Why should survival horror games have puzzles? It's supposed to be survival horror, not puzzle horror...

Why should survival horror games have puzzles? It's supposed to be survival horror, not puzzle horror. STALKER managed to be great without puzzles. Why didn't they just make an atmospheric open ended horror adventure game with Hidden and Dangerous 2's weight based inventory system? And you know what's worse? It's when you can solve a puzzle without being required to read much. Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and those generic survival horror games are the biggest offender to this. At least in Alone in The Dark, the books contain clues for the puzzles you encounter, which are odd and cryptic but really simple, unlike RE's and SH's overly complicated and obnoxious puzzles.

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Also, why is it that many horror games have multiple endings? I find it to be a rare coincidence considering multiple endings aren't all that common in other vidya genres.

In the spirit of survival horror the player should never feel triumphant over the opposition IE the monsters/enemies, puzzles are a way to set up the player for a win without making the rest of the game feel safer, if you're dogged by a monster that you kill that monster loose meaning in the context of survival horror, the player will know they can be killed. But a puzzle is against the environment enough to give a sense of satisfaction and progress but not enough to breed confidence against the main opposition of the game.
At least that's the way I feel about it.

Multiple Endings is to add replay values as survival horrors are usually short and reliant on back tracking, hence why by most definition one of the most celebrated vidya, RE4 isn't a survival horror despite being the sequel to some.

To make player choices have consequences on the story of course. There's nothing wrong with that though. But I hate being required to collect all endings.

Most of Silent Hill's puzzles are more reliant on exploration rather than critical thinking. They force you to search more and put your character into more danger in order to progress, raising the tension. Having every single puzzle be "you need to find all the keys" would also work, but that gets old after the first couple times.

Generally, a horror game is set up with the idea of low ammo/no ammo and something super dangerous after you.

So here is the question:

How do you get someone to keep investigating the environment, getting deep into the atmosphere?

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2

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Short of platforming, puzzles are a non-death dealing way of slowing the player down without bricking the game.

Anyone know of a better way to slow a game down than the above 3 methods?

I legitimately can't understand your English, but I think I get the implication.
Survival horror isn't about not being able to kill the monsters. It's about killing the monsters being the last resort when you can't totally avoid it. You can kill most monsters in Silent Hill; the difference is that there's no satisfaction to killing the monsters, just stress.

The main thing that makes it survival horror is avoidance of danger and conservation of health and resources.

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So, you're saying that puzzles should exist because there's not enough competitions and challenges in the game? Well, that's a pretty retarded thing to say IMO. Not all VIDEO games need some form of competition to be good.

If anything, the player should be given a choice to fight or to flee the fight by solving puzzles, like in Alone in the Dark 2. In AITD 2, most of the fights can be avoided by solving environmental puzzles in order to create environmental hazards for the enemies. I haven't see other horror games doing this.

Actually ,what they were saying is that the "monster" should be unbeatable, therefore encouraging you to run, but then the game needs ways of giving you some sort of victory; the carrot in front of the horse, if you will, to keep you pushing forward, while at the same time, giving you a moment to catch your breath.

But yes, the option of "solve this puzzle and you get to go safely" or "fail and the monster might get you" is an interesting way to go about it.

Holy fucking shit I know I'm not native but re reading it barely makes sense even for me, but yeah. The point of a monster in a survival horror is to either be something that drains your resources, or something you need to run away from, if you feel triumphant killing monsters you're playing doom, or RE4 an action horror game, not a survival horror.


No because the point of a survival horror is to feel powerless, afraid until the final climax, if the enemies are just competitions, things you can overcome then why would you be afraid of them ? It wouldn't make sense mechanically. In SH 1-3 fighting only did one of two things : fuck you over because you fight like shit, or fuck you over because you spent resources that would be better used later against during a mandatory fight running away and avoiding monsters is a better strategy because you're weak and they're not.

Like a stealth game with combat, combat is the failure state of the game, the last line before gameover where you loose stuff and make the rest of the game harde for your or force you to backtrack to restock. Puzzle though are opposition you can overcome without diminishing the threat value of the enemies and therefore provide a sense of progress for the player without having to reintroduce new threats in terms of enemies.

I'm under a shitload of painkillers atm so I don't know if I'm making sense.

You obviously haven't played Alone in The Dark. Most SH's puzzles require critical thinking, while AITD's puzzles are mostly based on intuition from what you've read from the game's literature.


Are you pretending to be stupid?

Puzzles, especially good ones, can be seen as a break from the tension put forward by many survival horror games. You can deal with a puzzle in your own time, taking as long as you need to breathe and work through it, giving the player a sense of progress and calm without relying on scaring them witless.

