Horror in Space... without Body Horror? Is that even possible?

Here's a stray thought I've had from playing Dead Space 2 — there's a lot of Survival Horror or some other Horror In Space, but they all rely on some form of Body Horror to provide the actual scares. Either it's going to be a case of the slashies, or some sort of alien monstrosity tearing into people (or turning people INTO the monstrosity), etc. So, is there ANY horror video game in a cosmic setting (don't confuse with Cosmic Horror, please) without blood, guts and people torn asunder? The closest that comes to mind is the robot chapter from Live-A-Live, but it's not really horror, it's more like Fridge Horror.

edited 26th Jan '11 10:12:47 AM by Noelemahc

I think it's possible. Blame Alien for starting the space-plus-biohorror thing.

At the very least the Night's Dawn books do non-biological space horror.

I think you could creep people out really well without body horror. Do simple dead bodies cout as body horror? If not, then the Regula I scene in star Trek II can count, when Mc Coy walks right into the dead guy who is still warm and not yet into rigor mortis. I never appreciated that scene when I was little, but it chills me now.

Some ideas that flitted into my head:

• Bad lighting,
• fitting ambient noise,
• indisctinct noises that turn out to be nohting,
• indistinct noises that turn out to be OMG WHAT THE FFFFUUUUUU-,
• the occasional corpse,
• your NPC buddy going missing,
• blood globules floating around in zero-gee with no trace of a body,
• hearing your suit breathing increase in rapidity when an event happens that would normally be scary (door opening all of a sudden maybe or whatever),
• hearing your pulse,
• suit radio flipping out every so often with static,
• suit radio flipping out every so often as yoru lost buddy screams for help,
• apocalyptic logs,
• hearing your buddies spacesuit getting punctured over the radio and you hear all the air screaming out of his suit,
• non-apocolyptic logs,
• Finding your buddy with [sme sort of fatal suit-piercing injury],
• looooooong periods of no action punctuated by a brief tussle,
• haivng YOUR suit getting punctured and you have to scramble like crazy to patch it on the fly,
• and a heavy reliance of our fear of the unknown.

How's that, any good?

edited 26th Jan '11 11:29:13 AM by pvtnum11

Yes please! And, at least in my mind, 'simple' dead bodies are okay, mutilated bodies aren't. So if it's a case of a crazed maniac loose on a space station with a syringe of cyanide filled with people who routinely walk around with syringes in their hands (space hospital?), you can build suspense without having someone spew their guts into the screen every five minutes.

Even a simple trudge through an abandoned ship can be scary as hell, especially if you're REALLY ALL ALONE in there. Fridge Horror is gonna set in even before some crazy twist of fate lures you into the crew quarters with their ApocalypticLogs. And then you're gonna wish for someone to be there. Yahtzee's 1213 combined the visceral horror and intellectual horror quite well, the ending wasn't scary because of blood or gore, but because of a simple human feeling.

edited 26th Jan '11 12:10:58 PM by Noelemahc

I honestly have no idea what or who would fill all those points. Maybe the ship was hit by Reavers or something - THAT was what made them so freaking scary, you hardly saw a glimpse of them in the show and it was all mysterious and stuff. Plus the music helped a lot.

edited 26th Jan '11 11:46:04 AM by pvtnum11

So, is there ANY horror video game in a cosmic setting (don't confuse with Cosmic Horror, please) without blood, guts and people torn asunder?

No blood at all? Otherwise I'd say 7 Days a Skeptic.

edited 26th Jan '11 11:47:39 AM by Tzetze

I think some blood is a must. A bit here, a globule of it there, that gets stuck on yoru visor as you walk or float into it... Bloody smeared hand print but no body over there in the hallway...

Yeah, coudl be a lunatic loose on a ship.

Just tossing a barebones seat-of-the-pants plot out for whoever, but perhaps the derelict had sent out a mayday for a reactor failure or something and you're one of a team of techs on a deep-space recovery (tow truck IN SPACE) ship that have to go aboard and restart their stuff. You show up a week or two later and the ship is no longer answering hails, and looks pretty much like all power was lost. Captain of the recovery ship decides to latch on and see if there's any survivors from the lack of power, and if none, see about grabbing any good salvage.

So, you and some fellow techs get to go aboard. Ship is a mess - no gravity, stuff floating all over, but nothing out of the nomral. Some escape pods and/or shuttles are missing (but there's more to that than meets the eye). Then you find some bodies, but no clue how they died. Huh. Well, you're just here to get the reactor spun up again, look for salvage, but you get tasked to go back to yoru ship and get the doctor so s/he can annotate the bodies and whatnot. Well, one of the other techs goes missing, and then the ship decompresses all of a sudden, and that ends up killing (due to joined airlocks) most everyone on the recovery ship. As you were wearing your suit, you manage to slam yoru helmet seals shut quickly (or get to a small airlock just in time) and survive.

