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Edith finch is objectively a way better game and story than Ethan Carter. It's almost satirical that Ethan Carter employs the "it's all in their imagination / dream!" and "am I the true villain??" tropes together to make it such a wholly terrible story. The subplot puzzles and environment were fun enough but that story certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Have newer horror games gone past the need to make their protag a James Sunderland clone?
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Oct 28, 2020 14:00
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i liked ethan carter better than most but the ending twist is weak and woe betide you if you actually miss a puzzle and have to backtrack loving gorgeous though
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Oct 28, 2020 14:08
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Edith finch is objectively a way better game and story than Ethan Carter. It's almost satirical that Ethan Carter employs the "it's all in their imagination / dream!" and "am I the true villain??" tropes together to make it such a wholly terrible story. The subplot puzzles and environment were fun enough but that story certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth. The last new horror game I played was Blair Witch so lol no.
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Oct 28, 2020 14:44
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At this point if I suspect that the story is "I'm the guilty guilty bad guy actually" or "the monster was abuse/depression!!!" I refund immediately. That poo poo is so tired.
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Oct 28, 2020 14:51
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I hated the same twist in the Sexy Brutale. Any story that has a cool premise should not have a twist that undermines or outrights negates the loving thing. Someone's been sending me threatening photos of my house! Oh wait, it was me. I just woke up to find myself covered in blood next to a dead body! No wait that was a dream or the fault of some Mayan prophecy.
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Oct 28, 2020 14:52
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loving same on Sexy Brutale, what a great premise utterly undermined by its ending
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Oct 28, 2020 14:56
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I just woke up to find myself covered in blood next to a dead body! No wait that was a dream or the fault of some Mayan prophecy. Getting Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy flashbacks right now.
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Oct 28, 2020 14:59
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Sakurazuka posted:loving same on Sexy Brutale, what a great premise utterly undermined by its ending Yeah, especially since even the protagonist forgiving himself is kind of pointless. He is still an old man that is all alone in the world because he killed everyone he cared about. Even if he stops punishing himself, there isn't much for him to live for at this point. Having it all be in the protaganist's head just makes the story way worst.
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Oct 28, 2020 15:25
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Edith finch is objectively a way better game and story than Ethan Carter. It's almost satirical that Ethan Carter employs the "it's all in their imagination / dream!" and "am I the true villain??" tropes together to make it such a wholly terrible story. The subplot puzzles and environment were fun enough but that story certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I'm usually the kind of person that thinks a novel or game isn't ruined by a lackluster ending but Ethan Carter really went there. I was genuinely pissed they went with something so lazy.
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Oct 28, 2020 15:26
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People were real down on Firewatch because its ending was also bait and switch but I thought it was a fun subversion where the "antagonist" is basically every psych horror protagonist, a paranoid bad dad whose neglect and alcoholism got his son killed and he's living his personal hell every day secluded from society. The protagonist begins the game as a James Sunderland type where his wife has dementia and he's sexually frustrated but by the end of the game he gets closure and has a full character arc without becoming a weepy rear end in a top hat.
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Oct 28, 2020 15:28
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Another game I remember which had a good premise but botched by the ending was Untold Stories. Really really wished they didn't do the last episode to "tie it all up". the worst horror game ending (that I've encountered) ever though has to be Home, imagine how much worse it could be if you played James Sunderland
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Oct 28, 2020 15:52
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Lost in Vivo was merely above average but the protagonist is just a claustrophobe trying to find their dog, and ended up in a place where a Spooky Thing can manifest people's fears. the most common ending is you find your dog and get the hell out of dodge, roll credits the lack of personal angst was refreshing
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Oct 28, 2020 15:55
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I thought the whole thing was about bulimia or something. I honestly thought Lost in Vivo was a really shallow and half-hearted game overall, though. The entire thing seemed to be more concerned with putting backer name graffitis all over the place than with making a good horror game where I actually care about anything that happens.
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Oct 28, 2020 15:58
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Literally only the first 5 minutes has backer graffiti because that was the Kickstarter demo, LiV is easily one of the best (original) horror games of the last 10 years and if that's more of a condemnation of the genre then so be it lol. Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion (same co-creator) is practically a meme game and understands horror better than nearly everything else, LiV is just a distillation of that without the randomized corridors.
