Care to list things you absolutely can't stand in first person horror games? From overused tropes to nitpicks...

Care to list things you absolutely can't stand in first person horror games? From overused tropes to nitpicks, it's all good feedback for my own game project.

Personally, I hate flashlight batteries as a mechanic.

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youtube.com/watch?v=y_J43LLLtlo
youtube.com/watch?v=ubR6r2ZQCV4
youtube.com/watch?v=yCooV4bXdck
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jumpscares

I hate when sentient plague clouds bump into me. Now THAT'S a jumpscare!

Being able to see the same monster clearly for an extended period of time. If you're gonna have monsters out in the open, a) make them very visually horrifying and hard to make sense of, as in The Thing, or b) have a large variety of monsters with different behaviors/appearances to keep things fresh. Personally, I prefer that you barely see the monster at all, only having a vague idea of what it actually is and what it's capable of.

Preempting a scare with static in the HUD.

Actually coming face to face with a creature, the moment you know what's after you, its horror value depreciates massively

>look down
>no body

and
>the need to use music to make the game scary

Realistic feel/weight to objects really pull in the immersion not just what you interact but what interacts with you as well.

But I admit that is a hard task to complete and do well.

Ya know what was a really good horror game? That P.T game, whatever happened to that?

stutters

>Care to list things you absolutely can't stand in first person horror games?

Horror games that don't take advantage of sound or misuse it as a medium for building atmosphere.
You get games with fucking big, honkey tonk soundtracks drowning out the fucking tension building silence and I fucking hate it.

The best thing you can do in a horror game is establish a genuine "relationship" with the player where no noise is pointless, where if they fucking HEAR SOMETHING they know that something MADE that noise, that it isn't some illegitimate bait and switch and there's a 75% chance there's some sort of spooky business in there.

I hate it when a game lacks weapons and you're expected to run from things constantly. You can get away with the player being helpless for a short period, but fight or flight is a thing where flight only stays in play for so long. Eventually fight will take over and you'll be looking around for potential weapons. Every game that's tried to force a combat-free experience has been filled to the fucking gills with potential weapons.

>run into table
>objects go flying havok engine Oblivion style

The worst in any game not just horror. Was good for a laugh back in the mid 00s but now its just pathetic

the build-up to the """"scare"""" is always tedious and obvious
honestly if the horror-game doesn't actually feature good gameplay I'd probably just stop playing altogether because then I'd be both bored and apathetic

Let me apply a potential exception. Shoot it down if you wish.

>run into table
>knock over lamp
>building now on fire

>I hate it when a game lacks weapons and you're expected to run from things constantly.

I agree with this, but any time you can kill the spooky creature or thing in a horror game is the moment you take away any agency the boogy has as scary monster.
I think the best thing you can do with that kind of situation is to have very limited weapon use, only have it so it can delay said spook, purposefully USE weapons to install a false sense of security, OR kept in reserve in important plot points for when the pc needs to 'win', but, again, only after great trial and tribulation- nothing should ever come 'easy' in a horror game.

yeah. man amnesia a machine for pigs was fun until i stood still for 5 seconds and was slowly slapped to death

goddamn that shit pissed me off

It's scarier when you have the weapons and they just don't work. See the Controller encounter in STALKER. Or Burers.

>guns don't work on Controllers or Burers
they actually do work on them
just not as effectively as stabbing the shit out of them with your knife

>Personally, I hate flashlight batteries as a mechanic.
This shit is the worst in Outlast. Batteries are the only item you collect, so you're wasting battery to rummage through dark rooms just so you can find more batteries. It feels so pointless.

Come to think of it, something else I hate: horror games not punishing 'hiding' more.

Like, there's a reason the phrase, "You can run, but you can't hide" is so fucking famous and prominent: it's way fucking scarier to have to keep running and fleeing the scary thing then it is to hide in a corner behind a wall of half life 2 crates. Now, I don't mean "safe zones", I think there should be designated areas where a player can be safe, but they should be like bonfires in dark souls: strategic and limited.

