PLAYING PROJECT ZERO: FIRST IMPRESSIONS – Horrorgameanalysis

I’ve by no means performed a Undertaking Zero (in any other case recognized extra generally as Deadly Body) sport earlier than, and I figured, hey, 2025, why not make a begin? So I broke out the outdated backwards suitable PS3, dusted it off, dedicated numerous blood sacrifice rituals with a purpose to get it to work, and divined how lengthy I might push the outdated machine by sorting by way of the entrails of my damaged DualShock 3 controller (it was one other three years, for anybody questioning).

There’s one thing deeply satisfying about watching a disc slide into an outdated machine, and watching that outdated machine start to grapple with it. A deep, thrumming whirring. It fills the air of my residing house and makes me reminisce about televisions as extensive as they had been deep. A controller that’s barely clinging on to life, dreading being the subsequent one to be dissected for components to make my third and remaining controller work for an additional few years. That is hauntology in know-how, the method of time remodeling know-how into one thing extra mystical. That is additionally what Undertaking Zero (aided by the passage of time) does to its house and its applied sciences.

Undertaking Zero video games are all about ghosts and images, and I believe it is a pure mixture for a sport. Ghost images has a protracted and interesting historical past, one centered extra round technical prowess than discovering any precise ghosts (so far as we are able to inform). It’s significantly amusing to learn statements like this one written again in 2021: “individuals related images with veracity in some contexts and the unexplained in others — a heady combine that made it difficult for viewers to know which photos they may belief” (Mickevicius). In an period so firmly rooted within the digital that what we write may be spat again at us a thousand occasions, reworded in delicate methods, an period of anti-veracity, pictures don’t really feel very tangible in any respect.

Which is what makes the digicam of the primary Undertaking Zero (Koei Tecmo 2001) appear so particular, to this point. These are weighty outdated issues, given explicit energy and significance by their exorcistic powers. Goal one at a ghost and it’ll harm it – however the genius transfer, after all, is that it’s a must to let the ghost get shut earlier than you “squeeze the set off”. It’s important to be keen to let it frighten you extra, to invade your private house, with a purpose to profit from your restricted movie. Melissa Bianchi observes that the best way during which we use cameras in video video games “function utilizing mechanics like these present in first-person shooters” (2024, 563). In some sense the facility fantasy of the primary individual shooter remains to be baked into the gameplay. We’re nonetheless blasting ghosts with a gun – however the gun feels a lot much less efficient by advantage of the actual fact it’s a digicam. We get to linger on the photographs we take of them, take a look at their twisted faces, and damaged limbs. It’s a fabulously immersive expertise that challenges the participant’s conceptions about survival horror weapons – and that’s only a begin.

I received a bit forward of myself there, however gosh, there’s a lot to suggest about how the sport unfolds. After a brief prologue sequence the place you discover the primary few rooms of the home because the protagonist’s brother, you’re given management of the true predominant character, Miku, and also you reexplore the primary few rooms once more. There’s a extra profound sense of dread that comes whenever you understand the kiddie (tutorial) gloves have come off, and likewise whenever you understand your clunky outdated digicam is all it’s a must to defend your self with. The Himuro Mansion – the place the sport takes place – has a few of essentially the most foreboding atmosphere I’ve ever heard in a online game, the sort of stuff that does really feel legitimately haunted. It does a greater job than Clock Tower 3 does at showing like a venerable outdated horror sport, anyway.

It’s humorous that know-how and its weightiness mingle along with hauntings in my thoughts. The increasingly we entrench ourselves within the digital, the increasingly we need to contact issues, I believe. To make them manifest in our palms. To have a way of one thing tangible. Undertaking Zero’s digicam is one step in the direction of this, with the controller rumbling to let me know there’s one thing close by to take a photograph of. However time can also be a part of that mystique. Himuro Mansion is outdated, decrepit, however with a way of historical past. Rooms really feel dusty. A few of them have been long-cleared out of stuff. Others have outdated packing containers and scattered notes from a number of totally different individuals positioned inside them. There’s an actual internet of nonlinearity to Undertaking Zero to date, one thing that feels genuinely confronting as you attempt to work by way of the home itself, which obfuscates progress at each flip. Odd puzzles, looping hallways, and ghosts that return time and again, spouting the identical twisted voice strains, all contribute to a sense of surreality.

A ghost with lengthy arms wails “give me again my baby”. A blinded ghost screams “my eyes! My eyes!” One other wails about ropes. Every ghost is trapped in a second, they usually lash out at Miku, attempting to pull her into their twisted, haunted existence as a spirit. The sport is terrifying in surprising methods, as ghosts seem in entrance of you in split-second flashes, blink-and-you-miss-them moments that may have you ever questioning actuality. Is each spirit on this darkish, foreboding house hostile? Or maybe my immediate reflexes as I take advantage of my exorcism movie in opposition to these ghosts is harming spirits that in any other case would possibly merely want to observe me.

The fear begins to really feel increasingly real the deeper you get into the mansion. The ghosts not solely turn into stronger, however reoccur extra ceaselessly. The worst offender to date is definitely “Blinded”, a lady with blood pouring from her eyesockets, her life (and demise) destroyed by this terrible ritual you should examine. She exhibits up time and again, every time extra highly effective and aggressive. It’s in these moments that you should reckon with the identical stuff you really feel in one thing like Forbidden Siren (Undertaking Siren), the place enemies maintain coming again, and you should maintain placing them down. The violence restages itself again and again, and we ourselves turn into trapped on this horrible place. Repetition in video video games is one thing that I’ve turn into increasingly obsessive about. Clearly emotions of looping have a specific significance for me in the meanwhile, however I believe Undertaking Zero approaches it from a very attention-grabbing angle. We try to alleviate the ghosts and to drive them away, to free their spirits from this bodily place. However so as to take action the sport asks us to commit acts of violence in opposition to them. Whereas nonetheless in self-defence, there’s a sense of torture alongside our documentation of this haunted house. We doc these individuals (each within the journal entries and our digicam, and within the numerous artefacts we are able to discover scattered round), and demand that their story make sense to us. However can it? Ought to it?

These are the questions Undertaking Zero raises, and I’m excited to complete the primary sport and transfer on to the later ones within the sequence to see if the emotions of claustrophobia and cloying darkness maintain as a lot weight as they do for me proper now. A chic sport, and I can’t wait to run away and play extra as quickly as I hit “submit”… riiiiight…. now!

Reference Checklist

Bianchi, Melissa. 2024. “A Discipline Information to Monsters: Practices of Wildlife Watching in Video Video games”. In Ecogames: Playful Views on the Local weather Disaster.