Do you like horror games? Why?

[Deleted_Account]

I'm okay with jump scares being in horror games, just as long as the game has a healthy blend of other scares. 

[HorrorMovieRei]

1 hour ago, Agentbromsnor said:

the imagery was quite shocking back in the day. Yeah, it's pretty tame these days, but I remember very well that people were disturbed by the levels of gore, and depictions of torture and dead bodies everywhere. I do think that this should still be a hallmark of the series.

The problem is that gore's "scaryness" comes mainly from it's shock value, which grows stale overtime. It's like, in the 60's, those Dracula movies with Christopher Lee were probably the scariest thing on the planet because they had blood in it, but it soon lost it's impact. Then came the 70's with it's super gory exploitation films, which shocked people left and right, but eventually also lost their effect. Same thing in the 80's, then 90's, 2000's. We have raised the bar on shock value so high that some movies are starting to resort to scatology(Human centipede, Septic Man). That's not so say movies with gore can't be scary(original Evil Dead for example), but it's gonna be REALLY hard to make your product scary if you base it on shock value alone, specially in this day and age where everything in fiction that is shocking and disgusting has already been made in one form or another.

[Avoozl]

6 hours ago, KVELLER said:

FEAR never really scared me. The "scary sections" stop being tense when you realize that there isn't any actual threat.

They never scared me either, I simply enjoyed them for what they were.

[Mr. Freeze]

I'm watching set design and thematic analysis of The Shining, and an unintended side effect is revealing how utterly bush-league horror games attempt actual horror. 

[Deleted_Account]

I think Silent Hill 2 does a fantastic job at horror especially the Toluca Prison and the Lakeview Hotel. Really subtle and unnerving stuff.

[june gloom]

Silent Hill 2 is scary the way depression and grief are scary, which is why it's so effective at being both melancholy and disturbing.

[Agentbromsnor]

20 hours ago, HorrorMovieGuy said:

The problem is that gore's "scaryness" comes mainly from it's shock value, which grows stale overtime. It's like, in the 60's, those Dracula movies with Christopher Lee were probably the scariest thing on the planet because they had blood in it, but it soon lost it's impact. Then came the 70's with it's super gory exploitation films, which shocked people left and right, but eventually also lost their effect. Same thing in the 80's, then 90's, 2000's. We have raised the bar on shock value so high that some movies are starting to resort to scatology(Human centipede, Septic Man). That's not so say movies with gore can't be scary(original Evil Dead for example), but it's gonna be REALLY hard to make your product scary if you base it on shock value alone, specially in this day and age where everything in fiction that is shocking and disgusting has already been made in one form or another.

I do agree. I guess it also depends on the context a lot. With Doom, the whole "horror in space" theme has been done previously by the Alien franchise, and subsequently all the movies and media that cloned its formula.

When I'm trying to put Doom as a whole on a sort of genre-spectrum, I'd say it's an action series with a heavy influence of Evil Dead style horror (not counting Army of Darkness). I think in that sense it compares to the Alien movies very well, since those movies tend to have a varying blend of action and horror. Some titles lean more to the disturbing side of things, some are about guns blazing.

[MTF Sergeant]

If you're talking about 'proper' horror games, I would definitely play FNAF, and by FNAF, I mean all 5 main games.

 

FNAF 1 - considerably scary. Would be even better If you start find hidden easter eggs and somehow discover Golden Freddy.

 

FNAF 2 - Scary. But a bit boring. I liked the new animtronics and their jumpscares, but I hate that there are less secret animatronics and some of them are even considered as CANON to the plot. 

 

FNAF 3 - A whole mix of horror, thrill and suspense. The more you play through the game, the more you could understand the secrets of the restaurant.

 

FNAF 4 and 5 - scary as fuck.

[YukiHerz]

I do hope that post was ironic.

On the topic of shock value horror, I wonder how people would react if you took a modern work of fiction and showed it to people from a few decades ago.