If the atmosphere was always trying to be spooky as fuck, it'd go to 11 far too fast for players to be scared by it after a while. You need to build into it.


They're mostly story based detective-style games. Silent Hill is you trying to find your daughter/wife in a haunted town. Resident Evil is about unraveling the mystery in the Spencer mansion. The idea that the player can fail to solve the mystery is a great twist on the plot, and allows for multiple playthroughs despite their narrative focus.

Basically this is what the AITD games were doing. Putting a gramophone in a ballroom to prevent the dancing ghosts from killing you, putting a bucket of rotten meat to make the zombies sit still, and so on. In SH and RE though, the puzzles are garbage and artificial as hell.


That's why I said that there shouldn't be much competition in a survival horror game.

You're not paying attention to any of my arguments, go get some sleep.

For me, they only halt my sense of progress, and not in a satisfactory way.

Because "survival horror" games aren't really survival horror, they're just Action Horror with shitty controls and puzzles to pad out the comically weak gameplay.

Real survival horror = DayZ/7Days to Die/H1Z1 where your primary goal is to fucking survive in a horror themed situation.

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I know that Day Z is by definition a true survival horror, but I don't like it though. I want an adventure game with more tense and atmosphere than action.

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its the lack of a good game play loop. that and puzzles because you will need up spending 20 hours opening different doors.

like alien isolation

youtube.com/watch?v=hOrphBFlDsg&t=5m0s

end up*

I don't like it either, it's buggy, the community is shit, and it's plagued with shit-tier design issues and will probably never be complete.
Shame that there are so few games like that, and the ones that exist are essentially copies of each other. Penumbra series, Amnesia series, Outlast, SOMA and Alien Isolation. That's all I can think of as far as PC games go.

LOL
I bet you thought Dino Crisis puzzles were hard too.

The Amnesia series is the best survival horror series so far

I was quoting OP you immense fucking faggot
Yes, the point is they were not complicated at all.

Difficulty isn't synonymous to convolution, 9gag memer. In AITD's case, it's the literature that are difficult to comprehend instead of the puzzles, and that's how it should be because it makes the game feel natural.


They aren't hard at all, actually. They're just artificial, making you feel like you're playing a different game.

By complicated, I mean very mechanical and devoid of intuition.

Because Resident Evil coined the term "Survival Horror", and it was only a thinly veiled (but better done) Alone in the Dark ripoff. Alone in the Dark had no pretenses to being "Survival Horror" - it was just an adventure game with some combat and a spooky atmosphere.

So… tradition, basically. "Survival Horror" is just another way of saying "Resident Evil Clone" - and Resident Evil is a clone of an Adventure game.

I still hear the sounds you make of choking on a thousand cocks.
They were not that difficult nor convoluted, specially Silent Hill games where they required some logical thinking. Silent Hill games in the hardest puzzle difficulty in particular required actual prior literature knowledge
Just because you don't like thinking it doesn't make the puzzle convoluted.

Jesus fucking christ you're retarded.

Hell no, they lack good melee combat and well written literature.


Do you even understand what I mean by mechanical, artificial puzzles with the lack of intuition? It means that the puzzles are lifeless, disjointed from the goal of the game. Intuitive puzzles are what survival horror games need. Have you even played Alone in The Dark?

Then it might not be your type of game, I think, given the solving of a puzzle is supposed to denote progress (and for most people, usually does).

That's not to say there are no horror themed games that don't contain puzzles either. If a focus on exploration and combat was your thing, Doom 3 or System Shock 2 is probably your best bet (though SS2 does rely on some puzzles, they're mostly exploration and keycodes). Dead Space, DayZ and other modern horror titles work on creating scenarios around a horror theme, Dead by Daylight too, without requiring a huge knowledge of puzzles or other methods.


I disagree, but moreso because the puzzles in those games are supposed to represent a part of the larger mystery. Many of the puzzles in SH reflect the inner torment Alyssa was subjected to by the members of the cult. It's Alyssa's, and the town's, way of telling the protagonist what happened without any exposition or dialogue, and it's used as a method to reinforce the themes of the story without burdening the player.

RE tries to use puzzles as a means to reflect the person who designed the space around them, though I agree a large failing of RE was never establishing who Oswell Spencer was from the very beginning, since he designed the mansion and yet it's difficult to even find that out. It worked a lot better in RE2 and onwards, where the more illogical puzzles are in place due to the megalomaniac police chief.

Yes. The whole point of picking HARDEST difficulty on the puzzle difficulty selection is to actually get a HARD challenge.


