What do you think makes horror work?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a faggot who think the town of Silent Hill is a therapist.

But user it's just a theory.

No thats what it is in the first game. Its Cheryls childhood fears brought to life. Dogs, birds, bullies, bugs and medical staff. Its told to you ingame and Dahlia calls it all "childish sleeptalk". The therapist bullshit and "what does it all mean" starts with 2.

I think the most important factor of making horror work is OH MY GOD LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU

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It's such a primal instinct to want to turn back when you hear or see that. You know there's nothing there, but it's all about that adrenaline of will there or will there not be.

You can't fool me skeleton!

i always like gross scary monsters, but those stop being scary and become funny or for some reason "cute" for me (amnesia servants/the molded). i also love subtle horror, something slightly changes from the norm, something is here when it wasnt. I hate screamers/jumpscares but i do find them interesting since there are a lot of good jumpscares hidden in a pool of shitty ones

Why did Marv turned into a skellyton?

FEAR STEMS FROM MISUNDERSTANDING OR SUBVERSION
That is, fear is derived from an inability to understand what the object is or why it operates in the way it does. Subversion comes in when the object takes familiar elements (like human limbs) and incorporates them in a disturbing ways.
FUTHERMORE FEAR IS SOMETHING THAT CAN BE LEARNED
We are all conditioned by our environment, and that conditioning can influence our perception of objects. When you are 'taught' to fear something, that object commands a special influence over your psyche that even logical thought cannot penetrate. Why are people afraid of spiders? Is it a culturally learned phenomenon, or is there something intrinsically disturbing about spiders that provokes such a response? Is it a combination of both? I would argue that the common phobias stem from a practical fear that is combined with a subjective, learned fear. Even the most irrational fears have some basis of thought behind them. People fear large bodies of water because they don't want to be consumed by the sea and killed. People fear heights because they do not want to fall to their doom. Those who fear entering doorways may anticipate that the doorway is somehow unstable and therefore untrustworthy.

Fear compels tentative caution, which is itself an evolutionary response. We do things to survive, and we want to diminish behaviors that will impede that process.
THE FEARLESS ARE EITHER FOOLS OR THEY WILLING TO TEST THE BOUNDARIES FOR SOME SUBJECTIVE REASON
Effective horror casts doubt. The confident are not in doubt, so in order for fear to set in, doubt must be cast. Garbage horror tries to surprise the audience with a high octane, but short-lived, rollercoaster ride of emotion. When the initial feeling of horror subsides, there is nothing left. Truly great horror can get the observant to constantly question themselves. This is why true horror is so rare.

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The other day i thought about how the moulded are basically just marvel symbiotes like venom and its hard to find then anything but silly after that.

I disagree. I think horror works best when something unexpected happens. I have long since become so jaded to jumpscares to the point that they do not affect me, but I do remember jumping at one point in Bioschock 1 and Bioshock infinite. Both aren't jumpscares, but you should know what I am talking about if you've played them. Like I said, unexpected, not drawn out and not trying too hard.

This guy puts it really well with the part about subtle horror, though I will disagree with him about gross scary monsters. Sometimes, gross and scary monsters will always be gross and scary if they are designed well. It's funny you have a pic of Cry of Fear because some of the enemies in it still creep me out.

pls no sppok

Small thing worth mentioning:
Western horror tends to emphasize suspense, which is an emotional process.
Japanese horror tends to emphasize mystery, which is an intellectual process.

One isn't better than the other, but it's interesting to see how both of them can play to their strengths well, and what happens when they can't cover for their weaknesses.

The best example of Japanese horror would probably be the Silent Hill series. Anyone who's played the games knows that the game forces you to think and understand exactly what it is that you're presented with at any given moment. It's not about walking into a hospital full of monsters; it's about trying to understand what that hospital of monsters represented, and thinking back on it for hours trying to understand how it fits into the characters' backstories as a whole.
Japanese horror games that fail are broad and subjective, but most people who have played a J-horror (or watched a bad J-horror movie) know the biggest issue comes when the mystery outdoes the suspense to the point that it just isn't scary. J-horror, when done poorly, ends up being just boring. Lots of thinking without any fear to go along with it.

Western horror games are ones I admittedly don't play often, but I can think of a few off the top of my head. System Shock, though not necessarily a horror game, does try to build a horror atmosphere throughout. Contrasted to most J-horror, things are mostly as they appear, and it's more about putting puzzle pieces together to see the full picture as opposed to having the picture in front of you and trying to figure out what it means. Indie games like ImScared and even Slender fall into the same category. They build up suspense through the atmosphere and possible adversaries, and that's what's meant to be scary. If you want to think about things beyond that, it typically doesn't lead to much.
Fittingly, the biggest issues with poorly-crafted western horror games are something that most people have seen bitched about: Jump scares. Jump scares are a cheap jolt that fades as quickly as it hits you. Whether or not jump scares can be done well is a moot point. Jump scares shouldn't even be considered as their own entity; jump scares are scares in a suspenseful environment. Jump scares and slow, torturous build up are the same, but executed differently. Jump scares, when done poorly, break the suspense of the game because the player/viewer is left feeling unsatisfied or even patronized by them.

