Weekly Sunday Horror Thread

I think it would. It has some genuinely disturbing moments to it, the twin monsters, some of the hauntings you get in your apartment, the giant face room, the last boss and the general story to it. But it's got a fair share of problems that stops it from being a good horror game. The fact that a bottle of chocolate milk takes up as much space in your inventory as a chainsaw is retarded.

With how good Silent Hill 2 & 3 were, it'd be difficult to top that. When you crest a mountain, you can only go down.

Anybody know where I can find a copy of Sanitarium that doesn't require paying 10 bucks for a game from 98?
Never heard of it before now.

How low poly is too low poly?

At least some developers are honest about their games being walking simulators.

I wonder why Indie Horror games often are much scarier than the big AAA titles, even if they are not even intended to be scary.

Looks better than Parasite Eve and that was a great game. Keep on.

Just wait for VR horror. It's gonna be the spookiest shit.

There also are some surprisingly good RPG Maker horror games out there, doubly so if you can stand the "Anime grill in haunted highschool" scenario.

Misao and Mad Father actually both are made in the Wolf RPG Editior

How low-poly can we go?

For whatever it's worth, the low-poly stuff still has a certain edge over babbies first Unity game.

Turns out, someone made a "3d" version of Yume Nikki based on the old 2.5d EDuke32 engine.

White Day

They're easy to make and sell well enough

I dunno

It is a good game, Silent Hill or not

Don't know man, that's why I'm here

It's not just the low poly but the lightning. Today it's either too bright or "wew let's just darken that corner and put a jump scare or other such shit there for spooks :^)" bullshit pretty much telling the player what will happen.

Just look at SH1 for why low-poly can look incredible. There's something about the lack of detail that makes the horror seem even more potent because the low-poly coupled with outstanding sound design makes your imagination run with the the rest more than some hyper-detailed character could ever hope.

I want to whip up something like the guy in banned memories did, anyone know what engine he used for it?

I think one thing that is often overlooked is the fixed camera. This limits the actual control you have over the character and produces a feeling of helplessness.

Compared to the usual "you are the hero" theme of FPS games, I wonder if the feeling of watching (over) somebody else that the fixed cameras bring actually makes things scarier.

According to its GameJolt site, GameMaker:Studio

You're wrong. Its not the low-poly what makes Silent Hill scarier, but the design assets. The graphics looked a bit old even at the time, mostly because they rendered an actual town where you could semi-freely roam which was quite unusual in PSX-era. And what they lost in graphics they made up in both lighting- and sound effects, which are some of the best in all PSX games.

Original Silent Hill games have both fixed camera angles and camera that follows behind your character. In the first game whenever you were outside, the camera followed you in 3rd person mode. But the outside was still scary as fuck, especially at night-time.

not saying it's scary BECAUSE of low-poly stuff, I'm just saying it doesn't hurt it and that it's a good example of how what you're saying (great assets) can combine with technical limitations to create an effect/aesthetic that still holds up better today than most games that took the more detail = more spookz approach.

Not saying there isn't a time or place for photorealistic graphics in horror games, I just think that SH1 used what they had perfectly and we've got a little treasure on our hands today as result

Still, I'm curious whether players would be more concerned about their non-descript avatar (think silent protagonists a la Gordon Freeman) or distinct, third-person characters.

It's immersion versus empathy, I'd guess.

In horror in general, audience tends to put themselves in the place of the character regardless. The sort of "that spooky thing happened to this guy, it could happen to me!"-vibe typical to horror movies and games that keep you awake at night.

True, but I wonder how much you could use guilt-tripping as a mechanic to create anxiety and fear in players.

You guys should play Shadow Tower, it's a first person dungeon crawler made by From Software filled with spooky/weird shit and enemies that can fuck you up with one or two hits

Never heard of that. Is it a classical dungeon crawler (i.e. with tile-based movement, etc), or does it take a more liberal approach to the formula.

It's like King's Field, only a bit more advanced. I keep meaning to play it.

Best horror protag coming through. How come games don't do what Dino Crisis did and use dinosaurs? Its pretty terrifying.

I have it on my Vita. It's pretty good.

Because you can't really use dinosaurs without going full Jurassic Park. Plus, the enormous size of many of them makes it difficult to get them into the tight, enclosed spaces that horror games typically take place in.

I don't know man. DC handled the T-rex segments really well. Facing velociraptors in tight corridors was pretty spooky as well. Not to mention being chased around by countless compys.

