NFS Unbound is The Best Horror Game Ever
Hopefully that idiosyncratic title got your attention. If it didn’t, then you obviously wouldn’t be reading any further past this sentence and I’d look like a complete muppet.
But it’s true: more than Silent Hill, more than Slender: The Eight Pages, more than Dead Space and definitely more than the first Resident Evil game or its remake, I truly have never experienced on a personal level, a game more muscle-tensing and nerve-shredding than the police encounters that UK-based developer Criterion constantly sprung upon me in ‘Need for Speed: Unbound’.
You know when you play a video game like say, Zelda or Earthbound and there’s one moment (or maybe even several) that stick out and take you by surprise when they suddenly start getting all scary out of nowhere for a little bit? Just a little bit though. Then they abruptly going back to plucky courageous escapades on the open road again as if it never happened at all. Try and think back to when you played an otherwise unassuming game full of action and adventure that also snuck in a little hint of wrongness between the cracks. Maybe it was for one brief moment or an extended portion of the story, but it was just long or prominent enough to leave a lasting impression.
Now imagine if in one of those otherwise unassuming games full of action and adventure, those tiny moments of horror did not stop after that one time. Imagine if they kept creeping back in and repeating themselves over and over again, mounting with intensity until they eventually override the rest of the game they’re part of. That’s what Unbound feels like to play: this street racing game somehow managed to become commercial-grade creepy-pasta.
But then, that’s just me talking. I understand that your own personal views and experiences very likely don’t align with what I’m saying. There’s every chance that you’ve also played or been a fan of Need for Speed: Unbound and still don’t agree with me, and that’s fine. It’s all I can do to speak from my subjective personal experiences which can only stand to continue benefiting from being made aware of broader perspectives and viewpoints (and boy howdy am I still learning a great deal about that to this day). So why is Need for Speed: Unbound so special for me?
Well, it’s the first instance ever in which I actually, no joke, audibly SCREAMED while playing a video game.
I don’t mean a scream made in jest or in a fit of rage or even as a sudden temporary shock; I mean the anguished despair of a person who is powerless to do anything as Jason Vorhees walks over and swings his machete right at the head. The more I looked into what brought this scream about, the more I came to realise that this street racing game actually shares a lot of design traits in common with other horror games, many of which are canonically considered all-time classics. If I can’t convince you of this game’s merits, then at the very least I hope to make you understand. This will be the third time I’ve completely restructured this entire piece in my attempts to do just that, so I’ll keep my prattling to a minimum and get straight into it from here.
The way I’m going to present my case is by describing the gameplay and mechanics of Need for Speed: Unbound in extensive detail, what substantially sets it apart from other similar games in its own genre and then make direct comparisons between it and any games in the horror genre that fundamentally operate on similar design principles, talking about their successes and their failings in equal measure. This will provide the bulk of my piece and once it’s all out of my system, I’m going to write about how all of those established elements came together for the one actual specific sequence that made me do the big dramatic scream: the moment that solidified the status of ‘Need for Speed: Unbound’ (which I shall refer to from here on as “NFS Unbound”) as the one game that scared and terrified me the most above all others.
Without further a-doyyy, this is how a street racing game taught me about horror game design. ’tis the season to be spooky.
PIMP MY DARK RIDE
NFS Unbound starts with a lengthy in-depth playable prologue in which the player-customised avatar character, a mechanic for a parts and delivery service called Rydell’s Rides, gets to choose one of three starting vehicles to beef up for the purpose of making extra cash in street races. That’s before a colleague with eyes for greener pastures secretly opens the doors for a criminal gang to steal all the cars therein and add to their collection, leaving Rydell’s Rides in dire financial straits for the next two years. Local police by then have cracked down on public street racing, but the former colleague makes a return to announce The Grand: an event through which your player character sees a chance to win back the stolen car collection, return the vehicles to their rightful owners and make enough money to get the struggling garage/delivery/escort business back in the green again.
Also, A$AP Rocky is here.
I’ll keep this part short: the narrative is rather juvenile, but also has a sense of earnestness that feels charming enough to be somewhat endearing, even as the characters try to excuse their dangerous driving and underground gambling as an innocent past time that snooty local politicians aren’t hip enough to understand or empathise with. Aside from a heady and melancholic night-drive interlude with Rocky himself (which I actually genuinely enjoyed without a trace of irony), the story of NFS Unbound mainly serves to inform and justify what kinds of challenge events become avaiable at certain points in the game, while the interactions between characters provides the baseline amount of context required to sell it. So even though there’s not much meat to the story of NFS Unbound, at the very least it manages to provide the skeleton for a vastly more interesting progression system, and that’s all that matters for my purposes here.
The rest of NFS Unbound post-prologue takes place over the course of one month, divided up into four weeks. Every weekday, you must enter various events that appear around the open-world city, as has been the case for most mainline Need For Speed games since Underground 2. Performing well in these events earns you money and you use that money to purchase new cars and modify existing ones. Car tuning being a series tradition ever since Need For Speed Underground 1 took heavy inspiration from the earier Fast and Furious movies, you can boost any car’s performance with internal parts and external ornaments, or spruce them up aesthetically with custom artwork and pre-set visual effects. Different vehicles are divided into different classes based on their maximum potential stats, each of which are a requirement for different events. Get enough cars and enough money to be granted admission to a large three-part qualifying event for The Grand itself, each with a new car as the prize to be added to your garage collection in addition to a large sum of cash. If you’re feeling especially greedy however, you can wager an extra sum of money against another specific opponent, each of whom have different payout levels depending on their predicted performance. But if you finish a race in second place, it will be for naught if your wagering rival finishes in first, costing you a significant amount of prize money as a result. If that opponent performs unexpectedly poorly however (which has happened before in plenty of races I have attended), then finishing third or fourth out of seven-or-so racers might not be that big a deal considering how much money you could stand to win.
Police are a significant part of the game as well and while you’re driving between events or even in the middle of an event in progress, they will have to be evaded and outmanoeuvred. If a chase is initiated, you cannot enter any events until you escape being arrested just long enough for the police finally get bored and return to their patrol routes.
For anyone who’s ever played even one other street racing game before, this structure will sound very standard so far. Unremarkable, even. Fairly average stuff that has been seen in plenty of other games themed around street racing, even Need for Speed Heat by Ghost Games, the direct predecessor to NFS Unbound which itself carried over a lot of ideas and mechanics. One old favourite of mine, Midnight Club Los Angeles by Rockstar San Diego, also boasted many of these same gameplay elements: car tuning, money wagering, police chasing and all.
NFS Unbound remains more firmly planted in my memories however and it goes far beyond just gambling money against other rivals. Where it truly sets itself apart and becomes genuinely terrifying for me to play is in regards to the mentality taken to the finer gameplay details, giving it a spicier, more dangerous edge. (Seriously though, watching my own replays is enough to put me on the edge of my seat)
WHAT’S UNDER THE HOOD
Much was made about the sharp stylistic swerve from the Miami Vice neon beach party vibe of NFS Heat to the gritty Spiderverse cel-shaded graffiti decals of NFS Unbound, but Unbound doesn’t just carry over some gameplay elements established by Heat; it also either expands upon or modifies them to create something much more risky and arguably less constrained in my opinion. For one thing, Unbound’s handling model is much less stiff between all vehicles found in Heat with hugely perceptible differences felt when modifying and tuning a vehicle’s performance. With Heat, both the starting vehicles and the high-powered supercar that was teased in its own playable prologue all felt incredibly rigid when trying to turn them around gentle corners. Unbound boasts car handling that reflects a keen level of experience over multiple years of game development from the work of team members plucked from some of the best racing game studios in the world and a boost system that is wildly different and far more complex compared to anything Criterion themselves have made before. That’s because this time, instead of one boost meter like what most other racing games have, there’s two.
The blue meter is for reserved nitrous boost which you activate by holding the boost button. The yellow meter is for a KERS style induction boost divided into thirds, each of which you activate by instead tapping the boost button. Where the blue boost meter is very easy to replenish so long as you keep driving even if it takes a very long time to do so, the yellow boost meter can be filled up extremely quickly but requires a lot of effort in order to keep it topped up. This is done by drifting smoothly around corners, angling into gentle curves at top gear, getting extended air time over jumps, narrowly skimming past cars at speed, driving on the wrong side of the road, totalling other competitors and even any police cars that happen to be around. This yellow boost meter cannot be expended until one, two or all three thirds of it are filled. Depending on how many of those thirds are filled at a time, you can activate more powerful boosts; either choose to use one or two thirds as soon as you fill them for a shorter and snappier boost or strive to fill it entirely for a longer and more substantial boost. The rub is that even if you do fill the yellow boost meter to one of the thirds or even all three of them, the bar doesn’t stay filled for long and will unceremoniously fade away if it’s left unused for even a few seconds.
