How Anna Achieves a New Type of Horror

I don't mind a scary game now and then: I've enjoyed Resident Evil, Bioshock and Silent Hill. I laughed my way through Amnesia: Dark Descent and stopped playing Outlast from boredom. I will defend Haunting Ground to my dying breath despite never being able to beat it.

That being said, Anna was one of the few games which managed to scare me into not playing it anymore.

Anna: Extended Edition puts you in the shoes of a man who has dreams about a woman named Anna (Surprise!). Eventually he finds himself drawn to an old sawmill near the town he lives in which seems to be connected to his dreams and enters it in an effort to find the link between the place and the woman. It starts in a calm, lush green field in the mountains accented with elegant (and only slightly unnerving) guitar riffs before you enter the dark, boarded up mill.

As far as horror goes it's an age-old tale which doesn't bring a lot of twists to the table. It has a beautiful atmosphere as well, with light, elegant music consisting of piano and acoustic melodies accented by soft female voices. It builds a sensation of calm and peacefulness which, in any other game, would be absolutely relaxing.

The game has a number of interesting features: Upon entering the interior of the home and witnessing some spooky events, the player can return to the front door and actually just leave altogether, contrary to every horror trope ever. You never solve the mystery of who Anna is but at least you leave with your sanity in tact. The game (much like other horror games of its time) also reads your mouse movements for a sanity meter, so if you flinch when a scary event happens it will decrease your sanity which also effects the type of ending you get and the way the game feels going forward. This all works with a fairly mixed level of efficiency.

So with a fairly tropey story, mundane mechanics and honestly, pretty unintuitive puzzles, why am I even talking about this game at all?

The real appeal of Anna to me is the way it scares me. While generally most horror games bank on jump scares or fast-paced action to get your heart racing, one of the reasons Anna scares me is because it's almost impossible for me to understand as a designer.

A game like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, for example, relies on enemies which patrol and have discernible AI patterns. The player learns the tricks to beating them, and once you understand how to survive as a player the game becomes easy pickings. Being a designer myself, it's especially easy to discern how elements of the game are put together to create the experience which tends to ruin the horror. I'd liken it to how Neo from The Matrix learns to see the world differently and allows him to beat Agent Smith to a pulp - the sense of immersion disappears.

But with Anna: Extended Edition, a lot of the game's elements are too difficult for me to read and are completely unexpected. Things in the sawmill change as you go about solving puzzles - doors close out of nowhere when you're across the house from them, voices will emanate from the walls, objects will fly across the room at the walls, and all of it feels completely arbitrary.

These changes help to create a mentality of paranoia in the player, making you second-guess yourself. It makes you wonder if you're seeing things, or was the flower in the corner was already dead when you entered the room?

It rarely feels like you're walking into a trigger to make an event happen, nor does it feel like they happen on a timer system. Normally that would seem like a bad thing, but it helps to establish another important element to the game's atmosphere which also made the experience terrifying: the game is almost entirely indifferent about the player.

My favourite (read: scariest) parts of the game were the sections where I felt like I wasn't in control of anything. Unlike most horror games, stopping to catch my breath or compose myself before moving on to the next trigger doesn't work when the game doesn't take into account where the player is or what they're doing. Standing still and thinking about a puzzle solution? The door behind you slams shut. Crouching in a corner trying to think good thoughts? A scream rings out from the floor above you. Frightening things will happen independent of what I do so since the game doesn't care what the player is doing at all. The game will continue to run and you will continue to play it.

And I would hazard a guess that this directly ties into exactly why I stopped playing Anna forever based on my first terrifying experience with it:

Before the Extended Edition came out, Anna's puzzles were very different, but its sense of horror was still the same. I spent a good deal of time wandering through the mill, solving puzzles and wondering why the floorboards up above were squeaking or why I would feel a whispering voice over my shoulder and turn to find nothing. This went on for a great deal of time which slowly began to make me more and more unnerved.

In one room, a circle of candles sat on the ground which I stomped over on my way to and fro during my puzzle solving charade. Several minutes into solving a particular puzzle, I noticed something strange at the potted plant in the corner of the room - there were a bunch of fruit flies buzzing around it. I watched it from afar before thinking nothing of it an continuing on my puzzle-solving adventures. Later when I looked again and the bugs were gone, but the circle of candles which lay on the floor were now lit, flames dancing in the non-existent wind of the musky cabin.

This frightened me because a dozen lit candles, in some small way, felt more aggressive than a couple of gnats. I watch it from a safe distance when suddenly an apparition made of smoke appeared above the candles, facing my direction and watching me silently. It didn't chase me, speak to me, or make any sound. The calm, would-be-relaxing-if-there-wasn't-a-smoke-demon-in-front-of-me guitar music continued to chime gracefully in the background.

I was terrified. It was the first encounter with anything vaguely human and caught me entirely off-guard.

I let go of my mouse and watched it for what felt like ages in complete silence, wondering who would make the first move. I knew I definitely didn't want it to be me.

When it was apparent it wasn't going to attack me like I expected it to, I reached for the mouse, gingerly attempting to turn myself away so I didn't have to look at its haunting visage anymore.

As I moved my mouse, my character continued to stare directly into the eyes of the phantom until it disappeared which sent a chill down my spine.

Because in a horror game so indifferent to the player - a game where you have no control over anything but your character - losing that control is the worst feeling in the world.

Addendum: I'd like to note that even as I type this post I've had repeated chills down my spine from the experience, and I can think of no other video game which gives me chills as I attempt to recall it. Maybe I'm just a huge baby.

What kind of horror scares you the most in games?