I started playing Pic related for the first time last night, and I have to say, horror wise, I'm not spooped, and I'm kinda disappointed, because as nice as mysterious mansion with puzzles and mystery is, I was hoping for a horror game that was actually going to scare me
so tell me Holla Forums what are some legitimately scary horror games that don't rely on shit like jumpscares?
As far as I know, there are none. I have never played any scary games that got me with anything but a split second of surprise via cheap jumpscares.
i hope you picked the "hardest" difficulty, because its actually normal mode. im normally in favor of players choosing whatever theyre comfortable with, but in this game it will seriously impact your experience with the game.
how far are you into the game?
a lot of the "horror" comes from not knowing whats in the next room and running low on resources. or being over 30 min into the game without having saved. you get the idea.
it has few jumpscares and the remake is atmospheric as hell - so what exactly else do you want from a horror-ish game?
i found silent hill 2 to be pretty scary, but reading your post: maybe survival horror just isnt for you. you dont seem to like (or even acknowledge) the parts that make up the genre or are generally enjoyed in the package.
i also liked the spooked beach house in vampire bloodlines - but maybe im just easier to pull in on atmosphere than you. the soundtrack of the game did wonders for me.
I understand the atmospheric appeal, I just don't find the atmosphere, at least in REmake, to be particularly scary, its nice, a mansion in the middle of the woods with puzzles and secrets its a nice crawl, don't get me wrong, but none of it seems all that fear inducing, the first zombie you see is just sorta…there, maybe I'm just desensitized to zombies at this point, they are pathetically scary to me at this point, but with all the praise REmake got I was picturing something much different
Yeah, they should make it so that if you can use weapons, the game cannot be considered a horror.
You sound like you haven't even gotten very far yet.
True, I've only been about an hour in, does it get better?
I find Siren on PS2 to be pretty spooky. The bizzare combination of photographed enemy texture and weird low poly ps2 3D models gives me goosebumps. The stealth gameplay is hard but suspenseful too.
RE was never scary.
There's at least more than just a normal looking mansion with zombies here and there.
I think theres different flavors of horror.
I personally never found Silent Hill or any other game with disturbing enemies scary at all but the original resident evils where spooky as fuck for me. I think it's because there was this looming doubt of whether or not you'd make it through that made leaving your safe area and going into unknown areas stressful as fuck. You also never knew if the game would throw you through some section where you'd burn out the little supplies you had left and be fucked, where as in silent hill I had +200 pistol rounds by the end of it and could man mode most enemies with a 2x4. I suppose I've never been phased by pure horror imagery and atmosphere except stalkers underground sections
Resident Evil was never scary unless you're a kid, it's just a well built and tense survival/puzzle/exploration game.
Thats what I figured, I shouldn't be disappointed, because it is a pretty good puzzle/exploration game, but I really was looking forward to being able to play something that was going to legitimately scare me
theres an interesting new metagame in the remake in terms of backtracking and choosing paths as you unlock more parts of the mansion. you will see what i mean if you keep playing.
what difficulty did you choose?
Hardest of course, Im not a casual
Genuinely scary games tend to suck though.
Silent Hill definitely was the "legit scary" counterpart to RE but it's not as good mechanically and it's piss easy.
The more competent scary games I've played are probably the Fatal Frame games.
There's a recent game on PC called DreadOut that manages to capture some of the FF charm, maybe try that. It's a low budget indie game so adjust your expectations.
I suppose thats my real issue, I always assumed the real spooks would come at the expense of the gameplay, ideally the fear factor would come FROM the gameplay itself or the game, and not in a survival horror way, in a more "Eternal Darkness" kinda way where the game fucks with not only the MC but with the player as well
It just seems like the most logical step to me
Horror novels should unsettle the reader with the unsettling description of the surroundings and graphic description of the happenigs
Horror movies should unsettle the viewer with an unsettling use of background material and imagery
therefore Horror games should unsettle the player with an unsettling form of gameplay
How would that be done? Eternal Darkness scratches the surface here and there on that front, but I never really felt like the game fully fucked with me, I want the game to freak me out every chance it gets.
But that's false.
I played psone directors cut and the game at half way point more infuriated me than scared me. The part where you get the library for your first OM Disc. I had already had one slot open so I thought I was okay. I hadn't saved yet, no more ink, and the closest trunk was still in the mansion. No biggy. Head there soon enough. See a book shelf and pushed it aside to reveal a door from same library. Walked in and there was a small round table with an ink ribbon. Raged that day. Fucking back tracking to mansion to drop off extra picked up ammo, dodging a hunter I left behind. Than to go back, used an green/red herb after the fucking hunter wouldn't leave me alone and grab the ink ribbon just to head back to the mansion again to the save room.
Atmosphere is great but for a guy who played RE1 on psx for first time the back tracking was infuriating since a couple of times I ran out of pistol ammo and used a knife and kept herbs on me. Not a great way to play as chris who has shit for carrying space.
