Cognition Dissemination: In Space, Everyone Can Hear You Scream

Trends tend to come and go in the video game industry, as they have since the medium rose to prominence in the 1970s and the 1980s. But the latest one among AAA developers is one of the most surprising in recent memory, at least ostensibly.

Last week’s Summer Game Fest presentation was a prolonged and largely-boring time, one of Geoff Keighley’s worst streams in the last few years. It should have been closer in presentation to a certain other stream given the level of announcements and reveals the organizers came with. But it was at its best while spotlighting a noticeable trend that a handful of developers are tackling nearly simultaneously: Outer space horror games. There’s no definitive answer for why this has suddenly emerged as a trend at this particular time, but there’s always an opportunity for hypotheses.

It’s difficult to think of horror games in an outer space setting and not think of Dead Space. Publisher EA and developer Visceral Games created the franchise during the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation, which spawned three installments. It also died in the same generation with a third game that made changes to the gameplay style (it was co-op focused instead of a single-player experience like previous games) and came with other alterations fans didn’t like, resulting in sales and reception that put the series on ice. There didn’t appear to be any chance of it returning after Visceral was shuttered in 2017, but EA Motive is taking a good stab at a remake of the first game for current-generation consoles. It wouldn’t be fair to count this title as part of the trend of big-budget outer space horror games because this franchise largely established it.

Just the same, this also shouldn’t apply to The Callisto Protocol, an outer space horror game developed by several staffers involved with the older Dead Space games when they were staffed at Visceral. The game received its first gameplay demo at SGF, which hit all the notes a horror game of this type should. It’s just a funny coincidence that it’s not only coming alongside other games in this survival horror subgenre, but nearly two months before the Dead Space remake is set to release. At least there’s little chance of this game being overshadowed by the remake of a game many of this title’s staffers were originally responsible for when it releases in early December. Let’s just hope it won’t get delayed.

The other games featured during SGF made this trend noticeable. There’s Fort Solis, a game developed by European studio Fallen Leaf that will involve a player character trapped in a space station, in a game inspired by (surprise) Dead Space and sci-fi film Moon. It will feature the vocal talents of Troy Baker (with no NFTs) and Roger Clark. There was also Routine, which reemerged during the SGF stream after being first teased nearly a decade ago. This is a first-person experience that occurs on a lunar base, with a design that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1980s sci-fi work. While Aliens: Dark Descent is a tactical shooter despite the all-CG reveal trailer implying it would be something a little different, it’s an adaptation from the franchise with an original installment that inspired the outer space horror games we’re seeing now. So, it counts. Those are the rules.

There is no way to definitively explain why this became a trend, but I have a good hypothesis. The gaming audience started drifting towards more expansive experiences for big-budget games compared to linear experiences in most genres during the last console generation, with serious help from developers who all wanted to make these games by the dozens with gaming platforms capable of handling open world titles in near unison. Not every developer was capable of doing this, but there have now been enough that the market is bogged down in games like these, though many of them are still selling. But it’s possible to create titles that feel open to exploration despite occurring in smaller environments, and survival horror games are the perfect genre for that.

(The Metroidvania subgenre is another good one for the concept, but there aren’t many examples of them being done in the AAA world recently outside Remedy’s Control, or Bloodborne if we’re stretching the definition of “recent.”)

A likely reason why outer space has been chosen for the settings here is because of how relatable it is to the world we’ve been living within for around the past two years. Many among us who actually believed that COVID-19 is a virus that exists followed pandemic norms by staying indoors more. We have been trapped in our own miniature space while hell was silently being unleased outside. Nothing hammers a similar feeling home in video games without being too overt like an outer space horror experience in which players are trapped in their own house of horrors with few places to safely escape to. Some of these are coming coincidentally, like the Dead Space remake and The Callisto Protocol. The others simply needed the right inspiration.

It was worth acknowledging the very possible reasons why these horror games have suddenly manifested, but it’s also worth celebrating the sheer number of them with budgets in the pipeline. Outside low-budget and indie projects (fine on their own), Capcom was carrying the survival horror genre on its back with the Resident Evil series. In addition to receiving more games in that series, we’re now getting a surplus of the aforementioned outer space titles and other potential games like whatever Konami could be cooking up with the Silent Hill series, Hideo Kojima’s potential horror game, and too many more that I’d rather fully discuss in another feature. If you like the genre in video games, it’s tough to complain about the current era.