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RE7 has legit good sound design. Being intended for VR there are random positional ambient noises and even just playing on the couch I had to stop to peak around especially in Margie’s area where she’s largely the only threat.
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Feb 1, 2021 12:34
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Wanderer posted:Nope. You're really living down to that red text.  Silent Hill as a series is really still a golden calf for a lot of people, isn't it? Even though hardly anyone could name more than two games of the entire 10+ length series that they think is good enough to justify its reputation. I think that speaks to the fact that it might be time to stop trying to recapture something that exists in our memories more than in reality at this point.
Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 14:47
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Cardiovorax posted:
The team silent ones are good, yes even 4. The ones after that are not. What's hard to understand about this? The western developed ones may as well be a separate IP. Weird that you went with 2 games when most SH fans at least love 1-3 with 4 being divisive. No one really gives a gently caress about the games after team silent were disbanded and the licence was farmed off, you're right about that and won't get much argument. Regarde Aduck fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 14:54
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Cardiovorax posted:
i can name three
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Feb 1, 2021 14:59
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SH4 still had one of my favourite moments in the series, when you (don't know why I'm spoiling this but whatever) finally unlock the chains barring your apartment, after going through hellish worlds of decay to get to this point, finally escaping....and finding yourself back in one of those very worlds you just traversed through, a SH-version of your apartment building of course, absolutely hopeless. It was such a fitting result for this horrific world you're trapped in, such a perfect event horizon of lost hope. Of course, because it's a video game, you get up, go through the last level, fight the final boss. But the game could've ended there and, apart from some lingering plot threads, would've been thematically fitting.
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Feb 1, 2021 15:34
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I hated SH4 so much, it sucks a lot of good ideas are locked behind it. Morpheus posted:SH4 still had one of my favourite moments in the series, when you (don't know why I'm spoiling this but whatever) finally unlock the chains barring your apartment, after going through hellish worlds of decay to get to this point, finally escaping....and finding yourself back in one of those very worlds you just traversed through, a SH-version of your apartment building of course, absolutely hopeless. It was such a fitting result for this horrific world you're trapped in, such a perfect event horizon of lost hope. I hated the apartments most of all! I am a sucker for “the beginning is actually the end” trope in video games and it was extra creepy the villain’s corpse is in your room the entire time but drat do I never want to subject myself to that slog of a game again.
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Feb 1, 2021 15:41
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al-azad posted:I hated SH4 so much, it sucks a lot of good ideas are locked behind it.  If I could give out do-over cards to build on games with good ideas but awful execution, SH4 would be near the top of my list. Shattered Memories is on there too, I feel like the game was a decade too early and way underbudget to really do the "what you look at determines how the plot plays out justice." Also the ice theme otherworld rocked, we need more like it.
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Feb 1, 2021 15:47
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The issue imo with The Medium's atmosphere is that any danger that you might be in is all smoke and mirrors. It becomes very clear early on that A) You cannot fight without the very limited Light power up, which means that you will always have access to it when you need it, so resource management is nonexistent. B) The majority of things that can kill you like the bugs are just abnormally stabby locked doors with the key being Light C) The chase scene has the one part where the monster teleports and comes directly at you when you have no way to dodge without knowing in advance, so it sets the expectation that you'll just die and restart for monster sections The key part of games that it is trying to crib is that they do the puzzles and the dangerous oppressive atmosphere simultaneously. But not only did Bloober team not do that, it made the fact that they weren't doing that a major part of the design of the game.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:21
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CuddleCryptid posted:The issue imo with The Medium's atmosphere is that any danger that you might be in is all smoke and mirrors. It becomes very clear early on that Exactly this. The game had a great set up but after the first encounter with the monster, you really lose any tension.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:28
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https://twitter.com/re_games/status/1356391885816823808?s=21
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Feb 2, 2021 16:21
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Cardiovorax posted:Even though hardly anyone could name more than two games of the entire 10+ length series that they think is good enough to justify its reputation. lol what, most anyone that likes or talks about SH could tell you 1-2-3-4 for the easy points, Homecoming because of the most well known "It's bad"-s SH, Downpour because it's sometimes divisive but also gets a lot of griping or apologetics, fewer people might name Origins and Book of Memories but even those have their talk, ShatMemz often gets talked about for having neat ideas in a kind of hacky package and griping about "I looked at these things and the game decided I was a sex fiend" and similar. What in the world are you talking about.