Maybe you're referring to RE puzzles in particular, but SH puzzles mostly added to the lore of the games aside form just being a challenge.
Either way, there's nothing fucking wrong with a challenge

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No, you either haven't read the thread or doesn't understand my argument at all. Puzzles should feel like an organic part of the game instead of offering something entirely different.

They shouldn't represent the larger mystery, they should be a part of the mystery.

Compared to AITD's puzzles, they aren't telling anything at all.

Yeah, maybe it's justifiable in RE. Secret facilities need indiana jones tier riddles to prevent intruders from coming in.


Compared to AITD's puzzles? No. They still feel more like a challenge and not narrative heavy.

When the challenge is banal, well there is.

This. Survival Horror had its roots from adventure games with horror elements. The character relative camera angle wasn't there to make the game scarier. It was just how 3D adventure games were controlled back then especially with pre-rendered backgrounds.

I guess the character relative controls were here to make it scare. Look at this. Five skeletons just on the cover!

Yup, wasted my time. Instead of constructive criticism, all you get is OP's very autistic and specific taste in puzzles nobody has to share. Just play that fucking game over and over again if you like it so much.

Fuck, KQIV used to spook the shit out of my very young self.
Based oldfag

Maybe you should try BioShock Infinite, it's probably more your speed

It is constructive.

There is no such thing as taste in puzzle. Puzzles should be an organic part of a game's narrative, both their theme and the way they're solved, just like the whole of gameplay aspects in any kind of game. It's about consistency.


Do sagefags even bother to read the thread before posting?

When you make a stupid statement like
People are gonna mock you for it. Your fault for putting it in the OP. Try not to be too booty blasted about your own poor choice of words that makes you look like a retard.

Yup, and the only reason why Resident Evil even billed itself as a "Survival Horror" game instead of just flat out calling it an adventure title is because adventure games were basically a dead market at the time. Labeling your game as such was pretty much dooming it to failure.

It's just marketing that was spun so fucking hard, it shot off at a tangent and became it's own genre.


That goddamned ogre used to be turbo nightmare fuel, but I almost forgot just how profoundly creepy that game could be until I replayed it a few years ago.

People are fine with how SH puzzles work. You're the only complaining. Your "criticism" is useless because nobody finds it appealing and therefore not constructive. Nothing wrong with Alone In The Dark but not every game should be Alone In The Dark.
Sage to prevent dick smell from filling the catalog.

Well then you're all retards with no reading comprehension. I have explained every single thing about my argument and you don't even bother to try to use your brain to read them. All you do is just insulting me. You're the counter constructive here.


It's like telling avid RPG fans that people are fine with how Skyrim's RPG mechanics work. Why can't I introduce people to higher ideals? Why should we be stuck within a vacuum?

Because they force you to explore for the parts of the puzzle, which in Resident Evil's case means you encounter the setpieces, while in Silent Hill's case it means you have to run back out into the monster infested hell to get that item you forgot.

You need to stop.

Are you a newfag? People aren't going to bother reading your thread, this is how this site works. People read the OP and respond to it, and very few if any will actually look beyond that. You said something absolutely retarded in the OP, people are gonna mock you for it, and now you're even getting butthurt that I"m just telling you that simple fact. Come on man.

Also if your argument seems to boil down to "WHY ISN'T EVERYTHING AITD?!" which is about as retarded as it gets. Nothing constructive here.

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By making the puzzle more integral to both the narrative and gameplay, isn't that an improvement?

Yes I did, what can you do about it?


Yes and there's nothing wrong with pointing out the stupidity of it.

I use AITD to get my point across.

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Silent Hill actually did that a bunch of times, though not every puzzle was integral to gameplay.

For example, in Silent Hill 2, the cutscenes for the Innocent Man puzzle (where you have to pull a noose to free a wrongly sentenced innocent man's soul, which is a dead body in the other room with a note describing his and other criminals' crimes) The cutscene where you pull down the noose lingers really, REALLY uncomfortably, as if to imply that James was going to put his own head through it.

In the same game, there's the Louise puzzle, which is a box chained to a bed, with a note (with a "four" pun on it corresponding to the four locks on it, which in japan corresponds to the number 4, which is the number of death according to their culture, btw) that says that the writer will be taking care of "Louise" forever. It reflects James' true feelings about his wife.

All the games have these, but there are others that are just there to either freak you out, or to warm you up for other puzzles, like SH2's Henry Scott Mildred Clock puzzles.

