Games with a fucked up atmosphere

It kind of deserved them though. Story and atmosphere are good enough, but the gameplay is atrocious.

Did they fix the translation?

"Hurr I dun like tank controls" atrocious, or actually atrocious? Horror games shouldn't have fluid, good feeling gameplay.

Actually atrocious. It's been a while since I played it but I remember navigating the map was an exercise in frustration, and the combat is shit even by horror game standards.

It's one game I'd actually recommend watching an LP for.

Clanky, and the "boss fights" are literally hit and run

They did. The game is now perfectly playable, except for the dated graphics.

Yes

Alice felt pretty fucking forced to me.

Pathologic felt like a fever nightmare, i had to drop it midway trough the game cause i was feeling depressed.

pic related

Just started playing it recently. Instantly feels dark and immerses you immediately

Because you need muh good le graphics to enjoy a game

Nigger, the artstyle is what matters, and it fucking hits it point on.

fun times

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LOL Why the anger. I did not say you need the graphics, I just pointed out the only weak point in the game right now

What

The Nipponese are great at psychological terror.

I'm not impressed with blood and violence. It's the mindrape that makes a game scary.

Play pic related at 4 in the morning in a cold winter night.

youtube.com/watch?v=KXEQPAcGb0Y

Manhunt series
Sad Satan Clean
Outlast
The Cat Lady
Arx Fatalis
Betrayer
Darkwood
NaissanceE
Depths of Fear :: Knossos
POSTAL 1

I've been having problems playing the fucking first one at night.
Shit's scary yo.
F U C K

Man, all those games have such downer endings.

Here we go again. You're the problem.

Just a thought:
Can you pull off a dark atmosphere in an RPG?
Does the turn based aspect and knowing you're "in control" because of turn order or healing?
Darkest Dungeon sort of does that, but aside from the pig enemies and the enemies in the final area, the enemies aren't really horrifying and the atmosphere wears off.

How would you do it?
No victory fan-fares for winning battles, Enemies death animations are gruesome, game is a lot harder so you have to "survive" and need to avoid enemies some times.

FF7 pulls off an amazingly bleak and oppressive atmosphere for the entire Midgar section of the game, while still having lighthearted moments.

Dead Space 2, I think it is more unsettling than the first, because most of the things happen while you're here. Reading about normal inhabitants becoming crazy and slaughtering their family and friends in the name of religion, and the way they treat their dead made me wondering a lot. Also the fact that this happen in a world where the technology really advanced but nothing could stop the events.

True. And enemies look quite surreal- added by the graphical and animation limitations (while I think the remake will be shit, I hope they keep that).

I meant more of the horror aesthetic. Silent Hill shit. Genuine unsettling.

I think it can be done, Galerians made an effort at it. Whether it makes the mark or not is up to you, i wouldnt say its truly scary.

I should finish this sometime so I can say I finished a survival horror game.

I've never played one. I get spooked too easily. But I love digging into the psychology of it. Even if it's basic shit like "His ____ drowned, so enemies are water themed and look like drowning victims."

great setting mediocre gameplay

Holy fuck was I wrong. It must be a nightmare for most people whenever a plague hits their city.

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Try Illbleed I guess, for some reason I can get that to work, but never Illbleed.

I think you mean kind of fun but nothing that special.

The Void, Pathologic, Knock-Knock

イデアの日 is most definitely "fucked up" in terms of atmosphere.

Complete Resident Evil 4 like I did.

Ching chon nip nong.
Nice atmoshpere.

Of the three games in the SH trilogy, 2 is probably the most tame in terms of atmosphere.

Unsurprisingly, Dybowsky says he came up with the idea for the game during a fever dream.

Pussy

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The fuck is going on in that screenshot? Just reading the filename makes me want to know more.

Also Diablo 1 had a pretty screwed up atmosphere from the beginning, it started as sort of dark Gothic, but it slowly turned into just simply hell.

What game is that?

