Thanks for sharing, Dave Brown, Jonathan Barrett, Adam Olson and gyophry (who did both Brütal Legend and Final Fantasy VII).

Some of the scariest experiences I’ve had in my life come from video games. I can remember running from the family computer room in tears after a wax skeleton in an Are You Afraid of the Dark game chased me through a basement.

My chest still gets tight whenever I hear a burst of radio static, thanks to Silent Hill.

And there is this one scene in Dead Space that gives me goose bumps whenever I think about it.

Horror in video games is more complex that what goes on in horror movies. True, the feeling of terror you’re supposed to experience is similar. Scary video games and movies both rely heavily on pacing, shocking imagery and music. However, games are an interactive experience. There are consequences for the player that nobody in a darkened movie theatre could relate to. Horror games need gameplay elements that don’t distract you, level design that leads you into danger in ways you can’t predict and art direction that plays with your head so that you buy into what you’re experiencing instead of rationalising it away as “just a game.”

Scare Tactics: Dead Space

Here’s how a game can use its gameplay, level design and art direction to utterly freak you out: see Dead Space. In this game, you’re a space mechanic stranded on a ship overrun with creepy, crawly aliens. On a superficial level, it’s no different than a zombie shoot-em-up game. However, there is so much going on at a deeper level in Dead Space that it creates a multifaceted horror experience.

For example, art director Ian Milham explains that the use of differed lighting over a setting that looks like the inside of a rib cage was a big part of making Dead Space scary. “In a horror game, when you’re walking around, you walk slower than … in a shooter game,” he says. “You look at the world a lot more intently because you don’t know where [enemies] are and you get kind of spooked out. So the ribbed motif created hard scissor-lines in the background and moving shadows — there’s a lot for the light to play across.”

The effect creates the scene that gives me goosebumps. You’re walking down a hall where all you see is harsh shadows. Then you round a corner and see a mutilated person banging their head against the wall. The light from a nearby doorway plays across the grey steel wall and the red, ragged flesh hanging from the man’s torso. The image is so shocking that for a moment you don’t realise what’s happening to this person. Then he shifts backward and slams his head against the wall so hard his skull cracks and he falls down dead. His smashed head leaves a red smear on the grey wall.

That part of the game stuck with me almost more than the creepy aliens that still retain fragments of the human bodies they took over. It’s beyond scary to me — it’s flat-out disturbing.

“Scary is the result of lot of things,” Milham says. “The first thing you’ve got to do is give the world and what happens in it consequence and reality and make it super-grounded. So … when you see something terrible, you really believe it in a way [that you don't normally believe with a video game].”

A big challenge the Dead Space team had to face was making you believe that you were powerless as the main character — even though you’re able to make him run away from danger or shoot aliens with space weapons. “One of the things I said [to the design team] is ‘No Final Fantasy effects with weapons,’” says Milham. “If you’re too fantastic with something, you don’t really believe it. All the scary stuff just kind of goes away.”

Head Games: Arkham Asylum

Here’s another game that can freak you out, even though it’s not a horror game: Batman: Arkham Asylum. In this game, you’re following a story based on familiar characters from a comic book series with an established history. Batman seems nearly invulnerable because of his high-tech gadgets and rippling muscles. But then you encounter a character called the Scarecrow who employs mind tricks to weaken Batman. OK, fine, that’s canon — but the Scarecrow level design in Arkham Asylum isn’t just playing with Batman’s head. It’s playing with yours.

“During the Scarecrow levels we wanted to provide a constant sense of tension and vulnerability, as if they’re constantly just inches from the Scarecrow’s grasp,” explains Jamie Whitworth, designer on Arkham Asylum. “We compared this to common scenes in slasher flicks when the protagonist is attempting to hide from the villain whilst both characters are in the shot and would usually end in a panic stricken dash to safety.”

But unlike a slasher flick where you’re yelling at the dumb bimbo to run or call police, you’re the one responsible for getting Batman through the levels unscathed. You see him cough and know he’s been Fear Gassed by Scarecrow. Then the lighting begins to change and the long corridor down which you’re walking skews to one side. Little by little as you walk down the hall, the pieces of the realistic setting fall away to reveal things you know can’t be true — like rain falling inside a building. But your eyes are still seeing them. The gameplay communicates to your hands that, yes, that is, in fact, a gap you can fall through in the floor. You believe the upsetting things you start to see: such as a weeping person who sometimes appears as Batman and sometimes appears as an Arkham patient, depending on the light.

