Survival horror

Survival horror games are games built around the idea of resource management.

They generally involve players exploring, traversing and backtracking through labyrinth like environments (nearly always large buildings and/or towns/villages) finding items or solving "lock and key" puzzles to move the game onwards.

While doing this players have to balance various infrequent resources. Which resources in particular need to be balanced varies from game to game, but common ones include ammunition, light, sanity and a limited number of saves (to go along with this, many survival horror games also make use of infrequent save points to give the player a sense of having more to lose by not surviving).

The protagonists of survival horror games tend to be "everymen" or "everywomen" who are not as powerful as in standard action-adventure or action horror games and depending on the game, they may or may not be able to directly defend themselves.

In games in which players cannot defend themselves, the player must avoid or slow down enemies via running, hiding, stealth, setting traps and occasionally indirectly commanding other characters to attack (such as commanding a dog to help slow down enemies in the game Haunting Ground). Whereas, in games in which players can defend themselves with firearms, players have to manage their limited ammunition and decide which enemies to use their ammunition on.

To add to the player's sense of weakness and to help give the impression of playing as an "everyman" or "everywoman", the protagonist is often less skilled with a weapon as in more traditional action-adventure and action horror games and is less fluid in movement (a particular control scheme known as "tank controls" is strongly associated with survival horror games, although it has become less common in the genre in recent years).