Hunted

A few days ago, I made a post about the Chzo Mythos series in my own journal, detailing how the second game in the series (7 Days a Skeptic, which seems to actually be commonly regarded as the worst of them) had terrified me half to death - my morning routine has honestly had "turn all the lights in the flat on immediately" added to it because of the thought of a couple of scenes from it. One of the two main topics in this community is games that scared us, and even though this is something I've been aware of for fully two weeks rather than something I grew up with, it's already become stuck well in my mind.

Sadly the supply of Cillit Bang had run out several weeks ago.

The games that most scare me share the common theme or set-piece of being hunted. In two separate scenarios in 7 Days a Skeptic, you have to walk about the ship with the possibility of a wandering monster appearing at random and causing instant death if it touches you. The things is that thinking about this purely logically, it isn't frightening at all - there is not much consequence in dying apart from hearing a scream (which I have turned off, thank you very much) and being dumped to the Game Over screen with an MS-Painted picture of you being stabbed in the face by a stitched-together monster in a welding mask. Well, ignore the details - random chance, black screen, reload and try again. Nothing to it. So why do I have to close my eyes every time I move between rooms in the game? It's not any extra thought of the implied event that gets to me - just simply that I know that there's something out to get me.

This happens in other adventure games as well. Opening with one of our favourites, and also something that clearly inspired the Chzo series - King's Quest. Now, in amongst all the patently unfair dead ends and out-of-nowhere instant deaths, a feature of the early games was the random chance of something appearing on the screen, accompanied by a sudden musical cue, and either stealing an item for you (causing an unfair dead end) or killing you (causing an out-of-nowhere instant death). I'm sure Roberta Williams actually had a Takeshi-esque dislike of games and just wanted to frustrate as many people as possible. No machete-wielding undead monsters here, but I still find having to be on your toes all the time rather panic-inducing. The big difference here, though, is that you'll get a message warning you first - something like "You hear footsteps" and a couple of seconds to run off the side of the screen before your pursuer appears. No such luxury is given in 7 Days - the attackers appear whenever they feel like it, even emerging through doors right on top of you. Apparently a lot of people complained about this, so the author added a message when somebody is about to appear - but only in the paid-for Special Edition. In fact I was rather tempted to cough up the meagre registration fee just to get that.

In fact, what's even worse is that the first time this happens, you're not even aware you're being chased. The second time is at the climax of the game, where you're told the abomination is awake and roaming the ship, which should be a clear warning to watch out. But the first time begins with you having a struggle with the possessed body of the Captain and locking him in the brig, which you would think would be the end of it. However, as soon as you exit the room, with no indication whatsoever, the stunned body vanishes and he begins appearing at random everywhere else. I made this doubly worse for myself by immediately taking what I thought was a wrong turn and going into the room where you're meant to defeat him, then realizing that I had meant to go the other way and turning around only for him to appear right on top of me. Massive scream, strangling picture, and Whitney had to peel me off the ceiling.

This problem isn't just limited to adventure games, but they're the most common scenario in which you find yourself so woefully underpowered compared to whatever is about to kill you - you're commonly armed with nothing but some verbs, a set of spanners and half a mouldy carrot, and a character with absolutely no sense of urgency as he walks calmly towards your mouse cursor even if Michael Jackson himself is hot on his heels. In "survival horrors" like Resident Evil 4 where you have several grenades, a sub-machine gun and rocket launcher packed Tetris-style into your attache case and can safely blow all attackers into millions of bits, situations are never going to be as frightening (with the exception of one room - if you've played it you'll know full well where I'm talking about). A game that certainly left you underpowered was the first first-person shooter that I ever played - Jurassic Park.

Fire, run backwards, repeat until dead

There are several games with this name that were released across all the systems available at the time, but unusually, they're all totally different rather than being ports of each other. The PC one is a game of two halves that feel rather poorly bolted together - most of it is a three-quarter-view top-down action-adventure thing where you have to run around tasering things, pushing rocks off ledges, finding terminals to control park gates and perform other typical game-related activities that lead you through the park towards the central building. But once you reach there, it suddenly transforms into an attempt at a FPS, and your objective is little more than running through a set of polygonal levels with a gun that might as well shoot corks, trying to avoid the velociraptors in the dark.

