How can horror games be done right?

How can horror games be done right?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin#Diving_bell_accident
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_Disaster
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_school_massacre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Colleen_Stan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_Accident
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Maura_Murray
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Kitty_murder
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_John
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_William_Fisher
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monster_with_21_Faces
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doodler
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_in_the_Box_(Philadelphia)
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayetano_Santos_Godino
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youtube.com/watch?v=2gMjJNGg9Z8
youtube.com/watch?v=mw_HKzo9Ync
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

By being psychological thrillers with horror elements instead of the teenie story scarejump crap.

Clock Tower (SNES)

/thread

You die in game you die IN REAL LIFE

So RE7 is off the list

By constantly subverting the players expectations in clever ways. If a game establishes clear rules, then breaks them with no warning, that causes panic.
The simplest example would be stating in the tutorial section that there are safe areas, then having a particularly dangerous enemy in one later on. But you can also have more complicated ones, for example, having a monster move during the start menu. Some things should only happen on a small percentage to keep things fresh, but the start menu scare can increase if the game detects the player tends to pause when he sees enemies.

I'm also a fan of unique monsters.

Use pic related as the template.

Jump scares aren't scary they're startling

First and foremost, it needs to be a good game, not just a walking simulator with jumpscares. If it's a shooter then the gunplay needs be satisfying, enemies should be different not just visually but also mechanically, so the player would have to think of different tactics to deal with them etc. Scares should be the spice not the dish. In many horror games the whole gameplay is just dangling around waiting to trigger the next spooky sequence that will unlock the next chunk of the level so you can progress further and so on, and it's fucking cancer.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin#Diving_bell_accident
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_Disaster
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_school_massacre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Colleen_Stan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_Accident
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Maura_Murray
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_Knorr
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita_Massacre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobe_child_murders
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_Serial_Murder_Incident
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Kitty_murder
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_devil
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Paisnel
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Db_cooper
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Channon_Christian_and_Christopher_Newsom
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cure_for_Insomnia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rather#.22Kenneth.2C_what_is_the_frequency.3F.22
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_intrusion_incident
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_John
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_William_Fisher
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourang_Medan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Television_broadcast_interruption
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monster_with_21_Faces
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_(murder_victim)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doodler
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_in_the_Box_(Philadelphia)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown_conspiracy_theory
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Likens
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-Landrum_incident
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Miyazaki
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaoru_Kobayashi
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_West
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_himmler
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayetano_Santos_Godino
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bell
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-Fi_murders

The stalker games did it pretty good, those fucking underground labs, and that fucking lion.

Terrifying imagery

THIS IS MY SERMON, THIS IS MY SERMON, THIS IS MY SERMON

I would actually like to see more Doom 3 style horror games. It has potential and I feel we won't ever really get to see it fully realized due to reasons. The closest I can think of that are vaguely similar to Doom 3 would be the Bioshock and System Shock games but as I said only vaguely similar in style.

I'd like to see a game with really spooky dark atmosphere, possibly industrial type setting where it has fast FPS gameplay with the point of the gameplay mainly being to just kill spooky monster designs.

With that said I like Doom 3. This type of game has so much potential in the current year. Just let me run and gun demons with some good horror music and atmosphere. D44M doesn't fill this niche.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_Accident

This has been COMPLETELY debunked.

Go check out the Wyoming Incident, takes influence from the Max Headroom stuff

>white people neighborhood
fucking terrifying

I miss the old arcadish survival horror like Resident Evil or Dino Crisis.
I mean Silent Hill psychological horror is good and all, but sometime I just want to enjoy the survival part more than the horror.

>I would actually like to see more Doom 3 style horror games

Monster closet simulator?

Yeah I guess you can call it that.

Prove it
inb4 hypothermia

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_intrusion_incident

>The Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion was a television signal hijacking that occurred in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on the evening of November 22, 1987, by an unknown man (or group of unknown individuals).

Wow, so creepy and strange.

