I get freaked out by...a lot of stuff these
days. You know. The world, generally. Entropy. The prospect of going outside. Sometimes I just need a mental reset button,
something to lower my heart rate and kinda bring me back to zero. A systems diagnostic check. And the thing is, I actually have that button. Watch, I’ll show you. Whewwwwww. It’s like entering a decompression chamber. Everything stressful is, if temporarily, blown
out of my brain and replaced with this oozing synth. In an article for Laced Records, Thomas Quillfeldt
said it sounded a bit like whale songs, and it does! It’s simultaneously mournful and reassuring,
a little haunted but not malevolent. It feels...safe. This feeling is appropriate, as many of you
probably already know. The track is called Serenity, it’s by composer
Misao Senbongi, and it’s from Resident Evil 4- one of the most successful, and influential
horror games of all time. Also it has by far the most suplexes per minute
of any horror game in modern memory (just sayin! Just sayin!). Serenity is actually a part of a grand Resident
Evil tradition- the save room. Scrounging ammo, dodging zombies, trying to
fit a key AND a sparkplug AND a grenade launcher in your inventory at the same time, it’s
all incredibly stressful stuff. And that’s why the games, since the very
first one, have given you a respite in the save room. Take a breath, save your game, get everything
organized before you run outside again. And, since the very first Resident Evil, these
rooms have kinda had a feeling like an eye of a hurricane. You aren’t safe permanently. At some point, some point soon, you’re going
to have to brave the outside again, full of undead and puzzles and not nearly enough shotgun
ammo. But for a few precious seconds, you’re safe. This continued throughout the series; even
if games didn’t have traditional save rooms, they had something like a save theme. It speaks to a core design ethos- it can’t
be full-on horror all of the time. Ya need to give players a minute to rest. And that brings us to Resident Evil 4, also
known as baby’s first resident evil. Now I know that people say this game isn’t
traditional horror, and it’s not as scary as your fixed-camera limited-ink-roll spooks,
but when I played this as a recently bar-mitzvah’d boy, I was tense. This opening fight in the village has the
goal of pushing you to your absolute limit, and it wildly succeeds. After the near misses and last-second headshots
and [head removal], I came out of this fight literally trembling (again, I was 13). Resident Evil 4 may not be the lurking-dread
kind of scary, but it is incredibly good at making you feel on-edge, like you’re just
one missed shot away from certain death. On my umpteenth playthrough, I can game the
systems and feel totally empowered, but on my first, I found the flow of combat precarious
verging on exhausting. On my umpteenth playthrough, I know which
areas have enemies and which areas don’t. I know when I need to be on guard. On my first though? No security! I had no idea where ganados might pop up,
who might be a potential threat. Lakes aren’t safe. Lamps aren’t safe. Nothing is. This all culminates in a fight against “El
Gigante,” a brute who’s likely to home-run you right into the wall with a tree trunk
if you aren’t careful. Again, it’s not keep-me-up-at-night scary,
but it is unbelievably intense. And so to finish that fight, and then walk
down these stairs onto this secluded underground dock and hear...this...it’s a genuinely
unforgettable moment for me. It communicates, through those synthy whale
cries, actual safety. Sure, you’re in the eye of the storm, but
nothing’s going to hurt you here. I adore this series tradition. One of my favorite parts is how the theme
grows and changes over the games, from the simple synths of the first couple, to the
endless atmosphere of 4, to how the originals are changed and updated in the remakes, all
the way to Resident Evil 7, which somehow sounds like a decaying acoustic deconstruction
of the first. It’s brilliant. I also find it fascinating that the contrast
to horror isn’t happy either, isn’t bright and bouncy. Happy music is just distorted by the scares. Instead, it’s just a return to something
like neutral, the thing presumably most needed by the characters in these traumatic situations-
and the thing most needed by a 13-year old uhh man. Resident Evil isn’t the only series that’s
discovered this, either. And here’s where things get cool, because
horror games in general have some of the most strangely beautiful tracks I’ve heard in
gaming. Is it because these games are just really
good? Well yeah. But I think there’s a throughline here too,
something deeper than just “non-scary music makes the scary stuff more scary.” There’s this kind of...longing, present
in all these tracks. A desire to return to something that maybe
hasn’t even ever existed. Look okay this is all getting very poetic
very fast, so let me put my money where my mouth is, and by money I mean “foggy nightmareville,”
because it’s time to talk about Silent Hill. I mean, have we ever been spoiled for choice
more than looking for beautiful music in Silent Hill games? There’s Promise and its reprise, everyone’s
favorite, just sad piano that’s a little too intricate to allow a full descent into
mourning. There’s the unsettlingly motivated “Rain