While you're off recovering from almost dying, whoever the killer is manages to off pretty much the rest of yoru crew mates. You then find out that the killer is wanting to commandeer your recovery ship and leave the derelict behind, with you in it.

NOTE: You, as the player, is kept in the dark most of the time, left to figure things out as you go. Expect lots of switch-flipping, button puzzles to get stuff working and having to navigate zero-gee corridors and crawlspaces in poor lighting. Which may be booby-trapped.

How's that for a five minute plot?

edited 26th Jan '11 12:11:19 PM by pvtnum11

7 Days a Skeptic features epic dismemberment and a Frankenstein-style monster, and that falls under Body Horror, doesn't it?

That's a pretty good five-minute plot, ackshully. Because any other option would have you adapting bloodless horror stories from more mundane settings to simply take place IN SPACE!. And that won't be as interesting.

edited 26th Jan '11 12:27:21 PM by Noelemahc

Hmmm, sounds like I got a Firefly OC fan fic idea on my hands, too.

Using my above example as a game (as intended), the first part would be the Justified Tutorial level, where you get to walk around the recovery ship in safety, getting used to the controls and stuff as you do odd-jobs for various members of the crew. "Hey, can you tell Chief Maxwell that I need a MS274659-13 O-ring? Thanks, noob." or, "Can you go hit that switch over there and tell me what the [technobabble] gauge says?"

Sort of gets you into the game, learn the mechanics, and more importantly, hopefully gets you attached to the members of your crew. Some banter exchanged, jokes and laughs, whatever works to get the player immersed.

Then the game proper begins once all hell breaks loose on the ship.

edited 26th Jan '11 12:55:57 PM by pvtnum11

One potential way to do horror in space is to play up the loneliness of it all. It wouldn't be very good for sudden scares, but it sure could be used for a growing feeling of insecurity and paranoia.

Maybe a good old fashioned rogue AI? Have it do minor little things to guide the player around and toy with them, like locking and opening doors, flicking lights on and off, and making various machines go on and off to make noise that would draw the player over, as well as the occasional murder attempt, like jettisoning the player out of the ship.

I think it'd be better if there was a human behind it all. Not a stark raving mad lunatic, but someone who is very sane and has a reason to sabotage a ship (maybe it wan't large enough for his needs or something) to lure in a recovery ship in order to commandeer it. Who knows, perhaps you meet a few survivors in the derelict, and the killer was amongst them all the while, bidding his time for when the recovery ship shows up. He then runs off when no one is looking and seeks to take over the recovery ship, after spacing both ships at an opportune time in order to neutralize the crew. Maybe you notice a missing space suit in the suit locker room. Perhaps a survivor starts acting all sick and stuff (poisoned) before dying unexpectedly. I don't know. Several ways you could go with that.

But what woudl the killer want with your ship? Colony drop, maybe? Perhaps he wishes to drop the whole thing onto a regional capital city or something, while the reactor is seconds from critical. Maybe the recovery ship has a cargo of nasty stuff on it that woudl be pretty bad if it got loose - toxic fuels, radioactive gunk, whatever. Regardless, you are in the way of his plans.

The horror aspects could be mere side-effects of his work in sabotage, murder and trying to take over your ship. I'm envisioning an atmosphere that feels like survival horror, but ends up being something else entirely. Once The Reveal is over with, then the game woudl become a simple 'stop the bad guy from carrying out his schemes' sort of thing.

But hey, probably a bunch of ways to get a survival horror scenario in space without all the gore, right?

Have it do minor little things to guide the player around and toy with them, like locking and opening doors, flicking lights on and off, and making various machines go on and off to make noise that would draw the player over, as well as the occasional murder attempt, like jettisoning the player out of the ship.

Sounds like Marathon. The crazy AI, Durandal, sets a lot of crushing things and doors moving and jamming for no reason. And in the last game, a different AI sometimes 'ports you into empty space out of spite.

Durandal was kind of a jerk, yes. I think he was still bitter that Leela had him only opening doors or something; he explains it on one of the terminals you find.

I miss Leela, she was nice. (Security Officer/Leela shipper I am not, but I can understand the mindset.)

«Leela was so loyal and tried so hard; she deserved better.» But yeah. Marathon with more modern graphics would probably be pretty freaky, and without horror monsters; the Malevolent Architecture (and Alien Geometries, for that matter) is scary by itself, and then you add in that the AI causing it just likes toying with you...

edited 26th Jan '11 2:19:06 PM by Tzetze

I'd say yes, its possible, but at the same time its just wasting the setting. If you take out the body horror, you're taking out reason they have to be in space. At that point it really is just Recycled In Space - after all, from a horror standpoint, without aliens, theres little you could do that couldn't be done on a submarine.

