I recently started playing The Evil Within and yes, I’m about 10 years late to that party. But anyway: In the opening chapter you’re dragging your wounded and limping body through a run-down hospital that wouldn’t have gotten a permit in Silent Hill while being chased by a fat dude with a chainsaw and anger issues. You can’t defend yourself and you can’t run, you can only sneak and hide. If he catches you, he’ll turn you into minced meat really fast. It’s a tense setup with high stakes, and yet it isn’t scary. At all.

I wondered why. All the ingredients are there. In a horror film that would be one scary situation. In real life it would be a trauma-inducing nightmare. But in The Evil Within it’s just not scary, and it’s not due to the visual or audio design, because those are excellent. No, it has to do with something else. And I figured it out. It sounds counter-intuitive, but: Instant death in horror games isn’t scary.

If that sounds weird to you, then think about it. What are the consequences if you get instantly killed by the enemy? You have to retry. That’s it. You just reload a save and try again and again, until you get it right. And the more often you try the more familiar you get with the whole scenario, making it even less scary.

Now take a game like the original Resident Evil. What happens when you mess up an encounter? You’re low on health, maybe even poisoned. You’re low on ammo because you kept missing those damn Hunters. And you only have one healing item left. That sucks. Or in other words: That’s scary. It’s a situation you do not want to be in. It gives you the motivation to do better next time, and the fear that there won’t be a next time. You have tangible consequences you have to live with.

That’s not to say that instant death can’t build tension. In fact, instant death is scary in two ways. First, it’s just scary in concept. Getting killed in a single hit is a terrifying thought in any context. And secondly, it’s scary from a gamer perspective, because now you lost your progress and will have to replay the level over again. So when it comes down to practice, horror games with instant death are scary the same way that Super Mario Bros. is scary. And I’m not sure I’d call Mario an effective horror game, unless you’re talking about Lost Levels.

Would you agree? Do you know any horror games that have implemented instant death in an effective way? Let me know, I’m genuinely curious!