Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

[beetrain]

If you're looking for a recent horror game, there's one called Deadly Premonition, but I haven't played it myself because it doesn't have a PAL release.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

I played SH3 and made a bet with my friend that the game wouldn't scare me. I lost when it got me so bad I jumped and fell off my bed. Anyone who's ever played it will remember the part in the Amusement park with the rocking chair...yeah. I agree with Yahtzee about SH2 being about exploring and that inducing terror. I actually had to stop playing the game because once I got outside and it was night, with all the nurses roaming around, it was too much for my nerves. Really should go back and finish it.

Yahtzee, do you have any hopes for Alan Wake? That game looks like it might being doing horror some justice--from what I've seen anyway.

 

[happy_turtle]

Yahtzee talks about the running away option combat, I've gotta say when this is done properly it's quite nerve-racking. Best example I can think of was the Call of Cthulu game that came out years ago. I remember damn near wetting myself trying to escape my hotel room as the badguys were busy kicking the door in. A far from perfect game, but one with a great atmosphere, developers take note.

 

[QmunkE]

Penumbra: Black Plague (or Overture, whichever was the first one...) used the "running away" element pretty well, but only by making you completely crap at fighting. Still, pretty scary with the headphones on an lights out.

 

[happy_turtle]

Penumbra: Black Plague (or Overture, whichever was the first one...) used the "running away" element pretty well, but only by making you a completely crap at fighting. Still, pretty scary with the headphones on an lights out.

Yeah, I remember that one but I got rather annoyed at the character going mental when you see something scary. It was used in the Cthulu game I mentioned earlier and always peeved me. Forcing "fear" into a character is a cheap shot. If you're game is written well enough and scary enough then the player will exhibit the symptoms not the character.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I'd like to point out Yahtzee, that gore doesn't necessarily improve horror. Alfred Hitchcock often had very little to no gore in his films and yet they were scary as hell.

 

[Athinira]

5. Kill my dumb ass

Interesting, because this seems to be in direct contradiction with what Shamus Young told us about horror games in one of his articles some months back.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/6715-You-Dont-Scare-Me

(...)

Once you build this connection - once you have a player who has stopped thinking about the fact that they're sitting on a couch and holding a controller and is instead feeling as if they actually were inhabiting some baleful ruin, armed only with a bit of pipe and a few shreds of courage - then you need to maintain it as long as possible. You want them to think and act as if they were really there, and so the last thing you want to do as a game designer is kill that mood by killing the main character. Paradoxically, dying makes the game less scary.

I know this sounds odd, and goes against the classic survival-horror formula of springing "gotcha" deaths on the player every ten steps and putting save points ludicrously far apart. But consider these two types of fear:

1) Oh no! I'm going to DIE.
2) Oh no. I'm going to lose the game.

(...)

Creating real fear requires immersion, and sending the player back to the loading screen kills that. A second ago they were afraid for their lives. Now they remember they're in their living room, it's all just a game, and the danger was never real to begin with. You can threaten them all you like but once you actually kill the character, the player will remember you're all bark and no bite because you can't really hurt them. The worst you can do is stop them from progressing in the game, which just isn't all that terrifying.

Now, my viewpoint might be biased because it doesn't take alot to scare me in games. For example, i find games like Doom 3 and Dead Space scary to hell, but maybe it's just that i have some kind of fobia against dark horror in video games. But even so, i have never actually played those games to the end, or even far enough to die in either of them. But they still scare me to hell. I don't need to die to feel horror.


I will, however, agree with Yathzee, in that the monsters need to be percieved as an actual threat. If they aren't, the horror goes away. No matter how scared i get from playing Dead Space, if i suddenly found out that all the monsters wanted was to cuddle with you instead of killing you (don't think too much about that one), then 80% of the horror would go away. But i still agree more with Shamus, in that killin the player kills the immersion, especially because of loading screens.

 

[Mutie]

Oh, that reminds me... I really have to empty my dismemberment bucket.

 

[theSovietConnection]

I think a big problem with most horror games I've played is that I don't really feel any attachment to the main character. Some characters, such as Isaac Clark, I am able to relate to, and that seems to take what could have been a sub-par experience and amplified it (for me, anyways).

 

[RJ Dalton]

Well, I have a chance to actually have my post seen, but I have absolutely nothing to add. Once again.
It'd be better if Yahtzee would stop saying things I agree with so much and leave me room to argue, but as he doesn't, it leaves me feeling like I'm the one doing something wrong for not finding anything to disagree with.
Damn you, Yahtzee, for being right all the time!!!

 

[beetrain]

Yahtzee should really, -really- play Call of C'thulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

He has, as he said on his online journal:
"...an underrated little adventure gem with some nice little touches if a little bit too reliant on a dodgy combat system."

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/

 

[BlueInkAlchemist]

He mentioned Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem in passing in his Too Human review. I wonder how kind he'd be to it, considering it has no problems screwing with your brain and killing your ass.

 

[ewhac]

I've never been into the horror genre. The only "horror" game I can recall playing all the way through was, "Alone in the Dark." Leaving aside the primitive (by today's standards) graphics, I never found it creepy. More often than not, I found it annoying for its control system.

I spent maybe fifteen minutes with the 3DO port of Resident Evil.

Having the headcrabs gratuitously leap out at you in Half Life is about as scary as I can manage.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

Nearly two years old, and it's still "The New" Prince of Persia, eh?

 

[Guffe]

Contrary to yahtzee I am not a big fan of horror or scary moments in games/movies but I agree that if it is horror or supposed to keep you alert for the big boom it must be done well with all the elements from fear (heartbeat, music etc) to the death moment. I picked up the new Aliens vs Predator game a month ago and played the marine campain and I think that was scary, and well done scary. The movement sensor beating and all the dark places with aliens "hisshhh":ing around you and then suddenly BOOOM alien in your face and the blood all over my screen. My heart was beating like hell a couple of times ^^

 

[qbanknight]

this is actually a really good list of horror tropes that, while often used, are still effective

 

[cptpillowcase]

I agree with need for you character to die, and gruesomely at times. After seeing the chainsaw guy in RE4 cut my head off for the first time he suddenly became a lot more scary. It seems to be a lot more unnerving then other deaths, you'd never see Nathan Drake getting decapitated at any rate.

 

[I_AM_BATMAN]

The best Silent Hill is Silent Hill 2.That's It!

 

[KDR_11k]

So far the scariest game I've played was Project Zero (Fatal Frame), I'm not scared by atmosphere but by knowing there are gameplay consequences coming towards me. In PZ enemies are ghosts and thus can teleport around, go through walls, etc, you never know which direction they're going to come from and getting hit does a lot of damage. The red warning light (sixth sense or something) pops up to warn you that a hostile ghost is nearby and you go "fuckfuckfuckfuck" as you try to find the ghost before he gets to you. Also your only weapon is a camera and while I'm not sure the scoring system really goes well with the horror the camera certainly doesn't feel nearly as reassuring as a BFG. PZ4 is a Wii exclusive but Tecmo botched the controls so badly (yes, WAY worse than what you call terrible) that Nintendo told them to fix it if they want to see a western release and they never did.

With the SHSM monsters I felt too strong, I could run at them and just throw them away when they grab me, they were predictable and thus not scary. The biggest threat in a game is the unknown. Maybe they could have let the monsters use walls to travel (like melt into them and then burst out at another point) to make their positions less predictable, for example. And force the player to watch for the ice cracking in his path or he might get grabbed by a hand shooting out of the ground...