/v/ - Video Games

>>16891643

I know what you mean but it is a game barely

The hide and seek, run for your life horror is good, but only for a little while. Nothing from say Outlast compares to fighting enemies in Silent Hill. Swinging a pipe around frantically and desperately, while my radio static is going crazy and the industrial dread is trying to deafen me.

What about option 3, having some way to defend yourself but it is mostly garbage? In Dead Space you're just a juggernaut of death even when playing on the highest difficulty so it never gets scary. Give the player power but don't be afraid to take it away from them when they least expect it.

Also Soma is fucking garbage. Walking sim with a predictable story and mentally disabled protagonist, what a combo.

>>16891661

>What about option 3, having some way to defend yourself but it is mostly garbage?

Probably the best but i haven't played anything like that personally.

>Also Soma is fucking good

Fixed

>>16891665

As if i had ever set foot there

Imagine derailing your own fucking thread.

What an absolute faggot you'd have to be.

>>16891648

No. It is a walking sim with a lobotomized protagonist who is just retarded until the very end.

Avoiding enemies is much more intense to me than fighting them, at least in a first person perspective, but it needs to be done properly.

A great example for one of the only games that was very much capable in scaring me was Thief 1, (which isn't even marketed as a horror game) with low brightness and the necroage texture pack. Some levels are absolutely horrifying.

I concede third person or the old resident evil isometric view can pull off tense combat, but still doesn't manage to scare me personally. First person combat being scary is harder since I think having your gun like that on your screen tells our brain to go into fps shooty mode.

>>16891675

>walking sim

Has there been a more overused term in /v/?

mc is indeed retarded, which makes some parts rather contrived

>>16891674

True, i should learn to ignore retards

>>16891691

How is it when it comes to level design? Are some areas completely safe? is it easy to tell when there's actual danger and when there's not? I should really get around to playing it.

>>16891639

SOMA wasn't really scary, it was a philosophical walking simulator that in my opinion falls completely flat on its face. The only other person I've seen who shares that sentiment was Ross Scott.

>>16891700

I'd say you should absolutely get around to playing it. I consider it to be one of the best games ever made.

Level design is absolutely superb. The levels mostly feel more like locations than game levels. And the level variety is so good.

Also you're functionally invisible if you're situated in shadows. This gives you some breathing room as indeed the darkest corners of the levels are safe. This makes the stealth be more a fully fledged gameplay mechanic and less trial and error. It's up to you how risky you want to be, how patient and observant you want to be.

It's only scary if you have something to lose.

Try Pathologic 2 instead.

>>16891891

It's on the backlog

>>16891702

But that's entirely what it is. It's "enemy encounters" are less involved than Amnesia. At least in Amnesia you could throw crates at them to stun them or create distance by shutting doors. From what I remember of Soma, it's your usual "horror" game bullshit of hide and seek where once the enemy sees you, it's over.

>>16891639

I want weapons, but with limited resources.

Dead space 1 pulled that right.

Also, I don't want to find Huge boxes of ammo and healtpacks before entering a large door with a boss. That shit is overused and doesn't punish bad ammo management.

You know, there never seems to be a good medium between unarmed and armed. I think the scariest game would start unarmed but you are temporary armed with weapons that only really stun the enemy for a moment. You still have to dodge and runaway when you can. Breakable weapons with reasonable limits and limited ammo for guns as is common in survival horror. I guess it would be hard to construct a game like that if you include bosses in it since you need weapons, even if it's a knife, just to get through them. There aren't that many games like that that I can remember. I think some of the Clocktowers do this but I can't remember off the top of my head.

>>16892004

I think I remember this game since I complained about it a lot upon release. It had these refill pods that acted like help so if you even got attacked by the enemy, you still survived which kind of negated the horror element of it all. It also had faux choices of what to do with the human machine hybrids that had no affect on the story. It's more psychological horror than real horror and it didn't even do that good.

>>16892340

What you're describing sounds a lot like Alien Isolation.

