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F3AR has some kind of "AI Director" which spawned enemies differently when you replayed the same sections, and sometimes a doll's eyes would glow, and sometimes not - that kind of 'scares".
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Oct 17, 2019 12:30
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Also the occasional window children. F3AR wasn't a scary game from the get go, though. The first one was barely a scary game though, to be fair.
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Oct 17, 2019 12:44
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Bless them for trying, but yeah, they were more on the FPS end of the "horror FPS" spectrum.
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Oct 17, 2019 12:47
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I'm playing Outer Wilds finally now that it came to the PS4, and its fun as heck. Also some areas of it are straight up terrifying me in the same way that Subnautica did. Giants Deep in particular, but also that sort of scale that the game sort of just has sets me on edge quite a bit for reasons I don't understand
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Oct 17, 2019 13:05
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It's kinda hard to make a scary game when you deliberately use John Woo as your inspiration for the shooting in your game. Hard to be scared when you're jump kicking a dude in the face across a table while firing two guns at the same time.
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Oct 17, 2019 13:07
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Bless its little heart, F.E.A.R. really tried something whacky. Use bullet time to pin this space marine to a wall with your spike launcher, then, WATCH OUT! It's a spooky ghost child! Who is related to you in a pretty hosed-up way, it later turns out. It's a messy combo that doesn't quite work and I adore it for the effort.
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Oct 17, 2019 13:15
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Bless its little heart, F.E.A.R. really tried something whacky. Use bullet time to pin this space marine to a wall with your spike launcher, then, WATCH OUT! It's a spooky ghost child! Who is related to you in a pretty hosed-up way, it later turns out. It's a messy combo that doesn't quite work and I adore it for the effort. Added bonus being that using the bullet time and kung-fu kicking a guy across the room while shotgunning his buddy behind him was awesome and played great.
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Oct 17, 2019 13:16
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Throwing a grenade just to slow time and shoot it in the air was fun too The third game being a buddy cop coop experience was rad and more games need to go that route once the scares are gone. Related: if anyone noticed Dead Space 3 PC hit a sale price point it out. I want to play the coop and plan to gift it to a buddy
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Oct 17, 2019 13:17
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Yeah i won't actually poo poo on the fear series, i genuinely enjoyed all of them.
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Oct 17, 2019 14:22
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I enjoyed the F.E.A.R. games but it seemed weird to me that they were working on both that and Condemned at the same time, and imo both of them would have worked better if they swapped themes or gameplay. The horror in F.E.A.R. didn't work as well for me when you were sliding around like a loving badboy shooting fellas up, and the atmosphere and creepiness of Condemned could have benefitted with more supernatural horror rather than just hobofighting with the weird ending.
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Oct 17, 2019 15:24
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How timely, the FEAR trilogy is on sale at Fanatical for $4 right now, which is also the best and cheapest way to get the original FEAR since you can't buy it on its own on Steam. SPOOKY GAMES 6: Hellseeker 1. Apsulov: End of Gods 2. Conarium 3. TAMASHII 4. Apparition 5. Secrets of the Maw (DLC) 6. Bad Dream: Coma 7. They Breathe 8. The Final Station 9. Love, Sam 10. Pacify 11. Return of the Obra Dinn 12. Silver Chains 13. Bad Dream: Fever 14. DISTRAINT 2 15. Pamali: Indonesian Folklore Horror 16. Tormentum - Dark Sorrow 17. The Light Keeps Us Safe    As a developer, it’s got to be hard deciding when to bring your game out of Early Access. Once the public sees your unfinished game, they’re going to get all manner of ideas in their head about what constitutes finished to them, personally. The best you can hope for is satisfying a majority of players, but there’s still something of a floor that we can all probably agree on reaching before pushing that 1.0 button. The Light Keeps Us Safe is a moody, atmospheric, and at times terrifying game that honestly seems to have hit that button a little too soon, and it’s a bit of a toss-up whether or not you can overlook the bugs and rough edges for the unique experience it offers. The world ended again, can ya believe it? This time it was the machines, great, terrible constructs that wander the barren land in search of any humans left un-purged. There’s no Matrix to escape into here, there’s just you, in your bunker, alone with a strange lady’s voice in your head. Apparently there’s still a way to reach the refuge that the other survivors nipped off to, but you’ve got some work ahead of you to get there. Armed with the baddest-assed flashlight since Alan Wake’s chunky Maglite, you must forge out into the ruins of civilization in search of salvage to make your turbo torch even badder-assed. It’s got some neat modes that will help open new paths and options in the wasteland, eventually leading you to the salvation you’ve been looking for. If you’ve played Big Robot’s older title Sir, You Are Being Hunted, there are some elements here that will feel familiar. The Light Keeps Us Safe is primarily a stealth game, with you striking out from your bunker home into different randomly-generated regions to find the scraps to