants to help them move on. Then there’s Benjamin Fischer, who survived Hell House once and has no intention of letting it get to him again. Finally, Barrett’s wife, Edith, accompanies them to help.
The conflict of beliefs between Barrett and Florence is a key part of the story, and leads to a central question of whether the events in the house are caused by an actual presence or not. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll just refer to Hell House as the culprit.
The novel gets off to a strong start. As the four look around the disturbing house, a phonograph begins to play on its own. It is a message from Belasco, welcoming them and asking them to think of him as their “unseen host” (38). This reminded me of nothing so much as a little game I still haven’t overcome, Amnesia: Justine. Justine leaves a series of phonographs to guide and/or taunt the player. While her unseen presence is in part to increase the parallel to GLaDOS (the Justine DLC was part of a Portal 2 promotion), it also creates a disturbing impression much like Belasco’s message.
These messages have many things in common. Both begin with a welcome. Both reference the fact that the speaker is not present–Belasco is an “unseen host” and Justine is a “disembodied voice.” Interestingly, even though the events of Hell House take place long after Belasco’s death, he says he will be “with you in spirit” (38), while Justine, though the events of the game are much closer to the recording of the phonograph, says she is “a voice from the past.”
Both are also engaged in a “study.” Belasco wanted to corrupt his guests and observe them to see how far into evil they would descend, while Justine’s test is meant to see if you will take the extra time, effort, and risk to save her prisoners, or if you will sacrifice the prisoners to save your own life.
I don’t know if this means Justine was influenced by Hell House, or if it’s a coincidence. Either way, I liked the setup.
After that, things get a little shakier. It would have helped if I’d liked the characters more. Barrett is the sort of scientific character I usually like, but he spends most of the story saying things–usually about Florence–that make him seem so arrogant and sure of himself, I wanted to give him a smack. Florence, meanwhile, is so sure of herself, that she spends most of the story trusting a ghost just because he had a sob story. Even when she realizes parts of his story were being pulled from her own head, she still trusts him. Fischer, determined not to let his mental blocks down, spends most of the story trying to protect the other characters without actively challenging Hell House, which mainly means he sits around and stops them from committing suicide. Finally, Edith spends most of the story taking her clothes off and worrying about her sexuality.
This, more than my ambivalence toward the characters, is what made the plot wear thin for me after a while. Although Belasco’s study of evil “wasn’t exclusively sex” (58), it’s certainly its most common feature. In essence, Hell House reaches into the minds of the people in it and figures out how to mess with them the most. It can’t do anything with Fischer, because he’s closed himself off. It attacks Barrett a few times, but generally leaves him alone to make him believe he’s right about everything. That leaves it with the two women. Florence is celibate, so the House’s influence over-sexualizes her. Edith is psychologically scarred from rape, averse to sex, afraid she’s a lesbian, and overall sexually repressed, so it over-sexualizes her, too. After a while of these two characters trying to have sex with the men and/or each other and/or ghosts, it starts to feel like Hell House is just obsessed with it.
To me, the novel’s scariest moments were when you weren’t quite sure what was going on–invisible presences, disembodied voices, a telephone ringing all on its own… These people acting out-of-character was disconcerting at first, but eventually it happened enough to make it expected, and therefore too familiar to be frightening. Did Belasco’s study of evil conclude that sex is the ultimate evil?
You could argue the same thing is true of my favorite survival horror series, as Silent Hill manifests sexually-themed horrors for both James Sunderland and Angela Orosco in Silent Hill 2, but they were in very different contexts that connected to the individual characters’ psychologies. Besides, there was plenty of other disturbing stuff going on at the same time.
With all that said, Hell House did have some very effective creepiness at times. The ending felt a little drawn out, but I thought it was decent. I wanted the characters to survive, but I didn’t care enough about them to really have any emotional reactions to their plight.
It was an entertaining read, and I want to say I liked it, but there were just too many things about it that irked me.
Resident Evil: Revelations.
It can’t catch a break.
I’ve mentioned this game a few times, and not positively. In my first-ever blog post, I described it as a “step in the right direction,” but decried it and games like it as “half-hearted, watered down compromises.” Last month, I referred to Revelations as “a half-way attempt” when considering the future of the Resident Evil series.
Now that a sequel has been announced, it’s time I take a look at this game once again.
“Revelations is not survival horror.” A lot of people consider those of us who make such a claim to be nostalgic whiners who will never be pleased with anything. Is that true? Let’s break it down.
Back in that first blog post of mine, I said a survival horror game must have:
“a disturbing or frightening atmosphere, de-emphasized combat, a maze-like environment that encourages exploration, and puzzles”
I’ve since refined my description. The essential elements for a survival horror game are:
Puzzles are a tricky issue. Some are clearly puzzles, like the riddles in Silent Hill or the water puzzle in Resident Evil 3. Others are more ambiguous. If you need to put a gem in a statue to get a key, is that a puzzle? If it is, is using a medallion to open a door also a puzzle, or is that just a part of the recursive unlocking? And if that’s a puzzle, doesn’t that mean it’s a puzzle whenever you use a key, or if you unlock doors with a key card you found?
