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[Neonivek]

I've played and watched quite a few horror games and there is one these I find in common with the VAST majority of ones where there are other characters with you.

You are the ONLY one allowed to survive. Everyone can be picked off with sneaking enemies and often unbeatable attacks but no enemy will actually do it to you (and if they do, you tend to be the only one able to negate it).

the absolute worst game in this respect is probably the Fear series which features extensive scenes where you will survive often for seemingly no reason except that you are special. Sometimes this makes sense and I don't mind it, for example in Fatal Frames that arn't the first it is because you have the ONLY weapon that can actually effect ghosts (in fact the ability for people who are not you to survive is more impressive).

It only really bugs me in the sense that it sort of takes away from the experience. Why is this place less deadly to me?

[Catastrophic lolcats]

There are very few true horror games. The majority of "horror games" are shooters with jump scares. The closest I've seen to a horror game with guns is the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and even then it was more the atmosphere being so depressing rather than anything being all that scary in it.

[Josephus]

the Fear series which features extensive scenes where you will survive often for seemingly no reason except that you are special

You're Alma's son, along with Paxton Fettel. That's precisely why you survive. Unlike everyone else, you have freakish fast reactions and are aware of ghostly nonsense, which is why whenever something that instakills someone else attacks you, you have a shot at survival.

(I have no excuses for Fear 2, though)

[fenrif]

Amnesia is probobly one of the better horror games precisely because it actively discourages you from acting the hero. You can't fight the monster and even looking at it affects you negatively. The developers very wisely understood that you can't give a player the traditional video game scenario and create a sense of horror. Any game that encourages you to fight your enemies is almost gaurenteed to not be a horror. A game like Dead Space for example, is an action game in a horror setting... But having scary monsters and dark lighting isn't scary when you can just mow through enemies with your badass space guns like they are butter.

Of course there are ways around this. Resident Evil got around this by having crap controls and limited resources. The enemies in the early Resi games were scary because fighting effectively was kind of difficult, and you had limited ammo and healing supplies. Silent Hill kind of did the same thing, though those games are more existential horror that relied really heavily on the writing and setting (SH2 gave you way more ammo than it should've done IMHO).

Being the only one to survive never really bothered me. It's a concession to the fact that you're playing a video game and as such you'll get to finish the game one way or another. It's the same reason why a film wont just cut to black 30 minutes in, mid-sentance, and roll credits. It's just a matter of doing it well enough to not break suspension of disbelief. Also, in nearly every horror game you can die... It's just that the nature of the medium means you just reload the checkpoint and start again. I suppose this could be worked around by having permadeath and forcing the player to take over a new character when they get taken down. Enforcing the fear of death/the enemy with a restart of progress (probobly character progress rather than narrative).

[Neonivek]

Of course there are ways around this.

Usually it is by limiting your actual combat ability. I am reminded of Alone in the Dark (the older one) where combat was extremely deadly but where the horror of the series drained as the series went on simply because you were no longer trapped in horror... but more or less shooting your way through zombie pirates and zombie cowboys.

Fatal Frame does it by giving you a weapon that requires you to stay calm when an enemy is going right at you... often to the extent of almost letting them hit you. The biggest issue with Fatal Frame is simply the numbers it shows (it is a game that kills its own horror factor).

Being the only one to survive never really bothered me

It isn't that it is being the only one who is "allowed" to survive. Everyone around you will have cheap unavoidable deaths but never you. Monsters will ambush the NPCs and kill them but against you they suddenly gain a code of honor.

It always just draws attention to the fact that it is a game. "If the enemies can attack people through walls why havn't they ever done that to me? ohh right because it is a game".

Amnesia is probobly one of the better horror games precisely because it actively discourages you from acting the hero

It also oddly enough creates another effect. Since you cannot actually hurt a monster it almost turns you into an observer.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth has always struck me as a good example of a horror game. It is in many ways a proto-Amnesia, aside from the fact that there is some combat. Being a part of the Mythos, you of course have sanity to worry about. You can't even look at most of the things you are supposed to deal with, much like Amnesia. Should your sanity start to drain your character will freak the fuck out as your vision is distorted, and will end with suicide should the sanity drain not be stopped. There is a dedicated injury system and can lead to things like you fleeing from a bunch of horrors you can't possibly fight with two broken legs and tripping on morphine, making disturbing cracking noises as your broken femur pieces hit each other with every limping step. Minor injuries will regenerate over time, but major ones don't if not treated. Oh, and that morphine you can use for help from before? Addictive.

