I'm looking for games that are genuinely frightening, with a real sense of unease. Most of what I've found has relied on jump scares, which takes away from the ambiance relatively quickly.
Faggots on Tumblr (quit your bitching) recommended I play Outlast. However, I quickly found out the game was nothing more than a fast paced jump scare simulator.
I NEED something that is really fucking terrifying, truly scary, and so far you all have been pretty good with recommendations.
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I have a weak heart but I'm not a coward. I've been looking for genuinely scary games that aren't jump scares. They don't exist I tell you. I used to be scared by Siren, Silent Hill, and Fatal Frame as a kid, but now not so much. All scfi (((horror))) games are a joke. Cry of Fear has decent atmosphere and great enemy design, but it's nothing but a jumpscare fest.
Go watch films by Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci if you're searching for good horror. Video game designers have no idea of what good horror is.
Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou
Scary if you like the bizarre and surreal, and if piecing environmental clues together to come to realizations about yourself and the world is something that gets you.
Demonophobia
If you think gore is scary. And not the 'woah spooky guts everywhere' gore, the type that's long and drawn out, horrific in a way where you feel too invested to look away.
Slender (The Original)
Gets a bad rep for being jump scare city, but jump scares really aren't the way to describe it. You know you're being followed right from the moment you open the game. When he appears it's not a jump scare, it's just a sudden moment of "what do I do now?"
Walking
I can't give you a description for this one.
I hear lone survivor is a decent 2d horror/survival game with a silent hill vibe to it. Haven't played it yet but I do plan on giving it a whirl eventually.
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Doesn't re3 have a semi random element to it where nemesis can appear at different places on different playthroughs? I know re games aren't really scary, but the earlier ones were slightly more so than nowadays. I never played 3.
Eastern Mind makes me dizzy rather than scary. Demonophobia is tedious and laughable, the gore is more fetish fueled than actually scary.
Sweet Home. It's still the best horror game ever made.
Silent Hill 1.
None of these games is scary, OP.
The Uninvited. NES version.
4 was pretty scary. A angry mob of people chasing you is definitely terrifying.
The scariest moments in video games don't happen in horror games. Nethack makes me shiver when I have a good game going and get put in a tough situation.
STALKER can be this when you're low on ammo, at night or in an underground lab. You will learn to truly appreciate seeing friendly stalkers sitting around a campfire playing the guitar. There are inevitable jumpscares when random mutants leap at you from the dark, but the tension in the game is everpresent.
Best way for a game to scare you without relying on jumpscares is limited controls and leaving just enough details up to your imagination.
FNAF does this pretty well, when it's not relying on jumpscares, but most point and click adventure games can get just as scary, especially the text heavy ones.
Yeh, also changes depending on if you kill him or not.
Horror games usually just bore the shit out of me. The only time I feel fear in games is when a situation calls for me to be at my best. Whether it's going up against people that are good or a tough boss fight that I'm unprepared for.
Horror games just seem to depend on being spooky but once you get a good look or understanding of what you're up against, it's almost invariably a joke. Worst still is when some instakill monster is chasing you through a maze. "Oh well I got killed I guess I'll just try a different way." Or being afraid of having to do something tedious again isn't exactly fear. Maybe I've just got balls of fucking steel and some people are pussies.
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I dunno, play some japanese horror games, Scratches, even there is some .swf games more scary that Outlast.
I'd say Pathologic is good for horror since it's not 100% horror all the time. It has an unnerving atmosphere and a lot of intrigue to get you invested and keep you interested.
This game is kinda shitty but that janitor at the beginning is fucking terrifying.
How do i look this up, i don't think there is any possible way to look this up without finding something you don't want
MLB: The Show
Good call, Pathologic nails that feeling of hopeless despair. The vignettes are the best part, like that subplot with the wax woman in the Bachelor scenario. Chilling shit.
People love to hate on RE4, but one thing I really appreciate about it is that it is nearly entirely devoid of jumpscares. Or at least scripted ones - occasionally a villager or insect might creep up on you quietly when you aren't looking, but it tends to happen organically, not as a forced event. Still not exactly what I would call scary, but I've given up on "scary" in video games. Thick tension is the highest bar I think they can actually aim for.
Also, I've been thinking of doing a writeup or something on sound design in horror games. One of the things that I think makes modern horror vidya tend to fall flat is the overreliance on scripted sound cues that are not tied to in-game threats or other actually existent gameplay related objects. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about, roars, clanging in vents, slamming doors, and other scripted "spooky noises" that recent walking simulators and related games throw at you with increasing frequency. I believe that doing this actually lessens the tension over time, because the game trains the player not to think of most of those sounds as a threat. Sure they may be loud and sudden and make you jump, but they don't represent something the player has to overcome or interact with, in fact you're better off not paying attention to them. Outlast, Soma, that shitty painting game, P.T., and so on are packed with this stuff.
