Simple shadows can be scariest
Horror video games’ primitive graphics trigger imagination
There’s an old saying that goes, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” Well, what about a handful of amorphous pixels against a deadscreen blackness?
It is a golden age of video game technology when it comes to horror. Stars like Hayden Panettiere are rendered so photorealistically in games like “Until Dawn” as to be functionally indistinguishable from a film. Interactive movies such as “Erica” blur the line between lowbudget horror and slick new game tech even further. That’s not even counting the explosion in virtual reality titles like “The Persistence” and “Resident Evil 7,” which fully immerse you in a terrifying environment. With all these marvelous tools at hand, it seems weird that any game maker would go backward graphically.
However, there is a special type of scariness in lofi titles that use simplicity to trigger the imagination. Just as directtoVHS horror did in the ’ 80s and ’ 90s, there is something inherently sinister about the lofi aesthetic. It leaves many more gaps for the player to fill in, giving us just enough to work with so that we exaggerate what we think we see. Think of it as the far side of the uncanny valley, where something is just human enough to make us afraid of it.
Instead of popping in a VHS horror movie on Halloween, venture into a game where oldschool graphics enhance the terror.
“Faith”: “Faith” in particular is just north of Atari 2600 in terms of graphics, to the point that the player character, Father John Ward, is a blue blob whose walking animation has only two frames. The creepy woods and abandoned house he wanders through are similarly sparse in terms of visuals, but then again they don’t really need to be any more complex. We’ve seen “The Exorcist” and “The Blair Witch Project.”
We know how a Catholic horror film and haunted house look. Like a campfire ghost story, the game trusts us to picture the setting as it would be represented in reality.
With all that blank space to be projected on, when the enemies do show up, they are so much scarier than the formless figures they initially appear to be, especially as “Faith” loves to transition from its general style to extremely creepy, lofi rotoscope sections depicting monsters and ghosts. The sudden acceleration into full motion from jerky twoframe animation is jarring enough for a jump scare but still empty enough that players are forced to ask what it is that is attacking them.
( Publisher: Airdorf. ESRB Rating: Not Rated. Free.) For Mac and PC. itch. io “Ellen”: The game’s art is more of a pixelated version of a modern sidescrolling game, but the result is still an abstract, hazy set of graphics that bring a haunted house to dreamlike life. There are wonderful sections in the game where screams are heard outside, and then the foggy grays of windows are spackled with red. You almost have to lean in and be sure what you’re seeing is what you think you’re seeing. It’s like staring into the static of an old television and wondering if you can see a ghost. With an expertly crafted, ambiguous setting, you will definitely find devils in the distortion. The pixelation denies you the full ability to comprehend the action, which makes it more frightening.
( Publisher: Red Mount Media. ESRB Rating: Mature. $ 7.99.) For Mac, Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4 and Xbox One. itch. io
The lofi aesthetic leaves many more gaps for the player to fill in, giving us just enough to work with so that we exaggerate what we think we see.
“Yomawari: Midnight Shadows”: This is by far the scariest game I have played in the past couple of years. It’s essentially a game about two little girls who must explore a town haunted with demons to reunite with
each other. It’s depicted in a bright chibiart style reminiscent of Super Nintendo roleplaying games.
The demons are bonechilling, usually masses of random body parts and toothfilled mouths without faces. One that stands out in particular is the Girl in the Train, a violent spirit of a murder victim that makes it rain blood while stalking your character. Like “Ellen,” part of the heavy lifting is done with fantastic sound design, using moans and screams to create an incongruity between the lack of visual clarity and the razorsharp realism of the sound effects.
( Publisher: NIS America. ESRB Rating: Mature. $ 19.99.) For Mac, Nintendo Switch, PC and PS4. www. nisamerica. com/ games/ yomawari midnightshadows
“Football Game”: It’s hard to explain why “Football Game” scares me. On the surface, it’s a pixelated adventure about a high school quarterback named Tommy looking for his girlfriend. But everything is just … wrong. Tommy stares at himself in an 8bit mirror, looking into sunken eyes. The graphics stop appearing incapable of rendering faces and start appearing perfect for rendering distortions. The gameplay is standard adventurepuzzle fare, but every bit of dialogue makes it clear that players are exploring a world where something horrible happened. The genius of its lofi aesthetic is that it feels like a disturbed mind fingerpainting the internal demons of a killer, which makes the game’s cliffhanger ending very unsettling. “Football Game” banishes monsters back to the symbolic, and somewhere in our minds we recognize the fullness of the horror they suggest from these rough sketches.
( Publisher: Cloak and Dagger Games. ESRB Rating: Not Rated. $ 1.99.) For Mac, Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4 and Xbox One. www. steampowered. com.