A good horror game should keep you moving, you shouldn't feel 'safe'.

Well, yes. They work on them. But you're getting tossed around or having your guns yanked or your grenades caught.

i really couldn't stand the load doors from the first RE
how many times are they going to make a long black haired monster woman thing

the best part is when you have 3 batteries and 1 almost full in your flashlight and then comes a scripted event where your flashlight turns off anyway

>literally anything happens
>scare chord goes off
I hate this meme so much

>dynamic with a monster amounts to either it doing direct damage to you in such an inconsequential way that they become more annoying than scary, or they instakill you so the threat of "what's it gonna do to me" goes away"

Is there an actual way around this? Like after the first game over every time you see the monster its going to be less scary, you know what to expect. Is there a way to horrify the player and genuinely have them fear being attacked and killed?

Maybe it deletes a save if you get killed too often, or it plays a disturbing death animation that varies throughout the whole game? Maybe if it kills you it actively blocks off a story path and you'll play the rest of the game as another character wondering what the fuck happened and not knowing if things will get worse?

You're asking the real questions now.

Philosophers will discuss this problem until the Sun explodes.

Thief was pretty much the only game I can think of that really nailed it. No load screen transition doors to cheese them out like in silent hill, no definite safe rooms like resident evil, fucking nothing. You're in a constant state of alertness and movement and anything less than your complete attention means you'll fuck up and have everyone on your ass in moments... and that's when the game drops the spooky shit that gets the player.

Even though the game looks like ass, a lot of the mechanics in this genuinely put me on the edge of my seat and I think other horror games could do well in taking some of them.

charge your phone

Minimal saves and rare items scattered around probably , like resident evil 1-3. So you dont want to die or youll lose your shit and have to replay like 15 minutes of gameplay. But even those games get less spooky after the first playthrough sadly

Well, we're not here to discuss what we 'like' in a horror game, but just for you, sweet, handsome, user:

I really like when horror games mess with the meta, acknowledge the player, our actively take advantage of their digital medium and make you sleuth or dig around a little into the actual 'game', like, the 'game' itself. Because, frankly, you're right, you're absolutely right: there's very little that's scary about 'dying' in a game since there's no real consequence.

I think it was some weird, especially spooky, japanese indie game, but the main spooky was some kind of floating, sprite ms paint skull face? And if he caught/killed you the game would fucking exit- the game would literally close and you'd have to start it again. I also remember the game would have moments where in order to solve puzzles or what have you, you'd actually have to go into the game files/folders and look up it's changing data.

There's too many developers just hedging themselves into stereotyped notions or concepts of what horror is supposed to be like and limiting our experience of it to just, "scary thing come down from hall, he make loud noise and then you fall! BOOOO!! AAHHH!! BOOOOOO AAIIEEEE!!"

That just gets more tedious, though, and in the end the player playing more of the game isn't really a punishment.

Maybe if there was a gambling factor where some kind of rare in game currency was on the line if you fucked up, and maybe you need to have it to constantly refill your health or some kind of timer increase so you dont have a game over.

Hell, if it were legal and actually was a gambling survival horror game with real money I'm sure that'd scare the shit out of people.

>Hell, if it were legal and actually was a gambling survival horror game with real money I'm sure that'd scare the shit out of people.

carnevil 2 when

>start of Alien Isolation
>dude gets killed by Alien some minutes ago
>have to wait for elevator
>HEAVY VERY SCARY MUSIC
>literally nothing happens, lift arrives and i enter

I think Alien: Isolation handled this well in that you can fight the Alien and are expected to fight lesser threats, but the main one is only held off temporarily. As this user said, it's important to mix fight and flight.

often dying leads to worse ending

Lakeview Cabin actually perfectly captures the feeling of a slasher flick. IV in particular is the most effective I feel.

On-topic: I fucking hate the tendency of "horror shooters" that are basically just your typical third person shooter that has dark imagery.

