It's another All-New Saturday Summaries coming atcha! I'm going to have to figure out if I can sustain this "all-new" joke for another year. I suspect it shouldn't have persisted beyond January, but what's done is done. You know what else is overdone? Scary games! It's Halloween! Soonish, at least!

One might argue that scary games are the most successful of all game types in conferring a very particular emotional state to its player. Many games can make you feel elated, or energized, or relaxed, or even contemplative. However, those tend to be emotions operating on a higher psychological level, and thus more subjectively, than fear: one of the most instinctual and generally unpleasant states a human being can exist in. Conveying an appropriate feeling of dread in an environment where you are perfectly safe, say in your own living room with the lights off, is something horror fiction creators have been trying to perfect for decades, if not centuries. The reason games tend to be scarier than any other medium is that they remove the passive role that the story's purveyor takes; they can't just let things happen and brace themselves accordingly, but need to take an active role in their own torment. It's a system that makes the horror all the more real, with the slight drawback that it comes with a heavy sense of inertia: unless the player is invested in the story, they're likely as not to simply refuse to proceed out of a paralyzing trepidation. If anything, horror games in VR appear to compound the apprehension and hesitation of moving forward, knowing the horror is coming but not where and how and in what form.

Now, I've been spooked silly by many a horror game in the past, but I can't really think of too many situations where I particularly enjoyed one to the extent I would register it among my favorite gaming memories. The few times I have, it was due to something extra in the game's design that either alleviated the usual tedium of backtracking and inventory management that have become tenets of the genre ever since the first Resident Evil, adding a bonus layer of gameplay that was compelling in its own right, or a unique and genius method baked into the gameplay to make the scares that much more effective. Which is why, for this week's Saturday Summary pre-amble, I want to look at a few horror games I've enjoyed in the past and what they did differently to stand out from a horde of jumpscares, zombies, and finite flashlight batteries. Ultimately, I don't think I've ever walked away from a horror game I enjoyed thinking the story and scares were amazing, but rather how the gameplay was designed in such a way that the game delivered them in a satisfying manner. There is, after all, more to creating horror fiction in this medium than simply forcing the player to be an active participant in their own pantspoopery.

1. Fatal Frame: Fatal Frame's a perfect example of what I'm talking about when I say a good horror video game can not only elevate the fear through the player's participation, but also through its own mechanics. While the Fatal Frame series does have some irritating horror game clichés - in particular, backtracking through the same environments to discover a locked door has suddenly become unlocked because you did something largely unrelated elsewhere in the same building - the core mechanics lend themselves to a clever first-person shooter format with a photography twist, where you're lining up shots of hostile ghosts to cause damage to them. Ghosts are their most vulnerable, and thus most susceptible to damage, when you are: i.e. the ghost is lunging at you, ready to strangle the life out of you. It has let its guard down at this moment, affording the player a brief opportunity to land the titular "fatal frame": an instant kill shot for all but the most obstinate spooks. However, this requires precise timing in the middle of what is effectively a jumpscare, so you can't always rely on staying focused and calm when this opportunity presents itself. Such a smart, diabolical way to test the player's timing and concentration in a terrifying situation. It's a shame the more recent entries have doubled down on the series's less positive aspects.
2. Amnesia: The Dark Descent: Frictional Games gave this idea a dry run in their Penumbra games, but the core of Amnesia's horror comes from a very real desire in a horrible situation to not look directly at your aggressors. In Amnesia's case, looking at the lamprey-like humanoids stalking the halls of its manse setting will cause both the protagonist to start freaking out, generating all sorts of unwelcome visual effects and filters that makes the game harder to play, but also attracts their attention. They instinctively know when they're being looked at and by whom, so it behooves the player to keep the first-person view pointed squarely away from them. However, this also means that you cannot be 100% sure where they are, and when it's time to start moving away from their patrol and towards your next objective, you have to be sure you're not walking directly into their path. Maybe they're walking away - the sound of increasingly distant footsteps are often enough to go on - but without a quick glance, which might expose you, you won't be fully confident that your escape will go unnoticed. It's a risk vs. reward system that works on a fundamental level - a simple matter of life or death - and ties into the psychology of a terrified person so well. That the sequel, A Machine for Pigs, didn't quite replicate how this system worked was one of the many reasons why it was a disappointment.
3. Forbidden Siren 2: This is one of the games I've been attempting to make progress with for the sake of The Top Shelf (back next week!) and is simultaneously both a joy and a chore to play through. The brainchild of some ex-Silent Hill developers, the Siren series rebalances that model so that combat is less of a viable option than ever, and the player is usually better off using the game's "sightjacking" system, which allows them to see through the eyes of their invincible antagonists to predict their movements and learn information that might help them, such as the combination to a lock. The Shibito, the zombie-like enemies of the game, retain enough sapience to go about their daily routines, but have long forgotten the reasons why: sort of expanding on the idea of Romero's zombies retaining some small neurological aspect of what they once were. This, in some ways, makes them more scary than a truly mindless foe, and also more pitiable. In addition to the sightjacking and the slightly more human monsters, Siren 2 in particular introduces an enemy variant that is more dangerous while also being weak to light, and will attack the other type of enemy (who, like us, can see better with the lights on) whenever the two meet. It's often in the player's best interest, therefore, to figure out ways to cause the two enemies to encounter each other and then escape in the commotion. This requires using light sources and the darkness around them to their utmost benefit, and the game sometimes takes on a puzzle element as you figure out which light sources to take out or turn on to best accomplish your goals. It's a smart and terrifying game, hampered only by its repetition (you often have to complete the bite-sized, character-specific scenarios multiple times) and difficulty.

