Saturday Night Horror Thread

Desensitize yourself and face to bloodshed. If you have a steam, go and download Cry of Fear. It's free. Regardless of how people say they hate it I personally love it it is by far the easiest way to train yourself. Constant jumpscares with classic survival horror gameplay, with a good balance between casual and hardcore. Very easy to get through once you stop pissing your pants, unless you crank it up to nightmare difficulty. Do it now, I suggest getting it all out while the sun is still up.

You start feeling like you're a badass supernatural hunter of the night only to be reminded there are things beyond you.

It's sort of jarring and unexpected to experience actual spooks.

Posting again so I don't keep forgetting to take off that stupid fucking :^)

It's just some flying pots and pans and a few apparitions, color me unimpressed

Sure, but there's nothing you can actually do against them. Plus, if you've never played the level before, you don't know which part of the furniture actually may be flying toward you behind your back.

Yeah but they're unexpected flying pots and pans.

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Atmosphere, and the game takes a left turn with how you deal with the situation. The only actual scary part in vtmb is the dinosaur.

Whoever placed that thing there probably is still laughing his arse off whenever he remembers it.

F.E.A.R. is a good start, bundlestars has a bundle of all games and all dlc for just five euros. I just completed the second dlc extraction point.

I strangely got over my fear of spooky horror games when I told myself that there's too many horror vidya to see; that I'm not going to be able to play them all if I'm too terrified to play any sort of horror game.

I started and stuck with RE 4, being slowly desensitized from all of it. Those dogs at night during the thunderstorm plus regenerators still give me the creeps.

It's practically the first level in the game, that's too early to be taking a "left turn" because the norm hasn't been established. Isn't much of a left turn, either, just follow the script.

>The only actual scary part in vtmb is the dinosaur.
You know how right you are.

Wish there was more, honestly. What all did you want to play?

Fucking Russia

Fucking flags

Saudi-Arabia actually, from what I've heard. The guy supposedly met the hag in the middle of the desert.

Yeah, the amount of gamers pants he collectively shat has gotten some serious digits. I wouldnt doubt the dudes proud of himself.

I always saw it as more of a left turn because you go through some sections and are getting used to fighting basic enemies, so you think the majority of the game will be your standard rpg of fight this thing till it dies, use powers as is needed and suck blood. Then while youre starting to feel like a tough guy after the whole pier and gangsters you killed, you get a ghost thrown at you that fucks with you for an hour or so and completely changes the solution to the quest. You cant kill it or talk your way out so its a new concept thrown at you while you're just starting to get your feet wet and have the game mechanics and how the world works under your belt.

I cant help but wonder if she was just a hurt old lady walking down the road, needing help, until some superstitious idiot thought she was a ghost or demon waiting to ambush him and started screaming at her from his car while she was suffering.

You think it was shabnak-adyr?

Let's talk about the structure and nature of horror games.

To scare people, you have to see them as locks.
You're building a key to unlock their locks.
If the key isn't the right size and shape it will never unlock them.

You can see jumpscares as jiggling and hitting the key when it's inside the lock, it will make the lock react, basically any lock, but it won't unlock it, and it will even break some locks (they become completely used to jump scares and give up on the genre entirely in extreme cases).

Here's some rules i'd say every single developer interested in horror games should follow:

-Use every tool at your disposal, jumpscares shouldn't be offlimits, but they should be used very sparingly and in a smart way, just because other developers overuse or use certain things cheaply it doesn't mean you can't use them, just use them well and it's fine.

-Your game needs 5 years minimum of development, you're meant to have a squad of testers playing your game over and over and over, they must FUCKING HATE your game by the end, they must memorize it all, you're essentially sacrificing your testers enjoyment of the game because they serve a greater, more important purpose, and that is to tell you when certain aspects of the game, both mechanical aspects, but also the atmosphere, the elements you've put in that are frightening, hold up during multiple playtroughs, design your game so that certain things will be effective multiple times, and that will ensure the shit you've put in is effective the FIRST time the player meets it.

-Removing player control and making him defenseless =\= walking simulator, work very, very hard at finding solutions where the player still has agency and can interact with the game world while at the same time not being able to easily overpower the creatures or entities that are hunting him.

-Puzzles are part of the atmosphere, and sometimes the atmosphere can be built using puzzles, remember the piano puzzle in SH, the various hole-focused puzzles in SH games, it's up to you how much to make these puzzles obtuse, the important thing is that they must BUILD ATMOSPHERE, make them memorable, make them something that inside the lore of your game players will get invested and remember, not just a progression wall.

