What kind of game does the label “survival horror” denote? Since its inconspicuous first appearance in the original Resident Evil’s loading screen (functioning first and foremost, lest we forget, as a handy marketing catchphrase), the term has been so enthusiastically embraced and haphazardly applied as to be rendered almost meaningless in 2023. Horror gaming has witnessed multiple seismic shifts since 1996, most notably the turn to action-oriented design with the likes of The Suffering and Resident Evil 4 in the mid-2000s, as well as the rise of spooky almost-walking-simulators like SOMA in the mid-2010s.
Yet the term survival horror has expanded to such a degree that it now seems to stand in, albeit rather awkwardly, for the entirety of video game horror. Even with the caveat that borders for these kinds of labels are notoriously hard to define, survival horror remains an unusually amorphous realm, one that (as a quick search of the relevant tag on Steam will reveal) lays claim as much to first-person bloodbaths like Zombie Army Trilogy as it does moody, combat-free adventures like Visage. Still, old distinctions linger, and a clutch of recent indie survival horrors qualify their work with the word “classic”. I interviewed some of the developers to find out why - and, more importantly, what classic survival horror means.