Well, I'm all spooked out for today. While I'm over here dealing with the jibblies, please feel free to peruse this week's blogging (well, singular blog):

• The Indie Game of the Week feature floated wistfully over Driftmoon, a CRPG created over seven years by a Finnish couple. It's generally well-written, exploration is fun because of the way you can move objects around to solve puzzles and uncover items and secret passages, and I liked taking on each of its zones with a progress tracker that told me how many quests there were left to do. It's a barebones experience in many ways, but a great example of a breezy streamlined CRPG for someone looking for a pleasant, undemanding game from the Indie market. (For the next month and change, the Indie Game of the Week will be exclusively looking at 2017 games for last-minute GOTY list ideas, so in a sense Driftmoon was like the calm before the storm.)

Addenda

Last week saw a birthday (don't ask which number), so now I'm well-stocked for games for at least the rest of the year, barring perhaps a few impulse purchases come the Black Friday sales. I've spent a few hours with the first of these new games, Horizon: Zero Dawn, which is outlined below. Also on the docket: NieR: Automata, a game I've been anticipating for many years; Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, the newest entry in one of my all-time favorite RPG series; and Prey, which is one of those games with a divisive reception where I'm eager to see which side of the divide I will fall on. (I might have also picked up Luigi's Mansion 2 in Nintendo's Halloween sale, since I'm a big fan of the original, but I'm not sure when I'll get around to it. Soon, I hope.)

Gravity Rush 2

I talked last week about how Gravity Rush was a game that squandered its potential with its lack of imagination for gameplay challenges in a world that has an otherwise incredibly ambitious gravity-switching traversal system and bizarre story and setting, and how much of a bummer it's generally been to see that potential continue to be unexplored for its bigger and ostensibly better sequel. Really, though, what they've added to Gravity Rush 2 hasn't been a whole lot, substantively speaking. The new city, Jirga Para Lhao, is far too massive to support the handful of story and side-quests you do there, with whole districts full of floating skyscrapers or a well-to-do area of haughty nobles with one of the game's best BGM tracks (if nothing else, the music of Gravity Rush 2 is really friggin' good - it's frequently the ideal accompaniment to gliding lazily through the air) going largely underutilized. Across this enormous floating cityscape are a group of fairly mediocre side-quests, a handful of uninspired challenges along the lines of checkpoint races that were mostly carried over from the previous game, and a vast number of pink crystals that the player has to collect in their thousands in order to purchase new skills. You can spend hours hovering around collecting gems if that's something that floats your boat, so to speak, but it's not really what I would call a compelling gaming experience even as an avowed collectathon fan. With those games, you at least got totals to chase and progression meters to fill out; Gravity Rush 2 doesn't really care how many of these pink crystals you find, nor is it interested in tracking how many you have left in an area. They're just there to fill space, like so many other fixtures in the game.

The side-quests are frequently the biggest downer. Sometimes they find interesting applications for Kat's gravity switching powers, like a side-quest where you have to drum up business for a local kiosk food vendor by physically picking up people in Kat's stasis field - a telekinetic ability usually used to pick up objects to throw at enemies - and toss them towards the establishment in question. The game lampshades the "aggressive sales tactics" of this maneuver, which is cute, and equally cute is the new waitress outfit that Kat earns from completing the quest. However, so many story and side-quest objectives involve unappetizing and generic open-world tasks, like tailing someone to overhear some information or walking around a military base undetected by evading the guards before they call an alarm. The issue with some of these objectives is that they depend on mechanics that haven't been properly fleshed out: it's a classic open-world problem, where the designers try and come up with as many ideas that can fit within their framework as possible, without acknowledging that these individual components are all fairly flimsy on their own.