“[D]ropping players directly into the surreal Scarecrow levels wouldn’t have provided the necessary set up and it was easy to lose the sense of dread when these rooms were taken out of context,” says Whitworth. “The hallucination sequences were used to chip away at the player’s confidence and sense of reality so that they were on the edge before Scarecrow even shows up.”

The overall effect is unnerving in a way that’s similar to that hallway scene in Dead Space, if ultimately a lot less disturbing.

Lingering Fear

Horror in video games is both a tangible sensation and abstract emotion. Unlike a movie, which can only appeal to a limited spectrum of those senses at a time, the horror we experience in video games can come at us both from what we see and experience and what our minds supply us with as we play. When done right, it leaves a lasting impression on a player…like a scar on the mind you worry at whenever the lights go out.

That’s probably the best tool developers have to work with when making their games scary: your own mind.

“A lot of the horror comes from not knowing what’s coming next, that sort of endless tension,” Milham says. “You set up rhythms where you do an obvious scare with obvious foreshadowing and then you do another. And then you do the foreshadowing and you don’t [scare them], and you wait a couple beats longer just long enough for them to go ‘Oh you guys, you were going to scare me and then you didn’t.’ And then… OH MY GOD!”

PIC — Scarecrow
PIC — Batman
PIC — The Ring

The mansion is set up like the board game Clue, except nobody dies. Instead, somebody breaks something and your Sim has to find out who did it by going over every inch of the mansion for clues and questioning other Sims. I know you’re thinking “Whatever, standard adventure game stuff for kids.” But, dear cynical gamer, there’s something here aimed directly at you, not at a kid.

On the second floor of the mansion, there are some portraits you can interact with. Peer at a smaller one toward the right of the collection and who should be staring back at you but Faith from Mirror’s Edge. Later, with some dedicated snooping and side mission completion, you can score an Isaac Clarke outfit from Dead Space for your secret agent Sim to wear.

Little details like this make up a lot of the MySims Agents experience. This makes sense, because the game is about becoming a star detective—and you won’t get far on that path without an eye for details like strange portraits, footprints or hair salons. Throughout the game, you level up your snooping skills by upgrading gadgets and improving personal stats like charisma. You also build out your detective agency’s headquarters and recruit other Sims to work for you.

That’s another important detail I missed in my first look: the dispatch missions. Sure, I saw one of them and wrote about it—but I didn’t grasp quite how important they were to the game as a whole. There are a total of 50 dispatch missions that you can send your recruited Sims out to solve. While a dispatch mission is in progress, your Agent Sim will receive texts on how the mission is going and sometimes a random chance card in the form of a phone call. Completing dispatch missions raises your Agent’s relationship with client. Raise a relationship high enough and you can recruit that Sim to work for you (or just dance around like a moron) in your HQ. Once you finish all the dispatch missions, you’ll get to see not one, but two alternate endings after finishing the main part of the game.

I’ve said before that I get the feeling Agents is taking the MySims series in a different direction than previous games. Before (in, say, MySims Kingdom), the series was mostly about building things and visiting familiar characters from within the series. It was isolating to the point where I was embarrassed to play MySims Racing without a child companion to use as an excuse. But now—what with Dead Space references and an actual plot—I feel like the series is moving toward a type of game that could appeal to everybody despite being designed with a younger audience in mind. Kind of like Pixar films in the Disney lineup.

MySims Agents will be released later this month.

Yes, that’s right, we’re now publishing reader reviews here on Kotaku. This is your chance to deliver sensible game purchasing advice to the rest of the Kotaku community.

And thanks to the very kind chaps at Madman Entertainment, purveyor of all kinds of cool, indie and esoteric film, the best reader review we publish each month will win a prize pack containing ten of the latest Madman DVD releases.

