Horror Game Subgenres
Monster Mansion – 1982 – Cassette Vision During the second console generation, many went back to the format of having swappable games to be sold separately, like the early days of the first generation. Epoch followed suit, allowing for a greater variety of games to be made for the same platform, being their second-gen console, the Cassette Vision. They’d release Monster Mansion in 1982, where young Taro attempts to rescue one being held… in a monster-filled mansion! You’ll need a crucifix to take out grunt monsters, who will run when they realize you’re armed, like ghosts in Pac-Man. That being said, this game is overall an example of the Donkey Kong-like genre sweeping through. 2 years later, Elevator Panic would essentially be a sequel to Monster Mansion, but with elevators. You might think, their visuals, less detailed than what was achieved with Monster Panic, but to go the opposite direction, at the same time, Sega was approaching this kind of fast-paced side-scrolling monster game in an arcade cabinet.
Monster Bash – 1982 – cabinet Monster Bash has its hero’s focus being not on the rescuing part of Donkey Kong but the defeating the antagonist part, as in this game there are 3 iconic monsters to challenge: Count Dracula’s bat-infested house, Frankenstein’s castle that you’ll find, not only has his monster freely lurking about for you to hunt, but the place is infested with wolfmen, and of course, there’s the Chameleon Man’s bug-rich, that's top-down to shake things up! Imagine Donkey Kong being able to freely move about. That’s what this game does, giving you more to keep track of like a true duel in these environments.
“Beware… playing Atari can be pretty hair-raising!”
Haunted House – (seemingly copyrighted in 1981 and released in 1982) - VCS If you’re up for a slower-paced horror game, though, this is also when Atari released quite the impactful horror game for their console. I’d preface this with a flashing light warning because 1982’s Haunted House is about exploring in the darkness with only the sound and flashes of lightning through the window, briefly illuminating the environment as well as the small illumination of a match. The idea of exploring a pitch-black house at night, infested with tarantulas!? Now that’s scary… and, when thinking of ways to only draw what’s necessary in a game, having only the player’s expressive animating eyes is an impressive idea to me. The game is about a magic urn that was the heirloom of the first family of Spirit Bay. During an earthquake in 1890, it shattered into pieces that the townsfolk believe were kept by Zachary Graves, who wasn’t very liked in the town. He was an introvert who would spend most of his life in his decaying 4-story house before passing with his residence being condemned. Urban legends that it’s haunted would emerge, but so would the tale that the scepter old man Graves carried was so he could ward off spirits, which is where you come in. You are to enter the condemned tarantula-infested house in complete darkness (some of whose rooms haven’t been entered in 50 years) and perhaps find this scepter, hoping it protects you so you can finally try to find this urn of legend.
With one hand being used to hold matches, you could only hold one thing at a time in the other. For example, having to drop the scepter to pick up a key to unlock a door. Shoulda come wearin’ pockets, or perhaps they’re full of matchbooks that are also under your arms and filling your shoes as you can light matches to your heart’s content. For a task so daring, you can be easily startled, as encountering anything can blow out your match, and anything from bats to spiders touching you can fatally scare you. Interestingly, the scepter is better than the legends say, as it will ward off anything from the one ghost to bats and spiders on the easier difficulties. There’s 9 difficulties in total, including a training mode that illuminates the entire mansion, removes the doors/keys, and only has 1 of each enemy type in the mansion. The game, in general, felt fairer than I’d expect, like the music playing notes going up in pitch when ascending stairs and notes going down in pitch when descending them. It’s also nice that the camera scrolls with you, with each floor being its own screen instead of each room being a screen to load into. After finding all the pieces of the urn, you can make a mad dash out of there to see how you scored, which takes into consideration how many matches you’ve used as well as how many of your 9 lives. Even without the advantage of the most popular home console of the second generation’s install base, I can see why this has stood the test of time as a popular horror game that I’ve seen brought up so often!
Horror vs. Scary I think the idea of Haunted House for the VCS being considered more horror than Monster Bash is an example of “horror” being used interchangeably with the word “scary,” which is something I’ve noticed more in recent years. As I’ve always known it, horror refers to the intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust, and when used as a genre, also categorizes the use of horror iconography, like using Universal Monster designs for something like Monster Bash that isn’t necessarily trying to evoke the feelings of horror but celebrate how cool its designs and settings are. A good example being that to most people, House of the Dead is not scary, but it is a horror game. I say good example because it’s one commonly agreed upon, but there’s games with much less consensus.
