Survival horror fans have been eating insanely good for the better part of the last decade, with every franchise, IP, and setting imaginable receiving a terrifying experience for all to enjoy. In the midst of all the Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, it felt like there was one horror sequel missing in the sci-fi department, but now, the wait for Alien: Isolation 2 is almost over, to the relief of fans who have been waiting since 2014. However, the industry has changed a lot in that time, and if this new game is to succeed, then it has to learn from the biggest mistakes of the original and those of the wider genre—that being pacing and length.
In order to keep your players invested and scared for the entire runtime of a game, you need to carefully plan out the narrative arcs and twists from start to finish. That also means that the story has to begin and conclude in a timely manner; if you start crossing over the 20-hour mark without a good reason, the fear factor can dwindle, and the fatigue really sets in. Looking back at the first game, length was often the only major complaint people had about it, and now, with Alien: Isolation 2 on the horizon, I’m concerned that we may end up in a similar situation where the actual gameplay and atmosphere are incredible, but the duration ticks past its expiration date and ends up feeling like a slog rather than a satisfying journey.
Alien: Isolation 2 Needs to Avoid the Genre’s Biggest Issue
Making a good survival horror game is no easy feat, what with all the competition and the high expectations of the fans who have played just about every major release there is to play. You need to have a great hook right from the get-go, interesting enemies and combat, a compelling story, good world-building, and a tidy ending that closes things out before they overstay their welcome. If you manage to nail all of those components, then you end up with a virtually perfect horror game, but if you fail in even one regard, then the whole experience can be soured.
That’s exactly how I felt about Alien: Isolation when I first played it. I was immediately captivated by the thought of being hunted by a terrifying and intelligent Xenomorph, and while I was a little late to the party, judging by the reviews and the sales numbers, I was hoping for a real home-run finish. Yet, when I got to the middle of the game, having already spent a dozen or so hours exploring and progressing through the station, I started thinking that things were getting a bit repetitive, and when I looked at how much more game I had to conquer, my excitement became nonexistent when I saw I had about the same amount of time to go.
If you start crossing over the 20-hour mark, the fear factor can dwindle, and the fatigue really sets in.
This is the core issue that a lot of otherwise great horror games run into that is only really an issue within this specific genre. The whole point is to keep the stress level high and to subvert the player’s expectations, but if you have absorbed the atmosphere and gotten comfortable with the feel of the game over a longer period of time, then it can be a lot harder to feel afraid. And, if the story doesn’t have a reason to go on and the runtime is being padded by additional exploration and unnecessary backtracking, then the overall quality of the game becomes a lot lower when you compare how things started versus how they ended.
Also, survival horror specifically focuses some of its attention on weaponry, where in the early sections, you might have a weak pistol with a limited ammo supply, but as the game opens up and you start to progress to the later sections, suddenly that shoddy arsenal looks more like a military-grade cabinet capable of taking down anything that moves. What that means for longer games is that you either have to level up the action and give players more engaging segments, like in Resident Evil 4, or wind things down before that struggling survivor becomes a capable killing machine.
The Best Horror Games Value Quality Over Quantity
If we look at the highest rated games in the survival horror genre, they all have one thing in common: a solid length to quality ratio. The actual problem isn’t necessarily games being too long, it is how the developers fill out the playthrough, which means every piece of gameplay from the first few interactions, all the way until the credits roll. Some of the scariest and most stressful games, like Silent Hill 2 and Alan Wake 2, actually push the duration into the 15–20 hour region, and Resident Evil 4, arguably the greatest survival horror game ever made, is known for being decently long as well. However, in all these cases, the runtime always feels purposeful rather than filler.
You can even go the other way, and turn to much more recent releases such as Resident Evil Requiem or Silent Hill f, both of which can be beaten in under 10 hours without rushing. That may seem short, yet in that time, they deliver some horrifying moments and insane segments of action that just wouldn’t hit the same if the games were significantly longer. As nice as it was to revisit Raccoon City and as atmospheric as some of the spiritual dream sequences were, I felt as though the stories had run their course and the fear was nearing its end point, so I was content with the playthroughs being on the midrange section of the spectrum.
At the same time, there is such a thing as too little game. One of my favorite modern survival horror games is Scorn, but as much as I adore the world building and the art direction, beating the game in under three hours felt a little bit underwhelming. The same can be said for Bad Cheese, a Disney-inspired horror game that I was very excited to get my hands on, that also ended in a single session. In these instances, I had a great time with the content given, yet was hoping there would be a lot more, as in that amount of time, you aren’t really developing the story too much, and it feels as though you are exiting the world just as quickly as you entered.
The line of time is fine and hard to pin down. There is no one formula that will work for every game, and I do believe that there is a good case for longer and shorter games in different circumstances. It comes down to whether the story and the action within it has a reason to conclude when it does and if it is worth continuing things a bit longer to tie up the final strands of the narrative. For now, we will have to wait and see if Alien: Isolation 2 manages to fix that issue from the original game, but in the meantime, there are plenty of other sci-fi and general survival horror games to dig into that get the pacing right and only leave you wanting more at the end.
