Toblo1 said:
So FNAF is good, but not for you, Yahtzee? Makes sense......
Also, we seem to have the same philosophy when it comes to jump-scares in horror games: wanting the option to either fight back or run like hell from them.
I just want the ability to fight back because running away is incredibly boring and tedious. I'm not the stealthy-ranger type, I'm the tricky-up-close-fighter type.
Alien: Isolation and Amnesia were a couple of the lamest games I've ever played because they almost boiled down to on-rails walking simulators where every TWO minutes I'd have to go hide so my character could have a cry and whine for mummy, and it drew the experience out almost as painfully as being forced to watch someone play FF13. I dunno where Yahtzee got the idea that the Alien disappears for 'lengthy tea breaks in the green room' because from the moment I was forced to kill the first human on Sevestopol station, the Alien wouldn't leave me alone for the remainder of the game for two seconds, except in cutscenes.
In Amnesia, if I was seen it would take ten seconds to just die and respawn - rather than spend five minutes trying to hide, another three minutes waiting for ugly baddie #499019 to walk back to his scripted route, and then having to try sneak past again. The game literally gives me no incentive to avoid dying, or better yet just slam Quickload.
Example of the opposite: the game Darkwood that's currently available on Steam. You can fight back - but the combat system is difficult to get bearings on at first, and dying means losing anything not in your quickbar, and therefore having to journey back to your point of death with less (probably essential) gear. I'm actually encouraged to run rather than fight. However, I have the choice of testing myself against the enemy, if I so choose, which adds some tension to the proceedings if I'm not sure of myself.
It comes down to immersion and agency:
Amnesia doesn't provide agency in how to deal with a situation.
Alien: Isolation is a little better at it with the gadgets and such, but it's basically Amnesia with more particle effects and DOF.
Good old horror like Silent Hill and Parasite Eve II give you control of the situation but make said situation hard to deal with because of the nature of the options you have.
Jump scares jsut don't work on me anymore either: I've played DOOM for two decades, a game where a jumpscare is defined by "Oh, look, you just picked up a Soulsphere, so let's drop the walls around you and suddenly there's ten demons, three hellbarons, and a platoon of shotgunners" - not one moderately quickly shambling albino thalidomide baby.
I still remember my first day of This War of Mine:
Fell out of the chair bawling my fucking eyes out because food had run out by day two, and two of my survivors were both sick AND mortally injured, and the only other guy left was almost suicidal because he'd watched a soldier force a woman to have sex with him through vague threats of violence and he didn't have any home-made cigarettes to take the edge off. Watching a man with his bowels trying to flop out on the floor and unable to keep his eyes in their sockets if he so much as coughed trying to console the person holding the only knife in the house is exactly the kind of depressing you don't see in games now.