Lucifer’s Realm – 1981 – Atari 8-bit Lucifer’s Realm is a game where you find out your paperwork has gotten mixed up and, instead of going to heaven, you go the opposite, where you find out a former leader whose silver tongue is matched only by the devil raised the question of if the devil’s ability to get people behind him could be surpassed over the millennia of people coming in, with you entering an underworld where you might be shocked to find Satan is no longer the ruler, as he had once lost the war to a new empire. Not letting that undermine his own silver tongue, he asks you to join his rebellion in exchange for promising to fix your mistaken sentence, but how much do you trust this? Now this game seems like a dark comedy, but with the imagery you encounter, I can see why people also call it a horror game, and it is quite the horrifying situation to find yourself in, but so is Lunar Lander, and I wouldn’t consider that a horror game.
Here’s the thing. Anything can be horror to someone, which is why I never scoff at something being referred to as a horror game, though genres that refer to gameplay, I have stricter definitions for.
Action Horror Perspectives like first person are as strict as genres get. On the opposite end, the term action horror is almost meaningless, as everyone has their own arbitrary line for when a game has too much combat. Action really only means real-time when it comes to video games, and anything from Dead Ops Arcade to the original Alone in the Dark fits this.
"I got a shotgun"
Survival Horror Now survival horror is a subgenre of horror that almost lost having any definition in the 2010s after being used interchangeably by so many to just mean horror games overall. Slender: The Arrival called itself a survival horror game, and I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t call it the same subgenre of horror as Dino Crisis, and it wasn’t uncommon at the time to interpret the term survival horror to simply mean a horror game where the goal is to survive dying, labeling every horror game where you can die a survival horror game. Originally, survival horror was a genre that gained traction because they were horror games where you could fight back with satisfying combat that refreshingly distinguished survival horror from both horror games where you’re powerless and ones where you’re too powerful to worry. To make it simple, survival horror meant Resident Evil-like, and I still think that’s the best use of the term because any broadening beyond that will make it a meaningless distinction from any other type of horror game. The point of a subgenre is to specify what kind of horror you’re talking about, so do you consider a game to be a Resident Evil 1-8-like? If no, then it wouldn’t be a survival horror, and I’m glad that use of the term came back around after the 2010s… is coming back around anyway. Again, the definition of genres is subjective. The reason I’m doing this is to let you know which definition I go with so you can better understand what I mean when I use the term. Within the context of the original marketing term, “the world of survival horror” was a challenge to survive this specific gameplay style of limited ammo, healing, and even saves. As opposed to any game where you can die, it was the survival genre, as in a resource management game. The core of survival horror is how limited supplies affect the thrill of combat. Without the limited supplies, it wouldn’t be a survival horror, and without the combat, it also wouldn’t be survival horror.
AX-2: 宇宙輸送船ノストロモ (AX-2: Space Transport Nostromo) – 1981 – PC-6001 ASCII Publishing’s AX series are collections of games, with 1981’s AX-2 being alien-themed. You have Steal Alien, which is like Space Panic, but instead of the goal being to get every alien into a hole, that’s just to defend yourself as you find all the money. Dual Alien, the twist is that you’re controlling 2 people on the left and right boards simultaneously with the aliens moving independently, forcing you to strategize how every movement affects the other you. In The Woods has you exploring poisonous woods to collect diamonds, but without the ability to stop moving, it’s like navigating a car through a multi-story parking lot with no brakes. The Dante’s Inferno of AX-2’s Divine Comedy is Nostromo, where you break through walls to get material out of rooms without being touched by a seemingly invincible pursuer. This game is looked back upon more than the other games in this collection because it was sometimes called “the first survival horror game,” like Hunt the Wumpus is, though I’d lean more toward a Wumpus game holding the title because I’d consider Pac-Man a survival horror before this game. Nostromo is more of a Clocktower/Outlast-style game. Back in the 2010s, I never really heard of an accepted name for this subgenre of horror games, but nowadays, I hear them referred to as chase games the most, which makes me happy. The convenience of having more defined subgenres is to sum up what you’re looking for within a genre to sort if it’s a horror game like Ju-On, Evil Within, or White Day because if you’re in the mood for one, they’re probably not gonna scratch each other’s itch, so I find it beneficial to categorize them in different subgenres. If you want a top-down Dino Crisis, Nostromo is not it, but if you want a top-down White Day, it is.
