Interactive Horror Games: A Working Definition

I have a Google Doc that’s lived on my desktop for three years called “horror taxonomy.docx” and it is, embarrassingly, a real attempt to figure out where the boundaries are between different subgenres of horror gaming. I am the person who started that Google Doc and I am also the person who has not finished it.

This post is a stab at one corner of it: what is an interactive horror game, exactly, and how is it different from a cinematic horror game?

I’ll attempt a working answer.

Working definition

An interactive horror game is one where your input is the primary mechanism of fear. Not “your input causes fear.” Your input is fear. The QTE is the scare. The choice is the scare. The thing you do with your hands is where the horror lives.

This is different from cinematic horror, where the scare is delivered through camera and edit and music and the input is incidental. It’s different from survival horror, where the scare is environmental and your input is logistical (where do I hide, what do I shoot). It’s different from psychological horror, where the scare is internal and your input is barely relevant.

Interactive horror puts the input button on the fear. That’s the form’s central commitment.

Examples that fit the definition

Until Dawn

The “don’t move” mechanic in Until Dawn — where the game asks you to literally hold the controller still while a character hides — is the interactive horror form working at its purest. Your physical inability to keep the controller still is the fear. The game knows you’re going to twitch. The game is using your body against the character.

That’s not cinematic horror. A movie can’t ask you to hold your breath.

Outlast

The camcorder mechanic is interactive horror. Holding the night-vision button drains your battery. Putting the camera down to find more batteries leaves you in the dark. Every decision about when to look through the lens is a horror beat. Your finger on the button is the form.

Resident Evil 7 (first-person reload mechanic)

RE7’s first-person reloading — particularly in VR — turned a routine action into a horror beat. Looking down to slot a shell while a creature approaches you is the input being the fear. Hand position is the scare.

Phasmophobia

The voice-recognition system in Phasmophobia (the ghost responds to actual words you say) makes the microphone your finger on the button. Saying the ghost’s name out loud is the input. That’s pure interactive horror.

Examples that look like interactive horror but aren’t

Silent Hill 2

Despite being foundational to the modern horror game, Silent Hill 2’s horror is mostly cinematic and psychological. The combat is bad on purpose — James can’t fight — and the controls are deliberately clunky. Your input is not where the fear lives. The fear lives in the fog and the soundtrack and the writing.

Silent Hill 2 is cinematic horror with combat mechanics duct-taped to it.

The Dark Pictures Anthology

QTE-driven, choice-driven, but mechanically the input is mostly perfunctory. The choices are loaded but the moment-to-moment input rarely is the fear. The fear is the scene around the input. Cinematic horror with interactive trim.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Famously hide-and-cower horror. The input is logistical. The fear is the design. Closer to survival horror than interactive horror in my taxonomy. The sanity meter is the closest thing to input-driven fear, but even that is reactive rather than direct.

Why the distinction matters

Two reasons.

One: the form is undermarketed. Until Dawn is sold as a cinematic horror game and it’s reviewed as a cinematic horror game and most of the discourse about it is cinematic. But the reason Until Dawn is more memorable than a comparably-good horror film is that the input is doing something to you that no film can. The genre would be better understood if we named what it was.

Two: indie developers building in this lineage are mostly building cinematic horror with interactive trim. The genre has room for someone to build genuinely interactive horror — where the controller is the scare, not the scene around the scare — and I don’t see many people doing it.

Where the form is headed

VR is the obvious frontier. Resident Evil 7 in VR did something to my hands the flat-screen version couldn’t. Half-Life: Alyx isn’t horror exactly, but it’s the most input-driven game I’ve ever played, and the horror sequences in it are some of the best in the medium. Phasmophobia is a network of interactive horror beats — the input is the entire game.

VR will let interactive horror do things film can’t dream of. Your hand has to perform the unlock. Your head has to turn to see the corridor. Your voice has to say the name. The input is the fear and your body is the input device.

That’s the future I’m watching for.

What I’m trying to build

I’m a solo developer working on The Bone Game, a cinematic horror game in the Until Dawn lineage. By my own taxonomy, it’s mostly cinematic — fixed cameras, choice-driven, QTE-flavored. But there are sequences I’m building where the input is meant to be the fear: the moment where the narrator can stop telling the story and has to choose whether to keep going. The button hold that says “I will keep telling this.” The button release that says “I will not.”

If anything I wrote here resonated, you can put The Bone Game on your wishlist. The next post is the cornerstone — Cinematic Horror Games — which is the longest piece on this site. It’s where I lay out the full argument about what cinematic horror is and what it’s for.

This taxonomy post is a smaller piece of that larger argument. Pour a coffee for the next one.