I’ve probably talked about this topic before, I felt like writing a quick stand-alone “Horror Videogames Series” article about respawning monsters in survival horror games. Of course, this whole thing only applies to survival horror games where the player can actually fight (and defeat) the monsters.
Still, many traditional survival horror games – such as the original 1990s “Resident Evil” trilogy – often used respawning monsters very sparingly, almost more like a jump-scare. Usually, once you cleared an area, it stayed cleared and you could focus on exploration or puzzle-solving. Very occasionally, the game might shock you by spawning a zombie into a previously “safe” area – or include a set-piece where an area gets re-populated – but, again, this was an infrequent and deliberate planned “jump scare” type thing. And it works.
The main reason why these traditional survival horror games rarely included respawning monsters was because of resource management. You, the player, could only find a limited number of bullets and healing items and it was up to you to ration them out, use them carefully and make deliberate “fight or flight” decisions when you encountered a monster. This focus on careful decision-making is one thing that sets survival horror games apart from action games.
If you just ran away, or ran past the monster, you’d save bullets… but at the potential cost of being attacked by the monster (and having to use precious healing items). It’s a cost-benefit decision, a balancing of resources, which is there to make the player think. As such, the player’s actions had to have fairly permanent consequences. If you’ve “spent” bullets defeating a monster, it usually wouldn’t return.
However, in survival horror games where resources are less limited, frequently respawning monsters are a surprisingly good way to balance this out. A classic example is the 1999 sci-fi survival horror game “System Shock 2“. Since the monsters in this game can sometimes drop bullets or other supplies, the game needs to keep the player on their toes by spawning in new monsters whenever the player revisits a previously-cleared part of the space station. Otherwise, the player would end up with mountains of ammunition and nothing to use it on. The respawning monsters make sure that resources stay scarce.
A much more modern example, and the one which inspired this article, can be found in “Labyrinth Of The Demon King” (2025). Whilst this survival horror game, set in medieval Japan, does have some ranged weapons with limited ammunition (eg: a longbow and a primitive single-shot gun) you’ll mostly be fighting the undead with swords, daggers, hammers etc… Yes, the game balances this out with a parry system and a recharging stamina bar – where your attacks do much less damage if you have no stamina – but the fact remains that your melee weapons have “infinite ammo”.
And, again, the respawning monsters help to balance this out. But, like in “System Shock 2” (1999), the respawning monsters also change the mood and pacing of the game. They are there to keep the player feeling suspense at all times. They don’t have the relaxing feeling you have in traditional survival horror games when you’ve defeated all of the monsters in one area and can just relax and solve the puzzles. Of course, that relaxation is there to make the monsters in the next area you find feel like more of a sudden surprise or a sudden change of pace. A dramatic spike of adrenaline.
On the other hand, whilst survival horror games with respawning monsters lose out on most of these dramatic adrenaline spikes, since the player expects to find monsters everywhere, it allows for a more sustained mild-moderate feeling of suspense at all times. The game world as a whole feels a lot more hostile. It makes a subtle, but very noticeable, difference to the overall mood of the game.
Still, whilst it changes the mood of the game, the decision whether or not to include respawning monsters in a survival horror game all comes down to how the game handles ammunition. If there is a limited, fixed pre-set amount of ammunition in the entire game then respawning monsters should only be used as infrequent jump-scares, because the player has to carefully ration out their bullets (and each one should matter). On the other hand, if the game contains a theoretically unlimited amount of ammunition – or primarily focuses on melee weapons – then respawning monsters are necessary to keep things balanced.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