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Feb 2, 2021 17:26
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Yardbomb posted:lol what, most anyone that likes or talks about SH could tell you 1-2-3-4 for the easy points, Homecoming because of the most well known "It's bad"-s SH, Downpour because it's sometimes divisive but also gets a lot of griping or apologetics, fewer people might name Origins and Book of Memories but even those have their talk, ShatMemz often gets talked about for having neat ideas in a kind of hacky package and griping about "I looked at these things and the game decided I was a sex fiend" and similar. What in the world are you talking about. I think the big takeaway from Silent Hill now, is that people want the Japanese prospective on horror. Since Homecoming it's been farmed out to Western developers and hasn't felt the same ever since to most people. It's funny to me, that the developers that try to ape the Silent Hill style, are all Western, I am racking my brain thinking of some Japanese developers that come up with a similar style and they are either non-existent or they just do ok and I am unfamiliar with them.
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Feb 2, 2021 17:48
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Diabetic posted:I think the big takeaway from Silent Hill now, is that people want the Japanese prospective on horror. Since Homecoming it's been farmed out to Western developers and hasn't felt the same ever since to most people. It's funny to me, that the developers that try to ape the Silent Hill style, are all Western, I am racking my brain thinking of some Japanese developers that come up with a similar style and they are either non-existent or they just do ok and I am unfamiliar with them. I feel like Silent Hill is interesting not because it's a Japanese take on horror, but because it's more like a Japanese take on a western take on horror. So, you don't have the traditional Japanese horror, but you have it influencing a more western-styled horror story and setting.
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Feb 2, 2021 18:00
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Yeah I mean in it’s time Silent Hill was a grab bag of cult Western horror tropes. Jacob’s Ladder is an obvious one, a well respected take on “it was all a dying dream” but even Silent Hill 2 is straight up Solaris with a healthy dose of Catholic guilt. So when it was time for western devs to take a shot everybody pulled from Silent Hill instead of casting a wider net so the result was a pastiche of a pastiche.
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Feb 2, 2021 18:21
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We're talking western developers not knowing how to do silent hill, but at the same time even Capcom doesn't know how to do silent hill. The strong arming of robbie the rabbit as a possible more marketable replacement to pyramid head, putting PH and his clones in every game anyways, and passing the license around like a pipe under an underpass doesn't lead to good things. I mean what is this https://twitter.com/pcgamer/status/1356157399384645632?s=19 VVV Right, Konami, mixed them up CuddleCryptid fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 19:07
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Silent Hill is Konami's wank doll. Resident Evil, with the 9 foot 6 vampire lady, is owned by Capcom.
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Feb 2, 2021 19:21
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Diabetic posted:I think the big takeaway from Silent Hill now, is that people want the Japanese prospective on horror. Since Homecoming it's been farmed out to Western developers and hasn't felt the same ever since to most people. It's funny to me, that the developers that try to ape the Silent Hill style, are all Western, I am racking my brain thinking of some Japanese developers that come up with a similar style and they are either non-existent or they just do ok and I am unfamiliar with them. I dunno if it’s “Japanese take on horror” as much as there is a big empty space in the market for games that create & effectively leverage a sense of the uncanny that comes with feeling like you’ve kinda slipped behind the scenes of reality. Sorta like the alien feeling that can come with doing urbex alone and finding a large industrial spot abandoned and/or partially reclaimed by nature. Japanese horror media plays with it a lot though, so I get the connection. Stalker did a good job in this regard, I think? It’s been years since I played it.