Look at all the uniformity. It's truly frightening

Re7, with scary looking walking corpses instead of plain black shadow men with no detail

This guy gets it

No jump scares
Use stuff like indrid cold, black eyed kids, skinwalkers and skinwalker ranch, old hag syndrome, humanoid encounters, missing 411,

the max headroom incident was just a rip off of the maxresdefault incident

Build up jumpscares that never come so there's never relief from the tension

>instead of plain black shadow men
Yeah, the molded were pretty lame. Too goofy to really scare me. Most of the tense moments with them were being stuck in a room with several. And Jack, he just cracks me up to listen to.

an underrated element is to have monsters that look truly repulsive and creepy. Like just looking at them makes your skin crawl. A lot of games don't really do this

Too many games do this though, it gets old fast. You start to realize most of the game is just a cocktease for a jumpscare that will never come.

Until Dawn was good. Fight me.

This is a really good post. That picture is definitely pretty disturbing to me, although I can't articulate why. It just gives me a creepy feeling, I wish more games had imagery like this

You mean you haven't seen the video?

images, things and sightings that give you a feeling of "wrongness". Like that image that doesnt look like a gif of some lady and you feel like you know somethings wrong with it, its not particularly scary but eventually she moves her eyes and face to look at you. Something that invokes that feeling

youtube.com/watch?v=2gMjJNGg9Z8

It's an Alan Resnick film. His shit is amazing and he should be doing bigger and more regular projects.

bears aren't necessarily scary, why would you post one?

>everyone in here hating on jumpscares

Like anything else, they are a tool, and can be effective when done right. If you went into a game knowing there were 100% no jumpscares, a lot of the tension would be gone, especially if the game is the kind where it makes you think a scare is coming.

It's fine if a game doesn't have jumpscares, but if it doesn't I'd rather it give up the whole "oohh there MIGHT be a jumpscare!" and just focus on atmospheric/psychological horror instead. This is what annoyed me while playing Dead Space.

Jump scares with proper build up and in-universe context are scary. You've only ever experienced mediocre horror if you equate jump scare with startling. A jumpscare doesn't have to be something flashing on screen with a loud noise

I don't get it.

You can't have watched the whole thing yet.

His films/standup are post-irony done to perfection. Don't try to "get it"

>Least scary of the first four games
Use 3 and 1 as templates.

By abusing our natural fears, and keeping things difficult to get a full grasp on.

take for example the movie Jacob's Ladder, which Silent Hill 2 takes some of its effects from. any time something horrific is on screen it is usually moving, wriggling, or in darkness so we only get a little hint at what it is, our brains make up the rest and that uncertainty can manifest into varying levels of fear.

Another thing is futility. A virus, for example, raising the question of "am I infected? am I going to die?" or being trapped in a situation - IE a building, a town, an island. It's just you and your barely understood enemies.

reliability. You need your main character to be someone you can identify with, someone who could be just about anyone. James Sunderland, just your average guy - little bit of a dark past, but who doesnt have a few skeletons in their closet? Maybe I could be James.

Finally, and this may fall into the futility element, but the ability to turn everyday occurrences into something horrific. There are two manga that genuinely unnerved me, and that was Fuan No Tane and Uzumaki. I remember a few chapters of Fuan No Tane where a rather mundane visit to an elevator with a woman (who, going back to the unknown argument, is hiding her face, but at a glance seems like she could be pretty)

It isnt until the door closes that a chomping sound is heard and part of her face is revealed to be a horrific set of teeth. what happens after is never explained, and its better that way.

>grotesque monsters
>isolation/desolation/intrigue
>reliance on survival aspects (low ammunition/healing count)
>rewarding exploration (counteract above to an extend)
>sound/music is very important (footsteps on different grounds like earth, concrete and glass/ambience/drone music sometimes concrete)
>Puzzles
>environemnts

Seriously, horror is probably the most difficult genre to craft since it requires a lot of attention to details and an interest in the genre itself. I have yet to play something as tense as slent hill 1 or resident evil 2 in fact, i havent played anything that resembles this kind of horror since its an art long lost but can provide a more fleshed out checklist

This shit is why subnautica was so good. The noises and the ability to just barely see shit hit the "uncertainty" peg for me, and the whole Carar virus played with futility pretty hard, until I found out you could cure it, I thought I fucked up and was doomed to die after like 1 more ingame week.

