Chills and Thrills: How Horror Games Use Stealth Mechanics to Create Better Gameplay

Horror games and stealth games have a surprising amount in common. If you’re sneaking down a dark corridor, holding your breath in anticipation of whatever’s lurking around the next corner, carefully monitoring your footsteps and hoping that nothing spots you before you spot it, you could be playing a game of either genre—interesting, given that one is typically realistic while the other often employs supernatural elements to keep your on your toes.

For fans of both genres, the appeal is obvious: both stealth and horror games get your adrenaline pumping as you evade capture or death from whatever pursues you. There’s a lot of cross-pollination between both genres, even if they feel very different when you’re playing them. Stealth and horror games can learn a lot from one another, and many games combine the atmosphere and mechanics from one genre with another to improve the player experience.

Blending Horror Games with Stealth Nets Enthralling Results

Genre hybrids combine the best aspects of two different genres to create new atmospheres and experiences, and games that combine stealth and horror elements can be incredible. Even back in the early days of stealth gaming, games like Thief included horror elements to ramp up the tension. While this might detract from the realism for some players, others find the mixture thrilling.

Today, many games play with combining genres. Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Alien: Isolation are both horror games, appealing to players who like the feeling of creeping around castles or space stations with something much stronger than them in pursuit. Both games feature a player character that is significantly weaker than their enemies, making hiding a better option than fighting—another common theme in stealth games.

Part of the reason that these two genres work so well together is that they share many things in common. Crossing horror games with shooters provides one type of entertainment—the fun, fast-paced action of Left 4 Dead, for example—while crossing stealth with platforming can create a fun game like Sly Cooper. Mixing stealth and horror maximizes the tension present in both.

Horror Games Feature Tense Atmosphere Stealth Games Share

Dread and tension rule both stealth and horror games as you constantly try to anticipate what will come next, knowing full well that you can’t. Similar atmospheres are one of the biggest connections between the two genres.

That’s part of the reason that Silent Hills was so highly anticipated—Hideo Kojima, creator of the Metal Gear series, was set to segue from stealth into horror games as director of the next entry in the iconic horror series. With such a strong history in stealth games, Kojima knows how to create the tension and anticipation necessary for horror games. P.T. proved that Kojima had the horror-writing chops to turn that knowledge of stealth games to a new genre—unfortunately, Konami cancelled the project and we’re only left with thoughts of what might have been.

While it’s possible that Silent Hills might have been amazing even if Kojima didn’t have a strong background in stealth games, that background is part of what attracted many fans of his work on Metal Gear. Silent Hills didn’t need to be a stealth game to satisfy them—by capturing the nail-biting atmosphere that makes his stealth games so appealing and ramping it up to eleven with a supernatural twist, Silent Hills was set to push the limits of horror games.

Similar Mechanics Bind Horror Games and Stealth Together

Of course, atmosphere isn’t everything. Players like stealth and horror games for their gameplay as well. Intelligent AI is one of the most important aspects of stealth gaming, and a smart enemy can improve horror games, too—there’s a big difference between running from hordes of mindless zombies and evading a monster that seems to always be one step ahead of you, and the latter perfectly combines what we love about stealth games with horror.

This is where Alien: Isolation excelled. Alien is one of the great horror films, and pitting one human against a huge and terrifying monster is the perfect setup for a satisfying blend of horror and stealth. To make the in-game alien feel intelligent, the game’s developers coded it to reveal new behaviors as the game went on. While it wasn’t actually learning from the player, the gradual reveal of different actions certainly made it feel that way, making each subsequent encounter as unpredictable as the first.

Alien: Isolation encompasses a few genres, namely action-adventure, stealth, and survival horror. Rather than focusing on the combat that often drives action-adventure games, the game instead encourages players to evade and hide from the enemy, with the mechanics to back it up—players can use a flashlight and a motion tracker to keep track of the alien at the expense of attracting it, and can hide behind objects or in lockers to evade death. The alien is unkillable, making stealth necessary. No amount of bullets can take it down, and the best a player can do is drive it away temporarily using a flamethrower.

This perfect blending of stealth and horror mechanics draws in players from either genre, exposing them to how fun playing a game of the other genre can be. Alien: Isolation excels precisely because it uses both genres as inspiration rather than falling into the shoot-’em-up style that many horror games, such as recent Resident Evil games and Dead Space 3, employ in favor of slow-paced horror.

Blending Stealth in Horror Games Takes Players Out of Their Comfort Zones

Few gamers restrict themselves to one genre—there’s fun to be found in stepping outside your comfort zone and looking for new things. Stealth games get our adrenaline pumping by making us hide from enemies and attack from the shadows, while horror games have us on the edge of our seats by making us feel fragile in comparison to horrifying monsters—two different approaches that have much the same result.

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