What "gets" you in a horror game?

[Matthew Valkanov]

The inability to fight back. Knowing that there's nothing you can do against whatever it is that you come against FREAKS ME OUT.


SPOILER ALERT(by the way, how do you create those nifty little spoiler boxes? I'm a forum luddite):

There's this bit in Call of Cthulhu : Dark Corners of the Earth where you're in a hotel. Everything up to this point has been screaming DON'T stay the night there. Don't even stay in the town. You even find the remains of a previous lodger, and have a psychic vision of the hotel manager killing this person. Of course, you decide to stay the night(who wouldn't, right? -_-'), at which point your psychicness tells you that people are coming to your room to get you. You then have to quickly bolt doors, run, and move obstacles as you are pursued by these madmen. First time I tried I fell to my death jumping out a window. I immediately Alt-F4ed, put my laptop down, swore, and had a drink.

 

[C95J]

When you are running away from something, because when I am running away from something even slightly scary, it terrifies me to look back, I don't know why, it just does.

 

[C95J]

SPOILER ALERT(by the way, how do you create those nifty little spoiler boxes? I'm a forum luddite)

Spoiler

You now know how to make a spoiler

Quote this text then look back above, you just write what I wrote, then put the text inside.

 

[teqrevisited]

It doesn't take a lot to get me, honestly. Low lighting, silence, hellish ambient soundscapes, jump scares after any of the aforementioned...

As you can imagine Doom 3 was a nightmare for me. Constantly darting through shadows to get to the most brightly lit area, hugging my beloved shotgun for comfort. I didn't get on well with Silent Hill, either. God, that noise in the upper floor of the school.

Any game like this ends in much the same way for me. Either I creep about as carefully as possible trying to be prepared for the enemy spawns or I say "Shitshitshitshitshit" alot and run around screaming with my finger glued to the trigger shooting anything that looks like it might try to kill me.

 

[Varanfan9]

Solitude. You see I have monophobia, the fear of being alone so the scariest parts in games for me is when I am alone because I have no one to help me. Thats why I find the parts in Silent Hill Shattered Memories where there are no monsters and you are just wandering around the scariest. Cause I know any second shit's gonna go down and no one is there to help me so the suspense really kills me.

 

[Matthew Valkanov]

SPOILER ALERT(by the way, how do you create those nifty little spoiler boxes? I'm a forum luddite)

Spoiler

You now know how to make a spoiler

Quote this text then look back above, you just write what I wrote, then put the text inside.

Let's see...

Spoiler

Perfect

Thanks mate ^^

 

[John Burnett]

If theres any one thing that 'gets' me in a horror game its when stuff starts to grow. For instance in amnesia the stuff that grows on the wall, and the sounds it made, is probably the most terrifying part for me. Another example, though not a horror game, is in Fallout: New Vegas when you go into vault 22. I hate plants. Little shop of horrors included.

 

[Nick Angelici]

for me a few thing, the lighting like in the first chapter of Dead Space scared the FUCK out of me. if the whole game was isaac in level 1 armor with just the plasma cutter that game would of been a hell of a lot more terrifying.

also they needed to drop the pop out scares by a good bit and just used more sounds that were unexpected to get my mind going.

Imagination is the key to horror. if you almost never show the monster, you can scare people to hell and back like amnesia. The game even FORCED you to look away to avoid going crazy. and then later when it starts to pop up a little more you get even more terrified because now you have to worry whether or not its going to be patrolling beyond the next corner or door.

Your own mind is your enemy in horror, if they can do that, thats when you can truly experience fear.

 

[Nieroshai]

I'm a Lovecraft mythos fan, and a fan of any "horror" game that has a mythos as to what the horror of the game is. I don't need to be scared, being immersed in a believably supernatural world is enough.

 

[Someperson307]

The inability to fight back. Knowing that there's nothing you can do against whatever it is that you come against FREAKS ME OUT.


SPOILER ALERT(by the way, how do you create those nifty little spoiler boxes? I'm a forum luddite):

There's this bit in Call of Cthulhu : Dark Corners of the Earth where you're in a hotel. Everything up to this point has been screaming DON'T stay the night there. Don't even stay in the town. You even find the remains of a previous lodger, and have a psychic vision of the hotel manager killing this person. Of course, you decide to stay the night(who wouldn't, right? -_-'), at which point your psychicness tells you that people are coming to your room to get you. You then have to quickly bolt doors, run, and move obstacles as you are pursued by these madmen. First time I tried I fell to my death jumping out a window. I immediately Alt-F4ed, put my laptop down, swore, and had a drink.

That game has some crazy chases. The shoggoth comes to mind. I'm surprised there aren't more games that are rooted in Lovecraft's work. His stories create the perfect combination of fear and dread.

 

[Matthew Valkanov]

The inability to fight back. Knowing that there's nothing you can do against whatever it is that you come against FREAKS ME OUT.