Alessa. you mean Alessa.

lots of spooky skeletons

Yes i do. My bad. Cheryl stops existing after the crash. The young woman whos been in a coma after 4th degree full body burns for years in a hidden hospital basement half wakes up after she comes back and they merge. Her psychic powers which made her a target of bullying from kids who called her a witch go full akira and poison the towns inherent power like oil in a fishpond. Years of warped psycosis take her childhood fears and through the town rewrite reality around Silent Hill so those warped ideas of her tormentors become real things. Then she splits herself again to make Heather and dies after the nightmare collapses in on itself after Harry kills the Incubus.

That just made me think of something. Is there a horror game out there were the enemies are "cute girls" or silly creatures, but the tale that is told about them, or the way they're presented, or something about them that ultimately makes the player feel sad or frightened by it?

cry of fear monsters is one of the few exceptions. those designs are creepy as fuck, specially enemies like sawrunner and taller. sounds of screaming and chainsaws always fucks me up.

Yomawari?

Yomawari Night Alone and Yomawari Midnight Shadows. Its little girls alone in suburban/rural japan and the monsters are their fucked up childish interpretations of what they are seeing.

Like how you see a kids scribbles and think 'that looks nothing like what you are drawing' and its because their brains are not completely developed yet? think how a kid sees a youkai or oni or some ju-on shit? how do they interpret it?

Thats Yomawari.

Its also published by NISA so don't buy it.

Too late i have the collectors edition of both. The europe handled stuff avoids memeshit and (((editing))) NISA just funded it this time but the irish publication house did localisation.

Thankfully there is no talk of potatoes or "the troubles".

Fear of the unknown

the line between horror and action in a video game is really thin.

For instance, RE 1,2,3 can be considered horror.
RE4 starts to look more like action.
RE 5, 6 are completely action.

And yet, the imagery and monsters and everything just gets more refined and more disgusting looking.

RE7 comes back to horror (at least for the first few hours that I played).

So what is that line? For me, I think there is something to be said about tension.
With a horror game the tension needs to come from the unknown factors. Where are the next monsters? If I encounter one do I have the tools to survive? If I use my resources on THIS monster will I have the resources for the next possible one? Where are these monsters going to come from? (not necessarily jump scares), when or where will I get my next batch of resources to deal with these monsters?

Action can have some of these same tensions but in different ways. Typically in an action game i'm not exactly worried about running out of resources to dispatch the enemies. I may run out of the most convenient but typically there are resources right around the corner. Monsters are generally going to be outright in front of me too. Generally in an action game if I find a large cache of resources I know i'm about to fight a large number of or maybe some super enemy and the foreknowledge resolves that "what's around the corner" sort of tension there.

given all of that it really seems to be what the goal of the gameplay is.
Horror: A game that becomes more like a puzzle to solve.
Action: A game that is more about twitch-reflex.

Oh you are retarded

This thread reminded me of that one scene in VTMB.

>Buying Japanese games from a Western companies
You're funny ano-…
FUCK!!!
Oh well, anything else?

Don't tell me you assumed we all get the cucked american versions for everything do you? You know EU versions have different translation houses right?
Or do you assume we also called games shit like "Sonic Colors" because one country has a strange, divergent english nobody else uses?

Then again some retards actually think we all get americans nintendo translations to. What a nightmare world that must be.

Horror works when I play in the dark, webcam running, huge desk microphone on the desk along with a pop filter right up my mouth, my rgb backlit slightly lights up the room, stimulating my prostate with a huge dildo along with playing a horror game that has frequent fast in motion jumpscares with a loud piercing sound into my cheapo cloud x headset and everytime I get merely spooked, I yell very loudly at night.

Horror works when it's not the main focus and it's just an aesthetic.

You gave NISA money.

The closest thing I can think of is that new pokemon that disguises as pikachu or that parasite.

For a game with absolutely none of their usual issues from the Nippon Ichi Europe website.

user i want you to sit down. Almost every time you eat something or watch any advertisement or television program you are giving money to someone you probably dont like. Ever watch a Disney movie? you are also giving money to the people who hired pewdiepie for a long time.

If the product is fine thats all that matters. Unless you also don't buy shoes unless you know they weren't made in a sweatshopf if this is a moral highground thing.

YOU GAVE NISA MONEY.

What's the sauce?