What about making enemy encounters optional puzzles?

For example having an area of the level be covered in oil, bait the enemy to go there and set it on fire, the game shouldn't tell you directly, but have the systems in place to make that possible.

It doesn't need to affect the story, it just needs to get you thinking.

>>16891643

Visual novels are allowed here so this is 10x fine.

>ITT: People who haven't played condemned criminal origins

Fucking play the damn game already. Honourable mention also goes to silent hill even though the controls do suck. RE7 turned the whole PT clone thing on its head by making a HORROR game WITH COMBAT. No combat horror is a medium that's tired and overdone in my honest opinion.

I think a reasonable compromise would be to give the protagonist a weapon which can only temporarily repel an enemy, but not give you any sense of security by killing it permanently. It was one of the things that last Alien game actually did relatively decent.

Silent Hill 4 had a similar thingie where the only means to keep certain ghosts down on a permanent basis was by pinning them to the ground by a magical knife or whatever it was. The joke being that there were more of these super ghosts than there were knives, so putting down one usually meant you had to run back to another level and unpin the resident motherfucker there.

Which in turn could become a pain in the ass if your incompetence meant you had to do lots of backtracking.

>>16892834

RE7 was good but the mold monsters were fucking lame. I like the DLC where you play as the old guy that punches everything to death.

Dead Space 2 on Hardcore can be pretty spooky.

I wish more games would try the clock tower or haunting grounds thing where you have to evade the enemy and hide, but you also have the chance to struggle or use weapons and things in an area for one time use to keep them at bay.

The only game I can think of recently that's done this is Remothered where you can have weapons on you for a few uses to stab your stalker if they catch you and have objects that you can throw to make noise or throw them at your stalker to hurt and slow them down.

>>16894386

Does the Autism help or hinder her ability to give footjobs?

>>16894354

>clock tower or haunting grounds

That only works when the protag is female. It doesn't work for games with male protags, because the devs would need to femanize them enough that they wouldn't be able to defend themselves.

>>16892288

>I want weapons, but with limited resources.

This, it's a very delicate balance. Either give the player limited resources or make the player need good skill to fight back. No games really come to mind with the last example, a step in the right direction might be those night faggots in dying light. It doesnt get it quite right though

I've had the idea in my head for a long time of a survival horror game where you start the game with a revolver. There is no extra ammo in the game but one shot kills the enemies. The catch of course is that there's more than 6 enemies in the game and you can miss your shots if you panic. You have to pick and choose which areas you want to be free of enemies as you backtrack through most areas at least once.

>>16891639

If you want maximum tension, Rainworld is the perfect game. You CAN defend yourself, but doing so is insanely risky. There is always the risk of a swift and unexpected death, even if you git gud, so you can never let your guard down, EVER.

>>16894541

I should elaborate. Having a defense of any kind means that you have something to cling to in fear, should fearful circumstances arise. In walking sim horror, there is nothing to cling to so you just squirm or even psychologically withdraw from the game. When there is a defense, you are drawn FURTHER INTO the game when things get bad, which enables greater fear because you are immersed.

>>16891663

>puzzles for retards

>braindead monsters that barely count as environmental hazards

>high school kid tier philosophy

>spooky scary screen filters

>middle of the game

<Whaat? I copied myself and I'm still here!

>mid- to end of the game

<Whaat? I copied myself and I'm still here!

>end of the game

<Whaat? I copied myself and I'm still here!

>>16894548

Exactly.

As for Rainworld i'm not into platformers at all

I don't think weapons matter very much unless you're on the extremes (one man army or complete noodle). Almost every horror game that has scared me has had amazing sound design and had movement slightly clunkier than the average fps title. The biggest mistakes I see with ameture horror games are floaty movement and corny soundscapes. I don't want to hold W and feel like i'm on a treadmill, gun or no gun.