The magic of this boost system comes from the fact that you can try to keep the yellow boost filled so long as you continue drafting, drifting, jumping and near missing, quickly chaining all these manoeuvres together in quick succession during a high speed chase. But you’ll always have the blue boost in reserve for when you’re really desperate and need some last-resort way to get out of dodge, accepting the fact that it’s probably not going to come back until much later down the road.
Bear in mind that you will need to divide your attention between maintaining your boost to stay far enough ahead of other cars while navigating the roads ahead, avoiding obstacles and making sure you don’t let the desire for more boost in itself distract you from the race at hand. You could sometimes have boost during a moment at which using it would actually be less advantageous, either because it could throw you off course and cause you to spin out (it’s happened to me plenty of times) or send you careening into a turn that’s too sharp to risk understeer.
I personally like to call this “plate-spinning” gameplay and it’s a fairly modern approach to creating tension in horror games. I observe that it’s been notably popularised by Five Nights at Freddy’s and the many contemporaries that followed its massive success. Such games will task the player with managing and correcting multiple conditions at once that each require constant maintenance. In the case of Freddy’s, it’s animatronic Chuck E. Cheese rejects wandering a children’s pizzeria late at night, all being slowly drawn towards your location. Your goal as a player is to keep them at bay by placating them, distracting them or simply halting their progress outright with measures that either can only be used sparingly, have a fixed threshold of limited use or can malfunction at any moment for any reason. Such horror games in the “plate-spinning” mold usually separate their self-contained challenges into small bitesized chunks that tend to last around five minutes or less: ideal for a quick shot of adrenaline with only the barest amount of contextual set-up frontloaded into the pre-gameplay bits.
The reason I call it “plate-spinning” horror is because attention must be divided equally between all available disciplines and the slightest amount of neglect becomes a one way street to a floor covered in shattered dinnerware. Spin one plate to ensure it stays perfectly balanced for precious extra seconds at the potential expense of ignoring the other plates that themselves also need spinning to keep from getting shattered.
It’s a great way to help sell the stakes of a horror game more quickly and concisely for the benefit of an audience whose first exposure to it will likely be through other people’s online video playthroughs. Such games are usually intended to be quite static however, never moving the player beyond a strictly limited space and only affording a very rigidly defined structure, because many developers of such games don’t have the time or resources to integrate such systems into something so layered as what Criterion has made for NFS Unbound. That’s just one reason why I find this game to be so impressive. It’s never as simple as some other games in which holding the boost button down while constantly drifting around corners is the most reliable way to stay ahead. That’s not to say that such daredevil-spirited games aren’t valid or do anything wrong, but NFS Unbound also happens to boast something that’s expressive, tactile, innovative, organic and unlike anything else I’ve experienced before or since.
But that’s just the first layer of NFS Unbound: the primary loop of collecting boost to gain speed to blow past pursuers to collect more boost. That ideal goes much deeper when we get into the secondary and tertiary loops.
MORE THAN JUST A PAINTJOB
When you begin a new day of the current week in NFS Unbound, it will be daytime and your heat level will be zero. Completing absolutely any event during the day or night will add to that heat level as represented by a row of five fire icons, with each flame signifying one level of heat. Every time a flame is filled, the police will become a more aggressive presence in the game world. Every time you retire to the garage and use your current spoils via the car dealership or parts shop, day will turn to night and vice versa when you come back outside. When it turns back to daytime, a new day will begin and your previous heat level will be reset back to zero.
This heat system was borrowed publicly from NFS Unbound’s direct predecessor: the aptly named NFS Heat, but there are some key differences and changes between the two games. In NFS Heat, events can also be restarted and retried at any time with no penalty or imposed limitations. This means that you can just keep restarting and retrying an event as many times as you please until you get the most ideal desired outcome. Meanwhile, depending on the game-wide difficulty level selected in NFS Unbound, you will always be saddled with a strictly limited number of restart/retry tokens whose stock only refreshes at the beginning of the next day. Since there are always more events than restart tokens available during both day and night combined, you will very often be required to commit yourself to whichever event you chose to enter, only taking the risk of restarting if you are truly desperate and simply accepting the outcome of a race at all other times, even if you end up losing.
Most other street racing games, including Midnight Club, NFS Most Wanted and even NFS Heat will give you your prize money as soon as you win an event, plugging it directly into your accumulated bank. Whenever you lose a wager, incur damage on your vehicle or get busted by the cops, the consequences comes directly out of that bank. No matter how much money is lost though, it can always be won back from somewhere else relatively quickly and put straight into the bank again very shortly thereafter.
NFS Unbound does things a little bit differently however. When you win money through an event or by completing challenges in the world, that money first goes into a cache (a savings account if you will) long before it’s safely secured in the bank. The cache keeps increasing as more money is won, but none of it will be added to your overall bank until you return to the garage during the night to make the switch to daytime and reset your Heat level. Until then, the cached money is entirely at risk. If you lose too many events, you can even get negative money and will need to start winning more events to get those funds back above zero.
Regardless of your funds, this would be for nought without the timed restriction of the constantly progressing weekday structure. If you get yourself caught by the police, you lose all of the money from that cache and what’s more, the game skips that day or night entirely. So if you were on a hot streak of winning events during the day but got to a high Heat level and then got busted before you could reach the garage, you lose all the money you earned while racing during the day. But if you get busted during the night, you lose all the money earned during both day and night. The game only saves your progress when you leave or return to the garage, so all of the accumulated money earned from the entire day prior will be completely wiped away if you were arrested before the end of it. Even though negative funds in your cache won’t affect your overall bank, it’s of little consolation when you are unable to retry a previous day again for another chance. You’ll just have to make up the difference by taking even more risks now. Since time is always moving forward, you are forced to be precious with your money and be more thoughtful about how it’s spent, because on any day of the week, you could lose everything you have and not be able to get it back.
All street-based events in NFS Unbound across daytime and night-time are created totally equal but in NFS Heat, where you have the freedom to choose if you want to switch between night and day before leaving the garage completely at will, there is a much more strict divide. Daytime events in NFS Heat are presented as legal local-government-sanctioned races with closed circuits and public audience stands, while night-time events are “illegal” underground races with active traffic and patrolling police units. This game’s heat system was compromised further by dividing two entire in-game currencies between the day and night. Money, which can only be earned from completing daytime events, is used to purchase and access new cars or tuning parts. But in order to actually make those new cars and tuning parts available to purchase at all, you will need to spend some of your reputation points to unlock them first, and reputation points can only be earned during the illegal night-time events. This means that it’s only possible to build up the police “heat” meter and put yourself in danger while you are racing at night.
This design approach is admittedly in service of a completely different kind of experience, but it’s also reminiscent of a trap that many horror games sometimes fall into and I happen to have a snazzy nickname for this one as well: light-switch syndrome.
When the silent protagonist of Poppy’s Playtime sees a long corridor ahead of them with no puzzles to solve using their big grabby glove gadgets, that’s the only time when they can be chased by a giant roving cuddly toy monster. When Harry Mason walks through the snow layered streets of Silent Hill Shattered Memories and the whole town becomes enveloped by sheets of frost and giant ice pillars, that’s the only time during which monsters can appear and chase him down. When the green sanity meter starts to drain in Eternal Darkness because the player hasn’t performed an execution move on cosmic monstrosities to ensure that they stay dead, that’s the only time during which its memorable fourth-wall-breaking sanity effects can occur.
At all other times though, you are all-but guaranteed to be perfectly safe, like flipping a light-switch from on to off and back again.
Unlike say, Silent Hill 4 which takes its overtly established safe spaces and slowly perverts them as the story progresses, these kinds of horror games never subvert this rule, which often deflates tension and renders them more predictable. As well-regarded as these aforementioned games are, horror games need grey areas to keep the player on edge. They should ideally, almost never be easy to predict, because that makes them easier to comprehend, easier to prepare for, easier to master and thus does the horror become diminished.