Resident Evil is as much horror as Aliens. Try Silent Hill 2. Also, despite what people say, Doom 3 has surprisingly merciless and grim tone.
How was the second one?
Go play something like Cry of Fear.
From what I read in the thread I would think you might like:
Silent Hill 1, 2, 3
The Penumbra series
System Shock 2
Forbidden Siren(or whatever the fuck it's called for PS2)
Also , Call of Cthulhu, but get the patch(you HAVE to) and know that once you get guns, it's no longer scary.
I think for me, the Penumbra series was the scariest, just NEVER read any walkthroughs, there's stuff in that game that is super deadly, but you never know when it is, and that scared the shit out of me. Looking back I can say, if I knew what would come at me and what wouldn't, I wouldn't have been scared at all, but as it was, I didn't know and I suspected everything of being lethal and I was super fucking scared. Also, try not to fight anything, seriously.
Don't ever fight anything.
Don't ever try to kill anything to make things easier for yourself, just avoid every danger you can.
I had a blast being scared as fuck with this game, install and play, don't read a thing online, don't read a word of advice beside what I told you here. Just install it and play it.
Also, if you're really into desperate situations, install the original Pathologic, not the remake, and play it without reading anything online ever.
Good luck.
I know I needed it.
That actually looks pretty fucking creepy. Reminds me other Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw series.
Resident evil has never been scary. I personally like it simply because of the puzzles which is why RE4 and 5 bummed me out.
Its entertaining to explore the mansion and figure out the puzzles. That and the fact the game gives you more than enough ammunition to kill every single monster in the game really makes it more of a fun romp than any survival or horror.
I can't find the webms buried in my folder so I'll have to settle for inferior youtube embed that I could find without retarded reaction commentary..
I wish there was a game with the vibe of Trent Reznors quake OST
youtube.com
Just imagine playing a game where the whole gameplay and art-style was made to complement this soundtrack.
There's a few games coming out for VR in a while that look good, there's one where you live on a farm and in the middle of the night, you MIGHT get abducted by aliens, and by aliens I mean the really creepy oldschool "grey" version of aliens.
There's the one where you play as a 4-5 year old child and monsters come for you.
I forget the rest, but there's already some pretty good VR demoes made just for showing of what VR will look like.
One was called "Dreadhalls" (I think) and playing it with noise-cancelling headphones and not knowing what the game was scared me pretty badly(in a good way)
Fucking bitch showed up when I looked at the map, had to clench my jaw to be able to run away in-game without NOPEing and taking the HMD off
TL - DR : shit about VR but listen to this youtube.com
I feel like a retard for not knowing NIN did Quake's OST, interesting
Dude, the band's logo are on the fucking Nail ammo boxes.
like I said, I feel like a fucking retard, I noticed the logo before, but thought it was just a mid-90s in-joke at id and nothing more
This exactly. The only game I've played that actually got me spooked has been Silent Hill series.
Zombies aren't fucking scary.
youtube.com
OST is PRETTY fucking good.
Check the whole thing out, some of them aren't super quality, but a lot of them are.
Apparently Trent Reznor didn't really take the job seriously, but he did a fucking stellar job nonetheless.
Here's a full OST link
youtube.com
were you playing with the bullet adder set on x3?
I never found RE scary ( as much as I like them) and found the SH games the scary ones.
meh
Silent Hill 1-3, dude
overrated swedish fps
Cry of fear is fucking GREAT
No games are scary. None.
Ebin. It was never a very scary series, but it had it's moments. Atmosphere and enemy placement is top-tier.
Even my first time wasn't that bad.
Accurate.
They added a morality system that effected the form the monster you'd transform into would look like and fight, and continued the fucked up story. But it just wasn't scary enough, most of the game doesn't take place in a prison and a huge portion of the atmosphere was lost.
I don't even remember that being an option. In SH1 basically I melee'd or avoided pretty much every enemy in the game and saved guns for bosses. The only snag I ran into was the final boss, I had no healthkits when I got there and pretty much beat him by just sitting in one spot spamming the rifle and hoping the attack pattern RNG was on my side.
In SH2 I don't remember how much ammo I had towards the end because I actually used the weapons, but I still remember it being comfy compared to resident evil.
He said directors cut. The directors cut is absolute bullshit. I played a ton of the original RE and the remake, and eve I got fucked over in the directors cut. I got to a point where you have to go through this basement-ish area and I had no health or ammo to do it.
I never touched the rearranged mode because I fucking hated the music and was pissed at how they lied to us about uncensoring the game. Is it really that bad?
The remake isn't out, and the rerelease last year is the definitive edition. If not for the new translation, for the compatibility with modern OS and bugfixes.
Melee in SH was miles better than RE. RE I would just run from the zombies and save ammo for hunters, lickers and bosses.
Was there honestly any use for melee in the classic REs? It feels so worthless.
None at all. It was worthless. It's also worth noting that in SH3 and I think in 2, if you kill over 30 monsters it can get you a different ending, at least in 3, but I think you really need to try to kill that many monsters. Even with the infinite uzi.
