When you’re young, you believe in the possibility of anything – ghosts, goblins, the Resident Evil house – but by my age, the spell is broken
and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I like the idea that all you can do is run and hide in those games, replicating far more accurately what would happen in a real-life supernatural horror situation. Each has a genuinely anxiety-inducing atmosphere … which is utterly shattered when I take a few goes to get past a particularly scary bastard because I realise I’m just playing a game. When you die and come back, it’s like the lights going on in the cinema. Again and again and again.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent may have given me nightmares, but I’ll never know because it told me to “play with headphones on in a dark room”. Don’t tell me what to do when it comes to video games! Don’t you know who I was!? I ran a cable outside into my garden and played it under the blazing heat of the midday sun, with the sound running through some tiny Sony SR7 speakers I used with my Walkman in the 1990s. Couldn’t see or hear a bloody thing. Didn’t scare me at all. That’ll show them!.
But I think it’s more than that. I grew up with equally terrifying things when I was younger: the threat of nuclear war, Aids and getting my head kicked in by Stephen Gibson. I was still scared of Salem’s Lot. But supernatural scares require a supernatural imagination. A belief in the possibility of anything. And the older we get, the less willing we are to believe in possibilities. In my 20s anything was possible. In your 40s? Life shrinks. Opportunity shrinks. The world shrinks.
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