Your vision for a true survival horror game.

[Madrak the Red]

Right. Zombies. The ZOmbies in Left 4 Dead, first off, are like those in 28 Days Later. Note they are never refered to as 'Zombies', but rather 'The Infected'. As for them being 'unrealisticly' fast, as the OP claimed, zombies are not real, in case you hadn't noticed. The zombies in Left 4 Dead and 28 days are actually more 'realistic', that being of a very, very advanced strain of rabies driving the brain into so much anger that it does not register pain or feel the need to conserve itself-it on;y wants to destroy. Thismeans that large groups of infected would probably tear themselves apart first, but what the hey.

As form scariest horror game, it depends if you mean video game. The sacriest form of 'game' would be a LARP. Being dumped in the forset, alone, in the dark, being chased by someone, that for all you know could be something.

As for video games, I just feel I can turn it off, turn on the lights, and cuddle my cats. And then, you feel safe once more. It can never be nearly as terrifying as being chased throught the woods by someone in a rubber mask. And I know that sounds wrong, but they can be so, damn, scary.

 

[Ravenholm27]

I want a survival horror not based in some dank dark place, but in somewhere really..."Nice" and colourful looking but twisted at the same time. I WANT

Like Katamari but SCARY

More focused on Story and scares that can't hurt you physically in the game, but mentally outside of the game.

NO ZOMBIES

That was kinda of done w/ American Mcgee's Alice in which Alice's family die in a house fire and wonderland turns into a freakish hellhole that reflected her psyche really freaky in a way

 

[Jursa]

If you get bitten you turn into a zombie and the game locks itself and doesn't let you leave until you die...

 

[Svenparty]

I have heard of this Alice Game I'd check it out if I didnt have a rubbish computer (Lol)

Anyway there needs to be more "Unusual" horror games, most are consisting of Zombies and pure gore value instead of Real Fear

 

[geldonyetich]

How about a survival horror game with no zombies, aliens, ect, but rather the protagonist is just having a really bad day. No matter what you do, he loses his job, his wife, his kids, and everybody around him starts treating him like shit.

Come to think of it, that might have been the inspiration for that upcoming survival game where an earthquake decimates society and you're just trying to survive.

 

[sirsolo]

Well, the thing to balance out with these games is mainstreaming it. If you wish for something that specific, there's a chance that not enough people will like it. And that's a chance game developers are not taking.. unless it's EA. But that's more like good game ideas that get bugged to death.

So, specific=Modtastic.

 

[SteveZim1017]

alrite here's my pitch. all 1st person.

You're in the middle of of a 9 or 10 floor office building when some sort of large plant/creature beigns to surround it, infecting the ground floor employees. You have to work your way down, as the infected "zombies" work their way up, adding more to their ranks as they go (from your co-workers). only to find out around floor 2 or 3 that the creature outside has completely encompassed those floors and your only way out now is the roof (thanks to bullhorn directions from the police outside) forcing you to go back through the zombies you just hid from.

- start out brightly lit with a large person to zombie ratio, that decreases as they all get attacked and changed. eventually the power goes out as well leaving only the backup lights.

- all 10 floors are randomly configured (within reason) for each game played, sometimes you can get out downstairs, sometimes the roof, sometimes it changes halfway through.

-all you can do is kick (to kick open doors or kick over cubicle walls), jump, use/pickup (point at a door it opens door, at a desk lamp you pick it up) and punch/bludgeon (with said desklamp)

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

After all, who wants to go through a horror film when you know you are the victim? The game needs to make the player do things that are just so bad, wrong, and in general fucked up that they actually make the player feel guilt towards the things that they have done.

I think this is the first and best step to creating a true survival horror game.

You need to be a victim. Every game makes you feel the hero, whether tragic (who didn't want to hug Harry) or approved by the state (Leon rules you in ways you can't even contemplate), you feel empowered by the game that you can do this. How about making at game that if you pull it off, it will be a miracle?

You want a survival horror game? Bring back Nintendo hard. Don't make an achievement because you made it past the first level which was as simple as killing five bad guys and moving forward. Make an achievement for encountering an enemy that's so hard, that it's amazing that you got out. And make that enemy a regular part of the game. Make enemies TOUGHER than that. And Make Boss Battles something you have to think to avoid as any rational being would ("Oh, look. The Giant walking Pale Hulk with a Bazooka hasn't noticed me yet. I think I'll go that way now."), but still make it beatable for only the best of gamers.

In Truth, Survivor Horror suffers from what's plaguing our society now. It's all too easy. People cite Left4Dead, but when an entire city descends upon you in an instant, and you're already hurt and down to 80 bullets... it's the thing that nightmares are made of. On Expert, that game taxes you. We need more of that in gamedom.

You want scary, bring back hard.

