Halloween rises once again next week and along with it comes the rise of a new wave of big-name survival horror games. Within the next couple of years, a number of AAA Survival horror games are going to be unearthed: The Resident Evil 4 Remake, The Silent Hill 2 Remake, Alan Wake 2, The Callisto Project, Scorn, and many more.

While a lot of these may be remakes, there’s no denying that these new releases show that the genre is thriving after years of drifting through the darkness outside of mainstream attention. Here’s a quick look at survival horror, its fall in popularity, and its current resurrection.

The Survival horror genre got its start in the late 90s with the launch of Capcom’s Resident Evil 1, the game that outright coined the term ‘survival horror’. Like most genres, there is no exact definition of what a survival horror game is but generally, it refers to a game in which the player faces a number of terrifying horrors while also needing to grapple with survival elements. A key question of survival horror is whether it’d be better to kill an enemy or try to run past them and conserve ammo. You never know when the next boss might be and you wouldn’t want to be caught with just a knife or pipe.

With Resident Evil’s popularity, there was a golden age of survival horror games during the late PS1 and PS2 era. Silent Hill was directly inspired by the success of Resident Evil but developed a supernatural psychological take on the genre to great success. Other games at the time like Fatal Frame, Eternal Darkness, Haunting Grounds, and The Suffering among others each added their own spin on the formula but kept to the same general idea. These games were frequent throughout the 2000s but by the 2010s there weren’t quite as common as they used to be. To find out why consider subscribing to our newsletter and read the full article for free just by putting your email address in the box below

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