So what? The game is fine. If your issue is related to trickledown economics i hope you check every fucking item in your house with this level of staunch brand identitiy politics.
Were this some butchered, poorly translated weebshit i would agree but this is no different than Dead Space or Metal Gear Solid. Both made by fucking asshole companies, both with no in game presence from them. Does it suck that they get any money? sure. Does the team that made a great game deserve nothing because i should be an armchair brand warrior 100% of the time? no. Its two great games with not a single issue.
You may as well lose your shit over people buying the original battlefront 2 on steam because disney owns the rights now.

For me, anything involving outer space is inherently terrifying. I remember playing Star Control II on MS-DOS and just being shaken to the core by the creepy atmosphere and the opening part where that tentacled alien shows up.

On top of that there's some Eldritch Horror later in the game as well. I remember the part where you send an exploration team down to a planet and they find the remains of some destroyed civilization. It turns out that this civilization had been doing some sort of research that summons something unknown from Beyond time and space and they were completely destroyed by it. One of the members of your research team starts to get eaten by these things too and we don't know what they are nor do we ever find out. That was kind of a haunting moment.

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Yeah i'm familiar with that shit. None of which is in Yomawari or its sequel. Thats what i think you are failing to understand.

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I forgot what it was from since I felt self conscious and deleted it but I did keep the full page

Please stop existing

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You better remember you nigger, muh dick can't hold out forever.

cause I hate myself and i want to die sometimes

You could always reverse search it

But that would derail the thread, and I haven't gotten my game with cute scary girls yet:
And, not made buy a shit company.

Being a pussy.

Unexpected things make for better horror than most horror games do. While a game like Re7 is tense it rarely sticks with you as a horror game as you become accustomed to it.

Ark fucked me up a few days ago and got under my skin something fierce in a way that has actually stuck with me.

Since then I've been paranoid about areas Snakes could come out of. I live in a country with only 1 poisonous snake who is normal sized and very reclusive. I have zero things to fear from snakes and yet I'm on edge because Ark did an ambush so well that I made it an organic horror moment.

Pinkies did the same thing in Doom as a kid. In Episode 1 there's a maze with a pinkie in it. You can hear it roaring and might randomly run into it. when you do it always makes you jump.

spoops

Lemme guess, you went to pick up a tonic, some steam steamed up the area around you, and when you turned around JESUS LOVES ME, THIS I KNOW It's a pretty famous one, I know it got me pretty good.

seek shock therapy or kill yourself.

Stop sniffing your own farts retard. When a kid with a knife for a hand comes out the dark at me in a place covered in blood I'm not "intellectually scared". I'm thinking "Oh fuck, there's a monster with a knife trying to kill me".

You have absolutely no clue about horror but you're such a weeaboo that you think you do because you watched The ring

I'm intellectually scared rn

I hope that those aren't your examples of good jumpscares. I love CoF and AoM to death, but the first jumpscare in CoF is faggot shit. AoM is a constant barrage of jumpscares to the point that it kind of becomes scary again as a weird sort of fever dream.

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That's basically dead space

Fear has the problem of being a kind of catch all term for several different psychological responses. Fear can mean Startled, Apprehensive, Disturbed, Revulsion, Dread or Disgust. Even more annoying, the cause of each of these can vary greatly from person to person.

In general, horror attempts to capitalize on ratcheting up the apprehension followed by a shock reflex. You can do this rather easily by removing stimulus. Our brains are kind of keyed into things happening. So sudden silence or sudden simplification of music is common, as well as holding on a shot in film. You get the same thing with pictures of areas with no clear intention, your brain isn't quite used to seeing areas without a context or goal.

As a small aside, I worked as a night janitor for an elementary school for about a year. I'll tell you right now that for the first few weeks that is by far the most horrifying thing you can do. When you're out there all alone, with nobody around, in the dark with those colorful and happy pictures. You're going to jump at every strange pop and creak of the buildings, and something as simple as a raccoon or possum is going to make you shit yourself. However, after a few weeks of doing it, you become used to the environment and it no longer scares you… as much.

In an essence, effective horror is a horror based media experience that happens to hit you in an area you don't have an answer for. Sure, you can be scared of a thing, and if you see or have to experience a thing you might not like it, but that type of fear response is more connected to the brain sensing 'danger' in a very direct method than a true horror experience. I have a deep and illogical fear of spiders and the water. For water this is so extreme that in Dying Light at a point where you're required to go underwater to proceed I was unable to go on until a friend joined the game and went down to get it for me (to be clear, there's nothing hostile under the water to its in fact safer than being outside in general). A true horror experience, on the other hand, would be something like Ex Machina (if the movie didn't suck ass) to people who don't know exactly what to think about robots and AI. This same concept can be applied to dozens of different topics, from death, disease, spiritual threats, moral threats and so on.

