[6] A common theme of these games is escape or survival from the equivalent of a zombie apocalypse, with weapons, ammunition, and armor limited.
Other notable survival horror series include Alone in the Dark, Clock Tower, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, and Parasite Eve.
[7] These games commonly rely on the player-character's unreliable perceptions or questionable sanity in order to develop the story.
Through the use of unreliable narrators, such games may explore the fear of losing one's capacity to think rationally or even to recognize one's own identity.
[12] Some other examples of jump scare horror games include Dino Crisis, Outlast, Poppy Playtime, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill.
In comparison to the victim, the main character has some sort of advantage over the others, such as enhanced vision, greater strength, or supernatural abilities.
[14] Taito's classic arcade video game Space Invaders (1978) has also been cited as a precursor to horror video games, as it involved a survival scenario where an alien invasion slowly descends and increasingly destroys the landscape while menacing sound effects gradually speed up, which created a sense of panic in players when it first released.
[21][22][23] Other horror-themed action games that followed in the late 1980s included Capcom's Ghosts 'n Goblins (1985),[24] Konami's Castlevania (1986),[14][8] and Sega's Ghost House (1986) and Kenseiden (1988),[8] with more violent gory arcade horror games including Exidy's Chiller (1986) and Namco's Splatterhouse (1988).
[25] One of the most well-known "haunted house" themed graphic adventure games was Maniac Mansion (1987) by LucasArts.
It was Capcom's first survival horror title, directed by Tokuro Fujiwara, who had earlier designed Ghosts 'n Goblins and later went on to produce Resident Evil, which was originally intended to be a remake of Sweet Home.
Lovecraft fiction and George A. Romero zombie films, was one of the first survival horror games to bring a more immersive presentation, using crude 3D figures drawn atop a 2D pre-rendered background, so that players would control their character from a fixed camera angle.
[8] Sweet Home, Alone in the Dark, and Doctor Hauzer (published by River Hill in 1994) went on to inspire Capcom's original Resident Evil (1996),[27] which coined the "survival horror" term.
[28] 1995 saw the release of Clock Tower on the Super Famicom, which Carl Therrien claims is "clearly inspired by the slasher movie breed of uncanny.
The Five Nights at Freddy's series by Scott Cawthon also similarly captured popularity through watching streamers' reactions to jump-scares.