LISA

the game isn't scary at all and I was still on edge the whole time. Even the "funny" parts are high strung

dayum

So most people are on wheelchairs where you live?

Nier and Drakengard, pretty much anything yoko taro writes

it was quite the combo

Took me some time

Yeah, well I'm saying that Chelles is like E.Y.E in some way, grey shitty concrete buildings everywhere and you never see the Sun out there

Learn Nipponese

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But Drakengard and Drakengard3 were forced as shit.

Wow

I want to but every time I see a kanji I get irrationally angry that such a retarded writing system would ever exist.

woooow, you can't even memorize 500+ symbols to represent multiple concepts and some of the symbols overlap for no reason making everything even more confusing?

wooooowwwww, we got a retard here

Here's my best shot at a translation.
Image 3:
"When I took a shit outdoors, my ass was bitten by a pit viper…uuuuggghh~…
Image 4:
"Y…Young lady, I have a request. The poison… Please suck the poison out for me!"
Image 5:
"Will you suck it out?"
"Yes" "No" "No way"

real life

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The prologue in MGSV brings up any nostalgia you had from MGS3 and turns it into a nightmare. The first time I've ever seen vidya call back to a game from 10 years ago and turn it on it's head, fucking mind-boggling.

Gregory Horror Show, PS2 game.

Hell, I can't even memorize hiragana. My memory went down the drain about when I got to high school and I don't know why.

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ching chong whats wrong?

Some of it makes sense.

Demul is pretty easy to set up fam

Kind of funny you ask this since pretty much the first horror game made was an rpg; Sweet Home.

It manages it pretty well considering its limitations.

This 100%. There haven't been many games that have really captured the feel of "hopeless one-way ride to hell" that LISA pulled off.

There's been a few horror/RPG hybrid games, As the other user mentioned, Sweet Home for the FC, but also Koudelka and Parasite Eve (or so I've heard on the latter). Haven't played the former, but from my experiences with Koudelka it was handled reasonably well, if still prone to being hit or miss.
I really liked the game, but people back in the day really seemed especially prone to shitting on it. And half the time it seemed like if the trio of main characters (a spirit medium, thief, and a bishop) weren't forced to work with each other to survive, they'd have likely killed each other themselves before the game ended. Still, I suppose it's not for everyone, and general reception was so bad that the guy that was behind it (Hiroki Kikuta) quit the company he'd helped to found, dropped out of vidya for five years, and came back doing composition for eroge.

Pretty neat game though, and not one a lot of people have played (more people have probably played the PS2 sequels, which are more JRPG with a slice of horror than gothic horror with a side of RPG elements).

Game intro for anyone curious.

The cartoony style makes you wonder how it would look in real life. Holy shit, imagine the smell of some places with corpses lying around, or Satan's trailer. He looked kinda intimidating in the game, in real life only a real tough motherfucker or a deranged man would truly step in that trailer.
Marty's house would be somehow unnerving in real life, same for that town with the mutants running around.
Kinda makes me wish someone did a live action adaptation for some parts. I'd love a practical effects guy to make real life adaptations of the Joy mutants . Or have real actors acting goofy or weird when they're travelling, but becoming someone else during fights. They must have some brutal fighting styles if they were able to survive for so long.

I vaguely recall Koudelka being a supposed Sequel or Prequel to another game? I've gotta get into it again, truly dark and creepy RPG.

It was originally standalone (though given how the game saw a now-non canon sequel manga and a novelization, I suppose Kikuta expected to make it into some big thing), but after Kikuta left, Sacnoth took the world in Koudelka and broadened it into the universe for a sequel called Shadow Hearts, which is set 15 years later. Shadow Hearts itself more or less standalone given how poor reception of Koudelka was, but they are same universe/timeline, and occasionally an element from Koudelka shows back up in it. SH also spawned two followup games, Shadow Hearts (II): Covenant, set half a year after the bad end of the prior game, and Shadow Hearts: From the New World, a side-game set in the Americas 14 years after the prior game.

