Survival Horror Grants Power

Most modern games today give a sense of extreme power to players.  Meanwhile, Survival Horror strives to leave players feeling helpless and weak.  To me, Survival Horror will be the best genre due to this.  Survival Horror tests your wits and draws out the necessity to plan out what your next step of engagement will be.

In a modern action game, you encounter enemies; blam blam, you take them out, no penalty. Either they can resupply your ammo or there is an ammo cache up ahead.  In a strange way, enemies with weapons are less dangerous than those without.  Generally, you can pick up the enemy's weapon, giving you an endless amount of firepower.

However, in most instances of Survival Horror, you're fighting against a variety of enemies without weapons to drop and resupply you with.  In the long run, a shootout with a gang of soldiers with guns is far more beneficial than an encounter with a pack of zombies, no matter what you firepower is.

In the end, this brings about thoughts of strategy regarding either party.  For seemingly harder enemies with weapon drops, it usually rolls out to shooting them til they're dead.  But with easier to kill enemies, with no drops, the player has to think whether or not the usage of necessary supplies is worth the encounter.

After a long play session, if the player successfully maintained a good inventory, the sense of power they get from this is far greater than if they had access to this power throughout the game.  For instance, in the Resident Evil REmake, you can obtain the most powerful weapon in the game fairly early.  Its easy to just take the weapon and simply destroy anything encountered once found.  The only problem is that the ammo for it is limited and hard to find.  Yet if the player doesn't give in to the temptation of early power, they can build up a substantial amount of ammunition and get through the hardest sections of the game with ease.  Walking through the difficult final area of the game feels amazing with the Magnum fully loaded, not worrying about your last shot.

Survival horror, how I see it, is the best medium draw out a sense of power in the player.  Simply introducing a rise from helplessness helps deliver a more memorable experience than an adrenaline ride down the action highway.

~Lark Dawkins

I feel like this is yelled at Dead Space 3. Great Job!

P.S Did you get the Magmun parts?