Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Among the visual styles that have characterised successive eras of gaming, some have aged better than others. There’s an abiding nostalgia for pixel art, the blocky graphics that defined the home computer adventures and arcade cabinets of the 1980s and early 1990s. Even today, those games look full of personality, and their aesthetic is still adopted to bring cozy charm to games such as farming sensation Stardew Valley.The same fondness does not extend to the graphics of the era that followed, the first PlayStation generation’s lurch to crude 3D in the mid 1990s, when ugly textures were wrapped awkwardly around low-polygon models. Many see these graphics as little more than a clumsy but necessary stepping stone to the polished 3D visuals of today. Yet a growing community of indie creators are drawn to the aesthetic for its potential to frighten players. While glossy new editions of Resident Evil and Dead Space aim to terrify with HD nasties, lo-fi horror developers are showing how to get more scream for your buck.Horror is a genre that reliably attracts a devoted audience. Fans often don’t care how graphically advanced a game is, as long as it delivers the chills. One of the biggest success stories of the past decade is Five Nights at Freddy’s, a 2014 game about evading the clutches of murderous animatronics at a fast-food restaurant that spawned a dozen sequels and a movie series. That film’s production studio, Blumhouse, also known for Paranormal Activity and Get Out, recently announced its expansion into gaming, showcasing titles such as Grave Seasons, a nightmarish spin on the farming genre, and Fear The Spotlight, in which you play an asthmatic schoolgirl fleeing the aftermath of a seance gone awry.Blumhouse plans to apply the same logic to games as it does to films, offering modest budgets to creators with original ideas and hoping to score the occasional hit. As in cinema, where the likes of Peter Jackson and Kathryn Bigelow got their start directing horror, game developers also see the genre as a way to make a big impact with limited resources, pursuing their wildest ideas unfettered by creative oversight.This low barrier to entry has enabled many innovative ideas to emerge from solo horror developers and small teams. Don’t Scream asks you to explore a haunted forest, the story presented as Blair Witch Project-style found footage. The twist is that the player wears an active microphone — if they scream or gasp at any moment, they lose. Mundaun draws from the folk-horror tradition, its Alpine mysteries told in the Swiss Romansh language and drawn in dour pencil strokes, while Dredge is a fishing game with a Lovecraftian twist — there are creatures far worse than sharks awaiting in the deeps.Part of the appeal of the “haunted PS1” aesthetic of games such as Cruelty Squad or recent hit Crow Country is rooted in nostalgia. Today’s young game developers grew up playing the first generation of 3D titles. They connect this style with childhood innocence, and subverting those associations with horror imagery can be an effective way to elicit fright. There is also something inherently unsettling about this graphical style: its rough textures and janky animations are unpalatable and uncanny. Their lack of detail leaves much to the imagination, which — as the axiom goes — can conjure far worse scares than anything shown onscreen.The original generation of 1990s horror games such as Silent Hill used technical limitations to their advantage, for example filling their worlds with fog that both reduced computer processing costs and made each environment full of possible threats. Modern lo-fi horror also capitalises on the eeriness of such graphics. The Lynchian nightmare Paratopic unsettles players with garbled conversations and a character whose face won’t stay fixed to the front of his head. Iron Lung offers a superb lesson in reductionism, delivering maximum tension from the miniature space of a windowless submarine navigating an ocean of human blood. A few titles even extend their chilling grasp beyond the game file itself: Anatomy, by indie horror auteur Kitty Horrorshow, keeps forcing you to reset the game, which appears to degrade further each time you reboot it, while the MyHouse.wad mod for classic shooter Doom is a sprawling, ingenious work of horror metafiction inspired by the postmodern novel House of Leaves.Horror reflects society’s anxieties, its monsters used as metaphors for nuclear war, rampant consumerism or the perils of sexual liberation. As our most technologically advanced storytelling medium, games offer fertile ground to explore our fears around the encroaching role of technology in our lives, from the uncanniness of conducting personal relationships via screens to the existential threat posed by AI. The lo-fi scene explores these ideas at their most potent and conceptually ambitious, embracing an old aesthetic as the perfect canvas for conjuring new nightmares.