Spoiler: Major Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And keeping with Mythos tradition, you can't get an even remotely positive ending. Even the best one only means you get some more answers.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

snip

It's a good point about death you bring up. In horror games like Amensia or Penumbra I generally try to avoid death as much as possible at the start. Mainly because as soon as I die I realise there isn't anything really negative or scary about reloading at the last checkpoint.

Perma-death could be the soultion to this although that's generally extremely annoying in linear games and does nothing but force you to repeat parts of the game. This is why that the SCP Breach game is so exciting for me. Randomising the horror elements with perma-death, giving it a "Roguelike feeling" might be a way to reinforce the fear of death.

It isn't that it is being the only one who is "allowed" to survive. Everyone around you will have cheap unavoidable deaths but never you. Monsters will ambush the NPCs and kill them but against you they suddenly gain a code of honor.

It always just draws attention to the fact that it is a game. "If the enemies can attack people through walls why havn't they ever done that to me? ohh right because it is a game".

Well I think this comes back to "true horror versus action horror". A lot of the "true horror" games have little to none in the way of NPCs. Isolation is one of the easiest and most effective fears to play on in a video game. Seeing a NPC dashed to pieces by a monster shows how powerful that monster is but it breaks the isolation and gives you a clear indication of the threat. Unknown threats are the staple of horror because the unfamiliar and different is a basic human fear. 

Giving the threat a personality, even an animalist "I KEEL YOU" personality is still giving shape and meaning to your threat. It might indicate that it's a dumb creature that lacks any real sentient intelligence. This is much different to the primal fear of creating your own threats and shapes in the darkiness and having your own mind play against you.
Hell in Amensia the "water beast" has no model what so ever.

To me, the best horror is implanting an idea in the reader's head and having him being his own worst enemy. Horror doesn't need monsters running at you screaming but rather be something that comes back to you at 2am in the morning, when your girlfriend is visiting friends and you don't know if downing that bottle of Irish Whiskey will help you sleep or make it worse.

[ductape]

theres something deeper to this I think. An action game, be it horror or not, allows you to ignore the story and mow through the action if thats what you want to do. I know I often do.

Horror implies that the story is paramount to the experience, if there is action to be had, it should probably fall in after that. Shooting things isnt that scary (in a game, ever tried it in real life?) but if you are invested in the story and feel immersed, then you can feel scared.

I will admit that System Shock 2 scared the piss out of me back in the day. Heck I just about screamed and ran out the room when a spider attacked me for the first time while playing TES: Arena WAY back in the day but these are kinda jump scares. After we get used to these sorts of things, it seems that the scariest stuff is found when we become invested in the characters and story being told. This seems to hold true in the outside world as well as within video games.

So then, if in a horror we can agree that it is story telling that is the central facet, then of course the hero does not die easily, if at all. Have you ever read a novel (a serious novel that is published) that has the main protagonist die mid-struggle? No, probably not. Why? Well, thats just bad storytelling and people dont tend to buy those stories or return for more.

[Girlinhat]

I was gonna say SCP: Contai- but I can't even say the damned thing without shitting myself.  I haven't even played the game.  I've only seen one trailer and heard that it exists.  And yet that thing terrifies the holy living hell out of me on so many levels.

As far as I understand it, you are VERY lucky to even start the game.  Surviving doesn't happen.  You're going to blink, and you're going to die.

Fuckin' concrete dolls...

[Mech#4]

@Neonivek: Dead Space is guilty of a lot of the things you mentioned. Well, at least the first one is as I haven't played the sequal.
Unnamed mooks die first in unbeatable attack which you can't do anything about. Hey, let's split the party! Only you, Isaac, can get the key to open the door to get the 1/3 mcguffins to fix the lift to save the blah blah blah.

I had fun with the game (except for the asteroid shooting) it has many of the horror cliches though. It's like in zombie movies, to actually create a threat out of the shambling horde, they have to make the survivors do really stupid things which real people probably wouldn't do.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a nice horror game. The atmosphere is really well done and the beginning is a nice, lenthy piece of exploration. The ending, while fun, focuses more on combat though in a blind panic manner.

STALKER, as well as Metro 2033 both do really well when it comes to underground bunkers/laboratories with creepy monsters and so forth. STALKER slightly better but only because Metro 2033 is linear (possibly also because STALKER's monsters are more iconic. Bloodsuckers and Controllers?)

Amnesia is a great horror game. The enviroment gets quite claustrophobic, especially with the heavy darkness, and the lack of weapons makes you dread stumbling across one of the creatures as you know you'll have to escape from it somehow. That being said, the AI for the creatures was a little... too simple. Breaking line of sight with a pillar shouldn't cause them to wander off immediately.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Also, they spawn at specific places. More randomness there would've mixed things up a bit. Not that having one appear and wander about then disappear isn't creepy, but...

