Why Do Horror Games Sound So Beautiful?

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The Jon Bois playlist, I see Jacob Geller is a man of culture.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/functor7 📅︎︎ May 06 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Jacob Geller is always a treat

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/riflemandan 📅︎︎ May 07 2020 đź—«︎ replies
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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.
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Channel: Jacob Geller
Views: 1,003,324
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: essay, analysis, music, horror, jacob geller
Id: 6aFfN4HtjEc
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 29min 15sec (1755 seconds)
Published: Tue May 05 2020
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