>get a game over
>oh well, I'll go do something el-

>1. game locked out all your functions and threatens to do a system purge unless you start up the game and get to another save

>2. game uses datamining info to threaten to post porn on your social media accounts if you dont get back to another save

>3. game lets you leave but infects your computer with a virus that you can only destroy INSIDE THE GAME

>4. the game doesn't let you out

>It's an absolutely real fuckin' what the shit abstract kind of pathologic disgusting going on.jpg

Can confirm. I finished thief 1 and 2 this summer. The tension it can set up for you can be overwhelming sometimes.

Hell, you could confront and kill technically anything you saw, but that never stopped getting caught from being so, so unpleasant. I had quickload built into my muscle memory because the screaming and shouting and pursuit was so upsetting.

When devs felt the need to make helplessness and survival synonymous with all horror games. Yes, being vulnerable adds to the spoop but it shouldn't be the entire game.

Maybe have it vary so you never know what to expect. Sometimes it instakills you, sometimes it just does some damage, sometimes it doesn't do anything at all, sometimes it just comments on what nice weather we're having. Make it unpredictable.

>the screaming and shouting and pursuit was so upsetting.

I think that's probably scarier than any single enemy running at you. I got that same OH SHIT OH FUCK OH SHIT feeling whenever I played some singleplayer killing floor or l4d on a particularly spooky map.

i think Darkwood did it right

Can 2d games be scary?
Can stylized 2d games be scary?

I think its precisely because you actually do have a slim chance to get away or fight your way out of it that makes it scarier. It isn't just an instant game over in the form of a death screen, you actually do have a chance to leg it and hide from the AI again, but its clutch as fuck.

You want a game that did flight right? LSD. LSD did flight right. LSD presented you with existential dread with the concept of pursuit.

Make characters other than yourself matter, both emotional and mechanically, now make it possible to permanently lose those characters, it's still possible to clear the game but you will have to witness these people get butchered or devoured etc and lose them and their benefits for the remainder of the play through.

But that would require a game development to make an actual likeable character with depth that isn't a tans-antlantic vegesexual jigaboo stereotype or a hawt chick/roughneck

>LSD on downer

I hate when a special ability you have gets upgraded to super special ability that maybe is more effective but nowhere near as fun and there is no way of going back to how was before

RDR had this with the dead eye mechanic. I loved the first version where it was just normal satisfying Max Payne bullet time but then every time the ability got an upgrade it got more and more dumber until finally you just had to sit and watch John twist his arms in 1080 retarded degrees shooting all the baddies around him automatically in a cutscene

>use a flash bomb for the third time in your life
>escape
>difficulty is now cranked up 3x because BUILDER AID ME TO FIND THIS MENACER

take a bunch of benadryl and don't fall asleep and play LSD

and play thief as well.

Absolutely this. It's such a bummer how Silent Hill trivializes its enemies by making them non-entities in terms of gameplay. In the second game, there's no point to killing any of the monsters outside, and they ultimately just come off as goofy. Hell, at least it takes skill in RE to dodge the zombies. In SH, they're nothing.
Good question. The sad reality is that any 100% predictable event like dying and going back to a checkpoint weakens the game's mystery factor. We want to forget we're playing a video game, but that's difficult when you're an adult and know the limits. For example, the lift in SH2 that strips your inventory is a wonderful idea, but it's weakened by the knowledge that the devs still have to provide adequate lighting and enemies you can handle.

How do we negate this? Completely undermine the player's expectations, and pre-empt them every step of the way. Upon death, warp the player to somewhere completely random. Switch to first-person mode at random. Make you think you're going nuts, but with even more subtlety than the elevator thing from SH1. Lowering the enemy count is a good idea. For linear narrative, this is tough, but it can be done.

You have to pull the rug out from the player's feet. Otherwise, they'll never truly be scared

But only if you fuck up and fail in certain ways, your own deaths should be infrequent but also shocking. You have pretty good control of most situations but you have to cut it close often then build suspense to a certain point where you get dropped in the water with the beast figuratively speaking and you need to perform to escape or drive it off.

>Can 2d games be scary?
>Can stylized 2d games be scary?