SPOILER ALERT(by the way, how do you create those nifty little spoiler boxes? I'm a forum luddite):

There's this bit in Call of Cthulhu : Dark Corners of the Earth where you're in a hotel. Everything up to this point has been screaming DON'T stay the night there. Don't even stay in the town. You even find the remains of a previous lodger, and have a psychic vision of the hotel manager killing this person. Of course, you decide to stay the night(who wouldn't, right? -_-'), at which point your psychicness tells you that people are coming to your room to get you. You then have to quickly bolt doors, run, and move obstacles as you are pursued by these madmen. First time I tried I fell to my death jumping out a window. I immediately Alt-F4ed, put my laptop down, swore, and had a drink.

That game has some crazy chases. The shoggoth comes to mind. I'm surprised there aren't more games that are rooted in Lovecraft's work. His stories create the perfect combination of fear and dread.

There are a few other games, but they are really boring. Sherlock Holmes : The Awakened comes to mind. You expect something a bit creepier, with Sherlock, being the eternal sceptic, denying everything that has happened despite what he has seen and maybe a little bit of trauma and insanity. But it just fizzles out...

 

[sketch_zeppelin]

backround set peices or "stalker moments". when your walking around and you see somthing move in the backround for a second and by the time you realize somthings up its gone. It happens several times over the course of a given time frame and by the time it actually attacks you, your alerady pissing your self.

Its a method that makes otherwise forgetable enemy encounters horrifying.

 

[Argonian alchemist]

inanimate things... even in real life, other humans and animals don't scare me most of the time. I can hit them, I can fight those things... However, inanimate things like mannequins... dolls... puppets... ugh...

They creep me out...

 

[Phlakes]

It's not the biggest one, but when it's unscripted. Amnesia would've been a lot less scary if all the enemy encounters were scripted, but near the beginning when there's that what's-it-called wandering around and you know you could run into it no matter where you go, that's the tension horror games need. Hell, if you go into CoD multiplayer with one friend and limit yourself to no weapons and him to just the knife, that shit is intense.

In fact, Metroid Fusion is a bad example of this. Once you figure out that the SA-X encounters are scripted, it loses all the tension. Well, almost all of it.

 

[OneNooneKnows]

Environment and feel. And well-done suspense. That you just feel something horrible is going to happen really soon, but it never does. Then when you're lulled into a false sense of security WHAM! Lack of music is sometimes better on this apsect. Like the first part of Silent Hill 2. Just trotting through the foggy woods. Then you hear footsteps, close by. And nothing. Happens. But you keep expecting it.

Silent Hill (1, 2, 3, and to a degree the 4th, if it wasn't for that retarded Townsend fellow...) is a master of this. The monsters doesn't scare me. The creepy mood it sets down hard from the start does.

 

[Best of the 3]

The feelig of there being something, when in reality there is nothing. Feardid this on the first level. Nothing was there, but I shat bricks. oshock did it too, with the noises and grea setting when there was very little. This kind of thing makes me stop playing games out of fright.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Feeling absolutely powerless against whatever threat may appear.

Games like Killing Floor, Dead Space and Left 4 Dead don't feel scary because you have big guns with lots of ammo. Games like Penumbra, which force you to hide, or Fatal Frame, which I'm sure is fucking with me, scare me shitless.

EDIT: Or that damn chase scene from Call of Cthulhu.

 

[Someperson307]

The inability to fight back. Knowing that there's nothing you can do against whatever it is that you come against FREAKS ME OUT.


SPOILER ALERT(by the way, how do you create those nifty little spoiler boxes? I'm a forum luddite):

There's this bit in Call of Cthulhu : Dark Corners of the Earth where you're in a hotel. Everything up to this point has been screaming DON'T stay the night there. Don't even stay in the town. You even find the remains of a previous lodger, and have a psychic vision of the hotel manager killing this person. Of course, you decide to stay the night(who wouldn't, right? -_-'), at which point your psychicness tells you that people are coming to your room to get you. You then have to quickly bolt doors, run, and move obstacles as you are pursued by these madmen. First time I tried I fell to my death jumping out a window. I immediately Alt-F4ed, put my laptop down, swore, and had a drink.

That game has some crazy chases. The shoggoth comes to mind. I'm surprised there aren't more games that are rooted in Lovecraft's work. His stories create the perfect combination of fear and dread.

There are a few other games, but they are really boring. Sherlock Holmes : The Awakened comes to mind. You expect something a bit creepier, with Sherlock, being the eternal sceptic, denying everything that has happened despite what he has seen and maybe a little bit of trauma and insanity. But it just fizzles out...

It's a shame Headfirst was shut down, their other Call of Cthulhu games looked so cool.

 

[Ruiner87]

When the lights are flickering, and then a scary monster jumps out and surprises me.

Seriously though, it's when a game combines the elements of sound, lighting and tension to create an atmosphere with the ability to make me nervous. A great horror game will never (or at least rarely) need to use cheap scare tactics to get a reaction out of you. Hell, a great horror game will never even need to scare you. A great horror game should make you feel nervous, it should make you feel uneasy. The most truly horrifying thing is not a big, scary monster jumping out in front of you, but wondering if the big, scary monsters are actually there.

 

[rofl jet]

I think what disturbs me most is when they suddenly change something.
Example: There's a room thats always safe, then at some put there's a monster in it.