If every single puzzle matched up with the narritive, you throw your ability to fuck with the player away. You need to throw in a few odd one outs in a horror game to actually fuck with someone's head.

integral to NARRITIVE I meant.

Other than it shows that you're a newfag. If you think you can change this site then I wish you all the luck in the world. :^)

And I'm arguing they're done so the pace of the game and horror is correct. If you're going to call these puzzles parasitic to the overall ebb and flow of a game, I'd want examples from you to reference as examples of bad design. So far you've done nothing but say "It's not AITD", and not proved how AITD reinforces your argument, given many of the same techniques are used in contemporary horror game puzzles. The onus is firmly on you to do so.

You literally reworded what I stated, and called it wrong.

Okay, if you're going to compare everything to a single game for puzzle design, then put forward design efforts from recent times you agree with. Your beef seems to be squarely with the RE and SH series, but what about other games, even ones that focus squarely on puzzles and exploration? Amnesia, Penumbra, Call of Cthulhu, 7th Guest and 11th Hour, System Shock 1&2, Bioshock 1&2, more recent Alone in the Dark games (though I'd forgive anyone for ignoring the reboot), Pathologic, even Outlast if you wanted to compare "avoiding monsters" to solving puzzles. A lot of the puzzle designs feed solely into the narrative structure of these games, yet you refuse to address this in any other context.


If so, your argument is short sighted and unconvincing, which is why people would rather call you a retard.

I'll throw you a bone here, go play the games I listed above, come back in a week, and then tell us why AITD is the pinnacle of puzzle design over the rest of these games.

You're the gift that keeps on giving

skyrim is just silent hill with a norse theme and better mods

Horror games have always taken their roots in the adventure/rpg genre more than the shooter genre, it's much the same reason why most of them have inventory systems as well.

It tends to make sense as well. Having an inventory is crucial for resource management, puzzles thematically make sense in horror the same way they make sense in mystery games and are a great way for adding a breather to the tension and multiple endings are a good way of adding uncertainty to the player's actions, so even when they are progressing the player cannot be sure they are doing the right thing.

I appreciate the complaint that they're sometime poorly designed, but the answer to that is to design them better, not remove them.

Wax Doll, Piano and Innocent Man are all easy as fuck though. Stuff like the Shakespeare and Tarot on Hard are bullshitty though because you outright require outside knowledge to solve them. I don't actually remember the Louise box.

Also this thread is shit, OP is a retard and all of you have the debate skills of a YouTube comments section.

god damn that guy and his musical sting.
also fuck the random cave troll

Because to make a decent horror game you must be a sick fuck. So you'll add labyrinths and riddles and puzzles and many fucked up endings that tell you "you thought you were safe, right faggot? Well you fucked up".

What's shitty about horror games is that they add mandatory easyass puzzles and casualized bullshit. I'd add all sorts of "it's there but you're too dumb to see it" stuff. Kinda like Darl Souls 1 did with the traps, but with riddles and puzzles.

And yet I wish I could just forget about them.

Sadly. The first one was ok. The Justine one was also pretty good.
I kinda wish minecraft had Amnesia's spooks. It could have done it.

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Basically, to have you go looking for things multiple times, for both increasing the length of the game and force the player to explore the eerie place he is in.
I hate that puzzle. I was stuck in there for years as a kid. As a matter of fact, I hate that fucking school.

how the fuck was I supposed to know to combine the fucking horseshoe with the wax doll for a fucking trapdoor handle

There is no way wax is that fucking solid in real life

I figured this out within seconds as a kid because I knew wax can be melted and becomes solid after a while.

I mean I guess if you were never around a candle IRL it might not make sense but come on man.

What is Oasis

Moving the Goalposts: The Thread

We really should take a lesson from OP and remember why it's pointless to argue sometimes and to just call the person a faggot.

Since we're on the subject of this genre, I think a better question is to be asked then:

Why does it seem just about impossible for devs to make actual scary moments/enemies/ect. anymore that actually spook/scare the player? Has this generation gotten so desensitized by the intertubes (and as such us being too used to Holla Forums-tier shit) for so long that nothing truly scares even normalfags anymore?

I feel like horror vidya needs something other than muh ebin jumpscares to truly bring the genre into exciting new territory again. But what scares are even left to explore for players to experience?

Generally for the same reason why it's difficult for games to be genuinely funny. Both comedy and horror tend to require a degree of pacing to their presentation, and that's not easy to control when you hand the controller over to the player and they decide to go fuck off and do their own thing for an hour or so because they're stupid or too timid to venture further, or they're gawking at the environment or scrounging for loot or some shit.