Yeah stalker underground section is the best.
For me it was. Ink ribbons only 2 per item and took me 8 shots to kill my first zombie. So i looked at each "clip" giving me only 15 rounds and knew I was fucked.
No wasted rounds with other zombies. Shoot zombie 3 times, itll fall and get up. Shoot another 3 times fall and get up. Shoot it twice more and than dead. Now imagine my rage with the stairs in the middle where you walk around it and 3 zombies in there. Also with cerberus. One cerberus took 3 average distant shots because I was aiming for the closer cerberus. Once that one died, the 3 hit cerberus took 2 more mid bite shotgun hits before it died. I was spending ammo like air.
Is the non Director's Cut a less rage inducing game?
I don't think SH2's endings are influenced by the number of enemies killed, just the damage taken. In SH3 it'll give you the bad ending if you kill too many.
I only took one shot at directors cut arrange mode. I don't remember if they added more enemies or made less resources, but I was cruising along fine till the after the guardhouse. After that I had to go through the courtyard full of dogs, through the mansion full of hunters and new enemies, fight the snake again all on the resources I left the guardhouse with. Then you finally get to a new area, but theres usually 3-4 zombies to a room. They give you flamethrowers but you end up losing more health going for it than trying to sprint to the end.
I googled it to double check if I remembered correctly, and it seems it's kinda up in the air. They buffed the handgun to give a random oneshot kill, which made the game really easy for some people, and other people say chris (who I picked) on rearrange is the hardest resident evil in the series. Enemies do more damage and take more shots to kill and are more numerous.
Knifing zombies that are on the ground to get an extra hit in.
More like director's cuck.
Once you find the hammer it's easy.
Also, I haven't played Forbidden Siren yet, but are there any other good stealth/horror games out there? Those are two of my favourite genres, and also two which I feel would compliment each other really well.
You guys ever play Outbreak?
What the fuck is this shit? Yeah the original is just fine, a bit to easy, but it's way better than this shit. Especially the music, the changes in DC ruined the atmosphere and sounded like dog shit.
Funny, because Chris' aim is better than Jill's and is more likely to nail a headshot.
So basically, they just added more enemies and upped the modfiers? I fucking hate it when devs do this shit without a concern for balance.
I know right? It was supposed to be an apology for making us wait so long for RE2, and was also supposed to be completely uncensored. Then they basically said, "yeah sorry one of our guys shipped the wrong shit with it, sorry for the censorship guys." At least RE2 was the best game in the series to make up for this shit.
You need to kill over half, so if you made it all the way too the hospital without killing, you could clear that whole building and be okay. And since enemies there can shoot at you, it's a good idea to kill them.
Penumbra is "stealth" I guess.
I have not played Outbreak.
Nope. I hear people love Outbreak, but I never played it.
Thats what I thought, though they seem to get up quick as well. And I assume its useless on anything else besides regular zombies. I wonder if there are other melee weapons for RE.
Wait, does it happen that way? I hear in SH2 depending on doing something like looking at the knife a few times, you get different endings. I don't know how it affects SH3, but that ending concept sounds like Downpour which I hear sucked
Please do not compare Downpour to SH2 and 3
But I hear that in Downpour how much enemies you kill determines the shit ending you get, and apparently thats how you do it in SH2/3?
The outbreak games had a slow move and shoot option and several melee weapons that you could find. You could use them to conserve ammo or break locks on doors.
Pipes could be used until they became to bent and the player would throw it, wooden boards would break, there were throwing knives, Molotov cocktails you could craft, a switch knife, brooms that can break, etc.
Horror is quite possibly the most subjective genre ever made, because what scares one person might not scare another - they might even find it funny. Fear's a funky thing, after all.
I've never encountered any pants-shittingly scary games. Most survival horror games, like the first few Resident Evil games, make youfeel vulnerable by severely limiting your resources and setting you with goals that require you to face enemies that you can't always defeat. Silent Hill shoots for a foreboding atmosphere by combining this with unpredictability.
Horror, as a genre in general, is supposed the exploit the negative emotional reactions of an individual by playing on their primal fears. Emotions and physical responses such as fear, anguish, tension, depression, etc.
It varies from game to game, movie to movie, and book to book.
In Sh2 if you read the book on the roof, look at the knife and don't heal a lot, you get the In water ending.
It's kind of different: in SH3 you can only get one ending on your first playthrough (you can call this the canon ending); killing enemies only works after you completed the game once and this second ending is more like an alternative interpretation.
In SH2 the quantity of enemies you kill has no bearing on anything, the game shows you different endings depending on how much damage you've taken, how often you cure yourself, or the number of times you examine your items (like Mary's letter or Angela's knife).
In Downpour the intricacies found on SH2 are discarded and you get different endings based on stupid moral choices that only change pieces of dialogue between the characters (video related).
The Alone in The Dark-game has always scared me.