I'll go into what I generally call "over-optimistic open-world jank" in more detail, briefly. Grand Theft Auto, still the most recognizable example of the open-world genre, is a franchise where the focus of the game development had to be spread, more or less equally, across its many disparate elements: the level design of the city, the driving controls, the on-foot controls, the gunplay, and so on. Collectively, they're all just about effective enough to build a compelling story mission around - say, the Three Leaf Clover bank robbery from GTA IV or CJ's dalliances with the Hollywood crowd in San Andreas. However, whenever the game attempts to isolate any one aspect and turn it into its own mini-game challenge, they're often frustrating and ineffective. That's because you don't play GTA for the driving controls; you play it because you're invested in the narrative and dialogue and those driving controls, as iffy as they can be, are simply a means to that end. To wit, driving around listening to the radio or an NPC passenger before you're suddenly in a chase, or are forced to maintain your velocity because of a Speed-like bomb, or you simply abandon the car at as soon as you reach your destination. When a challenge asks you to complete a race with those controls, or drive carefully around a course, you're at the mercy of a gameplay system that couldn't be afforded a huge amount of attention, and it frequently leads to jank and irritation. Some open-world games have learned to either minimize these focused challenges, made them easy enough that the cracks don't show quite as readily, or just completely fail to anticipate that their dreams for what could be done with the engine and the resulting reality would be too far apart.

Gravity Rush 2 is definitely a case of the latter, never doing enough with its distinctive gravity-switching mechanics and instead focusing on tired old open-world missions and objectives that rarely require Kat's unique powers at all. If it's something I can do in a regular vehicle-based open-world game - say, picking up an NPC and driving them to various areas they want to visit, or eavesdropping on someone from a high vantage point - then it shouldn't get more focus in a game like Gravity Rush where so much more is possible. It's a distinct lack of imagination, as far as I'm concerned, and such a downer that the second game has not improved on these ideas but instead replicated them several times over for the sake of "more content".

That said, Gravity Rush 2 isn't completely without merit. The new photography mode is fun if fairly inconsequential, tying into one of the game's online features where players find treasure chests across the world and take pictures of them which are uploaded to help other players find them. These photos present a challenge, one that the game doesn't (and realistically can't) rate you on but you're hoping the player on the other end will appreciate, where you take a photo of the chest in such a way that its location is more obvious, perhaps by including landmarks or other recognizable elements in the background. You can also add yourself, by switching to the tripod mode and posing with your preferred costume and gesture, both of which are acquired through side-missions and the treasure chests themselves. It's a fun way to engage with other users in a mutually beneficial manner, and it's something of a shame that the game is shutting down these online features come 2018. I might advise anyone looking to play this game to get in before that deadline occurs, because those features one of the few highlights.

I like the look of the game, I really like the floating setting and the bizarre story events that result from raising above and below the cloud level, the music is fantastic, and the game and its heroine have an appealing earnestness and optimism that becomes contagious after a while. I just wish large swathes of it weren't so annoying and/or boring to play, especially for those of us who feel compelled to do everything in an open-world game. So little of its optional content is actually worth your time, ultimately, from the mining mini-game (which provides minimal returns) to the boring repeated objectives across the side-missions to the combat, which is still every bit as inaccurate and fiddly as it was in the last game. Gravity Rush 2 is in many ways a bummer, but there's a distinctiveness in its world design and a certain joyous freedom in its flying (well, gravity switching, which is effectively the same thing) mechanics that makes it worthwhile, barely. It only really falls down, both literally and figuratively, when it tries to be like every other open-world game.

Horizon Zero Dawn

This'll be a quick early impressions take, since I'm not too far into Guerrilla Games's Horizon: Zero Dawn and this Saturday Summaries update is long enough already, but I've been enjoying what I've played. The gremlin-esque nature of Child Aloy aside, I've liked every aspect the game has introduced so far: the hunting, with its weakpoint-detecting and archery and more recently the ways you can anticipate the movement of the mechanical enemies and set up traps in advance is super layered and has a difficulty curve I'm eager to start climbing; its surreal post-post-apocalyptic world that combines tribal mysticism with hulking and still functional mechanical relics of the past; the way the player shapes the character of Aloy through moral decisions that either focus on her intrinsic compassion, her resentful aggression, or her survivalist resourcefulness; the scars of an ancient apocalypse, and how Aloy's neural interface device is able to pick up informational tidbits and audio logs of a long-dead civilization that, from our perspective, is still a few hundred years away; and the stunning visuals of the game, from the way the mechanical beasts and other creatures interact with the environment to the impressive vistas that combine the natural world with the unnatural remnants of that aforementioned ancient high-tech society.

It's a game that smartly presupposes that everyone played through The Elder Scrolls games, and by extension franchises like Far Cry, as a sneaky ranger: Aloy's best strengths are her stealth and devastating arrows, both of which are given plenty of focus during the game's introductory tutorials. One quick glance at the skill trees and crafting suggests that I could always spend some time hunting particular foes for the resources and XP I need, while also being sure not to burn out early on hunting for boar bones for a new quiver upgrade when there's clearly so much more the game has yet to reveal. It's definitely the sort of game where I'm going to want to pace myself, but I'm also invested enough to follow the core storyline that I'm going to try to not let my completionist tendencies get the best of me, at least not until the story is done and I've still got half a map's worth of collectibles and side-quests to sweep up. Either way, I suspect this'll be a fixture for the Saturday Summaries for some weeks to come.