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Feb 2, 2021 19:34
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mysterious frankie posted:I dunno if it’s “Japanese take on horror” as much as there is a big empty space in the market for games that create & effectively leverage a sense of the uncanny that comes with feeling like you’ve kinda slipped behind the scenes of reality. Sorta like the alien feeling that can come with doing urbex alone and finding a large industrial spot abandoned and/or partially reclaimed by nature. Japanese horror media plays with it a lot though, so I get the connection. "feeling like you’ve kinda slipped behind the scenes of reality." - I love this description; it perfectly sums up the uncanny feeling for me.
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Feb 2, 2021 19:53
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mysterious frankie posted:I dunno if it’s “Japanese take on horror” as much as there is a big empty space in the market for games that create & effectively leverage a sense of the uncanny that comes with feeling like you’ve kinda slipped behind the scenes of reality. Sorta like the alien feeling that can come with doing urbex alone and finding a large industrial spot abandoned and/or partially reclaimed by nature. Japanese horror media plays with it a lot though, so I get the connection. I think it also has to do with the scenes that the games are set in. You get American horror games and they are set in haunted prisons or spaceships or creepy cult run towns. You get Japanese ones and they're set in schools or bowling alleys or apartment buildings. The familiarity is what makes it scary, most people aren't super familiar with prisons. You can't effectively engage with the spaces between if you aren't intimately familiar with what it is normally. As an example the other way, I feel like this is why Silent Hill worked and Siren didn't, beside Siren being in general harder to play. It relied a lot more on the familiarity of people who are familiar with those kinds of woodland villages as a cultural marker, and we don't really have those in the west. On the other hand, I wonder what kind of reception games like The Long Dark get in the sunshine states. It's probably just another survival game in most places, but for me it's more of a horror game at times, because my life experiences in the north is one that I've had a couple times in my life when I've been far out in the woods and have realized I'm a little too cold and I might have a problem. It resonates far more when it is something you have seen irl. CuddleCryptid fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 20:07
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Most people aren’t familiar with spaceships either but Alien is scary because it’s a grotesque perverse humanoid stalking blue collar truckers while their corporate overlords condemn them to death to study the thing. The familiarity is in the details, less the setting. The first Siren works because it’s regular people caught up in something alien invading their home. The sequel less so as it dives into cults and more tangible explanations of its horror.
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Feb 2, 2021 20:30
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al-azad posted:Yeah I mean in it’s time Silent Hill was a grab bag of cult Western horror tropes. Jacob’s Ladder is an obvious one, a well respected take on “it was all a dying dream” but even Silent Hill 2 is straight up Solaris with a healthy dose of Catholic guilt. So when it was time for western devs to take a shot everybody pulled from Silent Hill instead of casting a wider net so the result was a pastiche of a pastiche. Silent Hill 2 was famously inspired by Twin Peaks, which is itself probably the single most influential piece of outside media in video games.
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Feb 2, 2021 20:36
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al-azad posted:Most people aren’t familiar with spaceships either but Alien is scary because it’s a grotesque perverse humanoid stalking blue collar truckers while their corporate overlords condemn them to death to study the thing. See, I disagree with this, I believe that if you took Alien and shot for shot set it in a more familiar setting then it would have not have made it worse, and possible would have been better. At the end of the day a lot of the mechanisms of that movie are space magic. The spaceship was mostly there to justify the existence of the alien. Sure you have something like Event Horizon that cannot function without the setting, but there's a reason why something like The Thing never got farmed our for action sequels.
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Feb 2, 2021 20:39
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I think there's fundamentally a difference between the experience of the uncanny--where the details are ALMOST matching to the familiar but slightly askew--and the experience of a fantastical setting that aims to be relatable through small details. Both are totally valid ways to frame horror! But even if you distill Alien down to the idea of "they're space truckers"... most people aren't truckers. It completely lacks an element of the uncanny. This is why contrasting Silent Hill versus say the Fatal Frame or Siren games is interesting, because you do or don't get that strong uncanny response based on how much familiarity you have with the setting, even though in both cases you have "realistic" residential settings and not a spaceship or whatever.