>reliance on survival aspects (low ammunition/healing count)
>rewarding exploration
This will only make the game trivial, like SH1 and 2. Make exploration a necessity to survive, casuals be damned. I want to actually have to save ammo and health for bosses and chancing not being able to beat the game if I wasn't conservative enough.

What a shit list

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Channon_Christian_and_Christopher_Newsom

This is just one of the stories that helped cement my hatred of negroes. Only scary thing is knowing I have to pretend they're people.

It doesnt have to if the enemies are interesting emchanicly (dodging, sponging up random bullets) you can have algorhytm for this kind of stuff. I would take it even farther and make the loot completely randomized every playthrough to fuck with good players.You remember your favorite weapon, well fuck you its endgame now but have this cool new grip to balance shit out etc. There is SO much potential and fun to be had with horror but normies hate it and therefor its dead. Prey tried, i loved it it didnt suceed surpires surprise

Look at Lemmino's video about it on Youtube. I'm not that guy so I can't say it was debunked, but it is a more likely case for this incident.

you have to be careful with making horror too psychological though. it can easily be obnoxious 2deep4u "high art" garbage that isn't scary at all, and people only praise it to seem smart. I'm tired of horror games/movies that are just about the chracter's descent into madness and conveyed through pretentious metaphors

All you need is psychologically terrify the player, not put in bullshit jump scares.

Darkwood is horror done right

just do shit that is mentally scary or inconsistent with the game rules

>opening inventory pauses the game
>later on it doesn't pause the game anymore, and there's an enemy that gets alerted to you when you open it up

>Ingame map is hard to navigate and you need to navigate one cardinal direction for a majority of the area
>Compass occasionally leads you towards general direction of enemy if distant enough that it doesn't become apparent that the compass is following them.

>you see an enemy ahead of where you need to go that looks at you but keeps moving on
>when you go to where the enemy ahead of you was and look back, you can see yourself where you were when the enemy was looking at you

>backtrack into a previous safe area
>it's not safe anymore

>consumables to fuck with the enemies but aren't plentiful enough to use them on every encounter.

>More intelligent AI and the feeling that you are genuinely being hunted, you can't just break line of sight and hide under a bed and be invisible.

>Open areas to play on predatory instinct. Create bushes, shadows and objects that look like silhouettes to play on pareidolia. Have enemies that actually stalk these areas as well, but can be outsmarted and avoided.

just put in some clever spooky shit along with actual danger, but never play on either too hard. surprise is what makes things scary, which is why jump scares work, but they only work the first few times before they become obnoxious. If you want to scare people you have to play on the unknown and unexpected.

Most of the details that people tell over and over weren't even in the original reports and didn't appear in any accounts until DECADES later. It's basically an internet myth that's only LOOSELY based on a real event.

>you see an enemy ahead of where you need to go that looks at you but keeps moving on
>when you go to where the enemy ahead of you was and look back, you can see yourself where you were when the enemy was looking at you
I like this one

I want to compliment you. The best part about what you have said is, it all can be randomized which is one of the more important elements. Subsequent playhtorughs lose their tension since the player knowing most scripted events, changing things up with randomness keeps the player guessing even at his 5th walktrough.
Bonus points: Implement capcha for every interaction with map or inventory system to add extra terror

they need somekind of combat and badly, otherwise it becomes really boring when you dont need to fight any grotesque creatures you meet

does this have suicide forest?

Is it better than the ps1? Cause ps1 Clock Tower was shit.

This reminded me
Nevada-tan is 24 years old by now
probably making her older than most people browsing Sup Forums now

But not like how many modern games devolve into action games with horror elements. If you get strong enough that the enemies no longer feel like threats, or have enough supplies that it would be a BAD idea not to kill everything, then it falls apart as a horror game

post the one about noclip

without jumpscares

watch what cry of fear did better than resident evil 7 and we are on the right tracks.

youtube.com/watch?v=mw_HKzo9Ync

Have good gameplay.
Nothing says you have to be a slow, shitty, ugly FPS game in order to be scary.