upgrade your light gun. Your world is pretty much eternally cloaked in night now, leaving you plenty of shadows to skulk through and avoid the glaring gaze of your robot oppressors. Loot for upgrading your flashlight can be found in particularly well-guarded ruins and structures, but the landscape is dotted with interesting locations like old houses, dilapidated gas stations, ruptured chemical tanks, and murky swamps. These places hide lesser loot stashes that can provide you food for surviving, bandages for also surviving, and bottles for making distractions. What keeps this from becoming a banal light-survival joint is the incredible atmosphere and aesthetic. The first time you step out of your bunker into the still fields, cold moonlight peeking through the clouds to touch the cracked earth, it’s liable to give you chills. Few games have captured that sick, uneasy feeling of being alone and exposed in the dead of night, but The Light Keeps Us Safe does it masterfully. It’s not just window dressing either, because the machines hunting you are all kinds of threatening. Beyond the basic stationary observers that buzz menacingly and the crab-like monstrosities stamping around, there are utterly alien designs like floaters, invisible sentries, and projected spheres of energy that will track you down. There’s one that gets introduced in the third level that is absolutely terrifying in scope, partly because I thought it was part of the environment at first. So much of what you see here is bizarre and counter to your expectations that it can’t help but unnerve. Your flashlight upgrades can help you deal with some of these threats, because they’re not just there to make the beam brighter. Every time you improve your weapon it gains a new light mode, which includes familiar features like a concentrated beam and less familiar ones like a light that brings non-existent things into being. You’ll have to experiment to see how each new mode interacts with the enigmatic features of the world, and there are some really great moments that come about with these discoveries. It’s actually a fine example of game mechanics contributing to the storytelling, because there’s some serious world-building that happens once you realize how some of your modes work. If The Light Keeps Us Safe was just a tight, creepy adventure it would be an easy recommendation. But I mentioned Early Access before, because unfortunately this title bears some ugly marks from the process. It won’t be long into your journey that you start noticing the muddy controls, how your character tends to stick on certain corners or get caught by invisible walls. This can happen to the enemies as well, ruining some of that all-important tension. Ladders are a particular killer, with a bug that can literally send you flying off into space and force a restart from your last checkpoint. There’s a conspicuous lack of polish everywhere you look, too, from the clunky menus and UI to the lack of video options to the weird brightness screen that pops up after every single loading screen. It hurts to say it, but the game really does feel unfinished in how rough so many of the all-important gamefeel edges are. Even the story suffers from being undercooked, building plenty of atmosphere but not much substance, and it ends in just as unsatisfying a place. So that’s the real question when faced with picking this one up, are you looking for a complete experience, or just an impressive one? The first few hours here will be intense and creepy, but beyond that the bugs are going to eat into your fun and it’s going to end without really going anywhere. If you want to experience a strange, alien world full of fear and wonder, by all means pick this one up. But if you’re expecting anything more than that, sadly I can’t really say your time will be worth it.
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Oct 17, 2019 16:45
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See, I remember being pretty spooked at playing as this badass kung-fu man in FEAR, then Alma strolls along and none of that matters, confronting her means she'll rip you into goo
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Oct 17, 2019 16:59
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I don't really find scripted instant death things scary, they just annoy me.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:27
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Fear of death is more important than actual death, at which point the illusion is broken and it becomes a video gamey annoyance.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:33
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Amnesia’s baddies are scary until you die to them and then they’re nothing.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:52
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Bogart posted:Amnesia’s baddies are scary until you die to them and then they’re nothing. it's worse that I got in the habit of dying on purpose because that guaranteed that they would either spawn far away, or not spawn for a while, I can't remember the exact behaviour, but it became really exploitable
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Oct 17, 2019 18:04
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I don't know that I agree Condemned would've been better off with FEAR gameplay. The first game in particular has a sense of gritty brutality to it that really works to build tension.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:11
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Cardiovorax posted:I don't know that I agree Condemned would've been better off with FEAR gameplay. The first game in particular has a sense of gritty brutality to it that really works to build tension. I think it's more that I think F.E.A.R. suffered from having conflicting gameplay and story, you felt too powerful for it to be a horror game, at least in my eyes. Condemned, while a pretty good game as it is, but I thought could benefit from more supernatural poo poo.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:14
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What’s not supernatural about screaming at occultists to explode their heads?
