I recently finished playing Dead Space after borrowing it from a friend, and it started me thinking about fear in video games. Here is my opinion: Game developers have lost their way when it comes to making true horror games. What we have now, and have had ever since Doom defined the genre, are startling games. Take Dead Space for an example. The fear in Dead Space comes from monsters jumping out at you from the dark, or playing dead and then popping up when you least expect it. The fear is there, for a moment, but it quickly dissipates as you chop the sucker to hell. When you are equipped to completely trash any enemy that comes your way, the fear of your enemy does not last; it is fleeting, and insubstantial. So what makes a game truly horrific? Truly scary? Well, Dead Space also touches on this, although not nearly enough as it should have. True fear comes from the knowledge that you cannot defeat what scares you. For example, the beginning sequence of Dead Space is quite horrifying, because you have no weapons, and can only run screaming from the monsters that chase you. But for me, the single most terrifying sequence in the entire game comes in the fifth chapter, when a religious zealot sicks his latest creation on you: a monster that you cannot kill! You can shoot it, incapacitate it, stomp on it, but it will just keep coming for you. You can escape for a bit, but not for long. When I first heard the words "You hear that? It's coming", I felt a chill that all horror games should strive to achieve in their players. Once I had frozen the damn thing, I spent the rest of the game hoping, and praying, that it would never get out. I was a fool... More games need to have this aspect of horror. I am sick of games trying to scare me with jack in the boxes.
Stuff like this makes a game scary: Spoiler Put all of those in one game and you'll have the number 1 horror game immediately.
I agree. I have played the first part of dead space where you run down the hallways crappin your pants, and it was scary, but not the scary I would like. I want a game to scare me so bad I can't go to sleep for the next couple nights. I want a game that is scary because situations in the game could happen in real life. I think what makes a game scary is the amount of it you can relate to, and how much of that can come true. Today's games seem so unrealistic (Dead Space, F.E.A.R., Condemned).
Ambiance of the game. Silent Hill is a good one. You're going around in a game that was close to zero visibility due to the fog, the only way you know there is an enemy is because of a radio that develops static as the monster nears, which means you know how close, but you don't know the direction. Not to mention the pure brutality and crazy disgusting scenes in the game. Not to mention the entity named Pyramid Head. It was impossible to kill him when he chases you. That game was purely evil. If you like getting freaked out, go play it, seriously.
FEAR 2 is really good too. Half the time you don't know where the hell you're going, and I barely even want to continue that game just because I don't want to see alma.
The games containment of horror is associated with the gamers opinions and fears. If you are startled easily, a game like Dead Space could easily scare the hell out of you. It depends on how the certain events, story, or environment in such a game relate to the player.
Agreed. It's all about ambiance. But I think the most important aspect of ambiance is the audio. If you don't have some sort of audio theme to terrify people, then you won't have a scary game. Look through any true horrific game and you'll find a great soundtrack behind it.
Our generation has been exposed the more violence, sex, and in this case, horror. Something such as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 50 years ago would give children and adults alike nightmares that would require intense therapy to cope with. Now, it's just a thriller, with sudden, startling scenes. We never realize true horror unless personally experienced. By this, I mean making connections and inferences. Like stated above, it's all about the individual, and of course, the times.
A good horror game would give people enough backstory to understand some of what is going on, but not all of it. It would give them something to connect to on a personal level and the game would interpret their ways of solving problems and use that against them. In effect, a goo horror game would actually be a horror/rpg. All of your actions would determine how things unfolded and how scary they would be. Additionally, a good horror game should spend time focusing on having several short action sequences right after one-another, then waiting and unleashing longer ones where you will run out of ammo and have to creatively use the environment to dispatch the remaining foes or die. (An example could be having to blow up things, or use an item in your inventory to do something like thow a bottle of alchohol near a fire that is dangerously close to a car or something explosive, or maybe just shutting an elevator door on them.) Stupid little things like a zombie playing dead don't work, giant unkillable machines busting through a wall next to you and chasing you through a hall full of other foes and a dead end does though. Horror game maker should read this post, it could help them make money again... Or maybe I should make a horror game.. Nah too much time and work.
The only part that truly gave me a long amount of fear was when the ships power turns off in Dead Space, that was the only time I did not want to continue any further and just drop my remote and leave the game.
Fear itself is based usually on not knowing something. Like for example (feel free to laugh at this) the first time I played BioShock I nearly shat myself at the start when you are in the submarine, with the Splicer running around outside. I didn't know what the hell was happening and I was scared shitless. The other part was where you are in a room with a shotgun surrounded by light and then everything goes black when you pick it up. You sit there waiting going "What the hell.." then a Splicer comes behind you and smacks you in the back of the head. Nearly dropped my controller. I think startling is good but in moderation, but it's the suspense leading up to the startlement that does it. You know something is going to happen and you know something is going to attack you but you don't know when. I think the perfect game would be one where the monsters are always random. They attack out of nowhere and without warning, and it changes every time you play. That would be the perfect horror game.
yeah actually, i think i was pretty freaked out by that beginning part in bioshock. Mostly because you had no ****in clue what was happening or why.
It's all in the ambience and audio. There's nothing scary about what Dead Space did. It just put you in a dark corridor and put the enemy somewhere in the darkness. You know, if you die, you go back to a checkpoint. And that is the problem with dead Space. You remember the checkpoints because you keep dieing and everything becomes predictable. For a game to be scary. The enemies have to be few and far between. You have to hear the bad guys, you have to see the effect of the bad guys, sometimes see the bad guys and when you fight them. You can't kill them. You think you've beaten it but it runs off. The battles have to be desperate. Of course that's just one way to do horror. Another is to make you unsur as to what's going on. Bioshock did this really well. Until Frank came in. Then you knew what was going on because everyone told you what was happening. Splicers weren't as scary. Big Daddies were no longer lumbering hulks that you were scared to hit. Little Sisters were still creepy and that was about it. Personally, horror in games should be where you don't fight often. You hear the bad guy a lot. In the pipes, the crunch of snow along with yours, water splashing, a girl crying. Anything like that. And it shouldn't give you objectives. I find that gets rid of horror. Using Dead Space as an example, the person says, "The engine is broken. Without, we're all going to die." If it tells me to do it, I'll think okay then. I'll get roight on that and the horror is gone. If it doesn't, the fact that the engine is dead makes me think that I have to fix it. Nothing I can do about it. Both end on the same result but one makes me give myself the objective while the other doesn't.
Natal is going to be at least a year and a half away from release. Microsoft just gave game developers some dev kits for the unit. It will be a long ways out before any quality game comes out supporting Natal. But a horror game using Natal could have a lot of potential.
Jack in the boxes are fun in co op. I love walking through a dark hallway with my best friend and have something that pops out and we yell "HOLY MOTHA ****IN ****!" at the top of our lungs. Scary games have lost their dementedness. D2 was ****ing demented. Scary games now adays are just blood running down the walls, or a little girl crying, or some other commonly used horror.
i thought FEAR 2 was way scarier than deadspace. it was only scary for about ten minutes. in FEAR 2 they bombard you between firefights and intense scares that come out of no where. i think if you want to make a good horror game follow this formula, or go with something like doom 3, silent hill, system shock 2, Darkseed, and last but definetly not least fatal frame 2. if you want some good horror games these are the ones to check out.
The Resident Evil remake is prolly the scariest game I know of. Like Silent Hill it relies on ambiance not to scare you but to make you uneasy. Speaking of which, Silent Hill is definately my favorite scary game series. The second one in specific is my favorite. It's prolly my favorite scary game. I think that suprise scares are good but they tend to get old. Ambiance on the other hand never gets old.