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Feb 2, 2021 21:00
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Cardiovorax posted:
if you measure a series by the quantity of its successes vs flops then I have bad news about the entire horror genre edit: bad news about Alien, in fact Lunatic Sledge fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 22:15
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to contribute actual content I 100% agree a chunk of the Retro/New/Indie Silent Hill problem is that people are going for surface takes on the game--like, sometimes you have to go back to go forward, and I think studying the sources of SH and SH2 is a better bet for developing a winner compared to just, copying SH2 texture for texture like, understanding where it all came from and why those design decisions were made would go a long way to fixing a lot of the problems in newer attempts at the genre, but ALSO when you do that kind of digging sometimes you stumble across something that wasn't used, or a new angle, or you otherwise start to build a sort of creative parallel to your inspiration instead of just throwing things atop it. It's honestly good advice for anybody trying to imitate anything: look into what the thing you are imitating imitated edit after having a smoke and not wanting to triple post: even if the Silent Hill well has run dry, the things that made it are still ripe for horror; you can mine the most currently relevant and still terrifying parts out of Dean Koontz, Twin Peaks, Jacob's Ladder, The Box Man and whatever else, follow the blueprints and sculpt your own new horror game in the same mold. A lot of the SH sequels and not-quite-remakes focus too much on copying SH's homework, so to speak Lunatic Sledge fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 22:24
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Step one of making a good horror game in 2021: Take your AAA rendering engine and toss it in the bin. Alternatively make sure that your board members are 100% OK with some players never really seeing the big fancy textures that you spent 100k designing. The Medium suffers from this heavily, every goddamn inch of that game has a spotlight shining down on it.
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Feb 2, 2021 22:39
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CuddleCryptid posted:I think it also has to do with the scenes that the games are set in. You get American horror games and they are set in haunted prisons or spaceships or creepy cult run towns. You get Japanese ones and they're set in schools or bowling alleys or apartment buildings. The familiarity is what makes it scary, most people aren't super familiar with prisons. You can't effectively engage with the spaces between if you aren't intimately familiar with what it is normally. It doesn't necessarily have to be a commonplace setting you're used to though. As a teenager I had never been in a factory or a mental institution, but standing in abandoned ones in the middle of the day I still felt this really eerie sense that I hadn't so much travelled back in time,, as I had found my way into an abandoned and used up bit of world, and being there was sort of waking it up. I feel like any space meant to be\have been used by a human- even places that have never existed- can evoke that, but the developer has to know what they're trying to say and not have it be "I also like Silent Hill!"
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Feb 3, 2021 00:25
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I loved Siren's atmosphere and setting precisely because it felt true to life- I've never been to one of those towns, but Hanuda was very convincing to me as a "real" place, and a lived-in one; and I liked the way it effectively evoked a real place full of real people to which and to whom something terrible had happened and was continuing to happen.