[Impie]

I got tired of them pretty quickly when I was a moderator at Gamejolt. All anyone was making was crappy clones of a crappy Slenderman game where you walk around dark mazes and then randomly die.

 

Until Five Nights at Freddy's came out. Then all they made for about a year was FNAF clones, AND they wrecked the community with their childish Reddit squabbling bullshit and witch hunts. And I thought the Pewdiepie crowd was awful.

 

But I still like a good horror game that generates palpable atmosphere and doesn't rely on jumpscares for everything. I really LOVE Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and wish the PC port wasn't such garbage. You can't even finish the game, it's so buggy!

[CARRiON]

5 hours ago, TFK said:

If you're talking about 'proper' horror games, I would definitely play FNAF, and by FNAF, I mean all 5 main games.

 

FNAF 1 - considerably scary. Would be even better If you start find hidden easter eggs and somehow discover Golden Freddy.

 

FNAF 2 - Scary. But a bit boring. I liked the new animtronics and their jumpscares, but I hate that there are less secret animatronics and some of them are even considered as CANON to the plot. 

 

FNAF 3 - A whole mix of horror, thrill and suspense. The more you play through the game, the more you could understand the secrets of the restaurant.

 

FNAF 4 and 5 - scary as fuck.

BOO!

 

Scared ya, huh?

[Voros]

We need more SCP.

[MTF Sergeant]

5 hours ago, Voros said:

We need more SCP.

Do you think we need a sequel for SCP - 087-B?

[Agentbromsnor]

15 hours ago, CARRiON said:

BOO!

 

Scared ya, huh?

While I'm not a fan of FNAF nor the surrounding fanbase, I do appreciate the first FNAF game for reviving a lot of interest in the horror video game genre. The gameplay is nothing great, and even quite tedious, but the amount of detail put into the first game is pretty great and it also tells a creepy back-story quite well (at least, until he ruined it with the later games).

[MTF Sergeant]

On 06/22/2017 at 0:49 AM, Avoozl said:

They never scared me either, I simply enjoyed them for what they were.

FEAR shouldn't have been a first-person shooter game in the first place. I had expected it to be a survival-horror game

[roadworx]

2 hours ago, TFK said:

FEAR shouldn't have been a first-person shooter game in the first place. I had expected it to be a survival-horror game

why? the game is barely even a horror game. the main focus is directed towards the action, not the horror - which is part of the reason why the game is so damn good :)

[kb1]

There used to be a time when all those "boring" elements used to generally be creepy and scary. Unfortunately, in this day and age, everyone is thoroughly desensitized to all of it. Shame, really.

 

As far as the game mechanic though, I tend to not care so much if the setup is dumb: "I'm in the haunted house, and I need to get out, but I can't just bust a window and climb out." I accept that the designers wanted to emulate a real setting, and create a puzzle, without making every stupid action I can think of, actually work. The fact that I cannot bust the window and simply climb out, is,, yes, dumb, but that's the puzzle - that's not how the designer wanted me to progress through the game. Besides, if I could bust the window, the game would be over in 2 minutes.

 

Every game has this lack of realism in it somewhere. The old text adventures would say "The forest is too thick to continue", in response to typing "Go North". Sure, it sucks that I cannot go north, but there's no game to the north, anyway! There's nothing there, because the designer didn't put anything there.

 

By the way, does anyone here like text adventure games?

[Voros]

2 hours ago, kb1 said:

By the way, does anyone here like text adventure games?

They can be quite fun. If you're patient enough.

[KVELLER]

3 hours ago, kb1 said:

By the way, does anyone here like text adventure games?

I've never played one of them. Maybe I should try one sometime.

[june gloom]

Can't go wrong with Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork.

[HorrorMovieRei]

16 hours ago, kb1 said:

By the way, does anyone here like text adventure games?

I've been meaning to try them out. Downloaded the Zork trilogy, but haven't actually played them yet.

[RUSH]

Remember when Slenderman was all the rage? Yeah, I'm glad that's over with.