of Brass Petals,” a song that doesn’t even appear in Silent Hill 3, but is on the
soundtrack and more importantly feels like it understands the anxieties of these characters
perfectly. There’s the incredible “Not Tomorrow,”
which has the distinction of being quietly melancholy, maybe tinged with hopefulness,
while playing during a scene of true horror. Silent Hill’s music frequently makes the
choice to unnerve rather than outright terrify; they undercut themselves to achieve a greater
atmosphere, a choice I couldn’t respect more (and a choice I’ve already talked about
at length woops). But my favorite is what Not Tomorrow morphs
into in the next game- Silent Hill 2’s Theme of Laura. It still blows my mind that this song is from
a horror game at all. It is so many things. My friend Henry noted that it almost feels
like two tracks layered on top of each other, this acoustic base of guitar and strings drowning
in the ambiance that defines the rest of the game’s sound. But rather than these styles conflicting,
they accentuate each other- just like the bizarre combination of the original Not Tomorrow
and the grotesquerie it scores. It gets the Silent Hill sound, it walks that
tightrope so well. It’s definitely got spooky vibes, but it
also just rocks? And not in the way where it seems like it’s
trying to make the game feel “badass,” because that almost never works. Just in the way where this is like, a song
that I would actually listen to. That longing feeling though, the one I mentioned
earlier? That’s here in spades. This is probably not an experience shared
by every age group, but the general vibe of this song, the alternative-bordering-on-emo,
just hit this really specific musical memory for me. Music-analyzer extraordinaire Polyphonic hit
the nail on the head: “It feels like something that would play
at my high school dance.” Doesn’t it feel like that’s exactly the
vibe James is clinging to here? One of the false and faded glory of high school
dances, of that foggily remembered “best night of our lives”? The entire game is framed around a trip back
to a town based on the memory of one nice weekend he had with his wife, back when their
relationship was magical and the future darkness was just a speck on the horizon. When this game was made, 20 years ago, I’m
sure the tone of this song had a completely different connotation. But I, like James, can only see things through
clouded memories. This song, like the entire town, is a surprise
punch of nostalgia. It’s no surprise that Akira Yamaoka scored
essentially every Silent Hill game. He gets this series dude. He has helped define its essence. Music brings those subtextual feelings to
the surface. It’s why I use it in every minute of my
videos, and it’s certainly not unique to one genre. But it has a special power in horror, maybe
because our emotions are already so heightened, maybe because the simple act of being afraid
inherently connects us to that world better. Fearing something means that, even for a couple
minutes, that thing has power over you. And while some horror uses that power to just,
you know, keep scaring you, it can also be leveraged in a different direction- using
that built-in empathy to subvert those spooks into something even more compelling. The game Amnesia: The Dark Descent is familiar
to most gaming folks. The horror game that popularized the “no
fighting, only hiding” first person gameplay, the ~scariest game ever,~ the game that launched
a thousand screaming lets players. A lot of people have also heard of the sequel;
after all, it has one of history’s great names. AMNESIA: A MACHINE FOR PIGS But I rarely, if ever, hear this game talked
about. There are vanishingly few monster chases in
the game, it doesn’t have nearly the clickbait-ability of the first, and it’s also just...really
weird. I mean, the subtitle is A Machine for Pigs. It does not make itself easy to parse. The game takes place at the very end of 1899. You play as Oswald Mandus, a dude who wakes
up in a cage and has (wait for it) AMNESIA. As you wander around your spooky house that
periodically makes loud noises, Oswald determines that his children are stuck in the bowels
of his house, and he has to descend into the depths to find them. The “Machine for Pigs” part comes into
play as our protagonist discovers he’s got a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde thing going on. Oswald, good ol Ozzie, reliably amnesiated,
gradually figures out what’s going on with his other half- Mandus. The dude-stick with me here- took a trip to
Mexico, plundered an old temple, and found a “stone egg.” That stone egg showed him a vision of the
future so unbearably horrifying that Mandus went full Doomer, plunging all his resources
into a machine that would basically kill all of humanity because complete annihilation
would be more merciful than the 20th century. Also he killed his own children as a sacrifice
to the machine, and also because it would be kinder than them dying in World War 1. Wooooooooof. (also the machine turns people into pigs. Humans are the pigs, but also...pigs are the
pigs. That’s the name. A Machine for Pigs is what Mandus creates,
but also...the world is a machine for pigs. We are all pigs) It is a weird, fascinating game, one that
foregoes many of the horror game mainstays that its own predecessor helped create. In case you didn’t get this from the paragraph
