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I really agree with that. Some people insist that difficulty and the threat of death are necessary for a horror game to really be scary, but I'm of the opinion that after you've gone through any given section for the third time, any sense of atmosphere or tension goes right out the window. It's like the water demon in Amnesia: the first time you do it, it's terrifying as hell and you have no idea what to expect. By the third time, you just want to get done with it as fast as possible. The only fear left to it is the that of failing at a difficuklt section and having to it all over yet again.
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Mar 23, 2019 19:26
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Cardiovorax posted:I really agree with that. Some people insist that difficulty and the threat of death are necessary for a horror game to really be scary, but I'm of the opinion that after you've gone through any given section for the third time, any sense of atmosphere or tension goes right out the window. It's like the water demon in Amnesia: the first time you do it, it's terrifying as hell and you have no idea what to expect. By the third time, you just want to get done with it as fast as possible. The only fear left to it is the that of failing at a difficuklt section and having to it all over yet again. Agreed. Nothing makes a game less scary than dying to the same boss over and over. I was finding resident evil 7 scary until I got to the chainsaw fight and lost 20 times in a row (and then learned to be patient and get good). But after that, it really didn't scare me. Ideally, a game makes you think you're gonna die, but the danger is an illusion. Horror games really fall apart in terms of horror once you learn the mechanics of the game.
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Mar 23, 2019 19:48
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quote:Ideally, a game makes you think you're gonna die, but the danger is an illusion.
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Mar 23, 2019 19:55
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al-azad posted:I hope there are werewolves in the new game because WoD werewolves are huge and even the strongest vampire is rightfully cautious. You encounter one briefly in the original but it's a scripted moment. Then you meet Nines after he fights one and he's a bit roughed up but you should see the other guy whose gigantic severed head is resting on the bed next to Nines
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Mar 23, 2019 19:57
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Amnesia did a neat thing with its difficulty where if you die to a monster then it shuffles up the location of existing monsters while saving whatever progress you made. I don't know the details behind it but I noticed in the tougher sections, like the poisoned torture area near the end, monsters that patrolled a path were no longer there when I respawned. The game never let me brute force a challenge because the monster still existed and would inevitably be in my path, but it's like they designed it to let you get back to where you died faster which had the effect of easing frustration while maintaining the tension because you still don't know when a monster will appear. Yomawari did a similar thing. There are scripted challenges at certain locations but it seems like the monsters patrolling the streets are shuffled around which makes it extra effective when you charge through an area you thought was clear.
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Mar 23, 2019 21:19
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I'm gonna second the whole hotel isn't that scary in bloodlines thing. Like it's definitely a really cool part of that game don't get me wrong, a lot of good atmosphere and everything, but like, 90% of that level is of an axe wielding maniac appearing and disappearing which is pretty spooky but low impact, and random furniture bring thrown at you which is again, kind of tense because any object might be a weapon to be used against you but is not scary. You're an immortal vampire, it's hard for axe murderers and poltergeist shenanigans to be scary. Then again this is also long after that game was current.
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Mar 23, 2019 22:01
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What about the cradle in thief, I remember reading that that was a really scary area (I forget which thief game it was in though)
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Mar 23, 2019 22:05
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It was definitely creepy, but I think the Ocean House sequence is scarier, simply because it's basically the quintessential horror movie experience, but you are the hapless victim that really should've known better but went into the haunted house anyway. I didn't feel all that mighty or immortal when I was ashed by the contents of a kitchen going crazy, I'll say that much. The Shalebridge Cradle, on the other hand, is not as involved of an experience, and you spend so much time going back and forth that it can kind of lose its charm.
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Mar 23, 2019 22:08
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I only died in the ocean house when I got hit by a lamp that then bounced in the corner a bit hitting me multiple times in the process resulting in me getting insta killed. Just *bonk* YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED FINAL DEATH
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Mar 23, 2019 22:37
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I got killed by the falling chandelier ("OH HEY THINGIE IS DOING SOMETHING, MUST LOOK UP AND WATCH.  "), in the kitchen when I couldn't figure out how to leave it the first time around, and I died to the purple flames on the third floor. Yes, those actually burn. There's a surprising amount of stuff in that section that can kill you.
