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I think the best interpretation of GTA Silent Hill would be as a parody of the violence and depersonalization we see in GTA games, which are already present in Silent Hill games. All the enemies in Silent Hill have historically been basically depersonalized humans, all faceless in one way or another. SH4 victims were the first enemies who actually had names and identies. I think there are a number of ways SHGTA could start, but I think it'd progress in your character becoming more and more bloodthirsty and maniacal, even in comparison with the monsters inside Silent Hill. The reasons for your rampage would fall away over time, with the little "missions" becoming more and more pointless and eventually nonsensical until it's just abundantly clear that your character is only staying because he wants to be there. I like the "they were people all along, you only saw them as monsters and went on a murder rampage!!" twist but it's played out by now and I'd be unhappy if the game pulled it here, as would be likely with an untalented writer.
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Nov 12, 2019 20:05
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Black August posted:Yeah. I've always been ambivalent towards Stalker, but I am all the gently caress over its blowout stuff. The first STALKER had a mod for it...forget what it was called, but in addition to making things a little tougher, and making the nights dark as gently caress (as nights should be), they added random blowouts. Not, you know, frequent ones, but ones that weren't just plot-activated. So you'd be walking around in the pitch black night, and suddenly things would start to get brighter. A lot brighter. Way too fast. Suddenly you're scrambling through the brush trying to find shelter from the blowout that's about to occur, hoping you don't stumble across any invisible mutants or murderous hounds or whatever. It was intense.
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Nov 12, 2019 20:24
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play Call of Pripyat, it's their third do-over of the game and just as good but friendlier to new players
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Nov 12, 2019 20:31
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Danknificent posted:Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason (not sure if I'm remembering the title right) -- not an otherworld exactly, but it had narrative transitions and the cold was a big deal and pretty oppressive and well-realized. Oxxidation posted:cryostasis was fantastic and extremely russian Thanks! Years of playing old school RPGs have made that special Eastern European flavor of gameplay feel downright pleasant to me, so I'll have to check this one out.
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Nov 12, 2019 21:42
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Basic Chunnel posted:play Call of Pripyat, it's their third do-over of the game and just as good but friendlier to new players I fell for the fake ending in Shadows of Chernobyl and deleted the save and the game years ago before my dad told me about the secret ending level, does Call of Pripyat have that as well, or do I really have to go back and replay the original?
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Nov 12, 2019 22:09
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Basic Chunnel posted:play Call of Pripyat, it's their third do-over of the game and just as good but friendlier to new players 1: It points you to the closest viable shelter with plenty of leewway, rather than being an active "screw you for not knowing the game like a wiki already". 2: Closest available shelter might be a really lovely shelter. Like a radioactive corner of a boat, and I spent my stay drunk on vodka. So you had the QoL of ensuring you can avoid instant death. But it also paid to learn the map so you would know when running another 100 feet further is better. Plus blowouts repopulated the loot, so you had a reason to look forward to them rather than it just being "Hurf durf, instant death is cool." Giving you a nice satisfying curve of learning to do it on your own better than relying on help, and looking forward to the next disaster. So of course, most of the community reactions and mods I read up on were "This is too casual! Make blowouts faster! With less warning! With no handholding markers and radio warnings!!! It's not realistic unless the single most dangerous thing in the zone that everyone calls a truce on, is something every radio and map refuses to acknowledge!"  Going back and modding up the earlier ones also felt easier to appreciate after playing the third one, but that's much more clearly in personal preference mindset territory. EDIT: I also appreciated that while your starting gun was pretty awkward even with "Short controlled bursts"™ and a 100% recoil reduction, your starting outfit actually loving rules for economical "Time to sprint around the land hoovering up artifacts and not caring about hazard damage" wear. I love it when starting equipment was secretly badass the whole time. A concept which smooths out replays a hell of a lot, too. Section Z fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Nov 13, 2019 |
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Nov 13, 2019 03:09
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COP is a pro buy for the spooks. I think RPS ranked it number 1 on their top horror game list. Not that RPS is good...
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Nov 13, 2019 03:30
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Skyscraper posted:I fell for the fake ending in Shadows of Chernobyl and deleted the save and the game years ago before my dad told me about the secret ending level, does Call of Pripyat have that as well, or do I really have to go back and replay the original? The real/best ending to ShoC is worth doing, but maybe not redoing the entire game for. CoP doesn't have a secret/bad ending, but some slides on how some things you did/decisions you made wrapped up. It's much more polished than ShoC, but maybe not quite the stalker experience than the previous game.