Action Adventure Games In the tape for this article, I showed footage of the survival horror Wikipedia page to show how bloated consensus on the definition got in the 2010s, but one thing I consider to be an improvement is survival horror less being called a subgenre of action-adventure, as that might be the most unproductive label in all of video games. While action can communicate real-time, which would bar games like Hunt the Wumpus, Sweet Home, and probably the 1980 House of Usher, which technically had a form of active-time battle? To be frank, the adventure part is becoming word salad. It’s not like this is its own thing from the adventure genre either; every big place from GOG to IMDb will communicate action-adventure as something being both the action tag and adventure tag. I doubt most people see Nostromo and think ADVENT. I think when games like The Curse of Crowley Manor were referred to as adventure games, it was to communicate their main meat was their unfolding plot instead of communicating anything about gameplay. You’re a Scotland Yard detective trying to solve a case with supernatural twists happening. What the gameplay of that looks like is not described in that. Not even if the adventure ever ends, which some adventure games generate their unfolding plot indefinitely, so does adventure communicate narrative progression? Nostromo doesn’t fit that unless the unacknowledged story we make in gameplay or the existence of a premise makes every game an adventure game. Some people consider adventure to focus on exploration, which is not how I’d describe a single-screen game like Nostromo or the Uncharted trilogy’s keep-going-forward-into-the-corridor-shaped-level design. To others, the vibe of an adventure game is their MacGyver-esque puzzles, but is that how you’d describe Nostromo or Uncharted? Am I thinking too hard about this? Yes, but how useful is a label that incorporates every game from Crowley to Uncharted to Nostromo? The point of this article is to explore more productive use of subgenres, and in the case of “adventure,” I’m not sure I see a use in the label anymore. You know what I mean when I say “point-and-click game” without the word salad of “adventure” added to it. Even in the case of Crowley Manor, my whole life, I’ve seen people call “graphic adventures,” “text adventures,” and both simply “text games,” referring not to their display but their input, and I’m leaning more toward that being a far more useful description.
Dread Horror Speaking of Crowley, I’ll never forget someone saying they didn’t want to watch Nick Crowley’s videos because they were depressing-scary, which is why they like Nuke’s Top 5, which the find more their preference of light-hearted scary. Even within the subjective question of “Is a game scary?” lies the further question of “What kind of scary?” Take something like 1981’s NORAD for the Apple II, where you fend off nukes in a time of fearing WW3 would break out. I can easily see why people consider this sort of nuclear fiction to be horror. Part of horror is dread; however, The Alien for Apple II is also a management strategy game. You’re managing a research vessel where a professor tells you the alien she was working on escaped, causing a lab animal break-out! Both this and NORAD are immediate danger, whose consequences I imagine the visceralness of. Both cause tension and fear of failure to equal degrees to me, but I imagine most people see where I’m coming from in drawing a distinction between the feeling of dread in a WW3 horror and the fear of a monster movie like The Alien goes for. Both are the fear type of horror but different subgenres of fear. You might say it’s the distinction between the dread in 2024’s Mouthwashing and the dread in 2014’s Alien: Isolation.
Role-Playing Games I don’t find it useful information to ever specify if a game is an RPG because of the lack of consensus on what it means. Some people don’t consider Witcher 3 an RPG. Capcom and outlets like V-Jump called Resident Evil an RPG, like previous games retroactively called Survival Horror like Sweet Home. To different people, RPG means anything from it has experience points and leveling up like Call of Duty; the player needs to play a role in how the story unfolds like RPG of the Year award winner Detroit: Become Human; it must have stat progression, party building, and strategy like NCAA Football, which Todd Howard cited as one of his favorite RPGs. The games he’s directed put a focus on providing tools to aid players' larp in the world, like home decorating, character creation, and relationship mechanics. Maybe you’re so strict that a game needs all of the above to count as an RPG, like the long-run JRPG series Smackdown vs. Raw. I've even seen WWE2K called the most customizable RPG once. I’ve also seen a surprising many use the term “RPG” to simply mean having turn-based combat. I guess that means Pure Chess is an RPG to them while Morrowind is not, and yes, I’ve seen people not consider Morrowind an RPG. My takeaway is that while genres may be subjective, some genres have enough consensus to mean the same thing to most people, and that consensus can be regained if, at points, it may have begun to fade. Even when there is a lack of consensus, part of conversation is asking somewhat what they mean.