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Mar 23, 2019 22:39
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The whole sequence kinda lost its legitimacy when the lady wrote like "oh no he's breaking in! Someone help me! Someone he--" in a notebook that was handwritten. The second I actually thought about how that would work, the whole sequence became a slapstick with spooky music
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Mar 23, 2019 22:46
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Danaru posted:The whole sequence kinda lost its legitimacy when the lady wrote like "oh no he's breaking in! Someone help me! Someone he--" in a notebook that was handwritten. The second I actually thought about how that would work, the whole sequence became a slapstick with spooky music South Park Stick of Truth had a great bit about this where a guy on a spaceship leaves a bunch of awkward audio logs scattered around, but it's more fun when you don't question Candlejack logic. Just accept the villain is kind enough to document your sente--
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Mar 23, 2019 22:51
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It always kind of bothers me when people criticize that trope because it seems such a petty complaint. People point at things like that RE2make file in the sewers and make jokes about how the guy must have died on his enter key, as if in this here game about wall-crawling skinless super-zombies, this is the part that's just so incredibly unrealistic that suspension of disbelief simply can't be maintained any longer. There are only so many ways to signify to the player that "oh gently caress, bad poo poo is happening here right now" in a past situation without giving it the full Bioshock treatment and having fully voiced and modeled flashback scenes, but those are expensive as hell and don't really fit in every game to begin with, so you can't just put them everywhere.
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Mar 23, 2019 23:11
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I understand but it's such an easy fix to add quote:[...]is coming to kill me. Whoever finds this, tell or something to that effect - you can have the soon to be deceased try to write their last words, without it being about the fact that they are about to be axed/burned/staked/... double nine fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Mar 23, 2019 |
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Mar 23, 2019 23:17
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Yeah, not saying that there aren't (of course) more or less clumsy ways to do it. I just think people get hung up on this entirely out of proportion with how big of a deal it really is. Saying that it's enough to ruin the entire Ocean House sequence for you is really a major overreaction, I think.
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Mar 24, 2019 00:39
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Cardiovorax posted:It always kind of bothers me when people criticize that trope because it seems such a petty complaint. People point at things like that RE2make file in the sewers and make jokes about how the guy must have died on his enter key, as if in this here game about wall-crawling skinless super-zombies, this is the part that's just so incredibly unrealistic that suspension of disbelief simply can't be maintained any longer. it's an instance of internal inconsistency that reminds you you're playing a game and not actually in a spooky house / police station / whatever, and having your immersion broken is one of the worst things for horror it'd be like if RE2make had invisible walls instead of huge car wrecks to keep you from wandering Raccoon City, yeah it is a solution to a problem the designers are faced with but it's one that you look at and go "oh yeah lol I guess they had to do this SOMEhow"
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Mar 24, 2019 00:57
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Lunatic Sledge posted:it's an instance of internal inconsistency that reminds you you're playing a game and not actually in a spooky house / police station / whatever, and having your immersion broken is one of the worst things for horror A lot of the weirdness with that kind of thing in the Resident Evil games really is cultural. Japanese theatrical and storytelling techniques are granted more of a suspension of disbelief by the audience, so even their movies and games tend to count on more buy-in from the viewer/player than is usually given by western audiences. The other big influence on the RE series is Italian horror movies of the 70s and 80s, and those never gave a poo poo about credibility or logic anyway.
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Mar 24, 2019 01:04
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Dunno. I think at some point, I think you just have to accept that it's a core conceit of video games that people write down random stuff and leave behind single diary pages all over the place, despite the fact that they really have no business being anywhere. It doesn't really make less sense than Chief Irons talking about "locking up the pigs" on a scrap of paper and then leaving it literally lying on a table within sight of them. Not to say that cutscenes and "ghost flashbacks" aren't just categorically superior, because there's of course better and worse ways to do it. On the whole, though, I think this more on the level of a pet peeve that people are really just giving too much attention to.
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Mar 24, 2019 01:05
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Deadguy2322 posted:A lot of the weirdness with that kind of thing in the Resident Evil games really is cultural. Japanese theatrical and storytelling techniques are granted more of a suspension of disbelief by the audience, so even their movies and games tend to count on more buy-in from the viewer/player than is usually given by western audiences. The other big influence on the RE series is Italian horror movies of the 70s and 80s, and those never gave a poo poo about credibility or logic anyway. Yeah, "itchy scratchy" is a total embodiment of the death note trope but it works so well. How did this guy have the cognitive reasoning to talk about eating someone's face and then hid in the closet for however long while transforming into a zombie is exactly why that scene is unnerving.