Literally the only recent games I've actually consider 'scary' are 2d and stylized: Darkwood and Spooky's House of Jumpscares.

>take a bunch of benadryl and don't fall asleep and play LSD
jfc I am never in a million years doing that. Only time I absolutely lost my shit was robotripping. Never again.

Man, I forgot about that game! Perfect Halloween game so long as you can take the hint and not be a retread.

Have watched too many videos of people getting mad because they walked into the Bad End.

Out of curiosity, would you play a 2d horror game that looks like this?
Just trying to think about wether I ought to make it a comic or try to go gamedev.

i wanna play Dusk

Gives up and becomes an FPS

>it turns into a horror game, but only at the very end

seganerds.com/2015/02/02/jace-hall-wants-an-indie-developer-to-make-condemned-3/

To dream...

That looks more suited to a comic for me. Besides, if you're even at the point where you're weighing comic against gamedev, I'd say go comic anyway. You can always make a game later if you like what it turns into! Also publicity and stuff.

>Out of curiosity, would you play a 2d horror game that looks like this?

Naw, looks to goofy, reminds me too much of some 90's cartoon that ran for maybe 6 episodes after 8pm before it was pulled.. Specifically airing on teletoon.

Don't take that too personally though, a lot about what makes things scary is 'context', atmosphere, and obscuraction: letting your viewer's imagination do most of the heavy lifting to make things scarier than they actually are.
I personally, really strongly believe, that less detailed, maybe more low-poly, 2d or sprite stuff will always be able to trump high-quality, high-detail, 3d stuff simply because less-detailed stuff will always have moments of, "what exactly am I looking at?"

Like when you're a kid and you see a sprite from a distance and completely misinterpret what you're looking at.

If you die you revive as an AI but still in first/third person and forcibly kill the friendly characters you got with you. Not before they're dead are you presented with a gameover or menu screen. Unless you quit or reload a save manually, hitting ESC and seeing said menu overlay will not pause the game during this particular scene though.

Should probably only be limited to certain types of deaths to a specific type of enemy. It all plays out in-game though. Different reactions and "dialogue" depending which characters you got with you and how far the story has unfolded. You might just as well be killed again if the companions are armed or strong enough to do so.

>Seeing yourself kill that little girl you tried to keep safe all this time

>game forces me into the role of a particular dudebro spees mareen
>dudebro spees mareen is entirely silent/only grunts/has cero input and personality whatsoever
What is the fucking point then

>time limits/railroaded maps with clearly only one way to get through things
Boring, stale, shit unless you are just making a Borderlands-esque "shoot everything for points and giggles" simulator

>hurrr survival
If I wanted to play Don't Starve, I'd play Don't Starve.

>wobbly camera + strawberry jelly over everything
I mean fuck that shit, it's one of the laziest design choices to add effect to the surroundings ever conceived.

>no melee options whatsoever
I get we sign up for the guns, but why limit the fun?

>because you can't see it, you can't hear it either
It's great that literally everyone and everything ever can sneak up on me, specially in cutscenes! Said nobody ever.

I know there are some games that do both, like some of the adult swim games. I'm mainly torn cause I actually want to animate it, but with the amount of work that goes into it it'd probably be better off to make it a game since there's more potential to do stuff with it than a standalone linear cartoon.

I appreciate the honesty, and I agree with most of what you're saying. Personally I think there's room to experiment with something so detailed that you still get that "what am I looking at" feeling you'd get from, say, silent hill. I mean, mainly I want to have designs with a kind of intensity that they border on skizophrenic, and I think in motion the result could be a lot better. And I also think more stylized stuff can still be scary or unsettling if done correctly.

Maybe I'd just need to build a demonstration to really convince people on it, you know? But that just defeats the point of asking in the first place.

having the ability to actually hurt the monsters always help

Instakill or otherwise extremely deadly, with punishing deaths.

Don't be afraid of the monster, be afraid of losing 20 minutes of progress.