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Feb 3, 2021 04:32
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CuddleCryptid posted:See, I disagree with this, I believe that if you took Alien and shot for shot set it in a more familiar setting then it would have not have made it worse, and possible would have been better. At the end of the day a lot of the mechanisms of that movie are space magic. The spaceship was mostly there to justify the existence of the alien. Sure you have something like Event Horizon that cannot function without the setting, but there's a reason why something like The Thing never got farmed our for action sequels. At first I was about to partially agree with this, because it made me start thinking about about how the entire reason they bleed acid is reliant on "We need a reason they can't just shoot them that isn't 'LOL alien is as tough as the terminator!'" "Well they are in a space ship, holes in ships are bad. Make it make holes in ship if you shoot it". And then I remembered Alien 3 exists. Prison setting other people were posting as 'Western horror setting'. Which means a checkmark for not in a space ship=better. Nobody able to simply just shoot the goddamned alien because they don't even HAVE guns (but it still bleeds acid) so it is TWICE the handicaps on already weak humans vs the monster, which as we all know is the same thing as natural helplessness. They even threw in a dead kid, there were no dead kids in the original Alien. ...Yeah I don't think "On a space ship. Y/N" is a problem anymore. EDIT: This probably goes a lot towards my caveman view feelings about the Aliens franchise that "The times Xenomorphs are most scary are when the victims COULD, in a legitimate scenario, take them on. But everyone is dying anyways, often due to the cruel intentions of others wasting their chance at survival". Alien and Aliens you have people who could have done something about it or even prevented it, but their corporate overlords wanted them to fail. There are actual stakes involved that raise tension because it isn't trying to rely entirely on "helpless victims=profit" Section Z fucked around with this message at 10:05 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 09:47
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SH 3>2>1>shatmemz>4>down>home>0
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Feb 3, 2021 19:53
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CuddleCryptid posted:Step one of making a good horror game in 2021: Take your AAA rendering engine and toss it in the bin. Alternatively make sure that your board members are 100% OK with some players never really seeing the big fancy textures that you spent 100k designing. silent hill 3 was especially good at this, both with the sound cues posted earlier and totally inexplicable/pointless areas like the mirror room gives you the constant impression that the otherworld is also busily torturing anyone else caught within its sphere of influence and you're just glimpsing the edges of what it has in store
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Feb 3, 2021 20:02
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Relin posted:SH 3>2>1>shatmemz>4>down>home>0 I'd say 3=2 at best, but otherwise 
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Feb 3, 2021 20:06
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I got lost in the fog at the top of a Japanese mountain once and Siren is v realistic.
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Feb 3, 2021 20:43
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Oxxidation posted:silent hill 3 was especially good at this, both with the sound cues posted earlier and totally inexplicable/pointless areas like the mirror room Yeah, there's a weight to the atmosphere of silent hill that most horror games can never really tap into. That said it was kind of eyeopening seeing the libraries yamaoka used, most of the ambient music in 2 is just largely unaltered tracks ripped from them. edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpsXD_kCurQ tracking down the video and watching it again I was probably being unfair, he definitely made the base tracks more striking, interesting nonetheless. lurker2006 fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 22:18
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Given how half of Yamaoka's songs are amazing and the other half is saucepan ice skating I have a sneaking suspicion that he just makes a poo poo ton of all kinds of vaguely spooky songs and then developers just pick and choose. Of course the songs they use are great, he made ten thousand of them.
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Feb 3, 2021 22:24
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CuddleCryptid posted:Given how half of Yamaoka's songs are amazing and the other half is saucepan ice skating I have a sneaking suspicion that he just makes a poo poo ton of all kinds of vaguely spooky songs and then developers just pick and choose. I would absolutely buy an album of Silent Hill Music That Ended Up Pretty Good But Just Didn't Fit The Game Really, feat. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn
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Feb 3, 2021 22:30
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There’s an artist I follow called Avith Ortega that makes vaguely Silent Hilly music and it’s all good.
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Feb 4, 2021 01:15
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Should take a page from the guy who did the Resident Evil OST. Claim to be deaf, yet miraculously create memorable music. By stealing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kcF7E69C6Q
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Feb 4, 2021 03:06
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I watched a playthrough of The Medium and I couldn't understand why there was so much hype over such an aggressively boring game. Then out of curiosity I checked out what the critics had to say about it and now I can't stop laughing. 
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Feb 4, 2021 17:14
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I lost interest in the Medium after the first couple hours. Got to the spooky hide from the scary man part and wasn’t particularly feeling that invested in the setting. Maybe I would have continued if I spent actual $$$ instead of it just being a Gamepass game.
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Feb 4, 2021 17:48
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