That’s where the secret spark lies for me; NFS Unbound will tempt you at every turn to raise the stakes even higher in return for a bigger reward.
The garage planner displays each in-game day of the current week along with any conditions that may be imposed upon each: how much money is up for grabs, if any special “brand new car” sweepstakes events will appear and even if the police will have an increased presence from the very beginning of that day. So instead of having your heat level reset to zero like on any other day, it could start out at level one right out of the gate. Not totally perilous at a passing glance, but it definitely starts you off on the wrong foot.
Many of the highest-paying events will either have a buy-in threshold, a heat threshold or both. This means that you can’t enter those races unless you’re rich enough and/or notorious enough. If you rank very poorly during these events, you could stand to lose money by the end of it and still have the cops chasing you after you’ve returned to the open road: truly the worst of both worlds.
On top of that, there’s also events that don’t appear on the map at all and will be offered to you out of the blue while you’re casually driving around the map. Such events will boast enormous rewards, but will only be available for a brief window of time before they disappear off the face of the earth. There’s the safehouse escort jobs where in return for an extra place to lay low, you pick up a rival on the streets and sneak them back to their garage while the cops are already out looking for them. Much later on there will be expensive smuggling missions that involve commandeering a stolen car that you will have little to no familiarity with and driving it to whichever morally dubious contact requested it back. The only problem is that the car being driven will come with a dangerously high heat level pre-attached and as soon as you pick that car up at its location, the cops will immediately ambush you right then and there, giving you barely enough time to get used to how it controls.
All of these factors combined means that most days before preparing to leave the garage will usually start out with you taking note of what you can afford to purchase in the shop and what budget you want to reach in order to purchase more stuff. Then you decide on the most ideal events to participate in, make conscious concerted strategies on what routes to take on the way and how to bounce between each event without elevating the risk and getting caught. In addition, contingency plans will need to be considered in case something goes wrong (and it usually will) before finally planning your route back to the nearest available safe house, and that’s just during the daytime when events don’t pay out as much and the heat level isn’t yet at it’s highest. You may even end up deciding to buy something before you go out at night because at the very least, your at-risk money can’t get taken away later if you’ve already spent it.
Hang on a second…making plans? Managing resources? Skirting on the knife-edge of danger? We’ve gone far beyond plate-spinning and light-switches now. That sound like more than just horror to me; that sounds like THE horror.
More specifically, SURVIVAL horror.
A LOT OF MILEAGE
You’ll probably have seen people out there who have mused at great length about why people enjoy horror, what makes for some of the most memorable examples in the genre and where their chosen priorities lie. But in order to examine why NFS Unbound left me a nervous car-wreck, I want to examine the question: how exactly do horror games scare the people who play them? Obviously there’s things like themes, imagery, pacing and presentation that all play a huge role, but then the same is also true for horror experiences in any other medium of art, be it books, video, stage or even audio. My question is how do video games in particular try to scare the person playing them by honing their systems of interactive rules to govern the kinds of choices that the player makes within the context of those systems?
Even video games that don’t set any mandated goals or boast an outright failure state have some form of positive and negative reinforcement. Falling into a pit sends you back to the start of the obstacle course. Jumping past all the hazards and running beyond the flag at the end gets you some fireworks and a little jingle to celebrate. Neglecting to water your plants means you have less produce to sell. Giving them proper nourishment allows you to save up for an extension to your house later. Running out into the open will make it easier for the big monster to catch you. Staying put and sneaking around when the time is right will get you closer to recovering your sanity. These are all ways in which a game will push back against you. To try and steer you towards the positive reinforcement and condition you into playing the “correct” way. The way in which the developer is able to get the desired ideas and experiences across in a manner that they are best able to, like a writer relating more grounded and comfortably familiar experiences to a reader in order to open them up for something potentially less grounded and totally unfamiliar.
Again, I can only talk based on my personal level of familiarity with the genre, but while there isn’t necessarily one specific way for a horror game to scare a player, there are optimal tactics for a game designer to fall back on which have been established and refined over the decades, all of which I believe revolve around one thing that I observe to be core to the most classic and memorable horror game experiences that you probably may have already guessed by now.
Risk and reward.
Fortunately for Criterion Games, “risk and reward” is pretty much their unspoken game design motto.
Criterion fiddled around with a few games under the oversight of Ubisoft and Acclaim before being put on the map with a title called Burnout: an arcade-style timed checkpoint racing game with the key twist being that opponents were not the only vehicles on the road. Instead of closed circuits or scenic mountain paths, players would race down bustling highways and busy intersections populated predominantly by other cars and even trucks, all dawdling along at 60mph while the players barrelled past at speeds that were at least twice as fast. Those cars weren’t just there for show either; if the player made contact with any other vehicle on the road at speed, they would crash and lose precious seconds to both their fellow competitors and to the constantly ticking countdown timer before they were placed back on the road.
Complicating this risk directly was the boost system. Just like NFS Unbound years later, players of Burnout were explicitly encouraged to take risks and drive recklessly. Catching air, narrowly avoiding other cars and driving against oncoming traffic would reward players with a gradually topped up boost meter that when filled all the way, would allow them to go even faster than usual, potentially blazing past the competition and right into a solid wall if they weren’t careful. However, as soon as the player lets go of the boost button, even if they still had a little bit of boost left in the tank, they’d have to fill it all the way back up to the top before they could use it again, forcing them to commit to the risk if they wanted to gain a significant edge in any of the gruelling six-to-seven-minute-long races.
I remember playing Burnout as a child and being morbidly fascinated by the car crashes themselves, which were strangely unnerving in their almost mundane lack of glamour or flair. Two vehicles collide, they swerve and come to a stop, the camera replays the impact a few times before lingering on the scene just long enough for the gravity of the situation to set in before putting the player back on that road once again.
Each sequel that followed got more elaborate and the vehicles therein became faster and more fragile until they were like glass cannons barrelling through the streets of Paradise City. Players could even clash with each-other on the road, shunting, smashing, t-boning, getting revenge, psyching each-other out and even steering their already crashed wreckage in slow motion to destroy each-other. This in turn rewarded them with an extended boost meter that they could then keep topped up by drifting around multiple corners in a row without stopping. Soon after my brother and I discovered Burnout 3 following a fateful visit to the local Tesco supermarket in the mid-2000s, our fingers were holding onto our controllers for dear life with a vice-like grip, our thumbs fused to the boost button after keeping it held for the entire duration of each white-knuckled race, our eyes rendered bloodshot from the eyewatering sense of speed and our minds replaced with dark matter from having them so thoroughly blown away.
I’ve heard it said that horror movie directors also make great action movie directors because a lot of their creative sensibilities carry a surprising amount of overlap between both genres. Their ideas on what makes a tense and engaging horror sequence can also make for a fun and exciting action sequence thanks to similar applications of blocking, pacing, editing and cinematography employed in both. See for reference, the works of John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, Satoshi Kon, James Cameron, Guillermo Del Toro, Bong Joon-ho, Ridley Scott, Gore Verbinski and James Wan: all directors who have each dabbled in elements of action or horror or action and horror in their collective bodies of work.
Games like Burnout 3 and NFS Unbound obviously don’t sell or present themselves as horror games but the thing is, anyone can make a game where you drive really fast or fire guns at dudes and call it an action game on its face. What’s special about Criterion is the way their designers foster tension through pure spontaneous gameplay moments that emerge as a result of clashing systems, forcing players to very quickly consider their options and weigh up the potential consequences of their future actions on a dime, often in the space of just a few precious seconds, if even that much. This approach I feel, lands at a very strong mid-point in the action and horror Venn diagram, with NFS Unbound steering much closer towards the middle than Burnout ever did.
Looking back then, it makes a lot of sense to me why Criterion would slowly settle in as the custodians of Need For Speed after seeing it change hands for so many years beforehand. Need For Speed itself started life as a point-to-point arcade style racing game with a high-stakes twist of its own. The racers in the first handful of Need For Speed games were also set on public roads but unlike Burnout in which each collision would lead to a deadly crash, most vehicle collisions in The Need For Speed (for that is what the first game was called back on the 3DO console) would be the potential impetus for something arguably much worse in a gameplay sense. Where most arcade-style racing games (Burnout included) would use an arbitrary time limit topped up at checkpoints to keep the pace up, players who were racing each-other and dodging traffic in The Need For Speed were also being relentlessly pursued by the police. Falling too far behind the pack and getting overtaken by a police car would lead to the affected player getting ticketed. Three tickets in one race would then in turn lead to them getting arrested and disqualified from the event outright before they were ever allowed to finish at all.
