Do horror games actually scare you?

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

And I'm not talking about jumpscares, 'cause that shit is easy. A loud noise, like a closing door, can jump scare you because its all about startling you. Games like FNaF, Slender, and to a lesser extent Outlast/Aliens Isolation feel cheap when it comes to trying to scare you.

No, I'm talking about legit lasting dread. Where your skin tingles, your heart is if not racing, at least beating hard in your chest, and you just know there's a twisted malevolent squirrel on your shoulder whispering 'Make America Great again' in your ear. That type of horror.

I can tell you only a few games in the last years that's done it for me.
Silent Hill Homecoming. Don't ask me why, because I replayed it and it did nothing for me. But the first time around, my heart decided it needed to pound a hole in my chest. And I think it scared me for the very reason it didn't Yahtzee; you can't run from fights. You have to deal with the monsters, then and there, and there's no hiding or slippy by. They're in your face, biting, ripping, tearing, breaking, burning. And its tense and desperate and nerve racking. And if you can actually slip by one unnoticed, it feels like an accomplishment rather than something you do all the time with X.

Amnesia A Machine for Pigs. Mostly because the first time around you never know when the pigs are coming, especially the invisible ones that just shank you randomly. And unlike DD, the pigs never de-spawn, so no hiding in a cupboard for 10secs while they sniff once or twice then leave. Nope, you gotta run and run and run and its still there, hot on your tail. And it makes my heart race.

So what about you? Do horror games actually, legitimately, scare you? And if so, why?

 

[Mcgeezaks]

Yes, Amnesia:TDD is probably the only game that managed to keep me almost constantly scared. The creeking noises on the floor above you, the sound the monsters made, the ambience...just perfect.

 

[Fox12]

Yes... For a while. The affect typically wares off after about an hour so. Then I'm just not as scared anymore. That's why I typically only play in short bursts.

The one series that really got me was the ever popular Silent Hill series. It's not just the monsters that get me, it's the atmosphere. I'll never forget going through the school, and seeing banners in the classroom that read "Who R U?" Or seeing my face plastered on the wall with the words "A friend in need." Or seeing completely non-violent ghost children. Silent Hill 2 was even better. When you enter the town, the "Welcome!" Sign has fallen apart, and now reads "We come." It's little touches that really impress me. The monsters don't stay scary for long, but atmosphere... Hoo boy!

 

[pookie101]

only one to do it for me was alien isolation.. constantly hiding.. learning to relax and fear air vents at the same time.. great game

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

See I feel the opposite when it comes to SH2. I feel that they spent so much time building the atmosphere, they forgot to actually do anything with it. Like the entire opening walk through the woods is just...woods. And some fog. I kept waiting for shit to get real, but nope. Woods. Like what I have outside my house. No daemonic squirrels or rabbits with nails instead of eyes or half rotting bird babies to screech madly at you. Just a pleasant if moody trot through the woods. Type of shit you'd see on instagrams for aspiring photographers.

And then its still another what, 20-25mins before you meet a monster? And its just one, in an alleyway, crawling around, and you can easily backup and the monster despawns because the game loaded a new section for the camera.
That's why that game never really scared me. Leaving the room briefly and letting the monster either despawn or restart itself was as legitimate a strategy as trying to fight them. And I just find I can't be scared by a game whose own engine works against it.

Silent Hill 3 I felt was way stronger in both combat, atmosphere and monster have. Esepiaclly the cold opening in the amusement park where SPLAT! you get roller coasted. Good times that.

 

[Fox12]

SNIP

See I feel the opposite when it comes to SH2. I feel that they spent so much time building the atmosphere, they forgot to actually do anything with it. Like the entire opening walk through the woods is just...woods. And some fog. I kept waiting for shit to get real, but nope. Woods. Like what I have outside my house. No daemonic squirrels or rabbits with nails instead of eyes or half rotting bird babies to screech madly at you. Just a pleasant if moody trot through the woods. Type of shit you'd see on instagrams for aspiring photographers.

And then its still another what, 20-25mins before you meet a monster? And its just one, in an alleyway, crawling around, and you can easily backup and the monster despawns because the game loaded a new section for the camera.
That's why that game never really scared me. Leaving the room briefly and letting the monster either despawn or restart itself was as legitimate a strategy as trying to fight them. And I just find I can't be scared by a game whose own engine works against it.