On the other hand, most older horror or tension reliant games eschewed scripted sound cues almost entirely, leaving only sounds that were correlated to enemies or objects that existed in the gameworld. Now, I don't know how much of this was conscious design choice, and how much was raw space limitation, but it meant that every sound you heard mattered. Personally, I find that things like the soft tapping of velociraptor toenails in Dino Crisis, the weird set of noises that hammer haunted make in Thief, a wolf rustling in the hedge in RE4, and of course that fucking fucking Silent Hill radio, are all more causing of tension than the stuff in most modern games. Not because they are scary noises in and of themselves, but because of what they represent in the game, and the demand that the player pay close attention to them to survive.
A few games get halfway there. Alien: Isolation has some strong sound design in terms of careful listening being important to survival, but pollutes it by mixing it with scripted noise, and the inconsistency is more annoying than scary. The Dead Space series is actually great as an example of watching that concept decline from game to game: the first game only has a couple sequences including a bunch of "scary noise" not tied to actual threats, and use of sound is reliable enough to make the sudden lack of it in the space segments much more frightening. The second game has many more scripted sequences, and the music tends to start hammering away before any threat or fake threat can materialize, but still has many spots where careful listening can save your ass, and the third game eschews "sound as potential warning" almost entirely in favor of "instantly burst from somewhere and roar."
I'd be curious to hear what you guys think on this or examples of other games that resist scripted spooky noise in favor of strictly gameplay-related noise.
That reminds me why I hate see gameplays about horror games from some "youtubers", they think old games aren't scary compared with games like P.T. and their cancerous clones, even they don't take their time to feel the atmosphere, running for make a 15-20 min. of recording.
They want everything like a rollercoaster, gameplay and story in rails, some spooky moments for scream loud, but at the end, all the same shit, that shit for only say "jeez, It was a good spooky gamu, the scariest game I evah play!!", generic shit for mediocre people.
Madgascar is the scariest game you'll ever play.
I thought the start of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was pretty scary.
Too bad the rest of the game was bland fps.
They've probably never noticed the sound in games where you have to actually use it to survive because they're too busy running their mouth to hear anything not screamed at them.
Thinking on it more, it reminds me of the old movie directing adage about how having the most intense part of a scene be the quietest is often more effective than having it be the loudest. Hadn't really thought about that in relation to games. I appreciate the insight.
There is no such thing as a scary movie or game without jump scares.
wew lad
Play the Silent Hill games in the dark and tell me that, faggot.
Yume Nikki is actually scary like that.
Which ones? I've only played the original trilogy and except for the jumpscares/catscares, there was no physical fear reaction.
Horror requires intelligence and imagination in the player to be effective. When an audience is so dumb that they lack one or both of those, the only recourse is to rely on jump scares. That's why we have an entire genre of "Startle" games and not a single "Scare" game in existence.
A true horror game would make you want to turn all the lights on, play in broad daylight, and even when not playing, you'd still be emotionally and psychologically scarred for weeks just from the imagery. You'd be looking over your shoulder at work, or walking down the street. You'd be afraid to be alone and borderline paranoid. That's horror.
Sadly, there will never be a proper horror game, and that fucking sucks.
Eternal Darkness Sanity's Requiem sort of plays with your mind a bit. You have something called a sanity meter, which is a green bar next to your health. As you encounter monsters, your sanity depletes and the environment changes to reflect your mental state. There are some genuinely surprising moments in the game that happen when your sanity drops, but I wouldn't call them terrifying. They are worth experiencing, though.
Aside from that, I like Silent Hill 1 - 3, the atmosphere is great. The games somewhat rely on jump scares, but they're incorporated into gameplay (for example, you may enter a room with one enemy, but then come back later and 8 enemies will have appeared that are now hell bent on trying to kill you), so it actually feels like you should be afraid, if for no other reason than you're close to getting a game over.
I can't really think of anything else. The problem with horror is that it originates inside a person's mind, and it is a combination of surprise and fear, which can both be extremely subjective and irrational. Creating a universally terrifying game, or story, or anything, is always going to be a challenge because there's always going to be someone out there who will be able to see your twists coming.
The sanity effects are the only good thing about Eternal Darkness. Did you know the wankers patented the system? Gotta be the lowest blow since Namco patented loading time minigames.
Anyway I replayed the game last year, it's tedious as shit. There's no tension in the gameplay, only in the mood. And if you don't buy into the mood from the start, the gameplay has no hook to draw you in. Crap design.
Imagery was interesting, the game itself became too repetitive and felt stale several times over.
I thought the original Amnesia was pretty visceral, at least the first time through. Maybe not as much on replays.
FNAF isn't even a game.
Cry of Fear had great atmosphere but you're right. It relies too much on OMG SCARY SOUND. It did have a few good moments though for me at least.
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That's what I enjoyed most about the Dead Space games
Dead Space did a lot of things right. But anybody who thinks any of the franchise is scary has clearly never seen a gore film. Which is why it pisses me off that people don't like the second game for not being scary enough. They act like 1 had this "essence" of horror that's missing when the second is just more action with the same level of horror on a bigger scope.