New Horror-Game Mechanics

[Judgement101]

Shock-images of their character dead, and then make their character die in that way so the game is saying "You f***ed up, this is what will happen"

 

[Harkonnen64]

Here's an idea that I know hasn't been tried before: Flight simulation horror! I don't even know if that would be any good; I just know it would be original.

A game where you play as a grilled cheese sandwich escaping a young man trying to eat you would also be original but would you play it?

 

[Estocavio]

How about have the antagonist as a regular human being for once? I can guarantee that humans are more malicious, deadly and psychotic than any deformed monster.

Claudia Wolf (Silent Hill 3) and especially Eddie Dombrowski (Silent Hill 2) do nicely to fit your quota, even though you fight hundreds of monsters along the way.

If they replaced the monsters with raving lunartics that would work

 

[jeejvebe]

How about a thriller-game, without any supernatural elements.
Maybe you could play the target of a serial killer, just an ordinary human trying to stay alive.

 

[Fenreil]

They need to add elements that pretend to fuck with your console, like in Eternal Darkness. Watching your volume bar go down by itself or having the game pretend to erase your data is pretty fucking awesome. Add in the stuff other people suggested (limited weapons, etc.) and you're golden.

 

[Gralian]

Instead of making it monster horror or alien horror (á la Dead Space), actually make it about supernatural horror. Ghosts and stuff. And for the love of god don't explain it to the audience halfway in. Because the only reason we find shit scary is because it's unexplained. It's SUPERnatural. If you start to rationalise it we lose all fascination. The dude in the bedsheets pretending to be a ghost isn't scary if you know the trick behind it. Just like magic and mind tricks aren't amusing anymore when you know how they are performed. Alan Wake had a nice idea but ultimately fell short due to humanising the darkness via Jagger. But the strange happenings and disturbing voices of Taken who were stuck on a loop ("You forgot your lunchbox!") was what really sold the atmosphere of the game, and it's good they never explained what the darkness was or where it came from clearly. Because the mystery of it is what made the game memorable for me.

In fact, just focus on atmosphere entirely. Because it's scarier than anything that might go bump in the night.

 

[Darren-Jaguar]

Or just have a sort of "stress" system, that sort of works like stamina, and if it runs out your guy kills themselves, and it works like a normal death.

I've always thought it'd be an idea to have 2 "health" bars (not necessarily in horror, though):
Physical Health and Pain Threshold.

Physical Health doesn't restore easily. Goes too low, you may limp. Take too much and you'll die in some nasty way.
Pain Threshold restores slowly all the time. Goes too low, you'll probably writhe on the floor in pain, and if it goes too high you'll get a heart attack or something.

Because some things hurt and don't damage you.

 

[Proteus214]

The player character has a heart condition that acts up when he/she becomes scared. Kind of inspired by a combination of sanity in Eternal Darkness or having your character start panicking enough to blow your cover if you stare at a monster for too long in Penumbra.

 

[Tharwen]

I think that it would be extremely disturbing to make random little details about the game change. Maybe items move around your inventory and disappear (or new ones arrive), NPCs' clothes/memories/intentions change randomly, or a door will move to a different part of the room when your back is turned. If you could avoid making anything jump out at the player and never tell him that there's anything wrong, it would be an extremely immersive experience. Perhaps it could only work in the first portion of the game, before you find out that there's a direct threat.

Maybe things could start to become more obviously wrong, and NPCs start to cast two shadows/become more and more disfigured over time/laugh at things that scare you etc. Eventually, it turns out that there is something corrupting the people around you (but you're immune) and you end up on your own in the place you were exploring, needing to find a way out.

 

[Luke5515]

I was just thinking about how fighting back against the enemy kind of killed the horror sometimes. That brought me to thinking about how when playing spy on tf2 my heart would start pounding whenever i was low on cloak and there are lots of people around and maybe a pyro or two. You have to start making up new hiding places and be really smart about your movements.
I think that would be fun. Some unspeakable evil is slowly taking over the world and all you know is that it originated from X. You must go sneak into X and try to figure out how to stop it. You get spotted, you don't get killed, but you get attacked until you retreat and have to sneak some more, but now you need to use a different rout, seeing as the enemy knows where you came from. Also at the end you find you can't stop it and go insane. End.

 

[wolfshrimp]

There was a game once called Nosferatu: Wrath of Malachi which had the interesting idea of randomising the environment so no two playthroughs were ever the same. Combined with the ability of enemies to smash through floors and attack you. I found it particularly terrifying, they got the atmosphere right- limiting your attack capabilities but with a slow gradient of new weapons and enemies. The graphics weren't awesome but there was this grainy image overlay that made it rather like an old film.

FEAR was scary in a way but broke up the action and horror sections too predictably... the atmospherics were good.

 

[cornmancer]

I am the dude who slaps my friends when they say they want to see a movie in 3D, but I can see 3D horror movies and games being great.

 

[LightOfDarkness]

Anyone here tried Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth? It hasn't aged too badly, and is well worth a try if you're into horror games/Lovecraft (Cthulhu Mythos).

Not really a new mechanic in that game. It's simply a horror game that utilize uncommon game design to make the game more immersive and scary.

I can't really describe it. If you're interested search for it on Youtube, though it's of course nothing like actually playing it.

It had a sanity thing, where when you look at particularily gory scenes or cthulhu statues you start to lose it, your vision gets blurry, shifting in and out of a fisheye effect, and when you can barely see your player will commit suicide if he's got a loaded gun.

 

[Technicka]

Everyone that's mentioned the idea of the character panicking and effecting gameplay should have a peak at Clock Tower 3. While not the best in the series, it did do an amazing job of genuinely conveying the feeling of being in a situation where you were very much out of your league. When the main character (a young girl) was beyond terrified, the screen would become hazy, and her ability to defend herself diminished significantly. You were pretty much left with having her scream and scramble for a safe corner to calm down in; it made encounters with the killer that much more engaging as you'd suddenly have to run, since she'd dropped her weapon in a panic.