Think of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. While certainly a paranormal aspect is in that movie, the real horror theme of it is the idea of a man being driven to hurt his family. If you ask people if they would ever hurt the people that they love, they'd say no. The Shining takes that simple no answer away and shows you a scenario where a perfectly normal person, like you, slowly becomes more and more unhinged until he is capable of such an act. Not only was he able to be made to do this thing but something outside his control was able to do it to him, to effect him in such a way that there was really no other way things would play out.

Of course, saying this now, I wonder how great a 'The Shining' game would be for snobby horror fans. Just recreating a massive hotel, and making it into an upkeep simulator for a winter. With paranormal activity designed to unnerve, but not scare, the player. Slowly mounting to a point where the player avatar goes mad.

This, unironically. Also novelty. If you're new to horror you're going to be spooped more easily, eventually you get used to it.

Horror, more specifically fear, stems from lots of different parts of the brain, since it is present in any animal ever existed.
To make you understand better, think of the brain as an onion inb4 somebody once told me with each different layer representing one stage of intelligence development.
While the deepest layer (the more primitive) is afraid of things such as the dark, a beast with sharp teeth and loud noises/ being startled, it isn't the case with outer layers, who rationalize and deconstruct the percieved threat and either neutralize it or try to find a solution for it (aka finding a weapon to defend yourself, turning the light on etc).
Now the outer layers are what's interesting.
They are afraid of things such as cognitive dissonance that hints at the occult or supernatural, or even the promise of future pain & or torture.
Can you help me find out more about this?

AUDIO

Does anybody find The Sims to be a seriously creepy, even terrifying game? Nevermind the music, it might be the feeling of burden on your shoulder to defend all of these people from THEMSELVES, the feeling that you might not be alone, and that there's some malicious force actively bringing misfortune upon all of the residents, or how disconnected the world feels from reality. Unrelated, but I couldn't play Artificial Academy 2 a few days after witnessing my first murder. You go about your day normally, and then there's this scream, the screen goes red, and then suddenly you're on the next day, skipped over the save point. Really makes you feel like you're in danger, or maybe like you've missed something. Could be the fact that I just wasn't anticipating anything like that to be in the game at all, I don't know. I don't think you even need to be in the same place the murder happens to hear the screaming and black out either, but it was so sudden I just might not have noticed it happening.

Yeah nice try satan.
Well, I'll humour you a bit. I think those sorts of fears still go back to the basic fear of some unknown threat that's after you. The fear of a big organisation led by a government kidnapping and experimenting on people's just an abstraction of the monster in the dark.

That's a pretty good break down of it. Saved.

Why does he sound like an instructional tape for learning english?

Because Japanese people don't speak English very well and this was early voice acting in an entirely different language for them

Horror is more effective when it's atmospheric. This is one of the prime reasons why Silent Hill is so beloved, the atmosphere is perfect. The mist, the sound design, the monster design, the level design, it's all geared very well for unease. The mist doesn't let you see more than a few feet ahead of you, the chasms that cut streets, the sound of the radio, all give a feeling that something is not quite right. This world looks like reality, but it doesn't feel' like reality. It invokes the uncanny valley on a world level.
What horror should strive to do is something like this pic on every level possible. Something everyone knows, but flawed fundamentally. That's why things like the baby from Erasedhead are so memorable. You know it's suppoused to be a baby, it kind of looks like a baby, it sounds like a baby, but it's clearly not a baby.
This is why RE4 is not a horror game. The color palette is there, the character design is sort of there, but the gameplay is not there at all. Suplexing priests is not horrifying. It's the same problem with FEAR. You're basically a psychic navy SEAL, but you're supposed to be afraid of the ghost of a little girl that hasn't tried to kill you? Never mind the fact that you're usually done wiping out entire squads of elite soldiers by yourself when the scares start.

The first time someone died in my save i jumped out of my chair due to the scream. I pretty much asked for it though, because i put 2 bissexual women with the Evil trait in my save.
Postan the two girls and the poor fellow who died, if i recall correctly.

Delete that first image.

It doesn't go against that, the whole point of the fact that you are compelled to avoid enemies expect for more claustrophobic locations when you are forced to fight them, but fear in there comes from a different source and are given sound cues to find out where they are without actually seeing them most of the time makes them far scarier. I think the whole point of that radio scene in the beginning was to show you how dangerous those fuckers can be if you actually meet them.

Fear of death and helplessness.

The first half of Alien Isolation was thus the best horror game ever made, asides from Silent Hill 1.

I will ask you guys, what horror do you know which also mixes the elements of mystery in it? But not in the "you don't know what's happening" way. I'm asking about a horror game or anything else connected to horror that actually has a human culprit that is helping/causing paranormal scary occurences and the player or the main charcter has to piece together who that is from clues. Bonus points if causing paranormal occurences is the goal of the culprit in itself and not a means to an end. For example a murderer who tries to corrupt places into terrifying eldritch locations with ritualistic murders for some kind of reason would be my kind of thing.