This is actually a good beline into another complaint I have about 'horror': often times spoopies are overdesigned, triple AAA games are often extremely guilty of these because they think, "Ooooh, ahhh, he'sa so scary, see the blood? Look at his mug, he's got the teeth! he's got the spike! he's so violent, what a delight!"

If there's two bits of advice I could give it's that good character design is always based on simplicity -identifying a character or being and remembering them from a glance, think of the 'outline' rule, only not a meme- and that horror design, specifically, can be most strong and responsive when it's based around FETISHISM and not necessarily "danger".

Think back to silent hill's most iconic boogilies and woogilies: they're all basically, sweaty, saran wrapped, f-list characters who're gonna waddle on over to you n'.. Wowwee, I don't even know!

>something actually frightening or unsettling happens
>BWAAAAAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEMMMMMMMMMMFGJSAJFJSDFJKFSJFJ

No attacks.
This always necessitates the adjustment of other gameplay aspects and trivializes the experience into a hide'n'seek simulator.
>fuck's sake it's coming again, time to hold shift-W

STALKER lets you carry an entire arsenal and is still one of the scariest games I played (when it wants to be).

I can't stand when there is background music of any kind. They try to add suspense but it ends up just killing it. I like my horror games quiet so I can hear the monsterous horror lurking behind me as I run away in fear, afraid to look back at the thing that is breathing incredibly loud while the thud of it's footsteps gives insight on how much larger it is than me.

Fair points. I still think there's something there in overwhelming a viewer with what they're seeing in balanced amounts of visual overload. There's a guy out there, jimmyscreamerclauz, he makes a ton of horror animation. It's honestly pretty juvenile edgy shit, but his visuals are interesting and legitimately pretty upsetting and I'd probably shit bricks if I saw any of it in a game somewhere, especially in contrast to something more benign and normal.

youtube.com/watch?v=y_J43LLLtlo
youtube.com/watch?v=ubR6r2ZQCV4
youtube.com/watch?v=yCooV4bXdck
youtube.com/watch?v=XbHUZCZ0yOE

again, a lot of this shit is so edgy it gets pretty comedic after any sort of initial surprise, but I really think that if you put enough of it in the right places in the right context and in the right amounts it could be extremely effective. Specifically I'm more interested in the use of color and heavy black with surrealist imagery, and not explicitly on the content of DUDE EDGE LMAO.

I never noticed the texture work on those guys being so... fluid.

>Walk in room.
>Door slams behind you when you've taken a few steps away from it.

dude what the fuck, is this some pizzagate shit?

That's just a shitty artificial difficulty Souls approach. All it does is frustrate the player, not scare them.

Just make the monster terrifying as hell in the best way. Make the environment dark and keep sound to a minimum. We humans fear the unknown. Add no option to increase brightness either. Make the monster have dark colored skin. Make it twitchy and make it contort it's limbs in very disturbing ways when you look directly at it. Make it do no real damage to you. Make it so when the monster catches you it drags you into weird ass places delaying your progress further. Make the monster actually scary so that you don't want to encounter it at all. Make it so your character has a sanity level or something, and the more you see/get caught by the monster, the more your sanity goes down. The lower your sanity, the more you hallucinate, see shit that isn't there (you see a really rare item, but when you go to pick it up it just disappears right in front of you as soon as your cursor is about to touch it) or make it so you see doors and hallways and shit that aren't there, or random figures in the dark that disappear suddenly before you can look at them.

Essentially, to make a monster scary, you have to remove it's ability to kill you entirely, and give it the ability to fuck with your character in ways worse than death. To do this you have to make the game about more than just the monster. you have to make the monster just a character in the plot just like you are.

Do giant monsters ever stop being scary? I still get spooked stupid by the giant bugs in EDF or the leviathans in subnautica

I get spooked playing ARK whenever I have to go into the ocean just because of how damn sp00py giant monsters are. I think it's hardwired into our biology.

why did the third one down give me an erection

Konami happened to it. Didn't you remember?

Wasn't that game a demo for some silent hill game or something? I heard it was now unplayable.

