@fizzywoemac have you played Lone Survivor? It’s one of the best survival horror games in years, also the creator of that game made an 8 bit demake you can download free called Soundless Mountain 2.
I have Outlast, but haven’t played it yet, I’m currently working on Deadly Premonition which is genuinely creepy.
I’m super hype for TEW, but from what I’ve seen it looks like RE 4.5 which I’m very happy with, but I’m even more hype for Routine which by design is pure survival horror not action.
From what I’ve read on the Greenlight forums you can only have 2 batteries (which I guess are the game’s bullets?) equipped at once and when you use both batteries you lose your flash light so that sounds pretty damn limited to me.
I have to agree with Sonicabid. I’d fight for my life in this situation be it with a gun or a crowbar, horror games that dont let me fight take me right out of the game cuz all you can do is run or give up.
Saw lone survivor and was really interested, didnt really look into it enough to drop $ on it but i probably will now, looks Silent hillesque. And yeah, RE 4 with more of a direct survival horror focus. I just hope that it doesnt rely too heavily on staged events (that being said the staged events shown in the current gameplay look genuinely terrifying).
Yeah i feel this, but if im playing a survival horror game for the purely horror elements of it id rather not be able to fight than be able to blow all the limbs off an enemies body with one shot from my pistol. Survival horror with interesting combat has a tendency to devolve into that.
What horror game lets you blow all the limbs off an enemy with one shot from a pistol? Sounds pretty bad ass (tho agree not very scary). There are horror games that let you fight back without having over powered weapons, tho there might be an argument to be made that giving someone an over powered weapon then throwing shit at them that can murder them easily anyway would still be scary I think, tho that would probably be pretty hard to pull off. Hmm wonder how one would go about making something like that. But even still being able to fight back in some capacity i think help heighten the horror cuz if it’s done right you figure out that if you don’t manage supplies well or whatever that fighting back can also be futile which can be pretty scary as well, that your best efforts are for naught, or giving you some other means of fighting back besides a gun. Fatal Frame gave you a camera.
You know I’ve been playing through the Thief series recently and man…Thief one had some chapters that really fucking unnerved me despite my collection of holy water and water arrows for those zombies. It would be cool to play a horror game that takes place in ye olden times, where your fighting some Cthulhu abomination with not but a broad sword and bow or something.
Horror is like comedy; subjective as hell, there isn’t any universal standard for what is or isn’t scary, horror games of all types impact players differently compared to other genres so I understand if some of you don’t find Amnesia style games scary. Speaking for myself when it comes to horror game design I don’t believe any one approach is superior to the other, it all comes down to execution. I’ve probably played way more horror games than most people, and still the Dead Space trilogy particularly 2 scares me more than 99% of games I’ve played despite being a TPS with a strong focus on action.
The Slender game on ios is a perfect example to illustrate my point. It’s a brilliant concept and for a little while it’s terrifying, but due to the lazy game design it gets stale and not scary quickly.
It doesn’t help that figuring Slender out doesn’t take very long, I figured out how gimp the guy in around half an hour
And yea I’m not trying to say horror games HAVE to be a certain way, just that ones that are a particular way don’t scare me, and the reasons why, since it was a sort of mini conversation going on in the thread already.
The plasma cutter in dead space got bonkers if you upgraded it a bunch. The game’s selling point was “remove enemy limbs with surgical precision” and ironically it got to the point where i could hit a necromorph once anywhere on their body and they would be instantaneously eviscerated. It was funny at times and yes, it was viscerally satisfying.
When i say that weapons being too powerful in survival horror is a bad thing i mean that in a purely aesthetic way. It takes away from the game being scary and maintaining a immersive atmosphere, even if in the grand scheme of things the weapons systems overall add to the experience. Dead space had the atmosphere done amazingly, but it became less affecting as the combat progressed. I can say the same for a handful of my favorite games of all time like RES 4, Bioshock, and the original Condemned.
I very much agree that combat has a huge potential to enhance the horror experience, and more importantly make the game fun enough to warrant an entire playthrough of a substantial length. I also agree that the answer to making survival horror games both fun and genuinely “scary” lies not in the removal of combat completely but in its subtle deemphasis. Also the idea of the camera in fatal frame is pure genius imo, having to get close to enemies and focusing in on them being the only way to kill them is a perfect way to make gameplay both engaging and scary. Another example would be the regenerators in RES 4. And ive always wanted to play thief, looks amazing.
Having beaten DS1 at least 3 times, I can tell you that while plasma cutter was broken when fully upgraded, it still very much adheres to the “surgical precision” gimmick of the series, it would take 2 or 3 shots from a maxed out plasma cutter to kill a standard necromorph when aimed at the joints, but it would take like 5-6 shots to kill it if aimed at the torso, and headshots do dick.
I don’t have a preference whether horror games have combat or not, what I care about is how the combat ( or lack of it) is implemented into the game world. Doom 3 is not a real horror game, it’s an old school corridor shooter with a coat of horror paint slapped onto it, but due to the fact that most enemies are bullet sponges not to mention scary looking and the moody visuals (partciularly when you enter a dark room and the orange glowing demonic glyphs suddenly appear on the walls) the game still felt like a horror game albeit a simplistic and flawed one. On the opposite end of the spectrum we have a game like Clock Tower which is essentially you running away from a midget with giant scissors the whole time, yet due to the immediacy and immersion of the game world it feels like a horror game too albeit a different interpretation of what Doom 3 did.
Also the regnerators in the DS series shit on the ones in RE4, so much more menacing in appearance, aggressiveness, and the fact that they can pop out from anywhere above, below, side vents, and their AI pathing isn’t completely scripted.
Love that this thread turned into the real horror games thread. In the general horror thread no one talsk about games much lol.
Thief is AWESOME I highly recommend it, but it’s not a horror game, it just has some really moody, creepy missions with Zombies and Demons an shit. You can get all 3 on Steam for pretty cheap, as well as on GOG.com, also whicked cheap, and GOG is DRM free if that matters to you. Also some DOPE as hell skin mods for Thief 1.