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Nov 13, 2019 12:46
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I would recommend COP because it doesn't have the stability issues the other ones have.
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Nov 13, 2019 13:08
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Call of Pripyat is super stable even with mods and in fact there are mods that make it possible to access and play through every area in every game pretty much at will, open world style. They don't support a proper plot line yet, but the plot isn't really what you play these games for anyway.
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Nov 13, 2019 13:15
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tight aspirations posted:The real/best ending to ShoC is worth doing, but maybe not redoing the entire game for. CoP doesn't have a secret/bad ending, but some slides on how some things you did/decisions you made wrapped up. OK, so you inspired me to look it up and wow, that's an awful lot I missed the first time. I mainly wanted to experience the last level with the portals but there's like, the whole plot of the game there that you'd miss if you didn't know that the bad ending was fake. And also according to the wiki it's supposed to be a prequel to CoP.
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Nov 13, 2019 17:40
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Skyscraper posted:I feel like GTA Silent Hill could make for an amazing concept for Silent Hill reacting to a different kind of pathology than James' Guilt, but also I know that that wouldn't be what they were going for and it would've turned out like a bad version of Deadly Premonition. All this idea makes me think is that I'm very glad the franchise didn't devolve to the point where there was an action title where you play as Pyramid head, which just feels so disappointingly plausible. I've always felt like everybody loved Silent Hill 2 and James Sunderland's Extreme Metaphor Town so why didn't they just stick to that? Go full twin peaks, let the town be a bizarre rear end fun house of personal torments, there is such a huge space for building stories in that environment. Maybe even give a protagonist the ability to see others' funhouse nonsense but none of his own! ...Which sounds a lot like what 4 wanted to be despite what it became
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Nov 13, 2019 18:29
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quote:I've always felt like everybody loved Silent Hill 2 and James Sunderland's Extreme Metaphor Town so why didn't they just stick to that?
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Nov 13, 2019 19:09
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tbh I think it’s a lot to assume that highbrow appreciation of SH2’s psychoanalytic aspects were ever part of its commercial appeal
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Nov 13, 2019 19:14
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According to what I've been able to find on Google, Silent Hill 2 was the best-selling game in the series after Silent Hill 1 and sales went down by a lot (as in, 50% right off the bat and only down from that) for every game from Silent Hill 3 onwards, so I guess it's arguable what people liked more. They clearly started losing people hard after Silent Hill 2, but whether that's an argument in its favour or against it, I really can't say. 
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Nov 13, 2019 19:24
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Poulpe posted:I've always felt like everybody loved Silent Hill 2 and James Sunderland's Extreme Metaphor Town so why didn't they just stick to that? After 4, Konami HQ in Japan was 100% done with Silent Hill but Konami of America wanted it to continue. The producers (most notably Tomm Hulett) knew that more Silent Hill 2 is exactly what everyone wanted, so they set about giving it to them. But... how? The entire indie horror genre is a veritable graveyard of games that want desperately to be Silent Hill 2 and can't capture what worked about it. How the hell was the American branch of the publisher, with no budget, no support from Japan, and not a single member of the team that made SH2, supposed to do that? They shopped it around to whatever developers they could afford, and Homecoming, Shattered Memories, and Downpour were the new Extreme Metaphor Towns we got. There's never going to be another Silent Hill 2. There are going to be direct homages to it of dubious quality for all of eternity, and a few rare games that effectively capture elements of it in very different ways.
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Nov 13, 2019 19:30
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Just read Junji Ito
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Nov 13, 2019 19:33
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It's remarkable that few games can capture the sort of existential, eldritch horror that Junji Ito creates. Instead everything is 'well I guess I'll shotgun this being from beyond the stars and find some more ammo'.
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Nov 13, 2019 19:35
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TBF it's hard to make "there's a balloon with my face hunting me down to hang me" scary in video game form.
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Nov 13, 2019 19:37
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And really, sometimes you just want a scary story where there is at least the possibility of winning involved somewhere. Existential horror walks a very thin line between "scary" and "bleak and depressing." Life already sucks enough without constantly reminding you of it even in your video game escapism.
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Nov 13, 2019 19:38
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Basic Chunnel posted:Just read Junji Ito In case you or anyone else is unaware.
