00slash00 said:
So I want to play something scary for Halloween (this is about as festive as I get), but I don't know what to play. My plan was to play Outlast but after an hour or so of playing it, I have concluded it isn't for me. I find it far too frustrating to be scary. I have a other few games that could be classified as scary or creepy, such as Silent Hill: Downpour, Scratches, Metro 2033, and The Cat Lady.
So what are the scariest games you've played, that will run on modern systems?
Also, of the games I mentioned (excluding Outlast, because I don't have the patience for that game), which one of those games would you say is the scariest or creepiest?
Thank you.
If your a genera fan your not going to find much that's scary for video games as all of them pretty much just re-cycle un-offensive funhouse tropes. Basically the stuff we're all supposed to think is scary because we're told it is, but nobody actually does, so it's safe to put out there. Fear and shock by definition being uncomfortable experiences and something that only certain people are wired to enjoy, and usually retroactively. Hence the over-use of jump scares to startle and pass it off as fear. It's also why things like the "Saw" movies were successful, they got a rise out of people and made them uncomfortable, as a result a lot of people who CLAIMED to be horror fans said they were "just disgusting and not scary" and stated preferences for faux-horror or Steven King like "suspense" stories masquerading as horror where your mind is supposed to do all the work. It could be argued "Torture Porn" as some called it was the last time we saw attempts to do real horror, but the inevitable outcry horror gets from the mainstream by genuinely making people uncomfortable, succeeded in making creators move on. We're pretty much back to the point where at the most your dealing with "dark" stories and variations on things that are considered to be safe, and relatively unoffensive, territory.
With video games the big problem is that the industry really stopped trying for the same reason the movies did, they didn't want to risk offending the mainstream audience, which they also decided they needed. You kind of saw the death of horror video games with "Silent Hill 2" where there were complaints over the demo about the bludgeoning of those skinless killer babies from the first game, so the developers removed them because they made people uncomfortable enough to complain. "Silent Hill 2" was a good game in it's own right, but after that things sort of stopped moving forward because there was a clear line set here that game developers would not go past, and thus it lead to a situation where once you've seen the psychological stuff and a few trippy monsters a couple of times you've seen almost everything the genera has to offer.
For modern machines there is a game coming out in the next few days called "The Evil Within" that has potential though I expect more of the same from other games in the genera despite the hype (which can still be fun if done well). That's a craps shoot since it's not out, but it's going to be the most technically advanced option.
"Silent Hill: Homecoming" is the game right before "Downpour" and I actually thought it was okay, some people complain about how it makes it so you can kill monsters fairly easily at times, but overall I kind of feel forced stealth/evasion gets annoying and a big part of the problem is that Silent Hill monsters tend to become less scary when you get used to them, and that game has the usual cast of mooks. I mean you can only confront the same evil nurses so many times before you go "okay, meh, seen this before".
"Dreadout" seems to be an indie attempt to re-capture the magic of Fatal Frame, it's very short though, and the conclusion has yet to be released. I'd recommend "Fatal Frame" as being fairly different in the way it works (using a soul trapping camera to fight as opposed to your regular hardware, and ghosts instead of monsters) but as far as US releases go that's a PS-2 era game and won't run on "current" machines. I think Let's play videos clock in at around an hour or 90 minutes in most cases including time people get stumped on the puzzles.
"Resident Evil: Revelations" was not bad either, combining the usual bio-terror zombies with undersea creatures (sort of like say the minions of Davy Jones in the "Pirates Of The Caribbean" movies) much better for what it set out to do that the most recent numerical "Resident Evil" games IMO.
For older games via GoG that can work on current machines, I think "Undying" and "Realms Of The Haunting" are decent but they are VERY dated graphically which could be a huge turn off.
"Dead Space" tends to be very atmospheric as well, and has an interesting combat system based on dismemberment as opposed to the "Shoot them in the head" trope. That said a lot of it's best moments do come down to jump scares. It's sort of a combination of "Aliens" meets "Event Horizon" and "Supernova".
I'd try and avoid the "Amnesia" games if you didn't like "Outlast" since they are similar but with less forced stealth (though it's there in the first one) and more puzzles. The second game in particular tends to be incredibly slow, based mostly on the atmosphere and figuring out how to proceed at points rather than actually running into much. That said, both are very atmospheric games, but they are sort of what Outlast was trying to emulate, albeit Outlast wanted to introduce a lot more stealth puzzles.
That said, I wouldn't expect that much from horror games, almost everything I mentioned above should suffice as a "virtual funhouse" though.