 

[Kayevcee]

I dunno. Ludicrous difficulty levels might make all but the most hardcore/stubborn players just quit and never look back. I know I would, but then I don't enjoy playing anything scarier than System Shock 2.

I think the Silent Hill series made such a mark because it was such a contrast from the zombie shooting gallery that the genre usually generates, and properly hooking players that have 'seen it all before' would require not so much 'out of the box' thinking as completely out of the store room. Speaking of store rooms, I was developing an idea like this at work:

You play an ordinary dude/dudette in an ordinary town in... well, it works for the present day back to Victorian times I suppose. Something screwy is going on, and it's causing reality to split apart. Every fifteen minutes your character pops, Sliders-style, into a parallel universe.

Everything's almost the same, but not quite. Rooms might be rearranged. Whole buildings might be missing. Support characters might come with you or be somewhere else or have never been born. Throw a couple of really weird iterations in like the you wind up in the middle of an ice age or a nuclear meltdown or something and you find yourself desperate to move on. A pain in the ass for level designers and plotters alike (naturally, every time you play the universe-switch sends you to a random one out of a dozen or so) but if employed well it could be an excellent mechanism for messing with the brains of players in an entertaining fashion.

I had another thought about having a mentally unstable phone-in support character (a la GlaDOS and the -shock games) whose advice you could never trust because they might arbitrarily decide to kill you off. If every thrown switch was like another spin of the revolver's chamber I know I'd be bricking it before long. But then, support characters sort of defeat the solitude aspect of survival horror so maybe that's an idea for another genre.

-Nick

 

[AgentNein]

I don't know if anyone's mentioned this idea, but a map that you actually have to map out in game, which means that ifyou're chased down a hallway by a nasty somethingorother you might just lose your way.

Couple this with the lack of any save points in a "Dungeon" (for lack of a better term), but no cheap kills. Basically, my dream game would actually make me feel the real tension and fear of being close to death, or as close as you can get (by stopping saves within the dungeon). To avoid repitition from trying it over and over again, two things would be implemented. 1: randomly generated instances and maps. But in such a way so that everything doesn't look generic and samey....if that's possible with randomly generated stuff. Also, the game would cut you off on playing for 24 hours if you die. Would this piss a lot of people off? Yes. Would it give the game a bad rap and make it not sell well? Yes. But I'd love it. I want to feel like there's something at stake (even if it's me just not being able to 'try again').

Darkness. Cliche? More like classic, it's a very deep seated fear within us. Heavy use of ambient noises, no 'music' unless it's a part of the game world. Every 'Dungeon' would have a set of random happenstance (and locations to go with them) that may or may not appear in each playthrough. Keep things fresh, keep things as frightening as possible for multiple play throughs. Also, going back to the already mentioned idea of having to start a dungeon over every time you die, well death would never come quick or unexpectedly to those who play carefully.

These are all things I would love to see in a survival horror game.

 

[SquirrelPants]

I say that they just have to make it actually scary. See, all of the little things people are talking about here are good, but what happened to fear?
Think like this: Being startled means things jumping out of nowhere and biting at your buttocks. Sure, it SEEMS scary, but it's not fear that lasts. I want something to scare me in a way that I never want to play it again, the way that, say, the Blair Witch Project movie did.

 

[Dufferking75]

as long it keeps you on the edge of your toilet seat and keeps you dreading the next time you encounter a monster...

 

[MackB]

Slow zombies = not scary

 

[blackcherry]

I would like to see a horror game that is basically a mind fuck. In other words, the game need to be so messed up and physiologically damaging that you don't actually want to play it. After all, who wants to go through a horror film when you know you are the victim? The game needs to make the player do things that are just so bad, wrong, and in general fucked up that they actually make the player feel guilt towards the things that they have done. It has to matter if the player kills someone, like they get a flash of what the life of the person they killed would be like if they hadn't been killed. The player needs to feel like playing this game is a bad thing that they really shouldn't and ultimately don't want to go through. That is what makes a horror game, something so abominable that no one ever wants t experience it.

That said though, a true horror game will never be made (and will definitely never be distributed in Australia), because you just have to go too far in order to reach the levels of perversion that are required to actually make the players feel the horror. You basically have to go just so far beyond everything else out there to reach the all the gamers desensitized by the mindless violence of other games that there is really no acceptable way to do it.

Am I weird for thinking this concept would just be brilliant? I think if anything, the lack of killing over the game would amp up this basic bad feeling, so as you don't become desensitized towards the 'flashes of what they could have been'.

I still think that the scariest horror game would be one set in a forest with an almost silent hill feel to it. Have few monsters in it and make them attack at completely random intervals. Make it set at night with few points of light other than the small amount from the moon. Add in the appropriate atmospheric enhancers, sound and good lighting and it would work. I've been informed that this is beyond the ability's of this generation of consoles/PCs though, so shame :-(