Subsequent sequels to The Need For Speed would remove, re-introduce, revise, reinterpret and build upon the cop chase formula, bringing about impromptu pursuits outside of race events with designers employing the use of helicopters, spike strips, undercover cars, radio chatter, unique notoriety systems, dedicated missions that involved working with the police themselves and in the case of Most Wanted in 2005, an entire progression system centred wholly around becoming the baddest dude who ever lived. That game also had its own police heat system like Heat and Unbound, but Most Wanted was much more intent on keeping the player out of jail and in the game as often as possible. Yes, vehicles can be impounded if the player gets three infractions against them, but those can be paid off with money that was earned and saved up from elsewhere, or with a marker earned by beating a rival in the story that cancels out one of the infractions for the low low price of free. When a player gains notoriety from the police, the heat level is attached only to the car that was being driven, meaning that the player can evade suspicion simply by picking out a different car from their garage. Not to mention, that game also has ways of allowing the player to actively reduce any heat attached to a car by keeping them in reserve for long enough periods of time or just by changing up its body kit and giving it a new paint job to throw the police off of their scent. It is true that the player may incur the wrath of police more easily than Unbound just for speeding or running a red light in their presence, but they can almost as easily shake them off with “pursuit breakers”: large fragile structures that when driven through at speed are entirely capable of stopping whole swathes of police cars in their tracks at once while the player makes a beeline for the nearest garage uncontested.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying any of this to diminish or devalue those other experiences specifically; only to use them as a baseline point of comparison. The live-action cutscenes and too-cool-for-driving-school writing and dialogue of Most Wanted would suggest a lean towards an experience closer to a Hollywood movie. That is the experience they set out to capture and based on its critical reception, it was clearly doing something right if it resonated with a lot of fans even all these years later.
My point is that Most Wanted gives the player plenty of chances to succeed because it wants them to keep getting into car chases with the police. It’s a big part of how the progression system works. If the player fails, then they don’t get to live out the punk-ish free-wheeling hot-rod rebel fantasy that it’s selling to them. It’s called “Most Wanted” for a reason. Every game should want the player to take the intended path and “succeed” in what it wants them to do, even the utterly sadistic designers and writers of ‘I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream’ knew this. Failure in NFS Unbound when compared to Most Wanted serves a different kind of fantasy. Police are something to be actively avoided as much as possible. It feels more dangerous because of how much more perilously close that danger appears. The potential setbacks are more significant in both threat and scale and there are far fewer safety nets in place to catch the player should they fall…or are there?
Let’s shift to reverse and go back one sentence: I said that NFS Unbound “feels” more dangerous. This is quite different to actually being dangerous. If it truly were dangerous, the police heat level would never reset between days at all, negative funds would incur massive amounts of debt, your vehicle would never respawn on the road after the first time it crashed and you would never get bailed out of prison upon getting busted.
That brings me to another horror gaming design tactic that I want to cover, one that exists beyond horror games themselves but is nonetheless paramount to understanding how they work and how they can go wrong. It doesn’t need a fancy nickname though.
IT’S A GHOST CAR!
I call it the illusion of danger.
Most games that seek to amplify the tension in their story will establish some very pressing life or death stakes upon the player, but what happens when the player actually fails to evade that big monster and get their virtual character killed? Simple: they restart the section alive and well ready to try again. Pretty standard stuff where many other video games are concerned, but for a horror game, death is always the least enjoyable part. To be clear, this is not necessarily because it’s horrifying (though the imagery of the deaths themselves can often be pretty grotesque), but rather because it commonly comes at the expense of pacing and immersion. Too many major progress-impeding failures leads to impatience and frustration. I get very easily aggravated when playing any video game, even ones that I consider to be all-time favourites of mine. I was playing Astro Bot soon after its release and for all the times I was floored by the set-piece moments, Easter eggs, sensory feedback and constantly changing environments, there were also a few times when I’d get confused or irritated when the “correct” way to play wasn’t made clear enough to me on my first go around or when a certain challenge would prove too overwhelming, leading to multiple attempts at beating one short section. It’s happened enough times for me in other games to seriously sour my overall impressions and I feel genuinely terrible when it happens, especially if I was really enjoying the game otherwise.
But if a horror game isn’t hard, then there’s no threat and therefore, no reason to be scared, right? Not necessarily. It’s at this point that I’d like to call attention to something for any other classic “survival horror” game fans who might be reading this: think about some of your all time favourites and recall back to the earliest point at which you remember playing them. How many times in that playthrough did your player character experience a failure state during gameplay?
How often did they die? I’ll bet good money that it didn’t actually happen that often.
The classic Silent Hill games had a manual save system where progress could only be preserved at specific areas, forcing the player to prepare themselves and make concerted plans before taking any steps forward. Every perishable item the player picked up needed to be preciously conserved, every locked door needed to be marked in order for the way forward to become clear and even the deadliest handheld weapons couldn’t be fully relied on in the hands of their less-than-capable every-day protagonists. Despite all of this though, I can only vaguely remember two times total when I actually game-over’d while playing Silent Hill 2 for my first ever playthrough (the original version on PlayStation 2, that is). On my second playthrough, it only happened once. I can’t even remember the circumstances that led to me dying, but since none of my failures negatively affected my impressions of the overall game at the time, I can safely assume that I was entirely to blame for those deaths, especially since many of the classic Silent Hill games were actually surprisingly generous with the distribution of perishable items like gun ammo and health drinks…not that the game itself would ever say that to your face. After all, why would it?
The player is still terrified, so why break that illusion for them?
Contrast this with Silent Hill 3 and most (if not, all) of my failures in that game came down to sudden and unforeseeable errors like entering a room in which the door would suddenly lock behind me with no key and leave me with a cursed bleeding mirror that did nothing but slowly kill my player character over the course of thirty tedious seconds.
It certainly helps keep one guessing and it definitely was very strange and creepy the first time it happened to me, but after reloading my save from the title screen and checking that same room a second time to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, the shock had been completely deflated, leaving only the artifice of a scare in its place. I still enjoyed that moment and the rest of the game as a whole in spite of it, but since all my failures came exclusively as a result of these arbitrary deaths, the second half of Silent Hill 3 definitely felt much weaker than the first.
There is however, one very notable and highly acclaimed exception to this rule of “don’t break the illusion with cheap deaths” and that’s Limbo by Playdead Studios.
That game has a very particular atmosphere comprised not of hair-raising dread, but of lonely angst. Death is a very common occurrence in Limbo. So common in fact, that one of the first deaths most players will see their character experience is being decapitated by a bear trap that was cunningly concealed between tall and suspiciously sharp blades of grass. Get past that and suddenly, more bear traps tied to ropes will swing towards the player from above, none of which they would ever have known to anticipate or prepare themselves for on their first playthrough.
It may sound like a bad time, but the thing about Limbo is that it’s designed entirely with trial and error gameplay in mind. Each death is of such trivial consequence that the ambient soundtrack doesn’t even stop when the player resets. The punishment for failure is at most, fifteen seconds of undone progress and three at the very least. This is a game that primes the player to become accustomed to death, as it quickly changes from being a mark of failure to a tool used for figuring out how the puzzles and hostile set-pieces function. Dying over and over is a fundamental requirement in order for the player to eventually understand what needs to be done. Far from deflating the sense of horror, this design approach actually serves to amplify it, as many other creatures succumb to their own gruesome ends that unlike the player, they don’t have the luxury of being able to undo after a quick fade to black.
Limbo is a game that put its studio and lead designers on the map and inspired many game developers across generations but mechanically speaking, it’s a die-and-retry puzzle platformer dressed up as a horror game. It’s still very good at getting its horror theme across; it wouldn’t be one of my favourite games of all time if it didn’t, but the theme does not inform the core gameplay mechanics, nor is it intended to. If it was, then Limbo as a game would simply be way more frustrating and aggravating to play. I don’t even need to create a hypothetical argument here to prove that point, because Tarsier Studios already did that themselves when making their own horror game series. My apologies to Tarsier Studios in advance, I loved Statik for PlayStation VR, but Little Nightmares as a purported horror experience is a fundamental failure, misinterpreting and mishandling a lot of ideas that Limbo brought to the fore.