…the fuck is that thing

That was a few years ago, when I thought there were plenty of horror games just waiting to be found and played. Surprised just how little (good ones, at least) horror games there are.

Good luck finding a publisher for that

Anything with a lovecraft feel? I'm not talking about LOL Cthullhu, I mean more the subtle horror of something bigger happening to you and the implication that everything you know or expect is in fact very much wrong.
Has a game broken the fourth wall well before? I don't recall any

Shabnak-adyr

Limiting player control and options for defense is not the same as wholesale removal of control and defense. If the only interaction between the player and the game is walking and mouselook, it's definitively a walking simulator.

What's your metric for this? Each of my favorite horror games was only 2-3 years in development. Each game in the Silent Hill trilogy only took two years apiece.

He just wants to give you a hug.

Broken the fourth wall, in horror specifically? Eternal Darkness

I don't think the albino is technically supposed to be a steppe witch, or at least it doesn't match the terrifying descriptions of shabnak-adyr in the game. Teeth too large to fit in its mouth, talons the length of a man's arm, clumps of dirt falling from its mouth as it speaks.

Thats what the long hair is for and the very roomy robe, so you can fully extend and trap unwary meals when they decide to get close out of pity.

S-sureley these are just twigs in front of the camera lens

Surely you get that feeling that something is watching you from your window at night? You can't always be wrong.

But at the same time, what was up with that fucking walking, that robe, that head down, shit don't make sense unless Russia is that weird.

This might be dumb, but /tg/ is slow as fuck…
Anyone have experience scaring some dudes around the tabletop? I want shit to be scary but since we're adults (mostly 35+) we've seen nearly everything in movies/tv.
Is the least thread gone? What happened with that guy andhis grandfather's house?

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Evidently it was Saudi Arabia. So with mostly brown people one albino would probably cause even more fear with that situation late at night.

Sounds like one of those scary "imaginary friends" you have as a kid that in hindsight is fucked up to think about as an adult.

Last threat 404'd.

I never played tabletop, but if you read Scarry's The Body in Pain, one of the most effective ways to scare the shit out of people is to turn their entire world against them. Make them paranoid as fuck - have healing potions be poisoned, make seemingly harmless inns in which the party could rest into monster-infested hellholes (or don't, should they expect it), and so forth.

Can AAA games actually be scary? I mean, you always know what to expect of them - jumpscares here, inventory management there.

Indie Horror Games on the other hand often are a bag full of surprises, even if the better part of said surprises is incredibly lame.

/tg/ horror is 90% ambiance, play in a place with dim lights, some creepy background music on low volume and like said, make them feel paranoid.

Are we spooky now?

OP, call it Weekend Night Horror Thread so you can cover both Saturday and Sunday (maybe Friday night too). Just a suggestion.

Also, let me get the fuck out of here because I can't handle spooky vidya.

They were able to be scary at one point, but I think they forgot how to even have a good atmosphere like REmake.

Posting to talk about STALKER. I'm playing Call of Pripyat right now and I found a room that keeps on looping on itself. It actually entered it 3 times before realizing that you literally cannot keep moving forwards. It's also dead silent in there, so much that I walked slowly when entering because it felt wrong to disturb the silence. It's not exactly horror, but I didn't expect it and I felt very slightly uncomfortable once I realized what was going on.

Bloodsuckers at night are terrifying as ever. Hell, they're scary in daylight as well. Both their strength and their raspy breathing make them very intimidating.

Last but not least, I did the Yanov Chimera hunt yesterday. Even though it takes place at night I felt relatively safe going in. I had good armour, night vision and a shotgun with plenty of ammo. I severely underestimated my opponent. I felt scared because my enemy was not only very deadly and fast (those pounces, jesus christ), but impossibly resilient. I must've spent 40 or 50 shells on the bastard.

I do not actually recall any room in Stalker with that quality.

Where is it? Could it just be a bug?

It's in Yanov, near where you hunt the chimera. The room is actually under it's spawn point. You can enter it through a boarded up doorway that's in a building in the hillside under it. Embed related. Skip to 2:30 to see it in action.

why Indie developers can't optimize their shit properly?

Unmodded, Skyline Apartments in LA is much, much spookier.

Now THAT'S the real spooky level in VtMB

8gb of RAM is the industry standard nowadays, user. Perhaps not for pixel garbage, but don't expect to go along with only 4 gb.

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