Here They Lie’s Creative Director Talks Horror, Influences, And Working On Spec Ops: The Line

Cory Davis and horror go way back. Since he was a child, he’s been fascinated with the way horror can elicit emotions other genres can’t. “Horror’s a place where you can have a big influence and impact on the emotions that someone is feeling.” After being surprised by how well Davis’ most recent game, Here They Lie, managed to use the realm of VR to craft a powerful horror experience, I caught up with Davis to talk about his history with the genre, working on different kinds of horror, and some of the difficulties of creating a horror game in VR.

Of Dodgeball And F.E.A.R.
In his younger years, Davis immersed himself in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Stanley Kubrick, obsessing over their freakish monsters and unreal, twisted locations. But even at that early stage, Davis understood Lovecraft’s best scares had little to do with physical monsters; the philosophical questions those stories posed consistently inspired his creativity. “That’s where I always went when I wanted to have an experience and question something in my life. Horror was always the place that I went to.”

Along with a love of horror, Davis also had a healthy fascination with video games, but it didn’t strike Davis to combine those two interests until his plan A lost its appeal. “I was studying architecture at Texas Tech University,” says Davis. ”There was some discussion with my professors there about the viability of architecture as a profession at the time.” His professors encouraged Davis to do what he loved instead of get into architecture, so he began working on level mods for Counter-Strike and Half-Life, using inspiration from the way Kubrick films like The Shining manipulated their audience. “It’s really strange how that film is constructed, because it’s built to make you feel unsettled, even about the spaces and the architecture where it’s filmed. There’s a lot of tricks going on that play with you.”

Davis’ first big project was the Dodgeball mod for the original Half-Life, which became popular enough to port over to Valve’s Source engine for Half-Life 2 years later. The mod was good enough to get Davis’ foot in the door at Monolith, which gave him his first professional gig as a junior level designer on the Extraction Point expansion for F.E.A.R., and later as a level designer on Condemned 2: Bloodshot. These were Davis’ first chances to implement the techniques he’d absorbed over the years by watching and reading horror fiction, as well as the fundamental aspects of design he’d learned from building mods. 

Considering his background, working on horror titles came naturally to Davis. “I love the idea of inconsistent geometry, players losing their mind, things you can almost only have in a game. Watching someone else go crazy isn’t the same thing as being in a room, [then watching as] it starts to have some interesting change as you’re standing in it.”

A Different Kind Of Horror
Seeking to implement more of his surreal and darker ideas on a larger scale, Davis left Monolith in 2008 to become the creative director on Spec Ops: The Line. After wrapping up work on Condemned 2, Davis vacationed in Mexico, where he first spoke with developer Yager and publisher 2K Games about joining the project. Here, Davis’ history of working on horror games proved a useful asset. “At the start of the project, 2K had a bunch of creative directors who were really behind taking the old Spec Ops series and doing dark and gritty with it, and I was on the exact same page with them.”

Many of the initial conversations Davis had with Yager and 2K touched on horror, as well as some of the darker aspects of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, the latter of which Davis counts among his favorite films of all time. 2K wanted a dark game about the atrocities of war, and to have the chance to work on a game inspired by a film he loved was a huge opportunity for Davis.

In order to work on the game, Davis and his wife had to relocate to Berlin, but the project was ambitious enough to merit the move. Although Spec Ops is bereft of ghosts, monsters, or hallways lined with blood, Davis considers it a horror game, which “drifted into a really interesting place that’s a lot harder to define than that” as Yager worked on the game over the course of several years. Much of the game emphasized the role the player takes in a video game, and many of its “horrors” have to do with the acts humans bring themselves to do (either by force or voluntarily) when the usual rules of society no longer apply. It was a horror story which drew from the more philosophical aspects of the Lovecraftian fiction Davis read as a young teenager.

Because of the game’s unique direction, 2K had a hard time trying to sell it. “There was some discussion about how to market the game after it had been in development for a while, and that’s when marketing began pushing back, trying to get it more in line with conventional shooters,” says Davis. The company even considered delaying the game to align make changes it thought might help Spec Ops sell better. Davis understood the publisher’s desire to make the game successful, but wanted to keep the game’s tone and inspiration intact. “There were strong battles towards the end of the project,” he says.

