Given that traditional horror games appear to be floundering or becoming more like standard third-person shooters, did you have specific ideas on how to reinvent the genre for the 21st century right from the start? Were there things that you definitely wanted to do or to avoid in order to stand out from the crowd or broaden the game’s appeal beyond the usual horror game fanbase?
Mikki Rautalahti: Well, Remedy had done Max Payne before, and there was really no desire to just do the same thing all over again. That was a big motivation for us, to do something that had a different tone and different gameplay experience. Honestly, I don’t know if we set out to reinvent anything. I think that kind of thing is generally determined by history, anyway.But I do know that we didn’t really set out to make a horror game – we think of it as a thriller, a tense and exciting and unpredictable journey with lots of twists and turns in the way. To a great extent, it‘s a mystery game. I know we kind of get put in the same category with horror games, and that’s not unreasonable, but that just wasn’t how we approached the project ourselves.That said, I do think we may very well appeal to people who generally stay away from scary games, because the way we handle things is very different. We’re far more about the tension than the sudden scare, and we don’t have a lot of blood and gore. There’s that classic horror game situation where you see a trail of blood, and you follow it to this room that has bodies all over the place, hanging from butcher hooks in the ceiling, the walls are painted red. And you go, “oh, this is bad, this is so goddamn bad,” and that’s a very visceral experience when you do it right. The Silent Hill games do that kind of thing particularly masterfully, I think.But we specifically didn’t want to do anything like that. That’s like being hit in the face with a hammer. You can get a really strong reaction like that, but there’s also a sort of a release of tension there, because when you’re in that situation, you know where you stand, if only for the moment. We really wanted to build the tension and keep tightening the screws in ways that are much less obvious. We wanted the threat to be more nebulous and pervasive, harder to grasp and harder to deal with.
