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

Yes, very much so. The deep unknown frontier can be alot scarier even with the absence of alien terror.

Living on a spaceship or walking on asteroids can be a very lonely and scary business. The threat from solar radiation, meteors, and system breakdown could be very terrifying. There just needs to be a game that exploits the horrors of accidents in space.

Eh, I disagree. Accidents aren't as scary as sabotage simply because they're accidents.

And call me a traditionalist if you will, but to me, Survival Horror IN SPACE! can pretty much only be about two things: Body Horror and/or Cosmic Horror. In my opinion, an inhuman enemy is a much more frightening foe than any crazed serial killer.

Why? Because it can't be reasoned with nor outwitted in any traditional sense. Something like that is so far beyond the human capability to understand or rationalize, which makes the whole thing much more frightening when you realize you don't have the slightest clue what it'll do next.

I'd like to add isolation and emptiness to the list of Things To Be Afraid Of In Space. And, on the more specific side, AI Is A Crap Shoot

Even if you not doing "aliens now ARE your face" route, you can still have more plausible body horror. The effects of radiation or vacuum exposure on a body are not nice.

I'd also want at least a horror-type level in a game set on James Cameron's Pandora. I know a lot of fans see that place as some sort of paradise, but so much of that place freaks me out, not just the size thing; that moon is ALIVE, and I'm not too sure whether everything that lives there is fully in control of it's actions.

The early moments of the Starship stage in Crysis 1 does it pretty well. You're floating through zero g on a ship full of alien geometries, while your character narrates the trip for the sake of his commanding officers. It's lonely and desolate right until you see something move in the distance. "I'm not alone in here." Then it gets into what is probably body horror, since the aliens are obviously based on aquatic life forms.

I've always thought that a "realistic" abandoned space station setup would present plenty of Paranoia Fuel in and of itself, monsters or no. No artificial gravity (requiring either magnetic boots or some form of jetpack to get around; also has the added bonus of debris floating around and cluttering your field of view) and a depressurized environment (requires a spacesuit with a limited supply of power and oxygen; also makes it impossible to hear anything sneaking up behind you) would be very good at ratcheting up the tension.

As for the loneliness aspect, I have a couple ideas: 1) something went wrong with the cryosleep, and you're the only survivor. Or, 2) you're the first crew member to come out of cryosleep, and you discover something has gone very, very wrong. So wrong that you can't risk waking the other crew members before it's dealt with. Naturally, communication with the outside would be totally cut off in either scenario.

With the success of Gravity, I'd say its certainly one that's door has been opened. With Video Games, we like our obstacle to be right in front of us. Either an enemy or an oxygen bar or something.

Having something we can't see and etc would be fascinating, which is something we see along the lines of Slender and its ultimately random threat.

However, I think, at some point in the video game, we would have to face some visible threat, but it doesn't have to be an alien bio-hazard one. I just think that the big atmospheric feelings of loneliness, darkness, lack of sound, and etc would be very difficult to execute from the get go and may not carry for a full AAA Title, particularly depending on how it is executed.

That reminds me. One of the really effective scenes in Modern Warfare 2 is the scene where we see Price's EMP accidentally destroyed the International Space Station from the perspective of an astronaut watching happen. When the pulse hits, he's flung out of orbit and we get a few seconds of him flailing helplessly before cutting back to the battle in Washington D.C.

What about technological Body Horror? I toyed around with a Sci-Fi setting where humans are embroiled in a Robot War, when Outside-Context Villain spacecraft show up, sentient ships (a la Reapers) that infect both sides' spacecraft and slowly convert it into a black tentacled monstrosity. Any robots (or Synths, as I called the antagonistic ones) unlucky enough to be on board were brought into the hive mind and used as onboard microorganisms. My favorite aspect of it all was that the sentient ships thought of themselves as higher life forms, the next step in evolution.

edited 22nd Apr '14 4:30:09 AM by Ninjaxenomorph

I could see a space station being quite an effective location for a ghost story: given a character alone on a station (perhaps he's the last to be shuttled down, tasked with the business of turning off various systems ahead of the station being decommissioned, broken up and allowed to burn up in the atmosphere), a space station gives a reason for the character to be isolated and prevented from leaving. Allow the player to see Earth every so often through a porthole: everyone that he knows, all of his support systems, just out of reach.

Save that he's not quite alone: something happened there, or some unquiet spirit followed him (or another crewmember) up from Earth. Start out with glimpses at the corner of the player's field of vision and barely-audible whispers, and build up from there. Craft the story with a bit of mystery, asking the player to figure out what the ghost wants and who it was.