Very much like Limbo, Little Nightmares is also a game with an ambiguous interpretive narrative through-line featuring a small child as the protagonist navigating a world of horrors by pushing and pulling objects around to figure out what they do while escaping from some very deadly and intimidatingly large gangly creatures whose only ambition is to see that small child die increasingly bleak and horrible deaths.
Those deaths and set-piece moments in both of the Little Nightmares games made by Tarsier Studios are more elaborate, more lavishly produced and more intense. The consequence for failure is greater with whole sequences needing to be attempted and re-completed again if the player fails to overcome just one part of them. Unfortunately, the instant-failure trial and error gameplay has not been balanced with any of this in mind. The difficulty ramps up after the first hour of play time and rarely lets up, which is entirely to its own detriment. The game expects players to retry entire monster death scenes verbatim if one mistake is made, yet also expects players to remain in the same state of urgent terror with every single restart and not become irritated or impatient after their fifth or sixth attempt of trying to grab onto a physics object with highly delicate collision detection parameters inside of a severely limited window of time.
Little Nightmares crafts an impressively well-presented nightmare reality full of genuinely unnerving threats but as a horror game, it learned entirely the wrong lessons from Limbo. It doesn’t provide enough leeway for me to become properly immersed in it before sending my player character falling into a pit thanks to a perspective-muddying camera system leading to misjudged jumping distance.
By upping the likelihood of failure without scaling the punishment to suit it, a horror game can ironically end up shooting itself in the foot, as has been documented by many who have played vastly more maligned horror games such as Outlast 2 or The Callisto Protocol and if I’ll be honest, it’s hard to imagine this not also being the case with Little Nightmares 3 or even Tarsier Studios’ spiritual successor ReAnimal. Little Nightmares is a deeply disappointing series of games that expects its audience to step through what it claims is an open passage to a terrifying and immersive experience, only to have them walk face-first into the doors of a glass house (and as the creator of the third Amy boss fight phase in Faith 64, I have very much learned to not be throwing stones in that regard).
We can even see this point of frustration rearing itself within other street racing games.
Although I remember thoroughly enjoying much of my time with Midnight Club: Los Angeles, most of my specific memories of that game blur together in a haze. It has admittedly been a long time since I played it, but I hardly even remember the police encounters in that game. I remember some of the radio chatter between named characters in the story, but not any of the police chases. In fact, I actually almost forgot that police chases were a thing in Midnight Club until I started writing this piece. The only parts I remember were the times I would lose a pink slip event which unlike the other races, could not be reset or tried again. If I failed, I would lose the car I was using and the autosave system (which has been pretty lenient otherwise) would only now override my consent for just that one moment. Similarly to the pink slip events in Juiced (who even remembers that one), it felt incredibly out of place with the rest of the game’s relatively laid back tone and was a source of immense frustration for me, mainly because if I wanted to get that car back, I would need to spend more time and money sprucing up another car from scratch just for another chance to race against the person who already beat me once before. With how egregious the rubber-band AI was in that game, I decided it wasn’t worth the bother.
Ideally, a designer should want the player to feel intimidated, but not completely overwhelmed either. I sang my praises for “plate-spinning” horror earlier, but it seems some developers of those games apparently feel an urgent need to up the ante in order to stand out from the crowd, much like how almost any game that seeks to ape Dark Souls is quietly expected to be larger, more obtuse and more difficult than any similar game that came before it.
This might not be a problem if you surround yourself with these kinds of games on a regular basis, but it can limit a game’s appeal beyond a core demographic that’s already pre-invested in each new genre release and sometimes, even the most seasoned of genre fans have their limits. I don’t refer to moments when someone decides to put themselves through the gauntlet of a super-high difficulty run and willingly sets all the birthday party robots to maximum hostility levels. I more refer to instances such as when I would try to play say, Five Nights At Freddy’s 4 and I would hear scuttling or heavy breathing within seconds of staring a new game, feeling immense levels of stress and pressure before I could even get my head around the controls that the game only just introduced me to. At that point, I become too overstimulated to have any chance of committing myself to being scared or invest myself much in the atmosphere being built by the audio or the story. It felt like I had to force myself to shut out the rest of the world just to start playing instead of actually reaching that feeling naturally and gradually as I played. While the first Freddy’s game could also be similarly fast paced at many times, it seemed to do a much better job of laying down the stakes and setting the mood before slowly ramping up the tension as the game drew on. It did a lot with a little in spite of it’s relative short length, but each new game that has followed seems to just pile on the “more” part.
As the designer of a survival horror game, if you want to make something that crafts terror and tension through raw gameplay as opposed to gnawing dread exclusively through narrative or artistic means, then you will generally want to threaten the player with a serious punishment for failure but at the same time, you want to make it a rare enough occurrence that seeing the game over screen feels not only like a special moment for the player but also like it was their own fault for not playing right. So how does one maintain the sense of threat while also making it further away than it appears? One way would perhaps be to stagger out the moment of failure and make it the result of repeated player mistakes. That way, a player can still have a chance to bounce back from those “micro-failures” with enough determination to improve and thus, the illusion of danger can be kept up for longer.
As far as horror gaming examples go, one cannot go wrong with Alien: Isolation. Developed by Creative Assembly who are more often renowned for their historic army strategy simulations in the Total War series, Alien: Isolation has players guide Ellen Ripley’s daughter around another doomed space mining vessel trying to scrounge enough supplies and intel to escape the ship and expunge the Alien completely. It’s one of those games whose easier difficulty settings are the vastly more ideal way to play, as they perfectly balance the risk of capture versus the reward of a swift escape (there’s that phrase again). The un-killable Alien will drop down from vents, wander around the area and leave entirely on its own terms with the player forced to hurriedly adapt to its presence, stay patient and keep the flamethrower in reserve for when things get too hairy. Add in the physical terminals which are the only method of saving in-game progress and there’s a lot of organic tension to be generated every time the rumble and thunk is heard from the Alien making its entrance. This too is a game that on reflection, I rarely died while playing due to anything aside from my own mistakes. Much akin to Metal Gear Solid or Hitman, it has multiple layers of failure: raising suspicion, being alerted, using up supplies to survive and slowly growing weaker and more anxious: all precursors to the finality of the full failure state itself, all of which can potentially be bounced back from to keep it at bay.
Unfortunately for Alien: Isolation, the high points don’t last long.
Things get rocky but nonetheless remain stable when the Working Joes are introduced: androids that work for the big evil company that wants to harness the alien creatures for their own dubious mega-corporate ends and will go after you for breaching protocol or impeding the company’s goals. They were a hassle but still integrated manageably enough into the emergent horror stealth set-up, so long as the player has enough charge in their stun baton or an EMP mine handy.
The bottom only drops out of Alien: Isolation around the final third of the story.
I wrote that I rarely died while playing this game, but that was a half-lie; I rarely died when the Alien itself was around ironically. It was only when the face-huggers were let loose that failure became more frustratingly common and the illusion of horror was extinguished with death after repeated death. The little spindly spider-like egg-dwellers will scuttle around on the floor and attach themselves to the player character’s face if they get too close for comfort, forcing them to carefully manoeuvre around like a literal game of grandmother’s footsteps. Not only is the player not primed or trained properly in anticipation of this moment but it also sets the tone for the rest of the game afterwards, whose set-piece chase sequences become way too strictly scripted and with too many Working Joes ruining the fun as the spaceship slowly falls apart, because how else can the developers be expected to raise the stakes?
