Well, as I said in some of my posts, a lot of it comes down to what your fighting. Yes, an opponent that can't be fought is scarier, but there needs to be a reason why it's that way. If your running from ghosts or the physical manifestation of a curse or something, it makes sense that your not going to be able to beat it to death with a heavy object. On the other hand we're talking about a lot of combat-free horror games (Outlast being the best of the bunch) where the enemies are conceptually not something that shouldn't be unbeatable, your dealing with regular 'ol crazy humans for the most part, and get plenty of chances to pretty much end some of these dudes stalking you. When it comes to most corporeal opponents this same logic applies and thus can be applied to things like say "Amnesia" (both games) as well for the most part.The Wooster said:
I'll also say my opinion of extra credits is mixed, I liked some of their stuff, but when they were on The Escapist I was fairly critical of a lot of things they had to say, and my opinion continues to be mixed. To be honest dropping their name is a bad idea in most serious discussions, for exactly the reason pointed out here, they will use "Alien"
as an example for an enemy that couldn't be fought and was scarier for it, when in reality the whole point of "Alien" is despite being set in space the threat was scarier for being fairly believable, and the crew was pro-active. The Alien wasn't even all that tough, plenty of things they tried might have worked on it, it's just they failed. The flame thrower is a good example (and the Alien did indeed run from the fire, as opposed to just running through it and chowing down). "Alien" was basically a science fiction version of a scenario where a ship transporting a tiger had an accident and the hungry and POed tiger got loose with only half a dozen crew members on board. Sure a couple of bullets would do the trick, but first you have to find the damn thing and tigers are sneaky and ambush their prey. Knowing it's something you can deal with, but you keep failing, as people drop one by one, can be freakier than some ghost. It's just that "Alien" made the tiger an alien predator, and the crew unaware of the "cargo" and thus unprepared for it getting loose. The sequel made it pretty clear that individually these things are hardly invincible. Furthermore if the Alien had been invincible, it wouldn't have been much a movie, it wouldn't have needed to hide, sneak around, and build tension, it would have just walked in and started munching on people without worrying about things like concealing itself in the vents, or being cunning in dealing with it's prey. The lack of preparation is also a big part of the story as it's abundantly clear that if the corperation had trusted the transporters and seen to it that they knew what they had and were prepared it never would have went down this way, which makes their paranoia and betrayal sting.
Of course then again I'm not entirely sure "Alien" truly counts as a horror movie, I've always seen it as more of a suspense/thriller movie. Of course it's labeled as horror, so my opinion doesn't matter much.