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Oct 28, 2020 16:04
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there's basically nothing in it that hasn't been done already but it's one of maybe three or four horror games in the last several years to have actually gotten my pulse up, so props for that special mention goes to that one ladder in the mines, which i'm pretty sure was an entirely avoidable situation on my part and that just makes it better
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Oct 28, 2020 16:06
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Transient comes out today apparently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O38bSuXQHnI I'm sure it's been discussed but this is the first I'm hearing of it, looks really cool! Since this is the horror thread I must also include some shade: the game does not appear to have any brakes when it comes to the dreamlands/cosmic stuff, there's nothing subtle here The Saddest Rhino posted:Another game I remember which had a good premise but botched by the ending was Untold Stories. Really really wished they didn't do the last episode to "tie it all up". Yeah I pretend the last chapter is just a non-canon bonus episode for real heads
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Oct 28, 2020 16:11
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Another game I remember which had a good premise but botched by the ending was Untold Stories. Really really wished they didn't do the last episode to "tie it all up". Oh man Untold Stories really poo poo the bed in a surprising way at the end. The absolutely infuriating thing is that given the structure, it could have just not had that ending at all and the rest of the game wouldn't really have suffered for it. I'd love a game like it, just a bunch of pseudo-puzzle horror vignettes, but without the hamfisted attempt to tie them together when they absolutely didn't need them. And yeah, Home was shockingly bad. I think it suffered from being the dev's first real stab at making a "professional" game, but shouldn't have been marketed as one. If I had gone in expecting a game jam horror game, I would have judged it a lot less harshly.
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Oct 28, 2020 16:14
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I remember Home! Not playing it mind, because it was terrible, but it was the first game I deleted off my Steam page when given the chance.
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Oct 28, 2020 16:23
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Edith finch is objectively a way better game and story than Ethan Carter. It's almost satirical that Ethan Carter employs the "it's all in their imagination / dream!" and "am I the true villain??" tropes together to make it such a wholly terrible story. The subplot puzzles and environment were fun enough but that story certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Edith Finch is one of the few walking simulators that actually uses the medium for something other than pretension. The way it switches up the gameplay for each perspective and the powerless, railroady nature of being a walking sim makes knowing that you're playing a fantasy version of the death of each character really hit home.
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Oct 28, 2020 23:33
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The Chad Jihad posted:Transient comes out today apparently: I streamed the entirety of Transient tonight, took me a little over four hours, and it is an absolute trainwreck of a game. The plot is a nonsense jumble of murder mystery and Lovecraft tropes, and the gameplay is walking down hallways and tepid puzzles. Everything that's good or interesting about the cyberpunk cosmic horror setting is tucked away in text files while you hunt for NPCs to vomit plot at you. I had high hopes for this because it was from the Conarium devs and I really enjoyed Conarium, but it turns out the studio folded last year and reformed without their lead programmer/writer, and goddamn does it show.
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Oct 29, 2020 09:42
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Cardiovorax posted:I thought the whole thing was about bulimia or something. I honestly thought Lost in Vivo was a really shallow and half-hearted game overall, though. The entire thing seemed to be more concerned with putting backer name graffitis all over the place than with making a good horror game where I actually care about anything that happens.
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Oct 29, 2020 09:47
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lurker2006 posted:For essentially a one man itch.io project it was pretty impressive.
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Oct 29, 2020 13:03
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Man, so many eldritch horror video games are so dull with what they imagine 'eldritch' to be (I mean, yeah eldritch beings being unfathomable and all but anyway). Like, it's always tentacles. Usually Cthulhu or something like that. Give me something with Azatoth. Have the characters teleported to within visual range of this impossibly massive being and see what happens to them. Show the machinations of a creature a million years in the making (Eternal Darkness was good for this). The whims of a capricious god, or the actions of a completely indifferent one - a world destroyed not because of malevolence or flippin' cultists, or whatever, but simply indifference. The absolutely most boring thing these games can do is make cultists an antagonist.
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Oct 29, 2020 14:20
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Is there an equivalent to asylumjam where it is about making eldritch horror titles that aren't about cthulhu/tentacles/fish? I wanna see a game about a bunch of cats righteously destroying two evil people.
