Navigation In Classic-Style Survival Horror Games

Well, for this article in the second season of my “Horror Videogames Series“, I thought that I’d talk about navigation in classic-style survival horror games. This is one of those things where the classic “Resident Evil” games (1996-2004) and the classic “Silent Hill” games (1999-2004) differ greatly from each other.

I ended up thinking about this topic whilst re-playing part of the original “Resident Evil 2” (1998). One of the great things about this game is the way that there are so many different routes and shortcuts you can use to get to different parts of the large police station that… most… of the earlier parts of the game take place in. These open up as the game progresses, guiding the player whilst also making backtracking easier. And, given the amount of “back and forth” needed for some puzzles and the fact that you’ve got limited inventory space (and therefore often need to find the nearest storage box quickly), finding shortcuts becomes even more important.

Yes, the later areas of the game have a bit less flexibility, but the “police station” parts of the game are so fun and memorable because they focus on a single location that you’ve actually got to take the time to learn. Put another way, I started playing this game again several months after my last re-play of it (and several years after the one before that), and I was still able to navigate the police station with ease. The game is so brilliantly memorable because the location is dense, non-linear and can often be navigated in multiple ways.

And both “Resident Evil” (1996/2002) and the original “Resident Evil 3” (1999) also do this to a certain extent too. In fact, the excellent 2002 remake of “Resident Evil” actually takes it a step further because – if you know anything about the game – you’ll probably want to use alternative routes sometimes because it can be dangerous to enter certain areas from particular directions or at certain times. Knowing your way around is important, and having to memorise the layout of these games probably also helps them to be so memorable too.

Yes, you can check a map – but you actually have to find maps for each area and they are a little bit of a hassle to use, so the player is encouraged to remember everything.

And, although some other classic “Resident Evil” games – like “Resident Evil: Code Veronica X” (2001) and “Resident Evil Zero” (2002) – don’t always offer the player quite as much flexibility, one of the hallmarks of these classic games are non-linear early game areas that can be navigated in a variety of ways.

On the other hand, the classic “Silent Hill” games do something very different to this. In these games – especially “Silent Hill” (1999) and “Silent Hill 2” (2001) – the locations are meant to be daunting and disorientating. There are large outdoor areas shrouded in dense fog and indoor areas filled with more doors – many of them completely useless locked doors– than you can remember. This is all part of the psychological horror that the “Silent Hill” series is famous for.

In these games, the “map” screen becomes ridiculously useful. This is helped by the fact that the game will annotate the map for you as you explore. There’s slightly less emphasis on learning a location off by heart and more of an emphasis on exploring. This allows these game to create tension since many of the areas look or sound creepy enough that you might be nervous about exploring them too thoroughly.

Not only that, locations in these games aren’t always the most reliable things in the world. Famously, at certain points in these games, the world around you will… change… into a nightmarish “otherworld” version of itself. This can open up and/or close off certain areas, making everything you’ve learnt about the “ordinary” version of a location irrelevant. Many of these games will also include deliberately confusing maze-like areas, such as the subway level in “Silent Hill 3” (2003), that are difficult to navigate easily.

Not to mention that, in one famously creepy part of “Silent Hill 2” (2001), the map screen is completely blank when you enter a certain area… and only gets filled in gradually as you keep exploring it. When I first encountered this area back in the day, the lack of a full map absolutely terrified me. It really felt like I was somewhere where I wasn’t supposed to be and that anything could be lurking within it…

Although you will obviously learn your way around a particular place after a while, these games actively discourage too much of this. This is probably one reason why they can still be scary when you replay them – because the locations are too large and complicated to memorise easily, there’s still a slight element of “the fear of the unknown” if you return to one of these games after a while.

Interestingly though, the modern “classic-style” survival horror games that I’ve played recently – “Alisa”  (2021) and “Tormented Souls” (2021) – both take more of a “Resident Evil”-style approach to navigation. Yes, the locations in these games don’t have quite the number of shortcuts and alternate routes as the early parts of an old “Resident Evil” game do, but they are designed to be memorised and learnt.

But, these days, this style of location design is – ironically – at its absolute best in stealth-based “run and hide” survival horror games like “Remothered: Broken Porcelain” (2020). Because the player has to actively avoid villains or monsters, alternative routes are an absolute necessity. And, although some stealth-horror games do have large locations, the genre is often at it’s very best when the player is actually able to learn and memorise a more densely-designed location.

Navigation is a surprisingly important part of horror games – since it is something that the player will be doing regularly. This is why horror games are often at their best when the locations are at least somewhat non-linear. Having to actively find your way around somewhere is infinitely more immersive and suspenseful than, for example, just walking along a series of linear corridors.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