It was a slow, atmospheric first person horror, that tried to manipulate the player using fear as a design tool
Kinda worked too.
A lot of horror games have many locked or broken doors, invisible walls, and other things that might break immersion. Breaking immersion in horror kills the atmosphere entirely, and you could argue that invalidates the game itself to an extent. I wanted to investigate if you could use the theme to your advantage, to make the player choose to go through the left door you want them to, without even trying the right,
I spent a lot of time researching fear. That meant both playing and analyzing a lot of horror games, and looking into fear itself. I went for a mainly behaviorist approach to the psychology of fear (since we're dealing with player behavior, after all) and looked mainly at using operant conditioning to make players bend to my whim.
I came to a few conclusions
There are usually three levels of fear in games (and nearly any other media). Tension, Shock and Panic.
Tension is the creeping fear of the unknown. When you hear that tapping noise from the hallway at night, and have to draw up your courage to open the door, that's tension.
Shock is when something horrible jumps out and goes BOO. Great for getting some cheap thrills, but shouldn't be relied upon.
I'd need to use a good mix of these to keep the game flowing.
For the story and setting, I was heavily inspired by the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, who's slow, creeping narratives usually tell of an investigator stumbling on some abhorrent, occult mystery that they should have left well alone. I chose the setting of a remote asylum, set somewhere in the early 20th century, and focusing on the attempts of one of the inmates, Albert Shrewsbury, to be reunited with his dead wife.
The story is the hook that keeps the players going. Throughout the game there are a series of books, with pieces of information, reports, letters, and diaries littered as rewards for the player's progression. They also serve to give the player a bit of a breather, and help with the pacing. Most players let out a sigh of relief when they got to a new book.
There were a few rules I set down:
No Weapons
Weapons give power to the player, and let them face the monsters. I didn't want anything to be defeated by combat. It would make it more difficult to judge player behavior, and reduce the aspect of fear.
No Items
A lot of games reward player exploration by leaving items off the beaten path. I was deliberately trying to avoid this type of thing, and having items would tempt players to search every corner for goodies. One player, a diehard JRPG fan, spent the first half of the game doing this anyway, out of habit.
No Dialogue
Bad voice acting turns horror into camp. The story would be presented by what the player saw for themselves. Plus, the sense of lonely isolation adds to the atmosphere.
The level was set up as a rat maze. Essentially a haunted house, with setpieces and scares set up at various points, where i could measure the player's reaction. I wanted to avoid shock tactics, as building tension and a fearful atmosphere were key to influencing the players' behavior. A few jumps are necessary to reinforce the fear, but shouldn't be the pure focus. Compare, for example, the dank hallways of Silent Hill 2 with the monster closets of Doom3. I was aiming for something more like the former. If I did things right, the players would react as I expected, rarely straying from the path.
The level was built in UnrealEd 3, using a mixture of custom assets and ones from the game. There weren't many meshes from UT3 that fit into a 1920s asylum theme, so most of the assets inside were custom made. A bit of kismet removed the HUD and slowed the player down to suit the scale I was working at. It took a whole lot more kismet to get all the set pieces, scares, random atmospherics and events working.
On the whole, I found that the more scared a player was, the more they reacted in a predictable way. My sample size was quite small, and all of them had strange quirks in the way they played, which could be explained by looking at the types of games they usually play. One player, fond of stealth games like Thief found himself sticking to the shadows when he was scared, to avoid detection. Another was jumping at shadows based purely on the knowledge that he was playing a horror game. When a player wasn't scared, they tended to wander, further breaking the immersion. Ideally, a larger sample of players would be needed, with more attention to their gaming background, if any.
I had a lot of fun working on Fairbourne, and am proud of the way it came out, especially since the construction of the game itself had to be squashed into just over two weeks. I got some really good feedback from players, and took some really good experience from it.
And naturally, the reactions to the scares were priceless.
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