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Mar 24, 2019 01:25
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Y'all are talking like people writing "he's going to kill me! He's right here next to me with the blade coming down! Oh no I'm about to be stabbed!" hasnt been a thing since Lovecraft himself put pen to paper.
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Mar 24, 2019 05:42
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The Keeper's Diary from Resident Evil is one of the best pieces of world building in any game, and al-azad posted:Yeah, "itchy scratchy" is a total embodiment of the death note trope but it works so well. How did this guy have the cognitive reasoning to talk about eating someone's face and then hid in the closet for however long while transforming into a zombie is exactly why that scene is unnerving. hits the nail on the head. quote:May 9, 1998 That's the poo poo. And this is the original version from the goofy PSX original RE and not the remake, which still kept the final two entries although it splits the May 19th one into two parts, with the second half being written two days later for no apparent reason. Also, the version from the RE5 Lost in Nightmares expansion is garbage so don't even bother looking it up.
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Mar 24, 2019 05:59
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Lovecraft had some awesome ideas but he whiffed hard on just as much. I can never read a diary entry that includes "He's coming in now oh please god no he's about to-" without immediately thinking of the Monty Python "Castle AAAAARGHHHH" gag. There's one point in the Hollywood Sewers of Bloodlines where a municipal worker literally writes "they're coming for me! Ahhhhh! Aaaaahhhhhghg!" like he was in the process of writing as he was devoured by tzimisce homonculi. It's a trope that comes across as very amateurish and heavy-handed.
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Mar 24, 2019 06:01
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Wasn't there a Castlevania game that did something with that? You find all these scrolls depicting dying adventurer's thoughts, and one of them says something like "These scrolls that record your final thoughts are bullsh--arrrrrrrrrgh"
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Mar 24, 2019 08:06
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DeathChicken posted:The hotel in Bloodlines is still the scariest drat thing I've ever experienced in a game. Just something about playing this big, immortal fancypants vampire, then suddenly you're running into an *other* that you can't fight back against and will aggro damage you to pieces I've always heard about the Hotel but I never played Bloodlines. I've probably asked about it before somewhere, maybe not SA, but what was it about the level that made it so scary? Speaking of which, did anyone play Thief 3? The Shalebridge Cradle hosed me up something fierce when I played however many years ago; I played a lot in the evenings and, being Thief, everything was at Night. It fit well, but I remember the Cradle having a foggy grey hue to it and that day I was pulling an all-nighter playing Thief 3 and lo and behold the early morning hours of a cloudy day matched the colors on my old monitor perfectly. It was a immersive as you could get in the mid 2000s. That loving level did me in and I can't even remember much about it or why, the most I remember was backstabbing one of the things in there thinking I was free from it patrolling, I went down a hall and turned around to see it charging my rear end and it scared the gently caress out of me. I finished the level and knocked the gently caress out, because I didn't expect the level to live up to the hype that I read about it (it even has it's own god drat Wikipedia page) and I played through that game just to experience it first hand. It owned.