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Oct 29, 2020 14:41
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Too Shy Guy posted:I streamed the entirety of Transient tonight, took me a little over four hours, and it is an absolute trainwreck of a game. The plot is a nonsense jumble of murder mystery and Lovecraft tropes, and the gameplay is walking down hallways and tepid puzzles. Everything that's good or interesting about the cyberpunk cosmic horror setting is tucked away in text files while you hunt for NPCs to vomit plot at you. For gently caress sake. Why is horror becoming a lost art? I don't get why every dev has collectively poo poo their pants when trying to make a horror game. At this point I wish they'd just steal good ideas from the internet and throw a budget at them.
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Oct 29, 2020 14:47
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Regarde Aduck posted:For gently caress sake. Why is horror becoming a lost art? I don't get why every dev has collectively poo poo their pants when trying to make a horror game. At this point I wish they'd just steal good ideas from the internet and throw a budget at them. Because it seems that horror games purely exist these days for youtubers to pull faces at.
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Oct 29, 2020 14:49
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Regarde Aduck posted:For gently caress sake. Why is horror becoming a lost art? I don't get why every dev has collectively poo poo their pants when trying to make a horror game. At this point I wish they'd just steal good ideas from the internet and throw a budget at them. Because if you have a game that is just fun and going "man there is a corpse there, pretty hosed up right" then its good while it lasts and then its over. But if you hint at some convoluted backstory that might or might not be there then you get six thousand Game Theory videos in free advertising and merch sales.
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Oct 29, 2020 16:15
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Too Shy Guy posted:cyberpunk cosmic horror setting Cyber punk in general seems to be on the cusp of becoming really annoying, I hope that Cyberpunk game comes out soon so nerds devour it and move on and we stop hearing about "cyberpunk" non stop like it's something new that hasn't been around already for decades 
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Oct 29, 2020 16:24
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CuddleCryptid posted:Because if you have a game that is just fun and going "man there is a corpse there, pretty hosed up right" then its good while it lasts and then its over. But if you hint at some convoluted backstory that might or might not be there then you get six thousand Game Theory videos in free advertising and merch sales. I mean one of the most popular horror series, Silent Hill, is built vague details that need to be dug into and theorized this so that's not the only issue. Really, it's because game development is getting easier. Anyone can pull a Unity package and throw some triggers and interactive animations to make a $2 game. Sometimes you can add a little more and make it a $15 game. Back in the day, you needed a pitch and a publisher and copies being pressed and marketed, so you couldn't just make a game with three people and hope it did well. There are still good horror games coming out and there are bad ones coming out.
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Oct 29, 2020 16:25
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I wonder exactly how many unity horror games are out there. And of those, how many use existing assets. And of those, how many have the goal "collect X notes".
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Oct 29, 2020 16:28
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Regarde Aduck posted:For gently caress sake. Why is horror becoming a lost art? I don't get why every dev has collectively poo poo their pants when trying to make a horror game. At this point I wish they'd just steal good ideas from the internet and throw a budget at them. Horror's always been this bad. It's a combination of the fans being impossible to please and the devs going "gently caress it" and taking the lazy way out because it still makes a ton of money.
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Oct 29, 2020 16:28
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Manager Hoyden posted:I wonder exactly how many unity horror games are out there. And of those, how many use existing assets. And of those, how many have the goal "collect X notes". It's bad now, but hoo boy remember what it was like right after the Slenderman game that first popularized this? gently caress. Like, there were quite a few games after PT Demo that used the 'repeating mundane hallway gets more weird' mechanic, but that actually requires a modicum of effort, so there weren't an incredible amount. But the collecting notes thing? Ugh.