This may be in keeping with the films somewhat; anyone who gets attacked by a face-hugger in the Alien movies will get impregnated with a baby alien and will usually end up dying anyway when it bursts out of their chest. But instead of instant failure, maybe a cue could have been taken from Argonaut Games, developer of the three-year-late movie tie-in for Alien: Resurrection. In that game, face-hugger eggs take more ammo to destroy than the face-huggers themselves, inviting more frugal players to take the risk of unavoidable attack if they want to conserve ammo. Sometimes however, even this is not an option as face-huggers will be prowling a room long before you come along. Crucially though, getting jumped by a face-hugger in Alien: Resurection does not actually result in instant death. It instead results in an outcome that provides a creative twist on the source material; the player will wake up post-face-hugging only to find that none of the other aliens or face-huggers will attack them at all, now that the player character has become a walking incubator for a ticking time bomb currently dwelling in their chest. Certain security doors will refuse to open for the player until they are able to get rid of it and if they fail to do so within a short time frame, the tiny alien bursts out of their chest and finally ends the game. Health kits will do nothing to stop it or slow it down; only a mobile extraction unit will suffice, as it alone has the ability to dissolve the fetal alien into the stomach-lining like a radiotherapy machine ionizing cancer cells away.
It’s just another example in gameplay of multiple small reversible moments of micro-failure snipping at the rope that holds back the threat of ultimate failure dangling just above the player’s head at almost all times. Despite the chances of outright failure ideally being very small in a horror game, they should never be zero. See something like Resident Evil 7 which has pursuing antagonists like Jack Baker who are demonstrably too deadly by themselves to be stopped, which means that instead of killing the player instantly, they decide to toy with their prey, sometimes even giving them healing items to keep the chase going simply because tormenting the player character is so much more fun for them. To make a U-turn back to racing games, before I ever played NFS Unbound, my first time playing a mainline series game was actually Need for Speed ProStreet. Even though that was a game which took place entirely on closed-circuits in the middle of a Gymkhana style globe-trotting festival with no police in sight whatsoever, I am still impressed to this day, as I was when I first played it, with how it framed the more true-to-life handling model that felt closer in spirit to Project Gotham Racing than Ridge Racer. The camera shake, motion blur, controller vibration, audio design, vehicle damage deformation, the just-barely-stiff-enough handling model and perspective lurch animation that occurred with every gear shift all handily communicated a much greater sense of thrilling danger and muscle-tensing inertia whether I was rocketing through the desert at mach-speed in a Bugatti Veyron or struggling around corners in a barely-modified Volkswagen Golf GTI.
So, sometimes the threat of things going totally sideways is often more effective at generating scares than the experience of actually seeing things go totally sideways, but certain developers will end up draping the illusion of danger over too much of a game so as to render it hollow and deflate the thrills entirely.
SMOKE AND WING-MIRRORS
Amnesia: The Dark Descent as a psychological horror experience, tries to make the player constantly question what they see and what they hear with a combination of densely layered, knowingly deceptive sound design and a sanity system that spawns fake monsters if the player hangs out in the dark too often. It is because of this quality that the game held a very special and viral allure when it was first released during a time when horror games were considered by large game publishers to be a dying breed. The problem with Amnesia comes when a player eventually realises that the extra layered sound effects are of no material significance and even when their character is killed by a non-illusory monster, the consequence for failure is literally non-existent. Once felled by an Ahh Real Monster, the only consequence for failure is reappearing back in the same area they appeared in with no other ailments and the monster itself deleted from existence forever and no effect on the game’s story. Even though this is the “intended” difficulty by the game’s own admission, it feels like the opposite problem to Little Nightmares, in that any risk feels more over-blown than it should be, as though the game is cheating by hiding behind the illusion.
Frictional Games did seem to take feedback onboard in multiple respects: one way was to introduce a harder difficulty that upon complete loss of player health or sanity, forces them back to a save point which itself is limited by their supply of tinder boxes used to light candles and stave off the gradual loss of sanity. What a paradox. There was also a short side-story add-on called ‘Justine’ that threw up its arms and introduced perma-death, meaning if the player died once, the entire game would close automatically and they would have to try again all the way from the beginning. Another way was to take all of the right lessons from Limbo and apply them to an eventual update for their follow-up game ‘SOMA’, which afforded players the option to immerse themselves more completely in the story without any monsters at all to get in the way of it, an add-on inspired by a popular fan-made patch for the PC version. The final way was to siphon off much of the organic survival horror gameplay elements and funnel them into the more emergent and highly praised Amnesia: The Bunker, which made the most of its large randomly arranged space beneath the trenches of No Mans Land during the Great World War, by sprinkling it with much more condensed stealth and survival elements including piles of bricks, a few bullets, a power generator, some rusty keys, a wind-up torch and one lone monster to avoid through multiple short playthroughs.
A good illusion can sometimes count for a lot, but a designer would have to make it very difficult for a player to peek behind the curtain. Many people may balk at this idea, but I fully believe that most, if not all games should try to go with the safe assumption that every player is a new player. NFS Unbound then, has plenty of new concepts to introduce and establish which goes towards justifying its lengthy and covertly low-stakes playable prologue, ensuring that one is safely accustomed to how everything works, all the ways in which one can fail and what is at stake if you do.
One scripted sequence when a new game is started is all that’s needed to lay down the rules of play and there’s no set-in-stone win or loss outcome before the title card appears. The only way that you as the player can tune your one and only starting car is by changing out the body parts and giving it a new paint job so initially, there’s not much at stake while you’re still being shown the ropes. The number of races available at any one time is small enough that one can feasibly finish all of them before moving on and your standing with the cops will never be bad enough to overwhelm you unless you actively try to get on their nerves. Even if you somehow lose all of your money, get arrested or flunk every single race, the wide-reaching consequences for your failure will be absolute zero anyway, because of the main inciting plot incident that serves to completely set back all of your progress anyway before a two-year time jump establishes a new status quo. Every single time after that “supposed-to-lose fight”, you only become as overwhelmed as you make yourself.
Thankfully however, there will usually be some level of profit gained in any event, even if you rank somewhere in the middle of the pack. The opponents, while aggressive, will hang back just enough times to allow you a chance to catch up and unless you crash at some point, certainly won’t overtake quite as aggressively as opponents in Midnight Club tended to, especially not when you’re almost about to cross the finish line anyway (yes, I am still salty). While every car is separated into tiers, they can be moved up a tier if enough upgrades are sunk into it. Reaching a higher tier by exceeding a lower one will only put it at the bottom of that new tier though, so it’s often more advisable to keep that car at the top of its own tier than move it up to the next one above unless you have absolutely nowhere else to spend serious amounts of money. That way, it can stand a much better chance against rivals in its field.
Also, despite what I said much earlier, it is possible to retry a day and make more money through events, but only if you don’t have enough money or the right vehicles to enter the Grand qualifier at the end of the week. In that case, you are sent back to a duplicate of Friday with all the money and cars that you already won to build up enough funds until you do qualify. If you still don’t have enough after all that time, then you’ll simply keep getting double or triple-Fridays until you finally have enough money and cars. The same thing even happens if you fail that weekend qualifier as well; Friday never ends.
Police in NFS Unbound are relentless, but like Alien Isolation and Metal Gear as mentioned before, there are multiple layers of failure that its entirely possible to recover from. First, there’s being spotted by a police unit. If the Heat level is not yet filled up to any level, police will not pay you the slightest amount of attention so long as you don’t cause any serious pile-ups right in front of them. Even running red lights or driving on the wrong side of the road won’t phase them unless you get them actively involved. If the heat is at level one or higher though, then you will need to make sure that you don’t land inside the police’s line of sight, or else a visibility meter will increase. The closer you are to them, the faster it fills up, so you should have just enough time to escape their radar before they get suspicious. Once you are seen though, that’s the first micro-failure.
The second micro-failure comes when you don’t manage to gain enough ground or do escape briefly only to be found again and remain in a chase for long enough to acquire another heat level with time, causing the police to send more re-enforcements to your constantly moving location.
The third micro-failure happens when your vehicle takes enough of a battering from spike strips and vehicular collisions to lose health, forcing you to proceed more carefully and pick fewer fights, even as the pursuit continues. There are repair stations littered across the map that will fix your car up to full working condition, but once you go through one, you cannot use any others to repair your car again until a few minutes have gone by. This means that you can’t simply rely on the repair stations all the time or hang around their general area for too long. Each repair station is also spaced out just far enough between each-other that it’s more viable to keep the chase going until you get to the next one across the way.
Your vehicle can also take a surprising amount of physical punishment before they’re damaged beyond repair or brought to a complete stop for just long enough to allow the police to finally bring the player into the ultimate stage of total failure. That’s the moment when the chase ends, the game skips to the next day and all the money from your temporary cache that was won from events and collectibles is completely taken away. The upshot here is that consequence for failure is incredibly steep, but it takes a very long time to actually reach that point.