[Voros]

There are three horror games I know that are bound to be released:

Agony, which is really graphic judging from the videos, with the gore, imagery. Tits.

Scorn, I'm not sure exactly what the game is truly like, but the H. R. Giger-esque design, the lonely atmosphere.

Routine, supposedly about a guy (who reminds me of Marathon guy a bit) in a techbase taken over by killer robots.

I've have high hopes for Agony, given how it's so uncensored.

[Neurosis]

20 hours ago, TFK said:

FEAR shouldn't have been a first-person shooter game in the first place. I had expected it to be a survival-horror game

 

Shouldn't that be the other way around? The horror elements in FEAR were lackluster at best, and the best part of that game was the FPS elements. 

 

Silent Hill ruined me in terms of horror games because no other horror game will ever be as good as the first 4 Silent Hill games. No other horror game has made me cry like Silent Hill 2 did, and no other horror game made me play through it 3 times in a row like Silent Hill 3 did. I spent most my childhood and teenage years trying to get into Resident Evil, I really tried to appreciate it for what it was, and the monster designs are great and all...but I hate Resident Evil with a burning passion. In fact, I hate pretty much every horror game because of how unoriginal, boring, and downright stupid they are. It's got nothing to do with being desensitized, a good horror game should grip me. A good horror game goes beyond its horror elements. But instead, in most of these games, I'm just walking around in the dark and yawn, boring. These games also lack any atmosphere and don't know how to utilize tension properly, opting for cheap jump scares like zombie doggos breaking through glass every chance they get. Jumpscares does not a good horror game make, and that goes for horror movies as well. 

 

also the horror tropes are so overused, it reminds me of anime in that it's a genre that keeps repeating the same tired tropes over and over ad nauseam. Notice how most of these games try to cram exposition in the form of finding notes every where. Like, literally every modern horror game has conveniently placed notes strewn throughout the game. 

 

and then there's Outlast 2. 

Spoiler

herp derp religion is scary u guise! Okay, religion IS scary but how many times we gotta have some twisted catholic people who wanna make blood sacrifices to god while mumbling biblical shit? come up with something different for once, at least Silent Hill made up its own religion.

 

[TheOrganGrinder]

I feel as though horror games are often too quick to kill the player character in too arbitrary a fashion, failing to recognise that the highest tension and greatest excitement are reached when the player is trying and fighting to stay alive.  When the player starts to feel as though death and failure are inevitable or even an intended part of a game's experience or design, that player tends to disconnect, to invest less effort in surviving and to find death (and the threat of death) less of a source of tension.  Perhaps horror is the one genre where you can't require the player to earn success by learning from failure, because a monster or trap that kills the player in a surprising, shocking, and horrific fashion is none of those things by the fifth or sixth time it happens; fear is gone, replaced by frustration.

 

Five Nights was an interesting experiment because its strongest jumpscares by far were its death animations - the jumpscare exists to punish the player for failing, rather than to scare and disorient the player in the hopes of making them fail.  It represents the fail state rather than being a means toward achieving one.

[Deleted_Account]

I like the early Resident Evil games, including REmake. Those gave me good scares back in the day. I miss those days.

[june gloom]

5 hours ago, Neurosis said:

 

Shouldn't that be the other way around? The horror elements in FEAR were lackluster at best, and the best part of that game was the FPS elements. 

 

Silent Hill ruined me in terms of horror games because no other horror game will ever be as good as the first 4 Silent Hill games. No other horror game has made me cry like Silent Hill 2 did, and no other horror game made me play through it 3 times in a row like Silent Hill 3 did. I spent most my childhood and teenage years trying to get into Resident Evil, I really tried to appreciate it for what it was, and the monster designs are great and all...but I hate Resident Evil with a burning passion. In fact, I hate pretty much every horror game because of how unoriginal, boring, and downright stupid they are. It's got nothing to do with being desensitized, a good horror game should grip me. A good horror game goes beyond its horror elements. But instead, in most of these games, I'm just walking around in the dark and yawn, boring. These games also lack any atmosphere and don't know how to utilize tension properly, opting for cheap jump scares like zombie doggos breaking through glass every chance they get. Jumpscares does not a good horror game make, and that goes for horror movies as well. 