True. But bear in mind that Dinosaurs, when compared to the zombies/mutated humans/ghosts you find in many classical horror games, lack the Uncanny Valley effect, which may or may not induce a greater amount of fear than the view of an oversized lizard.

That's pretty reasonable. Still could use a try. Dino crisis wants as much creepy uncanny stuff horror as much as it was "Oh God that thing is going to devour me whole". It's more based on the enemy outmatching you in every way, with its only intents being to murder you that gave it its horror feel.
Imagine being attacked by a bear innawoods. Now imagine the same experience, but instead of a bear which you could easily trick into leaving you alone, you have an Allosaurus. 40 feet long 2.5 ton overgrown agile lizard with all its intents set on eating you. No chance to run, no weapon to fight it off effectively, no real chance to outsmart it.

Huh. If you go that route, you almost land in the territory of Lovecraftian Horror, where things are scary by virtue of how absolutely powerless you are against them.

Currently playing stalker, but since everyone knows about that I'll post something I played a while ago.

From what I heard, White Night as neat visuals and atmosphere, but an absolutely awful control system. Any truth to this?

Resident evil camera angles

That is not necessarily a bad thing. See

That's exactly what DC1, and to a smaller extent, DC2 did. Every time the T-rex shows up you have to run. DC2 has the T-rex get eaten by a gigantosaurus. Afterwards, you decimate the gigantosaurus with a satellite plasma beam. Otherwise, both games featured the T-rex being a unbeatable threat.
DC2 wasn't as much a horror game as it was a run and gun arcade shooter. The real horror was in DC1 where you had limited ammo, limited mobility and limited medkits. The low amount of ammo meant you probably weren't going to kill any dinos unless it was crucial (e.g. clearing the dinos in a room with a puzzle).

In conclusion yes, a dino game where you are powerless to their onslaught would be neat.

Daily reminder that Underhell was GOTY 2013

Yeah. The camera angles aren't that bad either most of the time. It's just people bitching.

DO any of you guys know why DC1 works so much like ass on an emulator?

My PS stopped working and I wanna play it

I was surprised at how good that game is given its premise

it's a much better alien isolation then alien isolation

I've played it and didn't notice that. The only really bad thing were the one-shot enemies.

Dino Crisis did something right for and that was very limited ammo and changing sequences depending on what you do. Everyone knows the cord selection thing from RE2 but they took it further in DC, leading to a shitload of whatifs depending on which doors you board up or lasers you close.

But fuck that puzzle near the end when you had to find out the password through listening to beeps on a recording. Not everyone has a good tone recognition.

Not playing scary vidya, but i am reading some of Itou Junji's works.

you've been out of the loop for a while huh?
the thing that gives dinosaurs the potential to scare is their predatory nature coupled with speed
I can imagine a shooter with Dino Crisis level ammo management but also a not-so-reliable Amnesia style hiding mechanic being absolutely terrifying

How do you like the endings?

:^)

I miss the late night deep sea threads that inevitably mutated into Ito threads

Quiet a few have given me a shock. Starting from the beginning of the collection, I'd say it kind of picks up with Flesh Color Horror.

you can always start 'em up again, user

I would, if I wasn't such a lazy faggot and could be bothered to get my hands on the scans

You should read "Anything but a ghost". I don`t wanna spoiler too much but:

It gets pretty spooky towards the end

is this good enough for you?
mangafox.me/manga/itou_junji_kyoufu_manga_collection/

Verily. Many thanks, user

Is there a single one that doesn't get spooky towards the end?

...

Wots dis?

Brookhaven as in Silent Hill's Brookhaven?

What's that?

Dunno man i`ve read about 2/3rd`s of Ito`s stuff and so far its all pretty amazing,i`ve yet to find a story that isn`t spooky or does`nt have some fucked up ending. But that one got me really spooked the first time I read it,I was`nt expecting that ending.

that caught me by surprise

What is the most interesting and original setting you saw in a horror game?

Also, any games based of Gothic Horror?

Is Last Door even good? I know it's pixelshit, but is the story decent?

Silvio was fairly interesting, even though the execution was awful. Then again, it was a one man (or even one-swede) project.

...

I had to look up what this was. is right in that it's a VR zombie shooter, but it's also a wave based zombie shooter.

I'm hopeful VR gets a good horror game. But I know as soon as that happens, everyone and their mom is going to make a knock-off. Same thing with every successful horror game.

The first 2 parts of The Last Door were pretty great. The second especially, as it had some really unsettling things in it. The third one I liked alot less because the puzzles got retarded. The fourth one requires an account to play on the site or money to play and I cannot be assed.

The pain