about the guy killing his kids because of World War 1, it’s a game about psychological
horror and that chases you through the halls far more often than like, big pig dudes. Oh but there’s another thing I didn’t
mention and that’s that it’s scored by Jessica Freakin Curry. For those who don’t know, Jessica Curry
was a longtime co-head of the studio The Chinese Room, and is basically a rock star of video
game composition. Dear Esther’s remarkable score was all her
work and she both directed AND composed Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, which I can’t play
here because I’ll get demonetized but trust me when I say it is maybe the most beautiful
score to a game...ever written? Ever? It’s on spotify go listen to it please. But in between those two games, she also wrote
the score for A Machine for Pigs and did not miss the opportunity to make some truly bone-chilling
sounds. But, because she’s Jessica Curry, it also
has...this. This song, titled “Mandus,” plays over
the final section of the game, as you find the core of the giant machine you’ve been
trekking through over the last several hours. A voice pleads with you to not turn off the
machine, tries to express how awful the coming century will be, and now it’s not your Jekyll
or Hyde, it’s the machine itself, sentient enough to be utterly horrified by the future. “A house of skulls in the jungle. The innocent, the innocent, Mandus, trod and
bled and gassed and starved and beaten and murdered and enslaved. This is your coming century! They will eat them Mandus, they will make
pigs of you all” And given the content of this monologue, it
seems like the song should be extraordinarily grim. Dead kids! Mustard Gas! Nuclear Bombs! But instead you have this delicate series
of broken chords giving ways to strings and a vocal track that both just race up and down
faster and faster, almost like the industrialization Mandus and the machine have been dreading. And it’s not victorious, it’s not a defeat
of the prophecy, everything they’ve seen in the twentieth century does come to pass,
but it’s not horror either, it’s this sense of sheer inevitability, and it’s an
incredibly difficult line to walk tone-wise. How do you sell a finale in which the character’s
ultimate choice is to ensure the continuation of the World Wars and mass starvation and
all of the other cruelty humans are capable of, but by doing so also ensuring...humanity? What does that sound like?? But it’s almost silly to ask these questions,
because we know what it sounds like. Because Jessica Curry nailed it, as she always
always does. We have Mandus, as well as the following song,
“The New Century,” to beckon us into the dark. At this point you might just be thinking “great,
Jacob likes pretty songs, awesome, good job,” and you’re right I do like pretty songs,
but it’s not always enough to just throw some nice sounding music in your horror game
and call it a day. In The Evil Within, a game directed by Resident
Evil 4 mastermind Shinji Mikami, it does the same safe room trick as Resident Evil. No enemies, take a breath, inject some green
goo into your brain. But the game indicates it, not with moody
synths, but with a really familiar song: Clair de Lune. Virtually every time you hear this song, you
can zoom back to this safe asylum through a broken mirror, the song should hit that
same “eye of the hurricane” feeling as Resident Evils. And it’s...fine? I’m certainly not here to throw shade at
Debussy, the song itself is gorgeous. But it doesn’t stir the same feelings within
me as those quiet typewriter rooms, it doesn’t have the same weight as those synth-whales
slowly calling. The thing is, Clair de Lune isn’t much beyond
pretty in this game. It doesn’t really hit that nostalgia center
for me, it doesn’t yearn for a world different than the one we’re in. And I’m criticizing The Evil Within, a game
I genuinely like a lot, to set the table for a game that does this exceptionally well. You know what? A game that does almost everything exceptionally
well. Hell, it deserves its own titlecard. Flip the switch, here we go. The Evil Within 2, still helmed by Shinji
Mikami and still starring the first game’s not particularly compelling protagonist, released
3 years after the first one and sold about 25% as many copies. It also knocked my freakin socks off. This game has style. There are so many deliberate choices here,
like how utterly weak you feel, or the deliciously indulgent and twin peaks-y coffee drinking,
or the fact that nothing tells you this nightmarish wight doesn’t go down with a simple stealth
kill. Evil Within 2 feels like exactly the game
Mikami wanted to make, it is genuinely wonderful and deserves to be played. Now I’m about to spoil the story, so...do
what you will. Describing every plot twist in Evil Within
2 would be a difficult thing to do, and I’m not even gonna try. Here’s the broadest possible overview: There’s an evil corporation that controls
essentially a...VR horror world, where you lie in a bathtub and connect your brain to
this thing. They want to make this VR world...more powerful...so
they can take over the real one? I dunno it’s not important. Point is, you’re in this VR horror world. To make the horror world work, the evil corporation
needed someone who could keep it stable to be like, the base of it. And that person ends up being Sebastian’s