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It's hard to recommend games when you ask for there to be a mystery element. In order to tell you to check it out it's going to spoil the mystery.

Atmospheric horror is just the threat of jumpscares.

I'm not asking for a spoiler of what is the solution to the mystery, only games that do have that mystery.

Which would spoil the story more often than not.

So my best chance is just to randomly play horror games in hopes I'll find something I guess?

Yes.

Ice pick lodge do a few good games.

I wouldn't call it scary now but I used to be terrified of those knife tossers in Dangerous Dave for being instant kills (like everything) but also for the character death. Also their placement in the first level making you do tricky jumps to even shoot them.

I'm actually about to try that downloadable class with 80% evil characters, because with how prone characters are to cheating or otherwise not getting along, it'll be messy and exciting. Actually it'd be great if there was a proper trait randomizer for this purpose.

No he's right. Violent, certainly, but it's hilarious and cathartic to do, especially when you do it as Ashley and especially when their head goes splat.

Go back to halfchan and make some console war threads, jesus.

Why do people like you feel the need to constantly turn decent threads into shit-slinging matches?

Cry of Fear is probably my favourite horror game. Yeah, it has quite some cheap jump-scares and the story is pretty "meh" but for me the highlight of the game were those moments where there are no enemies. This "calm before the storm". Because (at least during the first playthrough) you really have no idea what to expect from this silence. In this game the expectation of being attacked was far more scarier than the actual attack. And of course the special mention deserves the inventory system.

Environment and buildup of suspense. It's a careful balance of building suspense and then alleviating that suspense, either through an attack or a safe place. Make the player expect something to jump out and kill them, but it never does. OR, make them only get the "jump" when they fuck up and it leads to a bad situation.

I don't remember any jump-scares in AoM. All enemies are fast and do a lot of damage, melee is useless, ammo is scarce and your flashlight is shit. I think the horror of AoM is more about making the player feel overwhelmed.

If you haven't, play Afraid of Monsters. Its from the same guy and is the superior game of the two imo, nothing against CoF of course.

Best kind of horror probably addresses the viewers personal phobias. I don't think that the genre cannot improve much beyond the proven generic formulas, except for trying out niches.

I once played the terrible game called Vietnam 2: 'Black Ops' (a 'manos the hand of fate' among games) that didn't set out to be a horror, but ended up frightening me in some way nonetheless when I was younger. The badly sampled soundbites of nearby soldiers and the eerie screams of kamikaze soldiers, combined with lots of tunnels apparently got to me. It didn't help that the bad AI did some weird shit sometimes too.

Talking about tunnels. The famous Alien jumpscare scene in the airducts and the ultra claustrophobic tunnel scene in Descent are also on my list of scariest bits in movies, even though I'm generally not claustrophobic at all.

Yeah, I did play AoM. See .

Oh, my bad.

I love myself some Silent Hill, but that's the only horror series that I've really enjoyed. For me personally, I've always found scary moments in otherwise innocent games far more scary than most horror games have ever been.
Embed related scared the shit out of me the first time I saw it, for whatever reason.

the feeling of being vulnerable and powerless, once the game gives you the ability to overcome any threat with no effort the horror is gone, it doesn't matter if the enemies are ugly and the enviroment is dark.

Can agree to this. The scariest game I've played recently was Alien: Isolation, but once you get the flamethrower, the alien stops being scary.

I wanna fugg that ghost loli tbh

Did anyone ever save that post one user made about creating a text-based horror adventure game? It was about eldritch stuff and shit.

Didn't you just describe Deadly Premonition?

Disagree because it doesn't work if you have no way to fight back at all. If you can just hide in the closet and it walks away then it's not really scary. It just becomes a road block to waste your time.

Good horror gives you an unreliable way to fight back. Either it's melee which means you have to get close and risk being hit or it's very limited on ammo.

The Nemesis in RE3 is a good example of this. You can't keep running forever and you have to fight back. It's just never a fight you're really equipped to deal with or if you are then you will be low on supplies for the next segment which could be worse.

What's wrong with Mitsudomoe? I've never seen the anime tbh

AA2 was an alright game, sadly it becomes a bit overwhelming at some point, and no group sex
that dude tho

I'd like a horror game where there's no game over, but bad endings as a result of being caught by whatever thing because you permanently lost a body part or an item which will make you unable to proceed on a path to the good ending.

that's a good one, but overall the is very little horror and very a weird gem

but this user gets it,
and not only atmosphere, your mind is capable of conjuring the most horrifying things no game could ever provide
by keeping the danger a mystery, keeping a eerie world and no real means of defense, whilst also keeping the edge on
its exceedingly hard to do as a video game medium, movies are easier because they directly guide emotions through you
even then its hard to find a good movie that holds that true, for games its even harder because they can't directly control the player
silent hill did an excellent job at keeping all of these elements together, its eerie atmosphere, resemblance of things that are real but not put together properly
but thing is, its prime element is not horror or fear per se, its eerie atmosphere, and the development of the story and characters, that is where it really touches and gains the player over

Personally, something that really scares me are situations where you know bad shit is about to happen, but the game gives you no choice other than to move forward.