If there are any problems I do have with NFS Unbound that serve to diminish the illusion though, it’s that the speed traps, drift zones, breakable billboards and other hidden collectibles are too trivial to beat once the highest tiers of vehicle become available on the last week, and the rewards for these Easter egg hunts stack up very quickly. There were even some basic delivery events early on during the first week that amounted to little more than time trials using exotic vehicles with no buy-ins and no heat penalty. I don’t think I ever saw a single police car appear during any of these events despite them taking place within the open world. Additionally, these events were also grouped with the other much more dangerous limited time events intended to tempt one towards giving into FOMO before they vanished forever. Sure, these time trials were mildly difficult but when there was virtually no risk attached, the reward for getting even the lowest time made these delivery missions a complete no-brainer.
While the street racing events like the point-to-point or circuit races still had risk attached with a purveying sense that things could very easily go wrong at any moment, the Takeover events were always my go-to option for getting money easily. Even during the first week of the whole game, I had managed to hone my proficiency with the two-tier boost system to the point that I came to relish the Takeover events. These events involved drifting around corners, bashing into wooden gates, knocking over green barrels, avoiding cones and driving into score multiplier gates to net a high score over the course of three laps with no opponents and no police in sight. Sure, completing these events would still add to my heat level, but I never once felt the risk outweighed the reward in that scenario, especially since I could bet money against one of the other three drivers who had already posted their high scores before me and I would still regularly place at the top of the podium every single time.
The subsequent pay-out for all of these side-events combined with the spare unspent cash I still had left over from last week’s qualifier had added up enough that by the second day of the final week, I had all the money I could ever need and plenty of cars to qualify for The Grand itself which at that point, felt like a foregone conclusion to me.
I must confess, this is what quietly killed most of my interest in playing NFS Unbound any further; I certainly wasn’t going to be playing it for the story at that point, especially when the game post-narrative apparently simply repeats the weekly event structure over and over again forever with no qualifiers to attend over the weekend. In addition, as someone who usually finds multiplayer more fun when I play if for its own inherent sake, I didn’t have much of a desire to build a new garage collection online with my sole motivation being to make some numbers go up. I appreciate that this game still managed to receive long-term updates in spite of its initially slow sales, but it’s not something that interests me personally.
NFS Unbound creates a lot of illusions, some of which don’t always hold up under scrutiny but at the same time, I don’t feel cheated by them. This is because while I wasn’t technically in danger for the long term, that danger still existed. Sure, the last Friday will never technically end until I have enough money and a big enough garage, but there’s also every chance that I could still keep failing repeatedly, lose progress consecutively and be forced to build it back up multiple times in a row, like a child repeating a whole year of school after failing their final assessment.
It also doesn’t invalidate the times when the game did endeavour to pull the rug out from under my feet after making me complacent beforehand; that’s also something that the best horror games have done over the years. I may have viewed the Takeover events as a complete cakewalk, but other players may view it to be one of the hardest events in the game depending on their skill level. I can also easily see other less-seasoned players having a much tougher time with the hidden collectibles and speed challenges simply for the fact that they may test skills that for whatever reason, the player is not yet fully adept with themselves. There is every chance that during an attempt to land a massive jump, they could careen into a tree or a wall or a car or worst of all, a police car.
Ultimately, it all still comes down to personal experience which as one final point, is also true of horror. Folks regard ‘Don’t Look Now’ as one of the greatest of all time even as I myself could barely follow along, regarding each tense and heady scene with utter confusion and bewildered detachment. Some people think the dated sights and sounds of the Video Board Game Atmosfear are cheesy and not at all true to life whereas for me, that’s exactly what gives the series its underrated charm.
People like to say that the stilted and awkward acting of Silent Hill 2 lends the story an ethereal dream-like quality on par with Twin Peaks by David Lynch, whereas I merely see it as just that: stilted and awkward acting. That game’s original designer may even prefer the over-the-shoulder camera perspective in the remake because it feels more grounded and intuitive than the original, whereas people like me will be enamoured by how the original game’s fixed camera conveys mood and dread through framing, directs the player without them needing to do much more than walk around and helps pace events with greater care than a camera that could allow the player to simply tell it where to look.
Need for Speed: Unbound is one of those games that will stay embedded in my thoughts for years because of how it exceeded even my basest expectations as a lifelong fan of the games put out by Criterion. I will never forget the thrill of zipping down a highway with the controller tensely clutched in my fingers as cars and concrete barriers closed in on me at light-speed. Every inward breath I take will remind me of my sighs of relief upon surviving another day, knowing that for the next half-hour, I had a whole garage of cars all for myself to paint, customise and fine-tune however I pleased. I even grew to admire the kids-in-the-playground chemistry between the custom avatar and their former accomplice in the story as they interrogate each-other over the phone, learn more about what they’ve been doing in the two years away and ultimately try to make things right again for the sake of old times. I can still project my mind back and re-experience every click, rumble and feeling of resistance in the controller itself as it reacted with a tangible tactile acknowledgement of my inputs and the game’s subsequent outputs.
Ultimately though, my favourite aspect of NFS Unbound is not the heat system, the day to night cycles, the frugal cash management, the eminently explorable open world or the absolute storm cloud of doom that was the police patrol cars.
My favourite aspect is how all of these components came together to create and inform one singular moment.
Before we get to it though, here’s my obligatory plug: I’ve written other articles and I’ve made other games, but I also want to let you know about a NEW racing game I’m working on at the moment with the creator of Tonight We Riot. It’s called TAHITIAN DREAMIN’ and we have biiig plans for it (and without spoiling, it’s also just the beginning too)!
And now, let’s get ready to scream.
Full disclosure time. It’s been almost a year after this moment happened, so while I can remember the broad strokes, much of this dramatisation will have to be reconstructed from vague memories that at best, will align 80% with what really happened.
But I can at least guarantee that the end result will be the same.
SCREECHING TIRES
It was the last day before the qualifier of week 3.
As soon as this current race was over, I would have the money.
My garage would be full and lined up with vehicles from every performance class.
I also vaguely recall having a brand new car in my possession that I had won from a prior event.
I could probably have gone home with that earlier before I had decided to further push my luck.
There was just one more problem to deal with.
Mid-way through the race, the police had checked in and decided to give chase. It’s entirely possible to lose the cops mid-race but also extremely unlikely, especially since this race was being held on a linear mountain pass that snaked down close to the city by the sea.
What also didn’t help was that my heat was already at level three and as soon as this race had ended, it would go up to level four.
I crossed the finish line in what I seem to remember was second place.
Good enough. That’ll do.
Because now I have bigger problems.
When the results screen faded away, gameplay would resume once the “ready steady go” countdown finished and I would be inundated with patrol units calling for backup, SUVs ready to pummel me into scraps, high speed interceptors nipping at my heels and helicopters keeping a constant eye on me from above.
No time to think.
Only barely enough to do.
Three, two, one.
Here we go.
Every single corner I drift around would need to be in service of getting as much yellow-meter boost as could be gained. Anything to widen the gap between me and the police encroaching from behind.
My strategy for evading capture typically involves skirting around the suburbs, shooting down the highway and losing my pursuers as I get closer to mother nature next door.
Using my boost to clear large ramps and weave through the spaghettified junctions that snaked between the secluded forests and hills away from the city, I managed to maintain a comfortable lead against the police.
But losing the cars was not going to be enough.
I had tussled with helicopters at least twice before but for obvious reasons, they cannot be lost easily just by driving away really fast. After all, they don’t need roads. What I needed was cover.
After gaining enough distance from my ground-level pursuers, I would have to dart through a tunnel in the hopes that said helicopters didn’t see me darting out the other side.
I was right to stay on the correct side of the road this time, but in my haste to get away and dodge other cars, I forgot to slow down and actually pay attention to what I was driving past.
I overtook another cop car.
It spotted me.
The chase was back on.
Desperation was starting to wear down on me now.
The vehicle I had chosen was perfectly adept for driving off-road. It was the reason I chose that car for the race beforehand.
I tried to swing the chase back into the dirt paths near the forest, but the off-road SUVs were glued to my position. No matter how many turns I took, nothing I did could shake them off of my back.
A meter started to fill all by itself at the top of the screen.