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Nov 13, 2019 19:38
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Cardiovorax posted:And really, sometimes you just want a scary story where there is at least the possibility of winning involved somewhere. Existential horror walks a very thin line between "scary" and "bleak and depressing." Life already sucks enough without constantly reminding you of it even in your video game escapism. Sure, but then you're not making the kind of horror game that fans of eldritch/cosmic horror want, so why try? Every time I see the word Lovecraftian in a description, in almost always just means that you shoot a gun at Cthulhu, or that there are some tentacled monsters that you flee into a closet to hide from. Lovecraftian (which honestly I wish we'd drop and use cosmic instead) horror loses all meaning if it's not actually what it describes. Lovecraftian stories sometimes ended with the protagonists victorious, more or less. Same with some Junji Ito tales too. Sometimes the world is still poo poo, or a lot of people are dead, but the things they faced were completely untouchable or on a scale they couldn't face, and they still escaped and won their own battles. I'm not talking about, like, a game based on Hellstar Remina that ends with the utter destruction of the entire Earth and absolutely no way to stop it, I mean a tale of someone trying to escape an unknowable location like the town from Uzumaki, which is a fantastic eldritch location in its concept. They can still succeed, while the place itself is some crazy horrific, unknowable location. Edit: I like the idea of Azathoth - it's a solar-system-sized beast that we have no way of stopping, but you never actually fight it in any games or media. At best all you can do is stop those who would try to get its attention. Even if all you're fighting are humans and small monsters or something, the concept overall is still cosmic in scale. Morpheus fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Nov 13, 2019 |
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Nov 13, 2019 19:46
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lots of games tried to ape silent hill 2 but none of them came close to the suffocating all-encompassing solipsism that was the town's incarnation in that game - every character, every area, everything inevitably related back to james sunderland and his own life in some way. even when you get peeks into angela and eddie's personal hells, they still exist as allegories for james' own situation. my favorite example is the abstract daddy, which promptly gets folded into james' silent hill after his initial encounter with it because angela's accusations make him link her father's sexual violence with the feelings of sexual frustration that in part compelled james to kill his wife it's not like SH2's strength lies in its allegory alone, either. it's sort of an oddball in the franchise tonally because the atmosphere it tries most strongly to convey isn't gruesome horror but oppressive despair, forgoing the icky walls of flesh present in the other games' Otherworlds for environments that are flooded, dilapidated, and (especially towards the end) horribly cramped. i'm not a claustrophobe but the one-two punch of the prison and labyrinth still got me feeling short of breath when i played it back in the day
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Nov 13, 2019 19:48
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Morpheus posted:Instead everything is 'well I guess I'll shotgun this being from beyond the stars and find some more ammo'. This owns though, because blasting the space wizard ur demon in the mouth with buckshot and that doing the trick rules.
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Nov 13, 2019 19:50
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Too Shy Guy posted:After 4, Konami HQ in Japan was 100% done with Silent Hill but Konami of America wanted it to continue. The producers (most notably Tomm Hulett) knew that more Silent Hill 2 is exactly what everyone wanted, so they set about giving it to them. I think that a bunch of the past page's discussion kind of hit the nail on the head- often the American silent hills were trying a little too hard to be exactly Silent Hill 2, rocking up with titty nurses and pyramid heads as they've basically become mascots with none of the artistic direction to back either, just a pastiche of something recognizable. What it always boils down to for me is that they needed better writing to begin with, which is a problem gaming as an entire media platform suffers from. Where I think 3 and 4 faltered were the focus on the cult, while 2 contained well written poignant stories where you came to empathize with the deeply flawed individuals within them. The town reflecting these problems in subtle and not so subtle ways since the very beginning and the player coming to realize that makes it feel special. Especially in the Americas I feel like the stories were more protagonist focused, and exclusively an exposition on their own slow reveal fun house gimmick, whereas James' was a mystery with an emotional twist, intertwined with these other weirdos' pathologies. Origins has that flesh-wall Silent Hill flavor but why should I even give a poo poo about John Everyman Armyman, especially when the town isn't trying very much to reflect his personal horrors as much as call back to the franchise itself? The more I write, the more it absolutely I feels like asking for the world. Good writing is hard. All that said, being a software dev myself I am fully aware how a cool idea in conception can quickly become a trainwreck of compromises and deadlines, even if the writing comes out solidly.
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Nov 13, 2019 19:50
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quote:Sure, but then you're not making the kind of horror game that fans of eldritch/cosmic horror want, so why try? Every time I see the word Lovecraftian in a description, in almost always just means that you shoot a gun at Cthulhu, or that there are some tentacled monsters that you flee into a closet to hide from. Lovecraft chat is something it seems the thread is heartily sick off, though, so I'm fine with leaving it at that if you are.
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Nov 13, 2019 19:51
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Lovecraft chat is going to be a staple because it features so heavily in horror, but I can't wait for the next genius to point out that he was racist again. we know, gently caress off, you're not clever
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Nov 13, 2019 20:00
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Yardbomb posted:This owns though, because blasting the space wizard ur demon in the mouth with buckshot and that doing the trick rules. Oh, good hunter.