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Oct 29, 2020 16:31
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RightClickSaveAs posted:Ughh I hope this doesn't become the next flavor of the week for horror games to chase. I'm picturing a wave of games replacing the mindblowing twist "you were the killer all along James" with "TeChNolOgY was the eldritch horror inside us this whole time Johnny"  Sorta likely: The plot twist is that you are both a Bad Dad With Tragic Past, and are grafting 'unnatural' things to yourselves out of a sense of guilt and self loathing  Too good for this sinful world: The 100% disembodied brains with CD players collected ending has you and the creature both overcome your trauma, hold hands, and push both ending cutscene selection buttons at the same time 
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Oct 29, 2020 16:37
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dogstile posted:Horror's always been this bad. It's a combination of the fans being impossible to please and the devs going "gently caress it" and taking the lazy way out because it still makes a ton of money. yeah the idea that things are any worse now is some nostalgia goggles "anyone can make a horror game" is a double edged sword because you do get the mountain of quick steam cash-in poo poo but you also get really cool stuff that probably would never have gotten made a decade ago before indie gaming blew up and became mainstream Blockhouse fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 17:09
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dogstile posted:Horror's always been this bad. It's a combination of the fans being impossible to please and the devs going "gently caress it" and taking the lazy way out because it still makes a ton of money. Much like horror films, the horror genre is far more sensitive to market trends than anything else. All the Conjuring sequels and spinoffs and Blumhouse garbage make huge returns because horror has always been rooted in cheap garbage dating back to Weird Tales and penny dreadfuls. But its budget and cheapness and sometimes willingness to explore art leads to the occasional transcendent piece, Get Out and Invisible Man, Mandy, The Lighthouse, Come to Daddy, concepts that only work on a budget cheaper than a 2 bedroom 2 bath condo in the Bay area. It's worse with video games because yeah, the "gamer" mentality is too homogenous for there to be a uniform opinion. The horror was a roadblock in FEAR, nobody cares about the spooky little girl or unskippable cutscenes in between slow motion dive kicking clone soldiers in office hallways. Everyone's favorite part of Dead Space was cutting off limbs so gently caress it, downplay the atmosphere and tension and invite a friend to cut some mutant legs off. So now people with zero budget are trying to reinvent horror but the messaging is so mixed by decades of what a horror game should be but ultimately fail at. You can't recreate Silent Hill or Resident Evil on an indie budget and the Silent Hill franchise is so poisoned I don't want to either. And nobody wants to pay twenty bucks for a 2 hour experience even though I'm adamant no horror game ever has benefited from being a longer experience. Conversations in horror game dev communities have basically landed on that the "savior" of horror games is the collective: things like DreadX, Haunted PS1, and Puppet Combo's new Torture Star Video label. The wiles of capitalism create a natural distaste for trying a short, experimental game that costs a cup of Starbucks coffee but package it altogether like the Weird Tales of old and not just distantly curate it but cultivate its direction and now you're seeing far fewer "collect the 8 scattered pages of my porno plz" games that were shat out on Steam to quickly turn around a few hundred dollars at no investment.
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Oct 29, 2020 17:17
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The Haunted PS1 Demo Disc was basically a glimpse into the future of indie horror games
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Oct 29, 2020 17:24
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Morpheus posted:Man, so many eldritch horror video games are so dull with what they imagine 'eldritch' to be (I mean, yeah eldritch beings being unfathomable and all but anyway). Agreed. It's always Cthulhu who isn't even the most entertaining Lovecraft monster. But it's always deep ones and tentacles and Cthulhu at the end
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Oct 29, 2020 17:28
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Cthulhu can be perfectly interesting and/or horrifying, but just like with everything else, it depends on presentation. I don't really think most devs drawing on the content of cosmic horror understand how the affect works, emotionally or psychologically. Hell, even Frictional kinda proved this with Amnesia: Rebirth. Even if you liked the game, the plot and themes felt like a giant waste of cosmic horror potential.
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Oct 29, 2020 17:53
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Magrunner was kind of dope but it was more pleasant than scary to have a planet-sized Cthulu cheer me on as I solved block puzzles
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Oct 29, 2020 17:56
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Hungry posted:Cthulhu can be perfectly interesting and/or horrifying, but just like with everything else, it depends on presentation. I don't really think most devs drawing on the content of cosmic horror understand how the affect works, emotionally or psychologically. Hell, even Frictional kinda proved this with Amnesia: Rebirth. Even if you liked the game, the plot and themes felt like a giant waste of cosmic horror potential. The problem with Cthulhu is that it's just a real big guy with an octopus head. Hell you can drive through him with a boat. Like, sure, he's scary, but not because of cosmic horror, but because he's a big monster that can, like, smoosh you. The worst part about him is that he's understandable. And nowadays he's so played out that he's more a mascot.
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Oct 29, 2020 18:04
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