>Spooky monster picks you up and throws you in to a pit of maggots
>Your inventory gets filled with maggots because of this

OP here, holy shit this thread is going way better than I hoped! Thanks guys, I'm taking notes on everything.

I unironically think a horror game where every 'cliche' is actively caused by some kind of spooky entity could be both extremely stressful and very frightening.

>There's a monster or entity that specifically goes BWAAAAAEEHHHHNNNMMMNN whenever it acknowledges you before running after you. It's "bwamp" is effected by distance, so sometimes it's louder, obviously. Could literally just be a mouth with legs or something.

>A small, goblin/child/ghost who's only purpose is to literally follow you around and close/slam the doors behind you. It'll always flee from your sight, cower, or hide from you- it only wishes to spooky you via closing them doors.

>playing a horror game
>hear a stock sound effect
I bought Singularity while it's on sale this week and 5 minutes into the game hear that over played "shwoosh" stock sound effect for no fucking reason. I refunded it instantly.

user, would you buy a horror game where all the sound effects were personally made by the indie devs with whatever shit they could find and or just make with their own voices? Like how movies used to be re-dubbed in these studio garages full of props to make sounds with?

If it's a game where sound design is important, yes (like horror games)

Do NOT show the monster too early or too often, doing so will make it go from 'spooky monster' to 'challenging enemy'
You really DON'T want the player to think of the monster as an enemy but as a monster, the moment they see it, they will hold it as an opponent and the fear of the unknown goes away, revealing a low-brightness walking simulator with a flashlight and some batteries

Make it fast and don't reveal it until you absolutely must, and make sure It fits the context of the area

Honestly, being stalked or hunted by monsters is really overplayed these days. Spooky things are all-too-often found as being appealing rather than horrifying. That skull-faced nightmare dog SCP has become a waifu.

You literally can't
The thing with real life cryptid myths is that no one comes back to the town alive, and the only thing that has been left is some camera footage and maybe a picture or two (not too revealing) just to haunt the rest, so the first time you encounter the thing is the time you get killed as well

The only thing that could make the gamer take it seriously was that they would actually die if the monster caught them, anything short of that and they would see the monster as a badge, like a hunter taking out a cheetah or a tiger

Being stalked by an unknown monster is ten times scarier than fighting old man Jenkins who forgot his pills again

Unknown, the word itself can spook people, the vaguer the description the better, because the mind runs wild, and will construct 20 different monstrosities and abominations that it THINKS it will fight, and dissolve them right afterwards, thus always keeping things fresh, you want your game to have 'hostile unknowns', because 'unknown' is a vessel for your brain to create the monster itself, thus what the important part is is CONCEALING the monster's identity and focusing on good plot and atmosphere for as long as you can!

And the key there is being stalked, I suppose. Having something engage in combat with the player is a mistake. Having it approach and engage in actions is a mistake. The scariest thing is the thing you see in passing that isn't there when you look back. The scariest thing is the thing that shows up in eyeshot but that you never can remove the mystery of.

You're right about the unknown. Keep it unknown. Use it sparingly. Use it to turn already tense situations into panic attacks.

Really, you want to do something right? Fuck with people via pareidolia. A monster that is NEVER defined in the game. Some vague thing. A trick of light and shadows. Make something where if people go in or datamine or try to figure it out... they can't.

>no voiced dialogue
>walk slowly as fuck
>cryptic goals
I REALLY wanted to get into Pathologic, but I think Im just gonna wait for the remake. I didnt like walking across the town just to realize I have no idea what I’m doing

I was an user that said was going through Call Of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth on that last horror game thread.

Got a lot of replies from user saying that the game had a superb beginning and then became a regular FPS and it kinda went downhill.

Gotta say that they were right. I still liked the game and the atmosphere very much but all the tension from the beginning till you escaped the town was almost gone during the rest of the game. Shooting was alright, at least until you got very injured and movements got crippled but strange as it felt more like you were glitching out. Things would have been fine if the only weapon you had was the knife.

"deep lore" for youtube theoryfags.