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Nov 13, 2019 20:05
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Before we wander too far away from Lovecraft, I should mention that I finally finished A Place for the Unwilling, which ends in a decidedly Lovecraftian place but takes a very slow, meandering route to get there. I wouldn't really call it a horror game in retrospect, but it definitely hits some of the themes we're discussing here.   Slow burns seem like a particularly tough sell in the gaming world. Most people sit down with a game for instant gratification, pure action, or a gripping narrative. It takes something special to get someone to invest in a long build-up, which might be why you don’t see many of them around here. A Place for the Unwilling is certainly different, in the strange city of shadows and your position as a bold little merchant. But where most slow burns build to a big reveal, this title continues to smolder all the way to the very end. It’s unique not just in its structure but its permanently lethargic pace, and the difficulty in even finding the full scope of the mystery. Your childhood friend, Henry Allen, is dead by his own hand. Despite the time and distance separating you, he has left his trading business and worldly possessions in your care. All he asks in his parting missive is for you to look after his widow and his mother. To settle these affairs you move to the city, a sprawling Victorian metropolis wreathed in fog, and continue the business in his stead. The many merchants and officials of the city offer their welcome but all is not well here, as the tensions between the rich and poor, capital and labor, are coming to a head. Your actions will impact the lives of those you meet in dramatic ways, and have the potential to shift the balance of power between classes. But behind all the deals and negotiations, the question remains… why did your friend end his life? You may have noticed a few interesting points on the store page for A Place for the Unwilling, such as the “Lovecraftian” tag, or the clearly-stated fact that the city will die in 21 days. And you may be wondering why I didn’t mention those in my synopsis of the game just now. That’s because for a remarkable stretch of the game, easily six to eight hours, you won’t detect a hint of anything eldritch or supernatural. You begin as a newcomer to the city, with your main concern being trading and socializing. The whole of the three districts are laid open to you, and you’re free to wander, talk to the many residents, and attempt to buy low and sell high from the shops. Every morning you’ll receive notes from some of the citizens, asking you to visit them, and you’ll have to spend your limited time each day deciding who to meet, who to help, and what to do around the city. The game proceeds like this, as a sort of low-key trading adventure, for the entire first week. You’ll learn more about the city and the people that you talk to, and there are some definite quirks about the place you’ll probably catch, but mostly you’ll be making friends and money. This doesn’t really change much over the following two weeks, either, but the tone and implications of it all will shift. The second week brings with it much grimmer intrigue to follow, and a clear sign that something unnatural is happening in the city. By the third week there’s a chance that you’ll have discovered the secret behind it all, but rather than being some seismic shift or dawning revelation, it just means you’ll be spending those last few days preparing for the end. That’s the slow, persistent burn of the game, how it gives you hours and hours of simply slipping into the fabric of the city to learn its ins and outs, and instead of building to anything it slips its secrets back to you and waits to see what you do with them. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing is entirely up to the player, really. A Place for the Unwilling is a giant mystery with no parlor scene, and no guarantee you’ll even uncover it all the first time. Revealing the secrets of the city requires befriending the right people and helping them with their tasks, which can prove difficult on a number of levels. Sometimes the tasks require actual moral choices, like neglecting the poor to please an influential businessman, or siding with citizens against the police at the risk of harm to yourself. Other times the task itself will be unclear, due to some sloppy writing or scripting oddities with the events. And sometimes things will simply take longer than you think, meaning you’ll miss resolving a quest because you returned ten minutes past 7 PM and the shop is closed. This is a tough game for perfectionists or completionists, because you won’t have time to do everything you might want to do, and some of the requirements are quite strict. You also won’t know how certain things work sometimes, particularly when quests are vague about where you should meet someone or who you should talk to for assistance. There are no second chances either, with some tasks only doable on the same day you receive them, regardless of whether that’s first thing in the morning or ten minutes before everything in the city closes. And that’s assuming no bugs impact your work, like dialogues playing out of sequence or your character getting stuck on walls or debris. I never had any game-ending issues but I came close on the next-to-last day, when I broke the area transitions somehow and couldn’t leave a particular street. Ultimately, it’s safe to say that A Place for the Unwilling will nothing like what you’re expecting. As a slow, unforgiving, obtuse, and occasionally buggy adventure, more than a little patience is required to get much out of it. And on days when no one is giving out tasks for whatever reason, or you receive one of ten endings that explains virtually nothing about the city’s true nature, you might be wondering what you’re doing here. But that’s also the beauty of it, that there’s nothing else quite like it out there. No other game lets you trade goods and foment popular rebellion on the streets of a city not quite moored in reality, or befriend the strange figures who laugh and share with you even as their doom approaches. Even after spending a dozen hours on a single playthrough and finding very little resolution, I’m far more curious than frustrated. So if you see me wandering the streets of the nameless city once again, you might see why I regard this little gem so highly.