>>16891639

I don't mind not being able to (reasonably) damage enemies, but I think it's scarier to be able to attack. Having your hands outright locked to your sides doesn't feel great. Not even able to flail and punch with no effect. When you get caught and cornered, with no way to run, you just kind of take your hand off the controls and wait for it to game over, which kills some spooks.

If you think there's even 1% chance you can stagger the hostile, enough to get away, then you will be spooked and trying to survive for the entire duration of your death. So yeah, always try to allow some form of attack. But it's not 100% vital, you can still have spooks. Frictional Games used to have more ways to attack but they have the locked hands approach now.

All FPS spook games will be dead from now on, though. VR is going to completely take over for that experience.

>>16891663

>>16891661

>>16891654

>>16891639

I think being barely armed or where you can fight but you're better off running is better. Not being armed risks making the game a walking sim where the tension is lessened because you can't put the player in too much danger or they can't proceed. If you're too strong, though, you lose the sense of danger the enemies pose. Its a hard balance to strike. Penumbra gave you this hammer that barely did anything but could theoretically be used to kill the dogs, one of the earliest enemies, but quickly became outclassed against the stronger enemies. I feel as though the Siren games hit a good balance where how you engage with enemies depends on which character you are playing as, from a gun-slinging mad scientist where the levels play somewhat like a third person shooter; except you can't permanently kill enemies and they will get up after a time, to completely helpless little girl who has to hide from enemies, but can hide in many confined spaces a grown adult never could fit in. Swapping characters around let you play the same stages in siren 2-3 times over and still keep things fresh because the way you interact with the scenery is different every time.

>>16894575

Fun fact: Catherine was just as dumb as the MC. Her entire plan is to cage the echoes of a dead species in a sattelite databank that she admits will only function for about a thousand or so years in a best case scenario. There's no endgame to Catherine's idea of salvation, no hope of actually saving the human race. One day, something on the satellite will break down or short circuit, and the echoes will go silent forever.

>>16894400

I'm sure that good ol' Joe Simpleman can overpower literal hell spawns or biological abominations able to break through walls.

Neither are scarier, they're both just frustrating.

Armed but enemies are so overwhelming it barely helps. Bonus points if you're armed but it's not with generic guns.

>>16894228

I'd say more than anything it was calculated enemy placement and metered resources. The devs know how many bullets you can have at any point in time and what enemies you will have to fight along with approximately how much ammo it would take to down them. Coupled with the adventure game aspects and limited inventory to keep most players from ever being able to carry everything they want and thus backtrack through potentially dangerous areas.

And the cost of getting hit also hits hard because healing items are even more sparse and without full knowledge of the map, and even the risk of moving around to item rooms or unused herbs, players can also make less optimal healing choices if they don't have the right herbs to mix to get better returns.

>>16891639

Definitely armed. The game giving you the illusion of power only to snatch it away when it matters the most is the most impactful to me in creating fear. Alien: Isolation did okay at this, although it wears off quickly because as soon as you try something on the Alien once and realize it doesn't work, you don't try it again. Surprisingly, RE2make on Hardcore did a decent job at this in the first Leon/Claire playthroughs. It helps when you can never seem to nail down a definite plan that works 100% of the time for defeating an enemy, to always have some uncertainty. The regular zombies were designed well in this regard because you didn't always kill them even when you shot them in the head, and you are never sure they're actually down when they go down. Sometimes they'll even go dormant until you leave and then wake up later and be in a completely different spot. Subvert as many expectations as possible. Real dread/terror comes from a holistic sense of not having control or knowledge of anything that's going on, not just one or two things like jumpscares and scary monsters.

SOMA is pretty shallow and uninspired, I wish it was forgotten by this time

I think the general consensus here is that armed is best, but it doesn't work if you have an entire armory up your ass.

You need to have something that you can do when shit hits the fan, otherwise it's just something happening for you to watch, not really take part in it.

But you can't succeed easily or always at it, otherwise you stop feeling danger from it. This is where low ammo or breakable weapons factor in.