Creating an expectation
Manipulating that expectation
Never letting the illusion break down

Didn't Eternal Darkness do that?

If you like gameplay clunkier than RE1 sure.

There is a difference between fear, horror, and revulsion, though few people identify it. Most people talk about fear responses when they talk about horror games, like jumpscares and feelings of helplessness. Many supposed horror movies focus too much on revulsion, which is the gut response to gross things like gore or filth. Horror has more to do with the aversion to unnatural phenomena - it's why ghosts are scary for people, even if the ghost itself is plain looking and harmless, because a human knows, at its core, a ghost should not exist. It doesn't have to be supernatural, either. Cannibalism can be plenty horrific, for example. Child abuse horrifies most.

You see, all three are related. They all have to do with survival responses to avoid danger, disease, and despair. All three should be utilized to create a truly horrifying experience, because facing your own instincts can heighten your sense of life and give that adrenaline and dopamine responses humans crave. But, most people superficially add fear and revulsion just to forget horror. It's much easier to scare someone by making them helpless than it is to make them horrified of a creature they can fight. Still, the heart of horror is facing concepts alien to the natural order, which is lost on most.

I don't think fear is so much uncertainty, but the idea of being vulnerable, where some entity is completely dominating you and there's absolutely nothing you can do to fight back. Uncertainty is merely a common factor, because it's the lack of information that dominates you, but that doesn't mean that you can't be afraid of something that you completely understand.

Stalker is my favorite horror game because you're just a layman doing layman things, but those things are set in a spooky place. Everything you do in STALKER is something you could do in real life, but now there's mutants and anomalies involved. It makes the mundane much more interesting.

What scares me the most is having to delve into an environment that is known to be dangerous, like entering a lab and getting to the lowermost floor. SCP:CB spooped me

That photo reminded me of the worm in ear webm

A strong feeling of tension can make a horror game, as the original RE games did. I'll never forget my second playthrough of 1 where I actually got the final boss and I beat him while on danger and just before he me. That feeling right there made the game.
Nemesis also succeeds at this, and whenever Mr X pops up in RE2, it elicits some of this feeling. I'd say RE2 is the weakest when it comes to building tension.
Silent Hill did its horror well by being lower on the tension, but putting this lower tension all over the game via fear of the unknown, thanks to the limited draw distance. It's not that scary now, seeing as I've beaten it 10 or so times, but the otherworld hospital and Nowhere do spook me on new playthroughs

As much as I like that game and I've replayed it more than most I own. Even that first playthrough had some tension the game really can't maintain a fearful atmosphere because of how easy it is to game the system in terms of sanity management, and how easy combat is with targetted locations that easily and quickly cripple 70% of the enemies.

Where did you copypasta this trash from?

I wanna see this.

Oh yeah, shitty games. Because they have shitty sounds and AI like you mentioned, there's something that gets me about them too. As long as something about it's even vaguely meant to be scary, I mean. Watched somebody stream this hot pile of shit, "Arctic alive" (sic) and it was somewhat scary, mainly for the reason that the dumb puzzle monsters would occasionally break the rules they're meant to be going by

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Horror structure is similar to a joke structure, both deal with subversion of expectation, both require build up and sudden well-timed release. Thus jump scare reliance is as invalid as atmosphere only arguments.
Expectations most of the time are contextual, once experienced subversion of expectation becomes an expectation itself.
Fears aren't universal, thus a horror can never truly hit all of it's audience.
Horror games to be good require not only to be a good horror, but also be good games, and making a good game is another bag of worms entirely. Playing experience should also be seamless in terms of working with the theme.

With all of these statements in mind, what do we get?
A properly scary game should be a good game with it's mechanics build with horror in mind, horror itself must know it's audience, know the context and the pacing at which each part should be delivered, and all of that should be a novelty too. Which realistically is quite an impossible task to achieve, so in the end the games that are praised are the ones that hit home with gameplay and visual design only, and not the horror itself.
To top it off, the player that could enjoy horror to it's full extent should not be a sophisticated and intelligent one. It should be a person that can't rationalize the most basic things and have trouble acknowledging and remembering sequences of the events happening around them. Children, retards and wasted casuals fit the bill.