very young daughter, and so they kidnap her and pretend she died in a house fire. Sebastian is devastated over the loss of his
daughter while they use her to control the VR world. Still with me? No? That’s okay, it- well it’s not that important
either. Sebastian’s wife, Myra, is obsessed with
the idea that their daughter isn’t dead, and was instead captured by a shadowy organization. She joins that organization and goes inside
the VR horror world with the plan of rescuing her daughter, but when she gets there, she
kinda loses control inside the system and decides that both she and her daughter should
stay there forEVER, but then Sebastian shows up and shoots her corrupted form in the...head? question mark? a bunch of times and that brings
her back to her senses and she realizes that Sebastian should take their daughter and go,
but she has to stay behind and destroy the VR horror world from the inside. On paper, it’s...it’s not Hamlet. The first game had a similarly convoluted
plot, and I played through that whole thing without really caring about any of the characters,
and while I adored Evil Within 2’s gameplay systems and world design and setpieces, I
was feeling pretty much the same way. And then I reached the last level. I’ve already told you what happens here-
Sebastian shoots his not-wife’s glowing orange goop a bunch and then she becomes good
again. But here’s what I didn’t tell you. Chapter 16, “In Limbo,” happens in this
white void, the world crumbling in on itself and reducing back to this ashy nothingness. After a point, there’s no combat, there’s
no gameplay tension, no threat of a zombie jumping out and clawing you. It’s just this long walk to your house on
top of this hill, a house you’ve revisited many times in dreams and nightmares, a house
you’ve seen burn to the ground over and over. And all the while, this slow walk up this
hill, you’re hearing this song. It’s called “Making Your Way Home” by
composer Masatoshi Yanagi. And I mean...good lord. There is some of Serenity here from Resident
Evil 4, some of those quiet synths and otherworldly calm. I said Serenity felt like a return to zero,
and this track could have easily been that- the level is even called “In Limbo.” But instead, there’s more- these strings
layered over it, the combination of the artificial and the real just like Laura’s Theme. And for the first time in the game, I felt
the significance of this to Sebastian. Walking up this hill, towards his house that
he watched burn to the ground, to his daughter who he thought was dead and his wife who he
thought was lost, you can feel the tragic conflict here. There is a world where he just stays in this
house, back to almost-normalcy, back to a life he resigned to being lost years ago. There’s a world where he can go back to
his old life. But it’s false. And so instead, this walk up to his house
is a goodbye, to those pieces of his memory and the life he once thought he’d live,
and all the while those strings. The game knows how powerful this song is,
and brilliantly, it never lets you escape it. Throughout the game, like the first, you’ve
traveled through mirrors to a sort of alternate-dimension police station, where you level up and save
and stuff, but here, in the limbo of this last level, that police station has just crashed
into the hillside with everything else. Instead of zooming to it through a mirror,
you just walk through the door. And instead of temporarily escaping the outside
world, now it comes in with you. I want to emphasize this again; for dozens
of hours, this office has been musically and physically separate. It’s been the escape, it’s been the safe
room. It is not until the very end that it is thrust
into the story proper, and it becomes another remnant of Sebastian’s past that he’ll
have to leave behind. “When this is all over, you won’t need
me again.” “Because this will be over? Or because I’ll be dead?” “The answer is the same either way.” Is this all there in the text? I guess. But it is entirely because of the music that
this scene works. A direct confrontation with your longing for
the past, demonstrating all the hopes and dreams and loss that lives there, while simultaneously
recognizing the impossibility of that return. And what’s even better, what drives this
home as such a crowning victory of music, is that replaying the game I realized this
theme had been there the whole time. It’s literally there for the titlecard!! With that music comes that emotional weight. With that music comes that longing. It is a song that makes the entire game better. I recognize that we’ve gotten away from
“horror” here. When I started writing this, I wanted to find
a way why it was key to the genre, why these songs were so necessary to creating the atmosphere
that also was conducive to being scared. I do think there’s something there- that
horror is always a fight to return to what’s known, and these songs reflect the futility
of ever walking back the past, ever turning back what’s already happened. But I think there’s something simpler, more
fundamental going on too. These songs transcend genre, because people
aren’t genres and what these tracks make me feel is just...connection, and empathy,
and that’s not a horror thing or a video game thing or even a story thing, that’s
just art.
The Jon Bois playlist, I see Jacob Geller is a man of culture.
Jacob Geller is always a treat