Silent Hill 3 I felt was way stronger in both combat, atmosphere and monster have. Esepiaclly the cold opening in the amusement park where SPLAT! you get roller coasted. Good times that.

That is funny, actually. I liked SH2 because I found the atmosphere and ideas behind it so creepy. Everything felt so carefully staged and put together. I also like the idea that you aren't the center of attention. That the town is just sort of passively aware of you.

SH3, on the other hand, didn't scare me at all. The beginning of the game was pretty creepy, because they threw everything at you in the beginning. But, after that, you'd seen nearly every enemy in the game. The atmosphere picks up later, but for a while you're just chilling in a train station and the sewer. By the time I got to the good stuff, I'd already gotten kind of bored. It didn't help that they armed you with a katana, a submachine gun, and a bloody maul. A lot of people I know consider SH3 to be their favorite game in the series, but I could never quite get into it.

I think SH1 was actually one of the stronger entries in the series, but a lot of people seem to have forgotten about it in favor of the later installments.

 

[Xprimentyl]

I mentioned in another thread that Silent Hill Homecoming was both my introduction to and my exit from the Silent Hill series; it pretty much hit upon everything that makes me uncomfortable. Body horror terrifies me, and that?s pretty much 100% of what Silent Hill throws at you from start to finish. The Asphyxia boss fight and the descent into an industrial hell leading to the horrific Scarlet boss fight both come to mind as a particularly high points of anxiety for me, but anxiety loomed over me from start to finish. Other than what could be seen, however, the idea of being trapped alone and vulnerable in a hell of you own making is scary enough in and of itself. I?m actually quite surprised I finished it.

 

[lionsprey]

when i first played it amnesia DD scared the crap out of me. especially the water monster. and its not really a horror game but i remember being really freaked out first time i played Vampire the masquerade bloodlines in the haunted hotel as well as the first place
you meet those small ball monsters and the haunted hospital scared the shit out of me as well.

 

[happyninja42]

I don't play too many games designed to make me scared, but of the few, the first F.E.A.R. game was very effective. And I don't mean the times when the game would jump scare you, I mean the build up preceding the jump scare. When you finish some combat zone, with lots of fast paced gunfire with the clone troopers, and then you open a door, see a trail of little girl footprints in blood leading to a door, hear her giggle in your headset, and then begins the creepiness. I loved that bit. They were really good at not doing the jumpscares all the time, but making you anticipate them for loooong stretches of gameplay.

Oh! The third Thief game from the original trilogy. The orphanage mission. That one had so much dread built into it, it wasn't even funny. The build up of that place, the frequent mention of it by random people in town, as a haunted location, with genuine fear in their voices. Reading reports of what happened there and how it was destroyed, all that. And then, you have to actually sneak in there, and deal with the creepiness of the place. Just, wonderfully unsettling.

 

[CaitSeith]

My indicator for games that left me with lingering fear is "did they give me nightmares that night?". So far Amnesia The Dark Descent and Alien: Isolation are the only ones in the list. I can't say if Song of Saya counts because:

1. It's a visual novel.
2. I didn't have nightmares because I couldn't even freaking sleep that night.

 

[Padwolf]

Typical as it is to say, Silent Hill 2 still scares the crap out of me. Because everything genuinely is out to get you, the entire town is out to get you!

It's not a horror game, but Dear Esther got to me. Now, that game was a gift. I had no sodding idea what it was. I was just planted on an island, all on my sodding own. So I walk around, and then I just feel the creeping feeling that something, somehow, somewhere was going to jump out at me. It was like playing Amnesia DD all over again. I thought something was coming for me. But oh no, it was just a walking sim with a sub par story. But still, I won't forget it because I spent so long dreading everything, believing it was a horror game.

Silent Hill 4: The room. Sod that game. Damn it to hell and back. Nowhere was safe in the end :'( Nowhere.

There was some game nline, I can't remember the name of it now, it was just a short little thing. I think it was called The Theater or something like that. But basically you just walk down this sort of cinema corridor, and it was like P.T in that you walk through, and just carry on walking, and the scene changes the more times you go through, and it just gets creepy.