In simplier terms it means that:
Horror games are weak to spoiling both with playtime and times in general.
No reasonable studio will ever take upon a task of making a horror game. Thus there will never be a great deep non-indie horror game and indie devs just won't be able to create something as grand or as complex, ever, due to lack of resources and experience available to them.
The more efficient brain than average one has and more experience with the media one is, the less effective the horror will be. And you, the one reading this, are probably already struggling to find anything that works.

Nothing works for me now and all I see in even well respected horror games is trash, deeply flawed games most of which no one would even touch if they weren't pursuing an unachievable goal.

This isn't true though. I can expect a 7 foot guy to come rape me and because I expect it doesn't make it any more horrifying when he starts to spit on his dick now does it?

You can expect good horror and it's still horrifying.

You are not making any sense.
If the rape guy after fucking you senseless then started bringing out a "body disposal kit" or tried locking you up for the sake of making you a slave, and the only thing you've expected is rape, then you'll be scared more. Then if you were not expecting the rape in the first place and wasn't accustomed to it then the act itself would be scarier than if you were accustomed to it. If you were told that the rapists are 7 foot tall strangers of middle eastern or african descend and then it turns out to be a relative or a friend then you'll be likely to get paranoid towards everyone around you afterwards.

"Scared more" was not the qualifier. Fear of the known is still scary.

It reminded me of that phobia some people have for having holes in your skin.

I think good horror comes down to limiting the player and making them feel both emotionally connected to the avatar they control either through immersion or through connection (a la the "security cam footage" feel of the early resident evil games), then making the player feel powerless or helpless. When the player feels pressured either to run and hid from their enemies or like they can't keep fighting due to limited resources, the true fear kicks in as their mind scrambles to look for options to fight or run.

Alien Isolation did a good job of this with the alien, where you can't actually kill it, you just end up slowing it down so you can run away and hide again.

Nowhere close to an ever present fear of the unknown and phobias (which also bear the unknown) though.
If you know for sure that you'll get raped you can expect and prepare, and you will. More over it isn't exactly fear we are talking about here then, it's a mixture of intimidation, inability to comprehend the experience and small bit of a fear of inevitability, all of which when playing videogames are mitigated by an ability to rationalize.
Computer image can't provide a strong enough natural presence by itself, it has to trick you into believing in the entity for the limited time it's planned to be presented to you. The more you know about the entity the less it's something undefined that could trigger fear and by proxy intimidation. And games encourage you to learn to perform better.
The smaller are the consequences the lesser the fear, thus the more you play horror games, the less is the fear, since you get to know that nothing will ever happen to you when playing vidya and browsing chans.
Usual videogames can't provide anything more than series of images and sound effects that are played when certain conditions are met, and the rules by which conditions are set are generally consistent between the titles, meaning that you can pick up on them. In comparison, irl you can experience the whole sensory bouquet of getting decapitated only once (or get raped without knowing how it is getting raped, since you are speaking from that position).
Now, the use of the weasel words was intended. Videogames and their rules are usually constrained within a running application on a single device, however the tools available to programs are bigger than that: other applications, OS, network and whatever device that gets a security clearance for the application. And with progression of the technology the range and senses affected will increase too. So there is a possibility of some game being able to monopolize on that, but in the end, videogame produced horror is far more accessible than rape or decapitation, and comparatively will completely lose it's value in your lifetime. The rules will be learned and you will be able to comprehend.

tldr: horror of the provided example comes from either characteristics that videogames cant replicate or fears of unexpected that will lose their value when translated to and repeatedly experienced in a videogame form. In other words: provided snippet does jack shit to disprove the argued progression.

when it's scary.

Horror works best when you don't completely understand how the game works. When you don't know the optimal path and actions to take. When you're not even sure what works and what doesn't work, whether crouching or hiding behind something or standing still even makes a difference. And you're not sure what happens if you fail.

Horror games lose a lot of impact once you've failed once or twice and you, on some level, learn that it's no big deal if your character dies. For example, play a game like Slender, which is all about running from Slenderman. If you get into it then it can be pretty spooky, trying to avoid Slenderman when he could be around any corner without warning. But if you just sprint and Slenderman a few times and get game overs, afterward a lot of the thrill is lost because you're not afraid of dying anymore.

Point is, good horror has to keep the player/viewer guessing. Once they figure out the pattern, it's over.

immersion is what makes it work, next question

Powerlessness. Alien Isolation and RE7 are good examples.

On the topic of PT: isn't PT technically a walking sim? And if not, why?

Persona 4's a good one. Not really a horror game at all, but there's some spooky moments in it, and it has exactly what you're describing as its plot, right down to the villain's motivations.

That combined with the outright janky running animation they have made me shit my pants

Horror is humor with a different sort of punchline. Subvert their expectations to create fear instead of laughter. Make former safe havens dangerous. Without warning, take away tools they've relied on the whole game.
That kinda shit.

Underrated post tbh.