Due to the ambiguity of puzzles, I now consider them a secondary element. Two elements that help survival horror, but are not necessarily required are:
Of course, there are many optional elements often mistaken for what survival horror fans want, such as fixed camera angles, save points, and inventory management. These things help, but they aren’t vital, and they can’t carry the game on their own.
So, how did Resident Evil: Revelations do?
One out of 5 isn’t bad… but it isn’t good, and it doesn’t make it survival horror.
Revelations is horror. I’ll give it that much credit. It even had a creepy atmosphere on the ship, and some moments were tense. There were some monsters I was terrible against, and I became nervous whenever I heard their signature sound–a definite trait of survival horror games. Attempting to use the Genesis Scanner to earn more herbs and unlock bonuses was also a nice, atmosphere touch.
The checkpoint system took away from the gameplay’s suspense, though, because you almost never lost significant progress.
I take that back. I managed to lose a chunk of progress when I got a checkpoint, then wandered in the opposite direction of the objective to explore as much as I could. Since there were no checkpoints along the non-plot path, I lost my exploration progress when I died.
On one hand, I want to say this is a good thing–exploration is a part of survival horror, so if you play it more like a survival horror game, you’ll have to fear lost progress.
On the other hand, the game punished me for exploration.
I wish I could say Revelations had de-emphasized combat. Two years ago, I said:
“There was no reward for fighting enemies, and many could be avoided. While there were more sections that forced you to battle than the original games had, this is probably the point where Revelations came closest to truly ‘returning to series roots.'”
However, at the time, I was discussing only the parts of the game set on the ship. While most of Resident Evil: Revelations was set on the Queen Zenobia, other chapters switched to different characters or to flashbacks, usually with a hefty dose of action. The developers hyped this as a feature, because apparently players would get too bored if they didn’t get a break from the survival horror gameplay.
For every area where you could avoid combat, there was an action-fest waiting elsewhere. Half credit for de-emphasized combat, I suppose.
Recursive unlocking is where I felt not disappointed, but betrayed by Revelations. When I revisited the demo to see where it led me astray, I described it as “window-dressing . . . superficial shout-outs to the classic games to pretend that’s what it was.” Unless you’ve played it or something similar, you can’t imagine how excited I was when I saw a door that needed a Helm Key. It felt just like the system of locked doors and keys in the early games.
It wasn’t. Sure, you might find a key that unlocked three doors, but would those three unlocked areas give you more pieces to gradually progress forward? No, one would lead to the next plot point and the other two would contain some herbs or ammo.
And that leads us to the problem of puzzles.
What do you think? Fun puzzle, moving the wires around so that they form a shape and all light up, which unlocks the door for you? I hope you said yes, because this is Revelations’ puzzle.
I don’t mean it only had one puzzle. I mean the majority of them were this exact type. If you encountered a puzzle, chances were pretty good you needed to use you screwdriver to open the panel and solve one of these.
Other “puzzles” fall back into the category of superficial shout-outs. There were a handful of item puzzles (such as a slot for a medallion) that, when I saw them early in the game, convinced me classic RE-style puzzles would fill the game. They didn’t. A few existed just to call back to the originals (or to trick people into thinking there would be puzzles).
There were a couple of notes that also served as series fanservice, but not enough to be considered Apocalyptic Logs. After the demo, we had all kinds of story theories based on the “hints” we thought we saw… nope. Not that sort of game, not that sort of storytelling.
Before I played Revelations, I saw people describe its story as weird and convoluted. I was okay with that, because I have nothing against games with weird, convoluted stories.
But it isn’t weird and convoluted in the same way as Professor Layton games, where you just have to roll with the insanity. Revelations’ story is weird and convoluted in the way where you don’t really know what’s going on, and when it’s all over, you don’t really care. (Apologies to anyone who enjoyed the story, but I found it particularly unmemorable.) And instead of giving you a single story through the eyes of one or two protagonists…
You play as Jill for the majority of the story, often accompanied by an AI partner named Parker. Some chapters switch to Chris, accompanied by AI partner Jessica. Then there are flashbacks where you play as Jill and Chris. Flashbacks where you play as Parker and Jessica. Concurrent missions where you play as Quint and Keith, two side characters so annoying that some reviews docked points just for them.
I enjoyed parts of Resident Evil: Revelations. I might go so far as to call it a decent game. However, you’ll notice the lack of affiliate links in this post. It doesn’t deserve that much credit from me.
It was unfocused, unmemorable, and definitely not survival horror. Yet it took a step toward survival horror. Overall, it gives the impression that its creators were afraid to make the survival horror game they wanted to.
Revelations tried and tried to return to series roots, but in the end, it couldn’t.