XCOM Isn’t a Horror Game But It Sure Does Feel Like One

Kotaku has a brief editorial-like piece on the recently released XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and how it supposedly feels almost like a horror game.

Here’s a snip:

But the back and forth of a firefight isn’t as terrifying as everything that happens before it. You start off matches with locales that once held people, but are now haunted by a dark navy fog of war haze. Sometimes you’re navigating those empty, eerie streets for entire minutes but you know that the aliens are lurking somewhere in those shadows. You don’t know where, but you know they’re there.

If nothing else, the unnerving screeches and guttural animal sounds before the alien’s turn tells you they’re waiting for you. That enemy that’s bioengineering abominations, that enemy that’s kidnapping humans and using them for god knows what, that enemy that can bring the dead back to life…that enemy is waiting for you.

It almost feels like they’re waiting for you to accidentally put yourself in a compromising position, and the inability to see ahead thanks to the fog of war doesn’t help that. If you happen to cross into the enemy’s vision, they are immediately granted a turn that they can use to better position themselves.

While this is obviously subjective to a large degree, I’d say that “almost like a horror game” is the kind of feeling an X-COM game is supposed to evoke in the first place, and is certainly a good descriptor for the original X-COM: UFO Defense.