This review was submitted by Iain Andrew. If you’ve played Dead Space, or just want to ask Iain more about it, leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Dead Space (360, PS3, PC)

Dead Space is a survival horror third-person shooter. Set on mining spaceship Ishimura, most of the gameplay involves “dismembering” the limbs of zombies who have taken hold of the ship.

Loved
Creepy Atmosphere – Dead Space has a forbidding atmosphere that instills the classic survival horror feeling of being on the edge of your seat, keenly listening and looking for signs of anything that might go bump in the night. The creaks and moans of the ship heard almost quietly in the background make for an unsettling contrast with the heavy footfalls you make as you walk or smash boxes of supplies.

Strategic Dismemberment – While I initially thought this was somewhat of a gimmick it’s really quite a good element added to the gameplay, as it makes think about how you should kill enemies to save ammo as well as being satisfying in itself.

Hated
Backtracking – While Dead Space does contain quite a bit of backtracking, it isn’t that bad as areas have often changed considerably from your last visit.

Lack Of Enemy Types – Although you encounter quite a few enemies in the course of the game, they’re all basically the same monster. Shoot for the legs then finish them off on the ground is the strategy that works most of the time. The dismemberment mechanic was very satisfying for the first half of the game but from then on the lack of changes in the enemies makes it lose some of its thrill.

Awesome Guns – In a survival horror game I find it hard to be afraid of the enemies when I can easily dispatch them in few shots. It takes away slightly from the very good atmosphere.

Overall I loved Dead Space. It didn’t bring much new stuff to the table but ticked all the right boxes.

Reviewed by: Iain Andrew

You can have your Reader Review published on Kotaku. Send your review to us at the usual address. Make sure it’s written in the same format as above and in under 300 words – yes, we’ve upped the word limit. We’ll publish the best ones we get and the best of the month will win a Madman DVD prize pack.

The report states, “EA launched [Dead Space] in 2008 and is working on the second and third installments”. Sounds clear-cut, but this being Variety (specifically, not Variety’s games blog), you can’t take that for granted. It may be a movie writer getting their wires crossed, and one of those two games is Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii.

But hey, even if that was the case, that means there’s at least one more Dead Space game on the way. And if the Variety writer is right, well, there’s two more Dead Space games on the way.

D.J. Caruso to direct ‘Dead Space’ [Variety]

Dead Space: The Real Movie (our name, not theirs) is set to be a joint production between EA and Temple Hill producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey (Twilight, Gears of War). According to a report on Variety, Bowen & Godfrey are currently looking at writers for the film; once they settle on one, and EA are happy with the “creative direction”, the project will be shipped off to whichever studio wants to pay EA the most money.

Director D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye, Y: The Last Man) is already attached, and while this is far from a done deal at the moment (there’s a long way to go before cameras start rolling), with that kind of talent signed up it sure seems likely that we’ll see a Dead Space flick in a few year’s time.

Dead Space with less running in the dark and more chatting? And big-screen dismemberment? Yeah, it could work.

D.J. Caruso to direct ‘Dead Space’ [Variety]

Image Comics and EA are teaming up to release a comic based on Dead Space Extraction.

The comic based on the Wii-exclusive, will team up illustrator Ben Templesmith and writer Antony Johnston following their partnership on last year’s Dead Space comic.

The comic will hit shelves this September for $US3, but a limited edition version of the comic featuring exclusive cover art will be available at the EA Comic-Con booth for $US2. Better still, both Templesmith and Johnston will be on hand to sign the issues on Thursday from 3 to 4 p.m. and Friday through Sunday from 1 to 2 p.m.

The booth will also have other Dead Space merch including Isaac Clarke Unitology figurine, iPhone skins, and Dead Space art books.

“There is so much more to the Dead Space universe than we could ever fit into one game and we’re excited to be working with Image Comics again to extend the story in Dead Space Extraction,” said Steve Papoutsis, executive producer of Dead Space Extraction. “Ben and Antony did such a tremendous job with the original comic, we can’t wait for fans to get their hands on this special issue.”

EA has taken a bold step. The company is bringing a prequel to the graphically and aurally award-winning 2008 Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 space horror game Dead Space to a less capable but arguably more immersive game console this fall, th Wii.

