So what was Jim afraid of? I keep trying to watch but somehow I seem to wind up with blank spaces in my mind between the start and video stop.... I gave up. I suspect it might be some kind of defense in my brain shutting out traumatic experiences....
That said I'll say like I usually do that I think removing combat from horror games is, and always will be, a mistake, largely because combative reactions are natural, and trying to design around the idea of not having combat ultimately becomes just as limiting and experience busting as turning a game into a purely action based experience... a shooter with monsters, which is ultimately what roughly half the shooters out there are anyway.
The trick is of course to design combat so it's something you want to avoid, and generally makes you feel like an underdog. The original, great, survival horror games, achieved this by having what were then necessarily clunky controls, combat wound up becoming a chore because it couldn't be any other way, and oddly the "man tank" worked. The transition however as tech improved was to simply try and make combat like everyone else and again, that didn't work
out too well.
I tend to look towards games like "Condemned" as having basically the right idea, as long as they don't wind up turning every scene into a melee brawl. Your looking at fairly decent combat controls, combined with an environment and relative difficulty that generally doesn't leave you feeling like "He Man".
I also tend to look towards the original "Alone In The Dark" (with the now horrible polygon graphics), a game which presented a decent blend of puzzles and combat, with many cases being situations where you might be able to fight past something, but there was almost invariably another way, and there simply were not enough bullets to shoot everything (nor could everything in your way be shot down).
The thing with the combat free "horror" games is that in a lot of cases I feel like I'm playing the old "7th Guest"/"11th Hour" games combined with forced stealth sequences, and less elaborate mini games.
I don't know, maybe the guys that did "Condemned", the guys that did "Dark Souls", and a dream team of atmospheric indie horror games should get together and turn something out.
Also some people will probably be surprised to here me say this (again) but other horror games I kind of wish people would look towards for inspiration are the old "Elvira" games, "Legacy: Realm Of Terror", and "Realms Of The Haunting" a whole era of horror gaming that people tend to forget about, which had some really interesting stuff for it's time. "Elvira 2: Jaws Of Cerberus" had a spell casting system where you had to gather stuff from offices and stuff and guess which items fit the requirements to mix which spell, of course there was some bad design where some items could be used for more than one thing, and if you mixed a spell with an item you needed for another spell (which had a very rare or unique component in the environment) you could literally screw yourself. The monsters were also fairly nasty, and I remember going around scrounging spell components to get enough stuff to fight some of the monsters. Not to mention some odd puzzles like using a tuning fork to break a skylight to let sunlight in on a vampire (if I remember correctly). I admit one thing I do not miss though is "adventure game logic".