Ninja Side-Story
While finishing up Spec Ops, Davis had a son in Berlin, and he and his wife began looking for a way to move to Los Angeles. Davis was able to get in contact with Toby Gard, one of the people behind the Tomb Raider series who was then a creative lead at Spark Unlimited. The two talked about working on a collaboration with Keiji Inafune’s studio, Comcept, on Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z.

Although Yaiba was met with mixed-to-negative reaction from critics and fans alike (garnering an average Metacritic score of 47 across all platforms), Davis is glad to have worked on the game. “Yaiba was a really cool experience for me because that’s where I got back in hands-on level design,” says Davis. It allowed him to move away from the trappings of horror and work on a lighter, more action-oriented title. It also let him become more familiar with the Unreal Engine, which proved useful down the line.

Davis felt the environment during Yaiba’s development constricted his potential (and that of his team), but it provided him two very important things: examples of what not to do after he left the project, and the opportunity to meet Rich Smith and John Garcia-Shelton, who, along with Davis and Gard, eventually went on to form their current studio, Tangentlemen.

On page two, we speak to Davis about the influences and practicalities of his latest title, Here They Lie. 

Inspiration From Dark Places
Here They Lie is the culmination of several ideas Davis had been kicking around for a while, but needed the right team to make happen. When he co-founded Tangentlemen, he knew he wanted to get back into making horror games, and that he wanted to get back to working hands-on with the games he was directing – a lesson he learned while working on Yaiba.

Davis drew from a number of influences while working on Here They Lie. He was heavily inspired by works that aspire to be more than their surreal components, like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain and Pantos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow, as well modern horror podcasts such as Lore and Here Be Monsters. He was also inspired by horror games like Outlast, which disempowered the player in order to more thoroughly scared them, as well as NaissanceE, a first-person exploration game which experimented with surrealist environmental design.

Some of the themes of Here The Lie, however, were influenced by concurrent life events. In 2012, shortly after he left Berlin for LA, Davis’ son, Morrison (whom Davis calls Mo), was diagnosed with hepatoblastoma, a type of liver cancer mostly affecting young children. Although Mo was eventually able to get a liver transplant which saved his life, Davis, his wife, and Mo spent about a year frequenting hospitals as Mo underwent chemotherapy. “It really reminded me of how precious every moment is.” Davis eventually implemented some of those darker moments into the themes of Here They Lie.

A New Realm Of Horror
While much of the tone was inspired by Davis’ media influences and life experiences, the nuts-and-bolts of Here They Lie were heavily influenced by practicalities. Chiefly, the game is built around the PlayStation VR, though the game will release on non-VR platforms down the road according to Davis. Always seeking to create the most immersive horror experience possible, Tangentlemen began experimenting with the platform. “We found that in VR we had a lot more opportunities to affect the player.”

When the studio mentioned the idea of bringing Here They Lie to PlayStation VR to Sony, they were intrigued about the idea, and eventually the game was locked as a launch title for the headset. However, a few problems began to arise as the studio began adapting the game to VR.

“The biggest issues were locomotion, vertigo, and nausea,” says Davis. As Kubrick did with The Shining, Davis had to consider every detail about the way his world was constructed: The speed at which characters move, the ways hallways were shaped, and where they made players look in order to avoid making them sick. This meant shaping areas of the game to have more gradual slopes instead of sharp 90-degree turns. “If you look at the paths the player walks down in the game, they’re almost set up like hiking paths rather than exactly as they would in an actual city. Luckily, we were building a surreal place, so that helps.”

Eventually, the studio had to tone down some of the more twisted environments in the game. At one point, the game has several sections featuring portals that teleport players from one environment to the next. But due to how the PlayStation VR renders one image in each eye, it wasn’t a practical feature. “The player could have one eyeball in one part of the level, and one in the other, and that wasn’t great.” To avoid the nausea that came from that situation, the team chose to expand and connect some of the environments, instead of having players hop among them. 

Despite the compromises, Here They Lie is one of the most effective uses of the PlayStation VR headset (you can read our review here). It’s a game with a deep understanding of horror, and how to affect the player using the world around them. You can see its dark, surreal influences clearly, and it’s loaded with just the right amount of mystery, horrific imagery, and food for thought you’d expect from someone who grew up around horror. 

Davis isn’t exactly sure what Tagentlemen is going to tackle next, though he would appreciate a break from a dark, gritty title like Here They Lie. But despite having worked in trappings of the genre for his entire life, Davis is still passionate about the genre that’s defined so much of his career. “I’d definitely love to work on another horror game.”