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Oct 17, 2019 18:34
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That's really only one level. In general, it's perfectly fair to say that the horror in Condemned is less overtly supernatural. On the other hand, I think that makes it hit harder when things do get freaky. Matter of taste I suppose.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:37
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FEAR and Condemned at least have the shared trait of being fun. They bend the genres in ways that don’t perfectly work, but how much does it matter if you enjoy yourself?
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Oct 17, 2019 19:03
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Condemned had combat that felt precisely right for what it was trying to do. Absent the final stinger that wasn't really necessary, I actually really liked the way the first one ends with Malcolm basically sobbing at you to 'go, kill it' and you have no idea what the hell 'it' is, but by God you bash its skull in with a shovel. A sense of never really knowing why any of this happened or what the hell you killed at the farm would've worked much better.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:07
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I really loved the fact that Ethan and Rosa didn't look like your typical game characters in the first Condemned. I also liked Grunberg's VA. Then they made Ethan looks and sound like a cliche gruff bastard in the sequel...
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Oct 17, 2019 19:13
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I thought they made him look like a hobo. A very buff hobo.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:21
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Disposable Scud posted:I really loved the fact that Ethan and Rosa didn't look like your typical game characters in the first Condemned. I also liked Grunberg's VA. Then they made Ethan looks and sound like a cliche gruff bastard in the sequel... I also love that much as he looks like a linebacker from the very beginning, Ethan goes from a fairly reasonable looking person to a man with a missing finger smeared with the bloody of his enemies and wearing the coat of a serial killer by the time he's pointing his pistol at SKX hog-tied in a trunk.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:24
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The bigger problem is they took a guy who’s ambiguously brown and made him a generic pale white guy.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:27
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I feel like I have to defend the game there a bit. Ethan in Condemned 2 has a distinctly unhealthy pallor, which I think is the impression you're supposed to get. They didn't really change his base skin tone, they just game him a very "I drink too much, I sleep too little, and I think my liver is giving out" sickly cast to it. If you see them side by side, you can really tell that this isn't how normal while person paleness looks. VVV Thanks for the reminder, been meaning to grab those. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Oct 17, 2019 |
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Oct 17, 2019 19:33
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Alan Wake's American Nightmares and Observer are free on Epic store. American Nightmares, if you don't have it by now, is a rock solid shooter with great homages to classic horror tropes.
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Oct 17, 2019 21:38
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Everyone in Condemned was beefed out. I thought it was an interesting choice, like how the NPC's in Hitman Blood Money looked like they belonged in porn, or a super tacky Image comic.
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Oct 17, 2019 21:58
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Anyone tried The Beast Inside?
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Oct 17, 2019 23:00
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Pyrolocutus posted:Anyone tried The Beast Inside? It looks cool as hell, but I am having enough trouble getting through Visage right now.
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Oct 18, 2019 00:48
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I've been playing what I can between my PC and my Switch and it's been a mixed bag. I didn't like Distraint much. I liked the art style and the hat wobble and it told a decent enough story, but there are moments like bringing human flesh to the cook and then taking the meal to an unsuspecting lady that really seem to undercut the main character trying to be decent? white chamber was a peculiar point and click and I wasn't a fan of how it set off event flags. There's at least one point where you can't solve puzzles in the majority of the place until you pick up a blanket and return to the main room, which triggers a scene. Corpse Party Blood Drive was weird as hell and I wish I'd found the trick to completely negating the ghosts and other people chasing you way, way earlier. The Darkening effect from Book of Shadows is back, possibly? Or is it? I couldn't tell. The only trap that caused it was so rare that I probably saw four in the entire game, and none of the environment really seemed to matter much.The worst thing here was a swinging guillotine that instantly killed you on the backswing or even when it wasn't moving. I want to like Death Mark because so far it's been interesting but the reading speed is really awkward and doesn't seem to be adjustable.
