Having beaten the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 the other day, I've been giving some thought to the way that the game, and the genre, treats its monsters.
Not long before I played it, the previous game I had played on my PS5 was Diablo IV, and it's actually kind of hilarious how each game treats its monsters in almost precisely the opposite way.
Diablo, the series of isometric action-RPGs from Blizzard, is all about mowing down waves upon waves of monsters. While individual creatures take a few seconds to defeat in the early levels, very quickly the game has you churning through dozens if not hundreds of them, the classes built to allow you to have many stacking and overlapping buffs that make it likely that you won't spend more than half a second with any given monster. The challenge, thus, becomes less about overcoming monsters and more about increasing your monster-churning efficiency, with only seriously powerful boss monsters getting instant-kill effects that you have to dodge.
It's a totally different genre of game, of course.
In stark contrast, Survival Horror makes each monster a challenge. And it does so in a way that I think is interesting: monsters don't actually hit very hard. Even if a boss like Pyramid Head slashes into you, you're probably going to be fine as long as you aren't already at death's door.
The challenge is one of lengthy attrition. Silent Hill 2, as well as Alan Wake II, are games in which there's no "reset" in which you heal up to full health or get a bunch of ammunition. Your performance in the early part of the game can have an impact on the later part of the game. Or at least, I believe that's true in Silent Hill 2. Alan Wake II, and I think others of this genre (even going as early as the FPS/Survival Horror classic Bioshock) have behind-the-scenes difficulty moderation that grants more healing items and other resources if you're struggling.
I don't actually know if there's any such thing in the Silent Hill 2 remake, but I suspect there isn't. And I think they can get away with that because there's a FromSoft-level "tough but fair" approach to its combat. You have a melee weapon that is pretty effective, and every monster's attacks can be dodged if you read the telegraphs right and dodge at the right time. Thus, if you find yourself in a situation where you're out of ammo and low on health, you can still proceed - you just need to be extra careful (this was how I found myself in the last part of the Otherworld Hospital).
It does make me curious, though, if you're someone who has truly mastered Silent Hill 2, if you might reach the hotel with hundreds of bullets and dozens of healing items.
The approach to monsters, as well, is interesting. Within SH2, I think the worst situations I ever got into were when I had, like, 3 monsters attacking me. There were segments with more, like the shower room in the prison, but the clear intent there was for you to run rather than fight them all, with several low barriers to hop over and open up some distance with.
Every fight feels pretty intense, even if you're not terribly worried that you'll survive this fight with a Mannequin or Lying Figure. The intensity come from the fact that if you fail to dodge them once or twice, that's less health to survive the next fight.
I remember when I first played Alan Wake II, I struggled a fair amount with the Nightingale boss fight because I walked into the fight with only a few bullets - far less than what I needed to actually defeat him. The helpful reset at the start of the boss fight after I died only meant that every attempt put me back into this running-on-fumes position. Much of the fight was spent scrounging for ammunition.
Having remembered that experience when I went into the Final Draft NG+ mode, I came in far better-prepared. I also realized, on that second playthrough, that there were actually only a total of three enemies to fight prior to that first boss, the initial taken cultist and then two guys just by the Witch's Ladle. Perhaps I was far more efficient in fighting them, and that allowed me to have an easier time on the boss.
It's a funny thing: I adore Alan Wake II, but I do think that the Silent Hill 2 remake's gameplay felt a little more refined. There were, I think, no moments in which I called BS on the game if I died. By contrast, there were times in AWII, like my first playthrough's fight against Cynthia Weaver, in which there seemed to be some kind of lag that kept me from moving properly - in a fight where you have a lot of things to dodge. That was the weekend the game had come out, and I don't think I had as much of a problem on my Final Draft run, so this might have been some optimization thing that was fixed in a patch.
More to the point, though, SH2 is very efficient with its monsters. There are only really three types of rank-and-file monsters, though there are variants of them that show up later, or four if you count the grate-walking Mandarins (which I treated more like an environmental hazard, except in the fight where you have to kill one, which feels more like a boss). But as a player, I found that the lack of enemy variety wasn't really a problem: if anything, it was a comfort. I knew more or less how to deal with them.
I'd be curious to see if anyone has a full count of how many of each monster appear in the game. While there are some that spawn at scripted events even in places you've already cleared, I think generally there's a finite number of them. One of the satisfying parts of the gameplay loop is when you get to stop worrying about an area and just run through the rooms because you know you've already killed all the monsters there.
One of the things that I don't love about Diablo is how its "hordes of hell" take on its monsters makes even some of the big ones that feel like they should have a big impact kind of disintegrate in seconds. Likewise, if you do die in that game, it's often from something that happens so quickly that you barely had time to react to it.
I don't know that the Survival Horror "every battle is dire" is necessarily my sweet spot, but I do kind of like the idea that a monster ought to feel like a serious thing to overcome.
This post didn't start off being about D&D, but it got me thinking a little about TTRPG monster design. I've been poring over the Draw Steel rules books, and I'm really fascinated by the Werewolf, its level 1 solo monster. The thing has 200 Stamina, which seems like a ton, but I need to see how much damage a party of 1st level characters can put out before I can know truly how long a fight that should be.
It did occur to me, though, that one of the issues of balance in a game like D&D, especially at low levels, is the degree to which player characters can go down very quickly, and thus, monsters need to be able to go down very quickly so that the players can survive against them.
It made me think about how the issue might be with damage output.
I've been mulling over some ideas about how to make a more exciting monster in D&D, particularly a solo monster. As mentioned here, in a game like Silent Hill 2, the monsters are often fought on their own, but they still feel like a threat.
If I have something cool to share, I'll post it.
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