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Nov 13, 2019 20:07
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dogstile posted:Lovecraft chat is going to be a staple because it features so heavily in horror, but I can't wait for the next genius to point out that he was racist again. So... at what point do people saying this every time his name is mentioned just BECOME that thing that we all know and don't need to hear again?
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Nov 13, 2019 20:28
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I dunno, but i'm not going to be the one to do it next time
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Nov 13, 2019 20:32
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Basic Chunnel posted:Just read Junji Ito Cardiovorax posted:And really, sometimes you just want a scary story where there is at least the possibility of winning involved somewhere. Existential horror walks a very thin line between "scary" and "bleak and depressing." Life already sucks enough without constantly reminding you of it even in your video game escapism. Now I'm just imagining somebody making a clicker game version of Amigara fault and saying "But it worked in the non-interactive media!" if reviews say the risk of carpal tunnel was more frightening. Much the same way "And then he killed a demon with their own kneecaps (again)" can remain fun gameplay, but could get old reading in a book 97 times in a row in one sitting. Section Z fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Nov 13, 2019 |
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Nov 13, 2019 20:44
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dogstile posted:I dunno, but i'm not going to be the one to do it next time our long national nightmare won't be over until we have a writer to replace Lovecraft and a horror franchise to replace Silent Hill
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Nov 13, 2019 21:00
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Skyscraper posted:our long national nightmare won't be over until we have a writer to replace Lovecraft and a horror franchise to replace Silent Hill Garth Marenghi, Darkplace: The Game
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Nov 13, 2019 21:26
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I love Silent Hill 2 and it's one of the greatest horror games of all time, but god drat, it's ruined the genre for at least a generation because everyone's trying to imitate it.
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Nov 13, 2019 21:26
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I mean the obvious answers are Ligotti and Prey :coolguy:
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Nov 13, 2019 21:28
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Basic Chunnel posted:I mean the obvious answers are Ligotti and Prey :coolguy: yes and maybe (I don't know, I never got that far in it) to be less flippant, I actually do think we'll see more Ligotti inspired horror games over the next few years (and arguably, already have, though I'm not sure I've seen him explicitly mentioned by a dev). Him getting name-dropped by the True Detective guy definitely boosted awareness, and there's since been some Penguin Classics reissues of his books so he's more in the cultural consciousness than he was. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Nov 13, 2019 |
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Nov 13, 2019 21:37
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I wish I had unlimited time because I really want everyone to play my psychological horror game where you're Lovecraft being tortured by the presence of black people. Instead of Pyramid Head it's a giant penguin. The game will be called Origins of Fear: Miscegenation. For real though I want the ultimate anti-Lovecraft cosmic horror. A story set in the poor south like the Appalachians where the real horror isn't a mixed blood monkey-man or poor working class fishermen who turn into fish monsters but rather the old money weirdos who can trace their lineage back multiple generations and they're all gross inbreds whose ancestors hosed abominations to come into power. That trope of the feeble old lord dying alone in his manor except he's dying of radiation poison from riding byakhees through space so he's siphoning the life from his minority caretaker. I think I just described Get Out with Lovecraft monsters.
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Nov 13, 2019 21:37
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There are several books to that effect. Broken Hours, Ballad of Black Tom, etc. read those
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Nov 13, 2019 21:42
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Basic Chunnel posted:I mean the obvious answers are Ligotti and Prey :coolguy: Ligotti deserves more popularity than he gets, and I think someone needs to make his Crampton spec script if X-files won't do it even in their desperate last seasons. He really is the horror author for our time. But, he didn't make Cthulhu, so there's no catchy squid face spokesmonster to spread the idea around, so we just keep getting more re-hashes of Lovecraft. I haven't played Prey yet but I suspect it isn't the cultural touchstone that Silent Hill 2 was. Looks neat though! Maybe the time has passed when this can even happen, but I've heard that a lot of people had experiences in college sitting around a TV, watching one guy play Silent Hill (2) and just saying "what the gently caress!" when crazy stuff happened, and I think that that is kind of the minimum for whatever replaces it.
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Nov 13, 2019 21:55
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