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Oct 18, 2019 01:09
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dogstile posted:I don't really find scripted instant death things scary, they just annoy me. Like guilty pleasure zero horror first person puncher, Breakdown. Dodging through a maze of instant kill trip-mines while pantsless not Sephiroth casually strolls through them giving no fucks? At least that stands out as more creative than the usual "Scary thing is scary because it can one-shot you, here is an empty hallway to flee through that maybe has a stubborn door handle at the end of it" exquisite tea posted:Fear of death is more important than actual death, at which point the illusion is broken and it becomes a video gamey annoyance. To go along with my very stupid example, I find it helps if there the thing you are meant to be afraid of gets to show off in some way in the process. Something more basic like walking down an empty hallway or opening the closet door you are hiding behind... isn't exactly framing your approaching instant death very kindly. Especially if that's a regular occurrence in a game, rather than a one off. It can also understandably get more strained if you are trying to make every danger something that will gently caress you up if you get caught, rather than a few of them or a single one. Put them together, and your risk people burning out on the experience faster. "Here comes the instant kill guy! He's scary because he can kill you better than the weak monsters!" "Will they be doing anything but following me through empty hallways?" "...Well, if he catches you you'll die! So we don't need anything else!" EDIT: To be fair, the other extreme that causes genuine tension is both harder to get right, and also has every fan willfully miss the point and gloss over the main element. Being a complete badass, and still worrying about your death. People to this day still hold up System Shock 2 as a great example, and it is. But a lot of gushing about it is also glossing over how you are still one of the most overpowered FPS protagonists around. You are amazing, you have very little risk of "death" even playing ironman style thanks to respawn booths. But you were still worried about loving up and dying in spite of all those safty nets. It's a lot harder to reach that balance, more so with how jaded gamers are overall now compared to back then. So it's understandable "Everything can kill you! PS, you are not allowed to so much as slap the monsters" is so popular, from a dev effort perspective, instead of "REAL horror is helplessness  "
Section Z fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Oct 18, 2019 |
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Oct 18, 2019 03:14
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There's nothing guilty about thinking Breakdown whips rear end.
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Oct 18, 2019 04:20
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Disposable Scud posted:There's nothing guilty about thinking Breakdown whips rear end. It's one of the best games ever made.
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Oct 18, 2019 04:49
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Section Z posted:People to this day still hold up System Shock 2 as a great example, and it is. But a lot of gushing about it is also glossing over how you are still one of the most overpowered FPS protagonists around. You are amazing, you have very little risk of "death" even playing ironman style thanks to respawn booths. But you were still worried about loving up and dying in spite of all those safty nets. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 11:05 on Oct 18, 2019 |
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Oct 18, 2019 11:00
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Disposable Scud posted:There's nothing guilty about thinking Breakdown whips rear end. Mr E posted:It's one of the best games ever made. Two posters who know when" Jump out of a helicopter" leads to a happy ending  Cardiovorax posted:Maybe "glossing over" carries a bit too much of an implication that people are intentionally choosing not to mention that facet of the game, when I think it is really rather more that people think it is excellent for reasons that have nothing to do with the relative power levels of the protagonist at all. I think too many people these days accept the truism that being powerful makes for bad horror in a rather uncritical fashion, which leads them to treat it as intrinsically a flaw even when it demonstrably isn't one. Though to be fair, my views are a bit cynical in regards to "gloss over player strengths" because we live in a time where people will literally decry the suggestion of adding mercy Invincibility as "You don't get REAL oldschool Sonic gameplay!"  If it is something convenient, somebody is gonna consider it a crime against their gamer cred to defend inconvenience. No matter the genre from horror, platformer, or even theme park sims. Hmm... On the subject of managment sims. I know there are plenty of spooky theme parks in gaming, and some with shallow sim elements hiding horror games. But has anyone tackled a fully fleshed out management game where your customers are aware they are in one, bugs and all? Even nicer ones like Planet Coaster would be pretty horrific just watching things work death free. "Oh my god, those people! From the ferris wheel! They all merged into a CUBE OF MEAT! Oh no, it's expanding, they are coming over the curbstones! We're surrounded  ""Pffft, walkway congestion only happens if SOMEONE didn't plan realistic walkways.  Now let's get a burger from that guy with the inside out face once we writhe free."Hiding the 'backstage' workflow is a concept already in some games. I wonder how that heat map would look when set to "Visible signs you are in a game rather than actual Theme Park/City/etc" Section Z fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Oct 18, 2019 |