For a jump scare, all you need is the right atmospherics, perhaps a bit of dynamic music, and a timing control of about three seconds.

Well I argue that crappy puzzles halt the pace of the game.

Those silent hill screenshots that I posted before are example of bad design.

For example, the sacrificial dagger puzzle in AITD 1 requires you to read a long parchment about a report of a usage of sinusoidal blade used for sacrifice. From that parchment, we know that the curved blade can be used to kill a demon that haunts the library. It's obvious, if you bother to read the parchment and use your intuition, like how you would read a literature. No item fetching chain, no riddle bullshit, just intuition and reading comprehension.

So here's what I want to say, survival horror puzzles should be more intuitive based. Intuition puzzles such as this sacrificial dagger puzzle for example would fit the mystery theme of survival horror games better. Now if you put an unrelated riddle in your game, that would betray the main theme of the game.

No I didn't. A spiritual mystery should be intuitive heavy. Therefore, the puzzles should be intuitive too.

Amnesia and Penumbra has quite a lot of riddles. I don't consider SS to be a horror game, and there are things like the circuit puzzle that I would hate. Bioshock is more of the same.


soc


I actually prefer a survival horror game without puzzles, but since fags here are autistic about their puzzles, oh well.


A horror game doesn't need to be "scary" to be good. It needs to give a feeling of uneasiness, uncomfortable distortion, tension, and so on. Scare is cheap, but atmosphere is not. I'm not very scared by the Silent Hill games, but I'm deeply immersed by the gloomy atmosphere that gradually turns into nightmarish, hellish atmosphere. I'm genuinely scared by SH PT, but everything felt so cheap compared to the original SH trilogy. It's scary only because you're expecting the jumpscares. If you remove all the jumpscares and make the ghost's head stop tilting rapidly, the game wouldn't induce the same uneasiness that the original games delivered to you.

tomorrow i am going to sell books that do not interest me. their stories…rectum. their stories, impenetrable, i'm afraid. lack of poetry. replace with poetry, my dear god. deergod. largo bitch. the crusty environment, buzzing. i flexed my muscles, which caused unfortunate burning…and merely added to the crust, rather than improving the situation. so, in the cave…in the cave where darkness growls, i struck the anvil. sparks blew out. schematics. what did i build? the greatest carapice…not as armor, but as a means of conveyance. it gets better all the time. but there's an anxiety, an inability to smooth the crust. others can take the crust; i don't care. they can have it. but i'm here to stand behind it, or over it. in the middle is not so good.

Why don't you all just hop in a windowless van and drive around Silent Hill arguing?

I wholeheartedly disagree.
Perhaps AitD sequels were straight outta gutter, but the first game was brilliant, and was, in my opinion, one of the most successful translations of the Lovecraft mythos into videogames. And most importantly, all the puzzles in there fit the context of the game world. No emblems that nobody would keep in their house, no grandfather clock that doesn't show current time at all and gives you clues to puzzles. You can argue that the mansion in the first game was had an underground lab underneath and therefore these outlandish puzzles would be there instead of traditional and more reliable security systems, but all games in the series are guilty of this.
I used to play survival horror games together with my brother because 2spooky, and I remember us making fun of one location in RE: Nemesis where a statue of the founder of Raccoon City had a battery inside, because obviously that's where everybody keeps their batteries. We would joke that the founder's statue was one of those dancing statuettes one can buy in a flea market.

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Friendly reminder that this is one of the most obnoxious and retarded puzzle in the entire franchise

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Compared to a bunch of autists who's argument is based only about "OP's a faggot" I have proof to say otherwise

But he is. And the argument was said multiple times, there's no reason for every horror game to be Alone In The Dark. Puzzles that give more insight into the lore of the game are fine too. But you faggot fucks are too focused on calling anyone who disagrees with you autistic when in reality you are projecting

Also, this also discloses that Holla Forums's concept of constructive criticism is so erred that YandereDev's autism is half-justified

People say that shooting ruins horror games but I think it's the opposite. Since with games like FEAR I couldn't just shut my eyes every time I thought something scary would happen, because then I'd die!

Not an argument
He has also clarified he was using it as an example.
Sure
OP has done more arguing than what you spergs can claim for, also,

Puzzles make you look at things from many different directions in order to find an answer which gives the game ample opportunities to add to the atmosphere of the game.

It also forces you to think in a certain way in order to find the solutions, so the game is able to mess with your head.

like how the witches house had you mutilating and sacrificing all the pretty and innocent things around you because that's the kind of person you're character was

Also it goes without saying that there are games that don't understand why puzzles are in survival horror and only do it because there're are're derivative garbage.