8 Tricks Horror Video Games Use To Terrify You
3. Purposefully Tricky Controls
Even when horror games are kind enough to give us a weapon to defend ourselves, that doesn't necessarily mean getting through enemies is going to be easy.
In addition to resource management, some games up the challenge by making our characters slightly awkward to control, with clunky 'tank controls' of classic survival horror titles being the most obvious.
Already making movement and aiming a chore, the true horror of this control scheme came to fruition whenever fleeing from enemies whereupon the fixed camera angle presentation would mean you'd find yourself changing direction each time the camera changed, meaning you could accidentally wander into the path of some zombie's teeth.
Even without fixed cameras, developers are able to find sneaky ways to make controlling our characters harder. In the remake of Resident 2, the aiming reticule becomes more accurate the longer players stand still while aiming, creating situations where players play chicken with zombies.
Alien: Isolation, comparatively deploys a different tactic in which everything takes slightly longer to do. From loading individual bullets into your gun or the game taking a few seconds longer before saving your progress, all of these succeed in making each encounter a lot more tense.