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Don't tell Albert Wesker, but the real ouroboros is survival horror itself. The subgenre is a curious one, forged from fairly rigid initial parameters – fixed camera angles, inventory management, puzzles, and limited ammo – that have been grudgingly flexed slightly over the years to accommodate modernity.
When I say slightly, I do mean slightly. Aside from visual changes, like how Capcom's Resident Evil 2 Remake popularized third person over-the-shoulder perspectives, not much else has changed when it comes to the accepted shape and flow players expect from the best survival horror games.
And you know what? I like it that way. Classic survival horror has to stay classic if it wants to stand apart from the best horror games, leaning into the pressures and stresses that make it such a nailbiting way to experience terror. The push for novelty that so often gets put upon countless game developers and genres need not apply here; I'd argue that the best survival horror games don't reinvent the wheel. They chow down and regurgitate it, again and again, adding a little something new each time.
Time to feast
The Resident 2 and Resident Evil 4 remakes are masterpieces, but which is better?
Think of it like improv in video game form. Each one of the most iconic survival horrors have something in common, an unmistakable DNA that grants entrance to a long legacy of those which came before.
Games are passed up and down the food chain, accepted with an enthusiastic "yes, and" instead of having a hammer taken to them. It's an additive process that keeps each new entry fresh yet familiar.
Familiarity really is what I play survival horror for. Looking between the entire Resident Evil timeline and the best Silent Hill games, charting the successes and shortcomings across all instalments, something tends to go wrong when developers try to fix something that wasn't initially broken. That's not me saying I didn't enjoy Resident Evil 6 (an action game with zombies) or this year's Silent Hill f (a Souls-y action game with puzzles) for what they are, but what they are isn't necessarily survival horror. At least, not in the classical sense.
The reality is that I consider survival horror fans to be some of the most puritanical genre fans of them all – myself included. It takes us a long time to warm up to new ideas; we see this in the cold reception to Silent Hill: Homecoming's Resident Evil 4-style combat slant when it launched back in 2009 as the first Silent Hill game to forego fixed camera angles, only for third-person combat to become standardized and welcomed by franchise fans in Silent Hill 2 Remake. Even Resi 6 has garnered a lot more respect and appreciation in recent years, with 2021's Resident Evil Village arguably also gunning for an action-over-horror approach to add a layer of connective tissue between them.
We're a picky bunch, especially if something doesn't immediately align with what the subgenre or franchise is known for. Survival horror is a tradition, after all, and aren't traditions meant to be kept the same instead of changing constantly?
Yes, and no. Traditional survival horror still has its expected shame and form, but it doesn't need to be ritualistic. It's something that strikes me in conversation with Bloober Team – how the Polish dev's new game Cronos: The New Dawn is more than just "Dead Space at home," as lead writer Grzegorz Like says jokingly. "I don't have anything against saying that Cronos gives someone [Dead Space] vibes. It isn't a copy, though."
Urge to merge
The trick is not to imitate, but to incorporate and build upon what's already working so well.
Instead of having one single touchstone, Bloober Team draws from the broader pool of survival horror games in Cronos: The New Dawn. It's unavoidable; they're all connected anyway.
Just like Dead Space's iconic tagline urges "cut off their limbs," Cronos opts for "don't let them merge." But according to co-director Jacek Ziȩba, the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes were its closest inspirations initially. Dead Space is just one of many reference points when it comes to evolutionary gameplay approaches.
He mentions Dead Space's plasma cutter, how the game pushes the player to cut off monsters' limbs instead of going for headshots or kneecapping as "something that really changed how you play survival horror." Alan Wake 2's flashlight burning mechanic and The Callisto Protocol's tentacle-shooting shtick also got Bloober thinking about other unique gameplay twists and conditions that could make Cronos stand out while standing with genre traditions.
Survival horror is cyclical, almost cannibalistic in a way. Ziȩba sees that too. "It all wraps around," he suggests, just like the ouroboros snake I mentioned earlier. "There would not have been a Dead Space if not for Resi 4, because Dead Space is Resi 4 in space. Of course, there's more mechanics, and it's different, but that's their [Visceral Games'] backbone. That was what inspired them. So we are also inspired by what they were inspired by, and it's this crazy mix of overall inspiration."
This furnishes my whole point perfectly. No brilliant survival horror game could have existed without its predecessors. The trick is not to imitate, but to incorporate and build upon what's already working so well. With Resident Evil Requiem on the horizon alongside a slew of upcoming horror games like Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, I'll be looking for genre manipulation over genre defiance in all of them.
Give me a survival horror game that shows its roots proudly but knows how to push and pull at the right moments. Give me fresh challenges in a familiar approach, unique quirks to complicate my expectations without overdoing it for novelty's sake. Give me a survival horror game that works smarter not harder to make a statement. Curiosity killed the cat; don't let it kill my favorite video games.
Check out our Cronos: The New Dawn review to see why I love this "unabashed mash-up of survival horror greatest hits"
