{GameDev:Blog}

When I played Signalis last year, and when I picked up Silent Hill 2 this year, I was very impressed how effortless it was for me to progress through the game and have a lot of fun in the process. It was especially interesting for me because those games are horror games, the genre that I did not have particularly good experiences with in the past. So I decided to try to study those games a little bit to understand what makes them special.

Therefore in this article I want to present my findings about techniques of indirect guidance used in survival horrors that make that contribute to creating a cohesive and smooth journey from start to finish.

The main thing that I immediately noticed is that those games seem to often avoid using a very direct language when it comes to player guidance. Benefits of such an approach are obvious - it’s easier to immerse yourself into a game that’s not flooded with ‘to-do’ lists and magical arrows above the character's head, and it also helps build the horror atmosphere. But that creates sort of a conflict. The player should feel scared, lost, disoriented, but only to a degree that won’t sabotage the willingness to progress through the game. In both of those titles it was partially achieved by combining the direct guidance for the protagonist's main motivation, and indirect guidance for advancing towards that motivation.

The main ‘quest’ is presented at the very beginning (or right after) and it's very short, direct and clear.

Signalis: Alina Seo or Ariane Yeong (you should find out yourself ;)

Silent Hill 2: Mary Shepherd-Sunderland

After that, you are on your own.

Regarding indirect guidance, I identified a very similar approach in both titles. There are two key ingredients: level design that supports exploration and puzzles. They can work particularly well in three scenarios:

• player is encouraged to explore the levels,
• player is met with problem and is now incentivised to explore for solution,
• player understand how to solve the problem, and is now acting towards the solution,

The unknown space can be intimidating, especially in horror games, so it’s crucial to make it easier to explore. While in hindsight it may not sound like something the developer can do, since it’s ultimately the player's choice, in fact it still can be addressed through level design.

Think of it like making a questionnaire. Let’s focus on two common types of questions: open ones and multiple-choice. The open question provides ample space for personal interpretation, while the multiple-choice question offers a set of predefined options. Picture these questions: if you were to skip one, which one would you be more likely to leave blank?

Levels that lack indirect or direct guidance can cause choice paralysis or simply be confusing. To help fight those feelings, the design can:

Give a hint as of where to go:

Present a smaller space:

Or divide the bigger one into smaller chunks:

Problem solving lies at the core of any game. Almost every activity that a player can do in a video game can be interpreted as a problem. But as the word has some negative connotations, we often use terms like quests, missions, favors, etc., instead.

In survival horrors is almost always some sort of logical puzzle. It can be as simple as finding a key for a locked door, a new fuse, a word riddle, all the way up to the infamous blocked garbage chute or piano puzzle.

Making good puzzles is an extremely hard task. The puzzle should be fun, interesting, and most importantly deducible. It’s not a coincidence I mentioned the piano puzzle from Silent Hill in the previous paragraph.

The games I talk about in this article are guilty of making good but also bad ones. However, I won't analyze them here. Instead I would like to highlight a few things about puzzles that indirectly support player guidance:

• Exploration is often a key to solving a puzzle. There are rarely cases where all the information required to solve the issue are available from the go.
• While exploring for the solution to puzzle A, puzzle B or solutions to different puzzles can also be presented on the way. That gives the player the next objective to tackle once the A case is solved.
• Solving the puzzle can often give a solution or a hint to another puzzle or open a new space for exploration.

Let’s take a look at examples to see how it works in practice. The levels are often divided into smaller sections. This serves the purpose of helping the player make a decision about what they should explore first. Take a big facility floor from Signalis that contains the east wing, west wing and middle section.

From the start the player is only able to explore the middle section. There they can find a key to the east wing section,

and only after fully exploring it, they can unlock the left wing section.

Silent Hill Wood Side Apartments (first part) work in similar fashion. There are 3 floors to explore. First one is initially closed, second is the one that gives the most space to explore, while third is mostly closed.

On the second floor a passage to the third floor can be unlocked

and the third floor allows the player to use stairwell to reach the first floor

Again in the very similar fashion there are three sections that are not all accessible at once, but rather one leads to the other.

In the bigger picture this can be seen as a simple linear design, but the sections themselves are big enough to ensure that the player does not feel like they follow a thread, and rather provide a feeling of reward when one section is finished, and another one is unlocked.

The sections are filled with puzzles (and also other gameplay elements like combat and resource management) to ensure that the spaces are interesting, and to keep up the motivation to complete them. The puzzles can be divided into two categories:

• ‘low level’ which I would describe as a problem that is found and solved inside a small section.
• ‘high level’ which might be a puzzle that starts in the first section but requires completing other ones as well to be solved.

The Grandfather Clock puzzle can be an example of low level puzzle

To solve it, the player needs three items: key to room 202, flashlight, and clock key. Everything can be found in close proximity and is contained in a small section ‘floor 2’.

The Butterfly box from Signalis is a good example of ‘high level’ puzzle. In order to open the box that is found in the middle section, the key must be crafted. One half of the key can be found in the east wing and the second in the west wing.

With both types of puzzles, the sections cohesively work together, as one big challenge while also when inspected in isolation they do not feel meaningless or unrelated.

Two additional ideas that I feel makes the whole gameplay experience a bit more user friendly:

• place problems in closer proximity to the player's start location. This will work with the assumption that when exploring, the player will first search the closest space instead of going as far as they can, while skipping other areas. This way the player won’t discover meaningless items first, but will rather be met with a problem that will drive a motivation to explore further and find the solution. But of course this does not mean that exceptions to this rule cannot work.
• when providing the player with items or information that have no immediate use (example: player is working on solving puzzle A, while is provided with item for puzzle B that’s not yet discovered). It’s important to make sure that the new information cannot be misinterpreted as something that’s required to solve the current puzzle. For example if the player is looking for a solution to a locked keypad, it’s a good idea to avoid providing them with codes that can be interpreted as solution. Give them canned juice instead ;)

And that concludes my journey into the secrets of survival horror. By delving into Signalis and Silent Hill 2, I believe I've unraveled the secret sauce – a blend of direct and indirect guidance, eerie spaces, and tricky puzzles that make these games tick. Dear reader, I trust this information proves both interesting and helpful. If you have any comments or spot mistakes, I'm open to corrections, so please feel free to drop me a note. Thanks!