The Shadow Hearts games are also really good, but again, it's a bit of a flip, as Koudelka is gothic horror with a touch of JRPG, while the Shadow Hearts games are JRPGs with a touch of horror to their designs/stories. The PS2 games also get lighter as the series went on; apparently Japanese players complained about SH1 being too dark and scary compared to most JRPGs and while the devs took those as complements, their publisher had them tone it down in the later games (though even then, they rebelled against the notion of "make a normal JRPG" by having the later games make up for being lighter in tone by being really fucking weird at times, even by JRPG standards). The monster designs throughout the entire series though are really good, even in the otherwise light-toned From the New World.

The games have never gotten all that popular here (or in Japan either, as far as I'm aware), and from what it seems, their publisher got sick of the devs making bizarre games aimed at a niche audience instead of mainstream, and dissolved the team and killed the series, Apparently there would have been a Shadow Hearts III as a prequel starring the protagonist of SH1's dad, but that never came to fruition.

Yeah, that's it, thanks for the read!

Been working on a bit of an infographic for the series as well, considering how much I've come to like it. Would be nice to have more anons to discuss it with in the future.

Again, only the first game on the PS1 is really horror, but in my experiences all the games are pretty interesting, though the PS2 games do have more enjoyable combat due to the Judgment Ring.

I think the creatures in Koudelka are some of most unique in any RPG. The setting is amazing too.

It was one of Japan's early attempts at a multimedia franchise, as was Parasite Eve. I believe both had manga and novels that expanded their settings, and at least one had a TV anime planned.

That all went tits up, of course, but it was a valiant effort.

For a non-horror game it was certainly terrifying

Yeah, you don't see a lot of RPGs, especially JRPGs, with a dark fantasy/historical fiction mix for the backdrop.

A number of the enemies in Koudelka occasionally show up in the PS2 games. Even those early game roaches become a major annoyance in the PS2 games. And apparently people expressed a liking for that fetuswad enemy type, because there's ALWAYS one that's an outright bonus boss in the PS2 entries.

Anyhow, I will say that, comparing the creature names in some old guidebook scans I found with the names used on the wiki, the wiki has a much better take on things. Still curious as to where they got their names for the enemies from though (maybe translating the Japanese guidebook?).

I found Binding of Isaac quite unsettling at first.

bump

HL2 mod Grey had good atmosphere. Shame the mod itself wasn't that good and short.

Ackchually. I think Project Firestart for Commodore 64 takes that place. Both games were released in 1989, but Sweet Home was released in December 15, 1989.

Project Firestart doesn't have an exact release month, but it's unlikely they both released on the same month, so it's pretty debatable. Project Firestart is also the first real survival horror, even before Alone in the Dark.

Nigga, you beat me to it, I was going to reply to this user about Koudelka.
It's a very flawed but fascinating game with some of the best English voice acting for the time. I still have yet to play Shadow Hearts as the movement away from horror kind of turns me off, but I'm sure I'd enjoy them. If you still plan to make that infographic I'd be happy to write the blurb for Koudelka

Already got one for it (it's the still the same series and is a canon game, of course I was going to make one for it, especially since I like the game myself), though if you can think of anything in general I can see if it ought to be added (I've got mechanics and FAQ info on a second graphic as well). Mainly just trying to proofread and edit them at the moment to the point I'm satisfied with releasing. Not sure whether or not to mention Chaos Wars on it though.

They're pretty darn good, but as stated before, it's a flip of the horror and RPG aspects, being more of JRPGs (and solid ones, at that; Sacnoth learned how to make the combat a good bit more interesting and further refined the Judgment Ring system as it went on, with ring and spell customization and combos) with the horror elements coming in for story and designs, rather than having various survival horror elements. At least Shadow Hearts 1 a try if you can emulate it, or find a cheap copy if you get lucky (it's not the cheapest PS2 game around due to poor sales; why they opted to release it the same week as fucking FFX, I have no clue).