You can have a large spacecraft crewed by only a handful of personnel, and those personnel could be joe and jane average. A sub would have lots of military types. A surface freighter may work, though. BIG ship with very low crew density. Kill what few crew embers are there except yoruself, and you got over a thousand feet of ship to get lost in, if it's one of the large super tankers or big bulk freighters...

Still, OP wanted horror in space, so I am obligated to toss out some ideas.

Why would the sub have the realistic number of crewmen but the spaceship doesn't? Yes, ordinary spacecraft now have relatively little on board, but thats because of constant contact with Earth, thus completely negating the whole loneliness thing, whereas the sub is self contained.

No need to even have a living threat if you're going to play on loneliness. Just have your player be the last crewmember to come out of cryosleep with the ship falling apart around him and everyone else dead from environmental hazards. Space is a dangerous place.

edited 26th Jan '11 2:39:07 PM by Recon5

Depending on the sub, you can have upwards of 80 to 120 pesonnel on board, and some of those are sharing a bunk (hot-racking: I sleep in it during my off-duty time, and when I'm going on-duty, you're coming off-duty and you get a hot rack to sleep in, hence the name). Thus, pretty crowded. A freighter, even the largest of them, can get by on as little as 20 personnel. Warships tend to have denser populations aboard than civvie ships.

Plus, if this is a civvie ship, then there won't be a convienent armory for the player to search for armor and weapon. Also bearing consideration, is that someone acting out of the norm on a military ship, in close contact with everyone else will stick out like a sore thumb. Easier to hide the wierdness on a civillian ship with lower crew density.

EDIT: ^ Ooo, I like.

edited 26th Jan '11 2:43:22 PM by pvtnum11

Wow, just wow, guys, that's a lot of ideas there. And yes, I'm aware that when you toss out Explosive Decompression (with or without Space Does Not Work That Way) and other fun ways of being torn apart, you essentially get something that's Recycled In Space, it's just that I was specifically interested if there are any existing videogames that use that =)

The cheapest way, but also the hardest to keep intriguing, is recycling Marie Celeste In Space, because then all you need are properly-thought-out ApocalypticLogs and a variety of environmental hazards caused by nobody being around to do ship maintenance. The difference from doing it on a ship or on a sub is that:

a) space is really really really vast

b) easier to do EVA-based puzzles for the player to bang their head against the wall with (Dead Space plays with this wonderfully) in a way that does not resort to Fridge Logic yet retains a significant degree of danger and fear

c) kewl speshul effecks, lazors lol

Marathon Infinity was genuinely scary at times, especially with the loneliness. The first level (and the nightmare levels) bring it well with Paranoia Fuel. Well, that and the Cosmic Horror, but when you're trying not to drown in lava, you worry more about your immediate situation.

edited 26th Jan '11 10:43:17 PM by Noelemahc

GFS Valhalla? The only body horror in GFS Valhalla was already in the player character long before getting their, and is in fact the reason why you can survive against some of the things crawling around inside. Seems like a good starting place, just choose a protagonist less bad ass than Samus and take away hyper mode powers.

Oh, who am I kidding, just replace monster that mutates the body with monster that kills and eats you. That drop in the Death Star's trash compactor in Star Wars could have easily been much more horrific if not in a family film.

I know its not "in space" but I want a "first contact" game set in the Avatar Verse. That moon is pants shitting scary when you think about the size difference between humans and the native fauna. For some reason I picture Picman, but with many more creepy monsters, bizarre landscapes, and very limited ammo.

I read a short story about an astronaut who's job is to maintain survey equipment on a tiny space probe-ship. It begins with him being assigned the job after the last guy went spacecrazy, and details how he slowly goes insane with fear of the space outside over his 60-day mission.

I'd really like to play a space horror game where the only monster is... space. If pulled off well, it could be very good.

I agree, but the problem is that last bit you said. Pulling that off with just a visual and audible cues as to what's going on will be quite difficult. Without the sensation of weightlessness, any game that has zero-gee in it is forced to rely on visuals to communicate it.

Shattered Horizons did a great job of making me nauseous, though.

Hey, holy crap, there's the physics I'd want to see in this game - steal those, rig it so that a working section of ship has traditional up and down, and then, when you go into a dead part of ship or do an EVA, you're in weightlessness.

Oh yeah, and screw with gravity, too. One section might be off-kilter, another is off, another is on so when you walk through the doorway and into another section, BAM you hit the floor.

Okay, I'm rambling now.

Hmmm. I wonder if Zalgo would be pants-crappingly horrifying enough.

No, that gets into Body Horror territory pretty quickly, nevermind.