And the Zombies Came to Town

I really brought out the pom-poms in my last post about Dead Space. Here is a wholly unoriginal piece of entertainment, crafted with such precision and buffed to a blindingly polished sheen, that it is really impossible dismiss it as anything but a fantastic entry into the survival horror genre.

Left 4 Dead has recently stepped into the ring of scares and made its presence known. The shock wave has hit the Xbox and PC communities with equal force and if one thing is certain, there are a lot of dollar signs headed towards Gabe Newell and Valve. But what's the big deal?

L4D stands in stark contrast to so many qualities that define Dead Space as a superlative horror experience that I'm tempted to pull out a running tally sheet of all the differences that separate them. I'll spare you the drudgery of course. After all, the superficial differences are apparent enough from the get-go: zombies versus space mutants, 4-player co-op versus single-player, action versus suspense.

Now that I think of it, it's that last dichotomy that really encapsulates the unique strengths of these two games. For all its refined controls and high-tech gadgetry, the success of Dead Space is founded on the same principles as a ride through a haunted house at the amusement park: it is tightly scripted, extremely orchestrated and often times, very predictable. That I still hold my breath or fuddle around with my controller when the scares manifest is a testament to the skill of the game's designers.

Left 4 Dead aspires to these same goals but it goes about it from a very different place, both technologically and stylistically. The game's "script" is governed by an AI-driven Director who plays a role equivalent to what a Dungeon Master would be for old pen and paper RPGs. The Director's job in L4D is to spawn zombie hordes into the level for players to fight. The pace and intensity at which it spawns in the nasties is determined by a complex formula that takes into account the players' performance, their overall health, the speed they are moving through the map, their weapons and myriad other factors. The Director's ultimate goal is to craft a challenging and different experience for the players each time they play, even if they are replaying the same map numerous times.

Qualitatively, the fluid work of the Director, combined with the constant company of your companions, AI-controlled or otherwise, makes for a game that is less about horror and more about survival. After a few play sessions, the user becomes intimately familiar with the threat, which renders them dangerous but hardly mysterious or terrifying. The familiarity of each map, designed to be played multiple times, also becomes a matter of rote memory. Additionally, winking references to pop culture and gaming as a whole are embedded as graffiti and other artifacts throughout the game's various "safe room" checkpoints. It's these sort of touches that ground the game in a very defined, self-referential space that precludes it from taking itself too seriously. If Dead Space could be compared to Ridley Scott's Alien, then Left 4 Dead can be said to share more DNA with James Cameron's Aliens and maybe with an extra strand of pre-Spiderman Sam Raimi for good measure.

And lest you forget the horror of humanity itself, Left 4 Dead goes to great length as showing us that the enemy is often not the "other" but rather the man standing watch behind your back. The scares don't come so much from the presence of ravenous zombies but from the ease with which a well-armed but uncooperative party of survivors can quickly turn into zombie gruel. "United we stand, divided we fall" is a mantra that rings all too true if you expect to have any success in Left 4 Dead.

If you've put any amount of time into Dead Space or Left 4 Dead you will not be hard-pressed to recount situations where you have felt alone in the dark. Both games use such different techniques to capture isolation, dread and horror. And both games are essential plays for horror fans of all stripes, doubly so if you are also a shooter aficionado.