>Create bushes, shadows and objects that look like silhouettes to play on pareidolia

an important element of horror IMO is making normal objects and sounds resemble what you fear. if you've seen the babadook, it's neat: the creature has these claw like hands, so you see claws everywhere: in the trees, in clouds, in the patterns of her son's hair...It's neat when there's a visual motif that communicates your paranoia

make it like spec ops the line but instead of dumping "le hero shit" dump horror halfway through the game
Like the first Predator movie

I thought Alien Isolation blended the ability to fight back with helplessness quite well. I could see a similar playstyle work for something like a Lovecraftian game.

PS1 Clock Tower wasn't outright BAD as much as it was just eh...

SNES game is fucking fantastic. WAY better than anything else in the series.

True

By making it creepy and unearving.

I loved Until Dawn for the wrong reasons.

It wasn't as spooky as it was thrilling and cozy.

Until Dawn is cozy!! COZY!

In a more serious note, make dying to the bad guy something awful. If all dying does is send you back a few minutes with everything intact, then it's no big deal if you get caught. Having to run for your life from some big hulking monster is a lot more scary if dying to it means you'll lose something significant. Think like in more open, survival-based games; even situations that aren't meant to be scary can become terrifying if dying means you lose all of your equipment and food.

SCP-3007

Heroine gets horifically raped, ending is changed. There is only one saved game, no savescumming. A;t + f4 or shutting down console like bitch in monster encounter results in raped/failed state.

This is a good idea but contextualizing so it makes sense would be a fucking nightmare.

Too many SCPs try too hard to be original by being meta and messing up the format.

Read it. 3007 genuinely sends chills down my spine. The implications are just horrifying.

Fpbp.
Most important is the no jump scares part, and I'd like to add - hardcore mode, eg death is permanent.

How about having audioless jumpscares? Like maybe there's a monster type that, if you stare at it from a distance long enough, slowly rises up then instantly rushes to your face with very minimal audio? Why is this so fucking rare? It's always the screeching violin that ruins it.

>Babadook
I'm so sick of it's fanboys, whenever I state the simple fact, that as a horror movie it's not scary at all, they immediately go "hurr Durr you didn't understand it".

Its not even complicated to understand ffs. It's just not scary. And not that deep desu.

There aren't any movies that are scary. Zero. Once you're an adult, what is supposed to scare you? Jump scares? Lol.

Creativity, Jumpscares are mostly shit, but if you make something unique in a horror game, that's just hits. We went from jumpscares, to brutality, but it is fading and going to shit like Outlast 2.

P.T did it really well, absolutely weird and shocking and mindfucking horror. I wish they would actually release a game like that.

I would recommend darkwood to everyone but currently steam controller support is broken so its a no buy until that is fixed.

>Babadook

pure garbage

That capcha being beating Dark Souls with integrated numpad controls

>It's just not scary. And not that deep desu.
100% true but it being scary or deep isnt why i like it

I just woke up and I'm not getting it.

All you need are Good puzzle, fixed camera angle, tank control, pre rendered background and memorable character.

The first image of that one even before the entry begins looks very unsettling to me.

Not sure if I'd exactly use the word scary, but I watched The Witch recently and there were several scenes in it that were really fucking uncomfortable, not because of anything disturbing on screen, but because they had such a dreadful atmosphere in them. I personally think it's one of the best horrors I've seen, and it didn't have any jumpscares at all. Maybe just a single really mild one. I would love to see a modern video game be able to accomplish something like this.

Keep reading the exploration log while comparing it to the images you'll get there.

It's the contrast between a normal looking neighborhood and a lady in a wierd pose facing you in the middle of the road.

well good luck since that's one of the most atmospheric and well executed movies i've ever seen

VR will be key to this. I wanted to make a VR horror game but since the start of VR all anyone has done is make horror games. However, with VR even simple jump scares have the ability to fuckin traumatize you

someone will die of a heart attack inside a VR headset

As good of an idea that is, I don't ever want to experience it again.

what is this picture sposed to represent

>Containment procedure & Description
It's an interesting, creepy SCP, but I don't really see what the big dea-
>Expand Interviews
HO- fuck.

change filetype from jpg to gif and youve got gold right there
also
did you have a heart attack like the character in the movie?