Gildan Bladeborn said:
Wow. I'd always heard fairly good things about the original Phantasmagoria, and downright awful things about the sequel (staggeringly cheesy apparently), but it was always one of those games that were on the fringes of my awareness - I knew it was out there, I had some notion of the basic concept and had seen screenshots and marketing blurbs, but that was as far as my familiarity with the title went.
But until now I'd never experienced anyone sitting down and actually describing the content, and knowing what I do now I am retroactively extremely glad my younger persona didn't get it into his head to sit down and play this game; I would have been scarred for life! Seriously, just reading about stuff like that makes me wince - I'm no stranger to graphic violence and dismemberment and the like, but there's a certain squick factor to blood and guts produced via torture and mutilation that's in a category all of its own. Egad.
It's not that bad, to be honest it reminded me a lot of "Friday The 13th: The Series" for some reason when I played it.
I'll also say that horror is not for everyone. Truthfully the gore and stuff exists to make people uncomfortable, that's the point of horror, and why a lot of people can't appreciate it. To be honest it seems to me that most people who complain about stuff like this and claim "it's not scary" are those who aren't real genere fans, and miss the point, they want some of the trappings but to not actually have anything try and wiggle under their skin.
Truthfully real horror, the stuff that does it's job, tends to be exactly the kind of thing that gets complaints because what can get a reaction from a horror fan is totally out there by normal standards. Fear of those reactions is why you see very little real horror anymore, but rather an increasing number of deritivitive works that go through the motions, and at best work as suspense movies or potboilers.
I'll also be honest in saying that invoking Steven King (as the article does) doesn't carry that much weight. While he loves to go on about psychological horror, and getting people to freak themselves out, while delivering very little in the way of actual horrific events and content, it's noteworthy that he's become increasingly scorned by actual horror fans the more he's embraced that attitude. Genere fans will frequently praise is more visceral earlier work, but look down on his more recent stuff, and it's been that way for decades. I think to some extent this also lead to his success because he produces pseudo-horror for an audience that can't handle the real stuff. His strengths aren't really on his concepts or the amount of skin crawling terror he generates anymore, but on his characterization and how he can get in the head of dozens of differant characters, make them all believable, and tie together a dozen differant and seemingly unrelated plot threads.
Honestly I think real horror fiction survives in the hands of guys like "Edward Lee" who mostly publish through the small press. Though truthfully Lee and others like him seem to be losing their "oomph" by becoming fairly derivitive (and honestly, that's a problem only a rare few authors don't suffer from). I'm not talking in terms of the quality of the writing, but in terms of the content, and concepts.
As far as video games go, I doubt we'll see another age of horror games for a while, because right now the industry isn't willing to push the envelope far enough. What's more actual horror fans (like serious RPG players) are a niche audience, and more money can be made by going through the motions, than actually trying to get a rise out of the jaded.