This meant that I had been in this chase for so long now that the police were preparing to double their efforts in bringing me to the slammer. At this point, my drifts yielded little boost, so my determination to fill the yellow boost bar is ironically what slowed me down.
The meter at the top of the screen had now filled completely.
I was upgraded to heat level 5.
My teeth were clenched.
Ever since the end of that race, I had steadily sustained damage on my vehicle to the point that could not afford to take more than a handful of impacts.
By now I had taken a route back towards the city and was brushing up against the rural areas full of wide open farmland. The digital worlds of games like NFS Unbound are much more compact and diverse than those seen in real life. Where it usually takes hours of real-life driving to see a change in scenery, such realism is not conducive to an experience that is best sampled in the brief moments of respite from work obligations, so such changes are allowed to happen in mere minutes within video game land.
I find the city to be stuffed with too many rigidly tight corners, closed in on all sides and with any number of pillars and bollards to complicate any escape attempts.
Much more ideal for laying low and sneaking around sight unseen, but too dangerous when I’m already in the middle of a high-speed chase.
Fortunately, there was one other benefit to the more industrial commercialised areas of the map: a greater abundance of repair stations.
I couldn’t make any other detours. Carefully steering my way into the station and out the other side would narrow the gap between me and the police even further, so whatever route I was on now, I had to stick with it.
The instant removal of all damage also revived my spirits, but the open farmland did little to help aid my escape.
Though I didn’t want to risk crashing easily in the streets, I ultimately decided to compromise. Give the police a run-around in the open fields for a bit and then zip through the narrow openings that led through the prickly suburbs, leaving my pursuers in a six-lane Three Stooges pile-up behind me.
The results didn’t prove quite as spectacular as that, but it still worked well enough.
That is, until I drove into the radar of another helicopter.
No more reliance on dirt roads this time.
If I couldn’t lose the police with sheer speed, I would have to confound them instead. I defaulted to my blue reserve boost and swerved between the junctions and turnings of the highway once again, threading the needle between traffic as I did.
With the police interceptors becoming increasingly congested behind me, I dove back into the tunnel.
No police on the other side.
The helicopter had just missed me.
But it wasn’t over yet.
Another meter appeared onscreen, this one at the bottom, emblazoned with the word “escaping”.
At this point, I remembered a trivia post on Reddit that someone had made about this game which involved a clever trick for evading line of sight at night-time: hide under a bridge and turn off your car engine.
The tunnel I took had led me to an elevated highway by the sea, underneath which was a collection of obscure off-road paths surrounded by clustered patches of wilting greenery.
The perfect place to hide.
Sirens and rotor blades echoed over the waves. I turned off the highway before anyone could see me.
I backed up under the concrete and quickly came to a complete stop. I turned off my engine by holding down the circle button. The headlights died down. The ambient music ceased. All was quiet. Two helicopters started circling my last known location, their lights unable to pierce through the concrete above me. Police cars patrolled the area a few junctions ahead of me, seeing nothing but black. I did not dare make a run for it now; not when every patrolling officer from here to Azerbaijan would surely see me.
But for now, all they could do was try to find me. I had all the time in the world. I could wait.
It was probably two minutes I waited under that highway, eyes darting between all the police icons buzzing around the screen, cursing expletives under my breath all the while.
Eventually though, they started to disperse.
My engine whirred back to life.
No time like the present.
Slowly I made my way back into the city and towards the nearest safehouse.
But I still couldn’t afford to be reckless.
Police cars don’t stray far from one-another even while casually patrolling the streets, so I would have to watch my mini-map like a hawk and turn away to another road at the first sign of police badges.
Even so, I had come out the other side of plenty of other chases like this, so I was hopeful that the streets would be clear enough to allow safe passage as I slowly closed in on my destination.
They say it’s the hope that kills you.
While I was keenly observing the mini-map, there was one thing I hadn’t accounted for, and that once again, was what was on the roads around me.
Every single level of the five-tier heat system brings with it a new police threat to make escape attempts more difficult, each with their own unique signifying presence on the mini-map. Level one lets the standard police patrol units off of their leashes. Level two brings with it the heavy duty SUVs that can follow you off-road and form walls on the highway to force you into spike strips. Level three opens the doors to high-speed interceptor vehicles based on real-life super cars. Level four allows for the aforementioned helicopters to make their grand entrance.
I had only reached heat level 5 one other time while playing NFS Unbound and when I had, that was the only other time I had reckoned with this final threat. I wish I’d paid more attention back then.
Heat level 5: undercover vehicles.
With their perfect black sheen, they looked totally unlike other police cars, almost like something the FBI would use to spy on people. Their appearance only just helps them blend in among the other regular vehicles on the road, but not quite so much that they can’t be spotted and avoided by a well-trained eye. But there’s one other thing that I neglected to internalise.
Undercover cars do not show up on the mini-map
Needless to say, mine was not a well-trained eye.
It wasn’t even concealed around a corner either. That undercover unit spotted me on a straight and narrow road and my eyes were so intently distracted by the mini-map that they failed to notice what was coming right for me.
It was as if the game was waiting for me to do that.
Almost immediately, cars and helicopters seemed to spring out from behind every house, pillar, rock and tree as if they had been hiding out of sight the whole time.
“Surpriiiise!” they seemed to say all at once as they followed me across the road for another few minutes of fun.
I determined that next time, I would only return to the garage with everything I needed for the qualifier. Hindsight is a hell of a drug.
By this point, I was thoroughly exhausted and kicking myself mentally, but still desperate to get away and cash in my winnings, vocally begging and pleading with the game to extend a small sliver of mercy my way.
Everything from here starts to blur together into an anguished haze. My old strategies had crumbled to pieces under all the pressure. I was no longer maintaining enough speed to create distance due to my stubborn insistence on build up that yellow boost meter. Each turn was a struggle against guardrails and paint being traded with the police as they pulled towards me from either side. I think I even crashed at least once and though I still respawned back on four wheels, things were not looking good.
The repair station timer was barely low enough that they would soon open again and I’d just passed it. I had no further plans beyond turning around and reaching that repair station, but it was my last chance to extend this tirade for just a little bit longer.
I don’t know how fast it happened, but it was over as soon as it did.
Snap. Sparks flying from under my car. I had been coerced into a spike strip.
Shouldn’t have stayed on the beaten path.
Speed wasn’t going to help me a second time and now I had none left. Even my blue reserve boost couldn’t help me much now.
At this point, the police took it in turns to launch themselves full pelt towards my hunk of twisted metal like Pixar’s Cars does Bonnie & Clyde. Flip out. Respawn. Flip out. Respawn. Flip out. Respawn. Less and less health each time.
I was barely a few more miles away from the nearest repair station which by now, was open for business. Probably the same one I used last time.
Whoever is listening, do you have any more last chances left to give?
When I’m playing almost any other game with pressure going as high as it was here, my default emotion will tend to be anger and indignation, lashing out at the game itself. I’ll feel cheated or wronged somehow, maybe because the conditions of a certain challenge were too temperamental to be reliably overcome with the skills that it had trained me in, perhaps the timing required or the chances of success were too slim for anyone who wasn’t already fanatically good at it or I was convinced that the game had kept some crucial part of itself hidden away from me for the sole reason of exclusively annoying me in particular. In any case, I would feel like the game had turned the tables and was playing me. There are only a few rare exceptions to this. When the friction between me and the game feels ideally tuned to the point where I know why I messed up and what I know the game is expecting me to do. All it requires is a shift in mentality and strategy in order to break through the barrier.
NFS Unbound was one of those games that had given me all the advice already, provided plenty of other alternative methods through which I could find means of escape and told me exactly what to expect when my plans didn’t work out. I had been given the entire strategy guide, but the mentality shift hadn’t come soon enough to save me.
I used up the last of my remaining boost reserve to make one last futile break for salvation, only the tiniest remnants of pixels left in the now reddened health meter, my voice reduced to making only infantile pleading wheezes of despair, unable to conjure anything coherent. Not that anything would have helped now, but in some small way, I thought hope against hope that somehow it would. I was no longer truly playing the game anymore, but it wasn’t playing me either. It never was. As the final cop car made impact with my vehicle, as the head of my customised avatar was forced down into the backseat of a patrol unit, as all of the day’s winnings were flushed down the drain right before my eyes, my brain echoed to itself in the form of unspoken waves of thought, “Congratulations. You played yourself.”
And then I screamed.