 

also the horror tropes are so overused, it reminds me of anime in that it's a genre that keeps repeating the same tired tropes over and over ad nauseam. Notice how most of these games try to cram exposition in the form of finding notes every where. Like, literally every modern horror game has conveniently placed notes strewn throughout the game. 

 

and then there's Outlast 2. 

  Hide contents

herp derp religion is scary u guise! Okay, religion IS scary but how many times we gotta have some twisted catholic people who wanna make blood sacrifices to god while mumbling biblical shit? come up with something different for once, at least Silent Hill made up its own religion.

 

To be fair to Silent Hill, it's clear their religion is very heavily based off of Christianity if you pay attention. The original game actually was going to center around Satanism but they were forced to change it.

 

Have you tried Afraid of Monsters? It's the last true scary game for me. Silent Hill 4 was fucking awful, and the beginning of the series' downwards slope into shittitude. Afraid of Monsters really made up for it. Cry of Fear is also pretty good -- the abandoned asylum is nerve-wracking.

[Agentbromsnor]

1 hour ago, Piper Maru said:

I like the early Resident Evil games, including REmake. Those gave me good scares back in the day. I miss those days.

Does that also include Resident Evil: Survivor? :)

[Deleted_Account]

 

1 hour ago, dethtoll said:

To be fair to Silent Hill, it's clear their religion is very heavily based off of Christianity if you pay attention. The original game actually was going to center around Satanism but they were forced to change it.

 

Have you tried Afraid of Monsters? It's the last true scary game for me. Silent Hill 4 was fucking awful, and the beginning of the series' downwards slope into shittitude. Afraid of Monsters really made up for it. Cry of Fear is also pretty good -- the abandoned asylum is nerve-wracking.

It's good to see other fans of the Silent Hill series, especially the games created by Team Silent. And it's good to see Afraid of Monsters and Cry of Fear get a mention, I love those games so much. But especially Afraid of Monsters, hence my avatar! I've been playing it a lot as of late, it really captures that mood that I look for in a horror game.

 

1 hour ago, Agentbromsnor said:

Does that also include Resident Evil: Survivor? :)

Why yes it does! :)

[Neurosis]

4 hours ago, dethtoll said:

To be fair to Silent Hill, it's clear their religion is very heavily based off of Christianity if you pay attention. The original game actually was going to center around Satanism but they were forced to change it.

 

Have you tried Afraid of Monsters? It's the last true scary game for me. Silent Hill 4 was fucking awful, and the beginning of the series' downwards slope into shittitude. Afraid of Monsters really made up for it. Cry of Fear is also pretty good -- the abandoned asylum is nerve-wracking.

 

Actually if I recall correctly, there's a book in the chapel in Silent Hill 3 that explains that it's a combination of many different religions, with a heavy overtone on Christianity. But yes, that is correct.

 

Afraid of Monsters is a Half Life mod, eh? Looking at the screenshots, it looks great, I might have to check it out! I agree that SH4 marked the beginning of a decline in quality, but at least it was still Team Silent. I actually hated it when I first played it but it eventually grew on me. Besides when you beat it and unlock the sexy outifts for Eileen and Cynthia is where things really get interesting haha ;)

 

3 hours ago, Piper Maru said:

 

It's good to see other fans of the Silent Hill series, especially the games created by Team Silent.

Yes I'm fairly new to the Silent Hill series (I've been listening to the OST by Akira Yamaoka for a decade long before I ever actually picked up the game) but I immediately fell in love with it, especially SH2 and SH3. It heavily influences my life, because strangely enough, I found comfort in those games during a particularly hard time in my life. So those games mean a lot to me.