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Oct 18, 2019 11:38
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Section Z posted:Hmm... On the subject of managment sims. I know there are plenty of spooky theme parks in gaming, and some with shallow sim elements hiding horror games. But has anyone tackled a fully fleshed out management game where your customers are aware they are in one, bugs and all? I like this idea but it is an extremely specific, off-beat one for a genre that's still horribly mired in abandoned asylums and mimicking Silent Hill 2. Management sims have an even more niche audience than horror games these days and there's not a lot of perceived crossover between them, so there's only like three that I can think of: - Lobotomy Corporation, where you manage an off-brand SCP Foundation - MachiaVillain, which is a Prison Architech-style haunted murder mansion sim - Daily Chthonicle, where you run a newspaper reporting on eldritch horrors (I can vouch real hard for this one) None of those have the meta-horror elements you're suggesting, but they all have different takes on interpreting horror from an omniscient management perspective. Meta-horror itself isn't even that well represented, with a few indie hits like Pony Island and Doki Doki Lit Club and then a lot of one-off developers trying and failing to capture the same magic. SPOOKY GAMES 6: Hellseeker 1. Apsulov: End of Gods 2. Conarium 3. TAMASHII 4. Apparition 5. Secrets of the Maw (DLC) 6. Bad Dream: Coma 7. They Breathe 8. The Final Station 9. Love, Sam 10. Pacify 11. Return of the Obra Dinn 12. Silver Chains 13. Bad Dream: Fever 14. DISTRAINT 2 15. Pamali: Indonesian Folklore Horror 16. Tormentum - Dark Sorrow 17. The Light Keeps Us Safe 18. Kalaban    All I really want from a horror game is a unique, effective experience, and the indie scene is generally the best place to find it. I’ve talked at great length about my appreciation for strange and international horror titles, and Kalaban certainly tries to elbow in there with its strange B-horror rendition of the Finnish countryside. It felt like just the kind of experience I was looking for, until the bugs started cropping up. There’s a lot I can look past to enjoy a game, but regular crashes can’t be ignored especially in a game this concise. In an alternate 1995, Finland is struggling to recover from a crippling recession. You play Bob, an American ex-pat who’s taken to hermiting on the outskirts of a sleepy country town. All this comes crashing down one night when what appears to be a werewolf busts up into his cabin. After dispatching the intruder with an axe, Bob sets off into the night to find out just what is going on. He discovers the entire town ransacked by strange beasts, and desperately searches for a way to escape this nightmare. Only by combing the ruins and gathering the supplies he needs can he hope to survive the night. Kalaban is a simple top-down horror adventure where your biggest objective is going to be finding a car and patching it up to get the hell out of town. There’s a fair number of open maps to explore, houses to loot, and sidequests to complete along the way, which will keep you flush in the food and items needed to keep on trucking through the terrible night. Food isn’t needed to survive, but acts as a long-term regeneration buff for your health. You’ll find keys and other items which allow access to buildings to explore and find more important items for your escape, and the whole time you’ll be hacking away at enemies with your trusty axe to keep them from eviscerating you as they did with most of the town. It’s a fine setup for an indie horror game, though it definitely trades more in the kitschy B-horror side of the genre than actual frightful encounters. Bob has plenty of irreverent observations to make about outhouses and corpses, and can be a bit of an rear end in a top hat when folks he doesn’t like meet grisly ends. I was definitely interested in seeing where the story would go, until the game started crashing on certain scene transitions. It was a consistent problem too, I simply could not move to specific maps without the game dying. I even started over only to find a different, more central map would now cause th crash. And even when it wasn’t dying on me, I was dealing with awkward collisions, some aggravating enemies, and a general lack of direction that was not being helped by having entire sections of the world off-limits due to crashes. Kalaban is the kind of game I love to see, a strange, quirky take on international notions of horror, except it literally doesn’t work. I can put up with a lot, but consistent, debilitating crashes are a bridge too far for me. And there are plenty of little annoyances and rough edges throughout the game that discourage the kind of patience needed to put up with bigger technical issues. There’s just too much stacked against this one to ever recommend it, which is a shame because it does feel like its heart is in the right place. That’s not enough to make a winning game though, so hopefully this game or the developer’s next project will show enough technical prowess to be worth sticking with.
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Oct 18, 2019 16:40
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Pony Island is so good.
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Oct 18, 2019 17:43
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Bogart posted:Pony Island is so good. I kind of wish it didn't give away its premise within the first, like, five minutes of the game, but other than that yeah it's a neat game.
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Oct 18, 2019 18:18
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