At a recent press event in New York City, the game’s executive producer, Steve Papoutsis, let me get my hands on the thing and begin to determine whether EA made a wise move.

What Is It?
Dead Space Extraction is a Wii-exclusive prequel to Dead Space. It is slated for late September release in the U.S. Development studios Visceral Games’ and Eurcom’s on-rails first-person adventure tells the story of the infestation of the Ishimura, the mining ship upon which most of last year’s game took place. the first game was after catastrophe. This game is the catastrophe.

What We Saw
This was Kotaku’s second hands-on with Extraction. Our first Dead Space Extraction preview was in May. This new opportunity focused on the game’s seventh chapter and featured the Ishimura’s chief botanist in battle with monsters. I played co-op, though that doesn’t add n extra character to the narrative or gameplay.

How Far Along Is It?
The level I played felt complete, but the game has a little more development time before release.

What Needs Improvement?
The Graphical Callbacks: This is the risk. Dead Space Extraction may be one of the best-looking games on the Wii, but parts of the game take place in parts of the Ishimura already rendered on more advanced systems in the first game. Extraction’s chapter seven version on the hydroponics area unavoidably looks inferior to what wowed me when I was there on my PS3. Extraction fares better with its enemies, whose gangly limbs animate as they did before and just beckon to be dismembered, as is the series’ trademark act of violence. (There’s your gore, Fangoria guy!)

What Should Stay The Same?
The Controls: In my brief time with the game, I didn’t mind not being able to control my character’s movement. I can’t tell how much I’d mind on a re-play when I was experiencing the same guidance through the same levels all over again. After all, last year, I walked around the Ishimura freely. I learned that Extraction’s co-op controls will work in a few ways: Supporting a pair of Remotes and Nunchuks, or a Nunchuk/Remote combo for player one and Remote-only for player two …. or a two-player, two-Zapper configuration. I played with Remote and Nunchuk and had a good time waving the Nunchuk for melee attacks and pushing my Remote toward and away from the screen in order to have the spinning sawblade of the weapon The Ripper slice through enemies. Here’s the control config as a chart:

The Structure: I’m used to going through a Dead Space by the chapter. That returns here. I didn’t see a fancy heads-up display hovering in front of my character’s face, but cutscenes still suggested there’s a lot of story interspersed with the game’s action.

Bosses: I liked the first Dead Space’s bosses, as conventional as some of them were. They never required a lot of re-fighting and had obvious weaknesses that were fun to exploit. During my time with Extraction, I watched two other people at my demo battle a hulking mini-boss in a blazing furnace room. They used a stasis power to hurl back projectiles and then blasted weak points, avoiding their enemies’ rampages. It was simple, but in the dark, visually interesting world of Dead Space it looked fun and smartly attenuated.

The Constant Interactivity: Like any good on-rails shooter, there’s lots of stuff to shoot in this game. Sometimes to kill. Sometimes to pick up. There’s even stuff to blast in the cutscenes for those who don’t feel like listening. Shoot the background to find your targets.

Final Thoughts
EA is making a game that will visually impress any Wii owners who want a darker shooter and have never played Dead Space. But the game can’t shake the fact that it can’t look like it’s predecessor. Can a new game in the same universe have the interest in its prequel narrative and the strength of its gameplay trump graphical limitations?

That’s a big gamble for EA. So far, it looks like things are going as well as can be expected.

Gamespot reported yesterday that Visceral Games general manager Glen Schofield and COO Michael Condrey were departing EA for Activision, less than a year after the release of Schofield’s pet project Dead Space and the re-branding, under Schofield, of EA Redwood Shores as Visceral Games.

Kotaku contacted EA this morning to address not only the men’s reported departure but about the seeming trend of developers departing or reducing involvement with a company that had seemed to be improving its image as a developer-first games publisher.

“EA has been nurturing great developers for 27 years and making room for the next generation is an important part of that process,” EA’s head of corporate communications, Jeff Brown, told Kotaku via e-mail. “It takes a team to make a great game like dead space and and there’s a stunning array of talent in the Visceral studio — creative leaders who now have the opportunity to step into the spotlight and have their talent recognised.”

Activision was unable to provide comment about the reported departures for this story, but we will update when and if they do.