Two good examples in this thread are Dead Space, where you literally stomp your enemies all the time, reducing all tension to jumpscares but also FEAR where you're a badass popping heads left and right and you're supposed to be scared when Alma shows up even though you can't actually interact at all with her, just see the cutscenes and maybe runaway. Neither of these really work as horror games because of this.

Meanwhile you have Rainworld and Thief where you do have resources and maneuvers you can use to defend yourself against some of the really scary shit you find, but they are severely limited and tricky to use so not only are you under immense tension when using them, you do end up feeling like a real badass when you pull them off, far more so than in either of the previous 2 games.

Unarmed horror can work too, but it's far, far harder to pull off because you stop relying on game overs and dead states to punish the player. In fact, the traditional gameplay loop stops working since at worst you'll be sent to a previous checkpoint without really losing anything, forcing you to redo sections you already saw, which stops being scary very fast and fun as well eventually.

Instead, it needs to draw from it's story and atmosphere a lot more, scaring the player not with the monsters it throws at you but with the reality that surrounds you.

The Dark Descent is an interesting example of this since it's the narrative that plays a big role in setting up the scaryness, greatly helped by the scenery and the story ends up scaring and traumatizing you more than the monsters do.

SOMA is another example, where the Theseus Ship, the ideas behind what makes a human human and how you regard the robotic people you find are what makes the game, everything else just complementing it. None of that needs to have a serious consequence later in the game, it just needs to put your head thinking about it. something SOMA does quite alright.

Too bad that the gameplay is trash and the protagonist is utterly retarded, those are the weakest points of the game and really undermine it. They could have done some pretty interesting things with the concept of multiple copies of the same mind, using different bodies and all that, but ended up falling short.

I always thought the way RE4 did it was smart, although the problem was that it always gave you ammo when you needed it. They would show an enemy, and obviously you'd shoot at it with whatever weapon you had, but then they show you anew enemy where that doesn't work anymore and you need either a new strategy or try another weapon. Like in the Village, you start with a pistol which works on normal villagers, but then you get to the chainsaw fuckers and realize 'this isn't working' and desperately run around trying to either evade it or find something that will work, until you find the shotgun or a grenade. Eventually you get to those guys that have the tentacles coming out of their necks, and that requires flash bangs, but then you get to El Gigante and realize most weapons don't effect it and you just have to keep firing and dodging until an opening appears. Then you get to the Regenerators which don't even get a cutscene and the only weapon that can make quick work of them, the sniper rifle, which takes a second or two to aim and un-aim, means one mistake could get you killed depending on how close they are.

Only game I can think of that sorta does it right is Deceit, a multiplayer game. You get pistols and shotguns, but the enemy is another player disguised as a survivor, so even if you have a shotgun, they might be right behind you, and if they kill you, the only thing that can revive you is another player with an antidote, which isn't common.

>>16909378

>where you literally stomp your enemies all the time, reducing all tension to jumpscares

Depends on the difficulty a lot

>but ended up falling short.

True, when i finished i thought it would have been a good idea to make the other copies playable as saved games and things along those lines.

>>16909411

>but the enemy is another player disguised as a survivor

Fuck that reminded me of "The Thing" maps in Starcraft, those maps tended to be well balanced as far as the thread topic is concerned

I always thought it would be neat to have a horror games with weapons that are options, but generally bad ones. Like have a wimpy protagonist with no gun experience, and give him a shotgun. If you the player fire without aiming, he doesn't brace right and sprains a wrist. Even at that he drops the thing the first time you fire it. The problems are that it doesn't necessarily make the gameplay more fun, and those "the first time you X" things never work well in games any more because everyone learns about them ahead of time. It'd be a good way to reinforce the idea that the PC's a non-fighter and really shouldn't be fighting, but doesn't just flat out take away weapons entirely. Maybe give the PC a shotgun but never give them any shells, so it's just a shitty club and his only weapon. Let the first swing or two at an enemy knock it around but not hurt it, then any swings after that don't connect and just get you hurt–after all, the enemies are probably good at fighting and the PC isn't supposed to be.