A Scenario
You open your eyes and you are in an abandoned meat factory, a desolate carnival, or maybe even a spooky forest. You move around this foreign environment, everything looks and feels real. While you can’t really smell anything, you hear almost everything. A few groans of something in the distance, your heart begins to pound. There is someone, or something else, in the distance. What could it be? From around a corner a maniac, a monster, or even some sort of humanoid creature lunges at you and tears you limb from limb.
Sounds exhilarating, right? For fans of Mutilated Mohawk Media, an experience like this is as valuable as gold. A fully immersive horror experience that can let you live through the most horrific sights you could imagine. Could we ever reach a state of technology where we could go in and out of horrific experiences at a whim? This week Mutilated Mohawk Media took a deep dive into the world of horror gaming, and more importantly the progress of virtual reality, to see just how far our experiences could go.
Experiencing The Horror
With major corporations dumping millions into VR entertainment systems, it isn’t hard to theorize what the future of horror gaming will be. We’ve already seen some relatively successful horror games come out for VR systems, most popularly Phasmophobia where you and a group of friends take on the role of hunting for ghosts in an investigation style game. This idea of putting players right into the midst of a horror movie scenario is so intriguing, and there is so much potential with this idea.
For instance, the visual aspect is almost there. With VR headsets we get a semi-realistic head component where it moves with your head. We also have audio sensory action with things like surround sound. What about the other senses? Primarily, the next big one that many people think we are going to achieve, is touch. So much research has been dumped into different forms of tactile gloves, haptic feedback vests, and running tracks to help you fully experience the game.
Some companies like HEAVE VR are developing gloves that allow you to feel like you are actually holding things by having built in resistance based on the item you are holding in game. While this is only a prototype, the demo shows the user picking up a fruit in game and the gloves having the correct amount of resistance to it. This has some crazy potential for the horror genre specifically. Being able to feel the resistance of the items that you have to pick up just adds another level of immersion, and the more immersed we can get would only allow for the horror factors to be greater.
Another innovation with virtual reality is the development of haptic feedback vests. These allow the users to experience sensations in the body, and the OWO’s haptic feedback vest claims that it allows the user to experience anything from being bitten by insects, getting punched, stabbed, or even getting shot. Just imagine how wild it would be to feel the monster biting into you, or feel the machete wielding maniac hack right into you. This is the level of horror gameplay that I think would be absolutely wild to play. Call me a masochist but I think being able to go right into a movie like Halloween, or Friday the 13th, and come out to tell the tale after quite literally getting hacked by the killer would be the coolest thing in the world.
With all of this new technology, it begs a serious question, what is the future of the genre? Sure, the classics will always be classics, but as VR becomes more and more immersive would studios just start transferring resources to make their movies just gaming experiences. Once we are at the technological level to go in and physically experience other worlds, why would studios not take advantage of this. Imagine actually getting to live through a Michael Myers movie, get to physically feel like you are running from Leatherface, or live (or die) through one of Jigsaw’s sadistic traps. These are all super realistic possibilities within the next decade.
I like to think of games that are out now. The biggest genre that I think will explode from this technology is one of the most popular subgenres of horror games; multiplayer. Games like Dead By Daylight, Friday the 13th, or even the Texas Chainsaw game coming out next year are games that full immersion would only help. To actually be there and experience the killer. To feel the items that you are holding or even to feel the chainsaw going through your skin would give these style of games a whole new dimension of terror.
It is crazy to think that one day the games we play will be fully immersive experiences that would be hard to distinguish from our own reality. For the fans of horror, and extreme horror, that is astounding news for us. One can only dream of the technological prowess that is to come.
To stay up to date with Mutilated Mohawk Media, follow us on our social medias. Our Instagram is here and our Twitter is here. Mutilated for life!