As I've mentioned previously, music is a huge factor in the mood of a game, and it was exactly that that made this so frightening to me. Normally, you have a gloomy foreboding background theme bassing away to itself as you wander around the dark corridors, but after you've gone through a few empty rooms, it'll suddenly change into a set of Psycho-strings-like chords to signify that there's a RAPTOR COMING UP BEHIND YOU! (The description of the music might not be totally accurate - after that happened the first time I always played through this entire section with the sound turned off, and I'm not going to try it again for the purposes of writing this). And after you've spent about a minute swivelling round to find out where the attack's coming from, the controls are so inadequate that the best tactic seems to be holding down Fire and running constantly backwards, hoping that you don't take too many claws to the face in the process. There's no way of avoiding attack whatsoever, and you just have to memorize where the health powerups are to have a hope of getting through.

Going back to adventure games, this facet of gameplay is also the cause of one of the very first games that I remember being scared of - Colossal Cave. A short while into the game (although I falsely remembered it as being well into it - perhaps I was just rubbish and took half an hour to get past the bird at the start) you will start getting messages to the effect of "There is an angry little dwarf in the room with you!" and have a random chance of having an axe thrown at you, combined with a random chance of it smacking you in the face and prematurely ending your quest (whatever that might be - I never really got far enough to find out). To counteract this, you could repeatedly pick up the thrown axe then throw it back, taking two turns in which you were under a hail of sharp things to have a random chance at stopping the onslaught. And then there was the pirate that stole all your treasure, as well, but you got a warning with him because the game would tell you of a rustling noise in the distance. But neither of these things could be fought or avoided effectively. Of course, I never much liked the way that Colossal Cave would occasionally suddenly break the fourth wall and talk to you either, but that's something different entirely. And it should be noted that none of this is actually happening on-screen - what everything looks like is largely up to your imagination. Sometimes that isn't a good thing.

A DOOM house? (sorry)

But the thing that I can most pinpoint as having started all this is another EGA adventure game that came slightly later - and, indeed, another amateur-made one. It's Hugo's House of Horrors, a game that was made by someone who seemed to have played the original King's Quest games, thought they were great ideas in game design and decided to mimic them but make them a bit more sadistic. In the second game, for example, there's a section where you have to cross an arched bridge. If you bump into the side of it at any point, you'll drop the book of matches you're carrying (not anything else. Just the matches) and have to pick them up again. It's only much later in the game, where circumstances dictate that you're going to have to light a stick of dynamite, that you realize your matches are soggy and you can't use them. So you have to restart again and spend ages going over the bridge, as because of the viewing angle and the way that the bridge is drawn the correct path is only achievable through manic arrow-pressing to follow a pixel-wide path. King Graham had it easy by comparison.

That was a bit of a tangent, but still - the part I meant to talk about. This happens in the first game, rather near the beginning. Using a candle, you peer under the stairs and find a whistle and some other object that I can't recall at the moment. You're then prompted "I wonder what the whistle is for?" (hint, hint). So naturally you type "blow whistle". The game informs you back that "Nothing happened". Then you wander around for a few seconds, whereupon a demented PC speaker version of "How Much Is That Doggy In the Window" plays and a large dog sidles in and bites your head off. So in summary, not only is there a sudden appearance of an instant-death enemy, you're tricked into triggering it yourself.

If you're wondering, the real solution is to go into the pantry where it's kept and type "throw meat to dog" within the generous two-second time span you're given. I was fairly certain that you could also do it by luring it via the whistle to the dining room at the other end of the house and then walking round the other way, but I never dared attempt that.

Eventually, and despite saying twice that I wouldn't try, I did complete 7 Days a Skeptic, got a frankly rather unsatisfying ending and rather less of a sense of closure than I hoped. I also started on the next game, Trilby's Notes, and got as far as being transported into a Silent Hill-like possessed dimension. quadralien then commented on my post saying that he'd played through the rest of the series and simply that 'You're not going to like it'. So I think my involvement with the series will draw to a close here.

Go and play it yourself.