WRONG
betraying expectations is a fucking meme, you can't just betray expectations and expect that to scare anyone, the unexpected is not the same thing as the betrayed expectation, if you're in a car and you expect the driver to turn left but instead he turns right might scare you, in certain contexts, if you don't trust the driver or if you already have some underlaying fear but by itself it merely elicits confusion or curiosity, a car suddenly veering off road on the other hand is more likely to be scary, because it is not only not what you expect, it is also not something you would even think about if you're expecting something, which is something you absolutely need when you're experiencing any sort of horror media.
take vid related for example, it's been praised for "constantly subverting expectations" but all it really does is go for the second most obvious route every time.
it also lacks any sort of pattern, and fear of the unknown doesn't work if you don't even have anything particular to fear.
this is my second complaint, this time having nothing to do with the post I quote, the rote obsession with "fear of the unknown", where writers will forget to add things that are actually scary, afraid to give too much away, ultimately ending with a "wooooh bad things are happening, why? no idea, so you better what out! whoops you got killed/jumped out out of nowhere, isn't that mysterious?"

WRONG
most games that make you powerless devolve into "don't stop running when this monster is around and you're 100% safe"
powerlessness=/=being put in danger

I should explain this more.
when you play a horror game or watch a horror movie, you're on the lookout for horror, so, for example, when I watch vid related, and the jumpscare music is on, I think, "oh, scary thing comes now, probably jumpscare", then, when it doesn't happen right away I update my model because I am still expecting horror because I clicked in a horror video and I think "ah, delayed jumpscare".
then the slenderman ripoff comes on.
really fucking scare my dudes.
Silent Hill is scary because it always hit you with stuff you don't just not expect, you don't even notice it. the uncomfortable camera angles, the noises, the constant gamble of danger that the combat entails, the imagery. it isn't subversive, it's downright subconscious.

A good horror is about gentle jumpscares and anticipation.

When you fear a snapping twig or a creaking floorboard, but the true monster itself remains an mystery to be speculated by the community for years to come, you know they've done it right.

Konami had its hands in a lot of pots

english teaching pachinko machines when?

The sense of weakness and not feeling like a god or a chosen one.

Maybe it's just me, but Subnautica did horror really great for me. At least, before getting the Cyclops. The sea is just terrifying. To this day I still don't have the guts to dive out into the 'Void' (where the playable area ends). Perhaps with some truly huge lovecraftian horror present, it would hit new levels of scary.

NIS does good work. NISA is fucking cancer.

dude i totally get what you are saying. i work i the hvac industry and had to work after hours at a church, it is a small town church with multiple rooms and everything was dark and some areas were dim lit. i had my flashlight to move get around and i was scared shitless especially the room where the kids do the whole sunday school. fuck it was terrifying, i knew there wasnt anything bad but still a felt super uneasy. got the job done though

NIS fully supports NISA's cancer.

scary stuff

Horror in fact doesn't work. The very concept of horror is fundamentally antithetical to good game design.

Making people scared without jumpscares. Your picture is a good example. There's a similar part in Silent Hill 3 where you have to go deeper and deeper, but there isn't any jumpscare. The surface is your comfort zone, but going deeper (away from it) scares you. We don't need jumpscares, we need to be away from what's normal and comfortable.

Impending doom.

To make horror work, it needs one thing - Comfy

Comfy makes everything work.

Horror exists from creating fear through ambience, suspense and a feeling of danger.

Fear is subverted by anything that creates a lasting sense of security.

half-life is an example of a good horror game (not half-life 2)

horror aesthetics and overall themes without inhibiting gameplay in any way

Yandere mode ended pretty quickly after some man's waifu coerced me into doing her while he was around, it's very bad not to pay attention if you aren't abusing the statue. Second attempt I wasted the first 2/3s chasing some dyke and ended up with some easy girl instead, that's still in progress. I'm thinking the time system in this game works badly in that you control everyone, just because you have the skip button and nothing much seems to happen while you're doing things either. To help with that I'm inclined to not do certain things, and reduce period time significantly.

I wouldn't count that, also the stalkers are from 2.

obviously, but point still stands. however, the post i replied to is correct, horror elements inhibit gameplay severely and as such half-life is basically the best horror game__ ever made especially considering how far it goes to keep the player immersed and often leaves the player in the dark about what is going on

That is a shilly rule you have there. If it is done right of course

no good game interrupts gameplay for no real reason, if you have to do that you're admitting your game is too shit so you need to add gimmicky shit to mix things up

I wish I didn't know who the culprit is already though

Generally it needs a good atmosphere and a sense of dread. I have an example of the latter. When I was playing Silent Hill 2 and noticed an empty swimming pool full of monsters I immediately thought "I'm going to have to go in there at some point". Just having blackened hallways doesn't cut it in my opinion.