Mikami: ‘There aren’t any real survival horror games in the world now’

Resident Evil 4’s director Shinji Mikami has claimed that his “biggest motivation” for returning to survival horror with The Evil Within is because he believes “there aren’t any real survival horror games in the world now”.

“For me, personally, why I came back to survival horror is that survival horror as a genre is all action now and there aren’t any real survival horror games in the world now,” Mikami told IGN. “That is the biggest motivation for me.”

Mikami’s “definition” of survival horror is that “first of all it has to be scary.”

“And then you have some kind of scary creature, and you get a rush from blowing it away. A good balance of those two things is what makes survival horror.”

The Evil Within’s producer Masato Kimura agrees.

“Balance is paramount to survival horror,” says Kimura. “For example, if the game is all horror, you run the risk of the player feeling ‘this game is too scary’ and putting the controller down. On the other hand, if you make it too action oriented it stops being scary.

Shinji Mikami shot to fame following his work on the Resident Evil series, where he oversaw development on Resident Evil 1 through 4. He also directed dino-horror Dino Crisis and acted as executive producer on Devil May Cry, before moving on to work with Platinum Games on sci-fi shooter Vanquish.

But Mikami hopes that The Evil Within will offer the most terrifying experience gamers will have played in years.

“Simply put, having the player pick up the controller and be able to genuinely say ‘Wow, I haven’t played a game this scary in ages!’ That is what we are after. That is the main thing we are focused on…”

“If players say ‘I haven’t played a game this scary in a while,’ that would make me the happiest.”

The Evil Within launches on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and next-generation consoles next year.

Source: IGN