[Neonivek]

Dead Space is guilty of a lot of the things you mentioned

It better, it was what inspired me to bother to make this topic.

Dead Space 2 also uses heaping helpings of "Nothing makes sense" when you use a bit of logic.

[Evilsx]

-snip-

SCP is one for the few game that scare the shit out for me, it made Amnesia to me, look like a child game, at the start you can survive but within SCP, you can died with in a few seconds.

[alexandertnt]

Horror in a game is a difficult thing to achieve. There is always the thought that you can just simply reload/respawn if anything goes wrong, which basically eliminates any fear of death. Using cliche's for horror also hurts, somethig that many games are guilty of. I have seen about 10000 zombies now, they just dont invoke fear anymore. I dont believe being the "hero" is the problem per se, but knowing your the hero is what invokes the feeling of indestructability, and the insignificance of everything around you.

As stated, perma-death would bring back some seriousness into dying, but for linear games it wouldnt work. The game would lose any horror effect if you repeated the same segments over and over. The SCP game though shows that randomness in a horror game has alot of untapped potential. It brings unpredictability, and allows for non-fustrating perma-death. However, dying over-and-over can trivialise death.

What generally makes horror horror is that you *dont* really know what is happening. It causes the mind to think up unwanted and uncomfortable scenario's. With games like Left 4 Dead, this doesnt happen. Nothing unexpected happens. Shoot some zombies, shoot some more. Same goes for Dead Space, just zombie shooting. Thats not to say that they are bad games, just that they dont really invoke horror. (The aminated deaths in Dead Space diddnt help either. Seen-one-seen-them-all little clips of animations seemed pointless.)

Amnesia tried to mind-screw the player into fear, and it worked quite well. It felt less formula-based, and more like something could change at any moment. The lack of "gamey" elements plus the great visuals and atmosphere was a huge contributor. Plus the story had you pressing further for more of it against the natural fear-of-the-unknown the game invoked.

I dont believe the story is critical to a horror game. The story in Amnesia I diddnt find particularly "scary" (at all). If you ignored the story in Amnesia it is still scary. Games can use visuals and ambience to stimulate the mind into imagining what could have happened, and what could happen. This alone can create a feeling of dread and horror. Throw in some randomness/unpredictability, and vary the game (so that it doesnt feel so formulaic, or even remove it) and IMO thats on track to a genuinely scary horror game.

Basically, A truely scary horror game is quite difficult to do. What makes a game a game tends to work against-the-grain of horror.

[Mech#4]

I wonder how successful a horror game would be if you could lose without actually knowing you had done so. I'm thinking in the vein of Sierra adventure games where if you miss an item early on, you can't complete a later puzzle. Now, not necissarily the same idea, but if you miss a detail or don't solve a puzzle that arms you with some knowledge, you deviate from the main story and into a bad end.

It would have to be done rather subtly.

Say a game where, there are these monsters. Let's use Amnesia's monsters. They can't be defeated through normal means. At one point in the game you come across one caught in a cage, or behind a cave in or something. At this time you have an option, not prompted, to... do something. Set it on fire with a torch, or throw salt on it. This then effects the creature and you go "Ah! Fire does hurt them, maybe that'll be useful later".

Later on, your cornered by one of these monsters in a corridor. Knowing what you found before, you can then defeat the monster by applying fire.


The main issue with my own idea here is, I know how frustrating it is to know you missed something early on that stops you from progressing. Maybe to that end you don't have a good end or bad ends, just various ways it can end, none less true then the other.

[Neonivek]

I wonder how successful a horror game would be if you could lose without actually knowing you had done so. I'm thinking in the vein of Sierra adventure games where if you miss an item early on, you can't complete a later puzzle. Now, not necissarily the same idea, but if you miss a detail or don't solve a puzzle that arms you with some knowledge, you deviate from the main story and into a bad end.

Yes but even people who love point and clicks agree that "You lost" and they don't tell you is a flaw. I've certainly never heard a die hard sierra fan ever defend it.

It is what often makes references to the "Why arn't there more point and clicks" annoying to me sometimes, because it is a very flawed game... but the people who read the article and never really played too many point and clicks read it and think those are the staple of the series (No... Moon puzzles have always been a bad thing to have in point and clicks, they arn't the basis of the genre)

But there is one horror game that almost did that. The entire point is that you can play the game normally and you will ultimately fail. The entire point of the game is actually to change and add things to what you did in order to achieve the best ending possible (Siren)