 

[Casual Shinji]

P.T. is the only horror game where I felt a physical reaction. Not of the bowel movement variety, but I could feel my body and my brain telling me 'Stop playing, because this does not feel right. And you live here so you'd better fucking listen to us!'

Silent Hill 2 also scared me well enough, but it never gripped my throat the way P.T. did.

 

[Baffle]

only one to do it for me was alien isolation.. constantly hiding.. learning to relax and fear air vents at the same time.. great game

Aye, I often had to apply the bicycle clips for that one.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

The first four Silent Hill games, to one degree or another. I also enjoyed Shattered Memories for the atmosphere.

 

[Evonisia]

If we're excluding the likes of FNaF and "Alien: Isolation"[footnote]Both of which do freak my shit not for the jump scares but rather the effective claustrophobic and vulnerable atmosphere[/footnote], then no, not really. At best I can name sections of horror games that manage to scare me like one particular moment of "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories" or about three moments in "Until Dawn", but most I can just go by with nary a creeping dread feeling.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

Very well said. Homecoming is better than people give it credit for, but I can totally see where someone might find flaws in it. And the creepy doll hell you find in the dentists office is scary as shit.

SNIP

If Aliens Isolation gets you, that's fair enough. I don't like it for the very reasons I don't ultimately like FNaF. The jump scares are all it relies on, to the point after you 888th alien tail to the gut it doesn't get you anymore. Especially considering there's no way to avoid the alien once it sees you, so you might as well just load your save then and not bother with the 2mins of gory death that follows.
The very first time you meet the alien in medical was the highlight, because its an unknown and everything is still fresh and creepy. After that I found no horror and the alien was more an annoyance than something to be feared. The Giger equivalent of a cafeteria bully rather than the local serial killer.

 

[Zhukov]

Actually scare me?

Well, no. Because I'm not in any danger while playing a horror game. I'm sitting at home in front of a computer with my housemate's cat on my lap.

But good horror games can certainly invoke feelings of tension and unease.

 

[the December King]

I've had a few tense moments so far with both The Forest and 7 Days To Die. Different atmospheres in both, certainly, but the fear still hit me.

Originally, there were moments I was dreading in Bioshock, and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series, too.

Even the threat of nightfall in Minecraft used to be really effective.

I find with horror in games, it's the little moments that enhance the overall experience.

 

[sanquin]

Doom 3 scared me back in the day, but I was still young. FEAR 1 scared me at times. I consider that my first real horror game. (even if it was fps/horror) Amnesia made me a bit nervous, but not really scared. And after that games just didn't scare me any more.

Movies however... The last horror movie I've ever watched was Mirrors. The bathroom scene haunted me in my sleep for a few nights, and mirrors as a whole made me...look twice for quite a while. And after that I've refused to watch horror movies again. I'm fine with scary stuff, as long as it doesn't haunt me like that. I doubt most horror movies would scare me these days, but on the off chance one does...no thank you.

 

[sXeth]

Generally no. I'm usually pretty cognizant of the fact that well, I'm sitting there holding a controller and looking at a screen of some sort. Horror movies don't really do much for me either.

Its further detached by the fact that few (if any?) games use more realistic scenarios. They're much more likely to fall into the supernatural categories. The horror movies I do enjoy tend to fall more into psychological thrillers that deal more with human villains or the like.

The other intrusion is generally "video game logic". The videogame world always have some weird design issue, like bizarrely unopenable doors or windows, which serves to highlight the gap. Doubly so if the protagonist simply doesn't acknowledge the existence of these possible exits at all. All too often, the protagonists in these games also cause detachment. The most common one is the "Horror game protagonist can't use weapons" cliche. No one in most of those situations would just bypass possible defensive weapons, even something as simple as a basic blunt object. The second seeming favorite is just an abundance of lockers scattered about, often well beyond any logical presence. And lockers aren't something thats even easy for an average adult to get into, never mind shut the door and be noiseless inside.

Pacing also tends to be problem. The tension just doesn't tend to keep well for 6-8 (or more) hour experiences. Things end up repeating and losing more of their edge each time. This was for instance, a big killer in Alien : Isolation for me. Ages before it finally ended, I was more in a state of amusement watching the alien circle around (not helped by the animations not really being great for it) from a hiding spot then any sense of terror. Impatience with the formulaic proceeding was the norm more then terror.