10 Horror Video Game Tropes That Need To Stop

Before Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Outlast forever made their mark on the horror landscape, survival horror was about conserving resources to ensure we had enough to fight back against whatever enemies were in our way.

But after the massive success of those games, survival horror became more of a game of deadly cat-and-mouse in which we were unable to fight back against whatever malicious monstrosities were after us.

By making us more vulnerable, these games subsequently made the enemies a greater threat. Instead of hitting headshots, we’d now need to sneak past them to avoid detection or face heart-pounding chases in which getting caught would lead to a quick death. And it’s this kind of gameplay which has now become the standard affair in most contemporary horrors.

While Resident Evil 2’s Mr X and the Xenomorph from Alien: Isolation nailed the relentless stalker enemy, the downside of this trope is that it can frequently lead to annoyance rather than terror.

Trial and error tactics of having to decipher where we’re supposed to go in dimly lit, labyrinthine areas can be effective at first, but the fear fades away after the dozenth time of getting lost and caught.