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Mar 24, 2019 10:39
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quote:I've always heard about the Hotel but I never played Bloodlines. I've probably asked about it before somewhere, maybe not SA, but what was it about the level that made it so scary? Imagine you're climbing up from the sewers. You come out at this dilapidated-looking construction site as ominous background music starts playing. Nobody's there, but everything looks like they could've been there just minutes ago. Tools and machinery are standing around as if people just left from one moment to the next, nobody even bothered packing stuff up. You explore the area a bit, but there's nothing really there. You're already wondering what could've driven them off, and if maybe your employers didn't tell you everything. You walk up to the door. Locked. Where could the key be? There's a small construction shack by the backhoe, looks like there isn't anywhere else to go. You check and yup, there's the key, hanging on board on the wall. Then you hear a rumbling. Alright, what's going on? The rumbling gets louder and OH poo poo THERE'S A GODAWFUL CRASH YOU ACTIVATE FORTITUDE AND SPRINT OUTSIDE AND holy gently caress something set the backhoe on you and tried to run you over with it, it crashed right into the wall of the little foreman's shack. Man, this ghost thing might not be as safe they told you it was. Oh well, at least you've got your key now. You walk up to the stairs again, ready youself to enter the Ocean House proper... And then lightbulb next to you explodes. This basically sets the mood for the rest of the area. The effects get more and more vicious and violent as the ghosts become more agitated by your presence. Basically speaking, I'm not kidding when I say it's like something right out of a Poltergeist movie. Imagine something essentially just like that, but in first person and with you as the protagonist. Shadows, visions, ominous writing on the wall, aggressive furniture, the works really. It's nothing special in terms of what it does, or at least it wouldn't be, if it didn't come so completely out of nowhere and wasn't so effectively timed. This is really important to keep in mind: you really don't see this coming. This is a horror-themed game, but it's not horror, and the first time you go into the Ocean House, you absolutely don't expect what's going to happen. It's easy to start panicking and get caught up in the atmosphere. It slowly ramps up and gets more and more intense until it culminates in you frantically sprinting through a burnt-out corridor as the spectral memories of a major fire lap at your heels and you just barely dodge a falling elevator on your way to finally fleeing from this godforsaken place. Really gets the adrenaline pumping. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 11:02 on Mar 24, 2019 |
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Mar 24, 2019 10:53
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Morpheus posted:Y'all are talking like people writing "he's going to kill me! He's right here next to me with the blade coming down! Oh no I'm about to be stabbed!" hasnt been a thing since Lovecraft himself put pen to paper. Kinda off-tangent but there’s a Poe story “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and the follow-up “The Predicament” where he parodied what was popular in Gothic Horror at the time. In the first story an editor for a famous magazine suggests an author go have a brush with death, in the second story the author does just this via a huge clock tower and keeps narrating the story despite losing her head.
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Mar 24, 2019 14:33
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Silhouette posted:That's the poo poo. And this is the original version from the goofy PSX original RE and not the remake, which still kept the final two entries although it splits the May 19th one into two parts, with the second half being written two days later for no apparent reason.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:07
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SelenicMartian posted:There's also the fork log in Bioforge, belonging to that blue guy most people probably kill with his own severed arm. Wait can you NOT kill him with his own severed arm?
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Mar 24, 2019 16:09
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You can use fists but like. Why would you?
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Mar 24, 2019 16:14
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Aw I thought there was a way to spare him 
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Mar 24, 2019 16:21
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Cardiovorax posted:Haha, and all the people over in tradgames were completely freaking out back when Paradox bought the World of Darkness series of IPs. So much for that. Yeah, ha ha, that definitely hasn't gotten hosed six ways from Sunday, ha ha.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:22
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The best weapon in the game is kicking everyone. Including the cyber raptor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZPnXFB0nuY
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Mar 24, 2019 16:25
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EDIT: Whoops, wrong thread, how scary.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:27
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It's hard to capture just how scary and advanced the Ocean House level felt back in 2006. This is before Amnesia, before people were streaming horror games, before there even really were any modern horror games on PC. Sure it's a cheesy funhouse NOW but back then it was something we had never seen before. It's part of what made Bloodlines such a great game. It still had that feeling of mystery, that sense of not know what's coming around the corner. Most games today, good or bad, you know exactly what you're getting. Ocean House was legitimately surprising and that was the scariest part of all.
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Mar 24, 2019 17:17
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An important thing to mention about Bloodlines is that it's a buggy piece of poo poo that wouldn't even launch unless I tracked down a fan mod to patch it.
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Mar 24, 2019 17:39
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friendly 2 da void posted:It's hard to capture just how scary and advanced the Ocean House level felt back in 2006. This is before Amnesia, before people were streaming horror games, before there even really were any modern horror games on PC. That's why I like playing games everyone dismisses, I never know what the hell is going to happen. Obscure awkward games like Ghosthunter, Licensed games like Green Lantern, Bolt and Over the Hedge, all do interesting plot things or fun gameplay things and it's like I never stop discovering things. Everyone knows what to expect from a popular RPG or horror game because everyone talks about it, like the Chainsaw Duel from RE7 or the Tower of Babel in Xenogears, but very few people know of Bolt climbing on the outside of a rocket to pull it apart piece by piece, that the characters in Over the Hedge can collect cute hats that give stat boosts and are fighting a pest control company that literally controls the pests with mind control, the amazing story of Ghosthunter's Swamp or the unique take on Green Lantern where Sinestro at no point turns evil.
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Mar 24, 2019 18:19
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Had any game done a thing yet where you keep finding journals with “Oh no he’s gonna he m-“ stuff and it keeps happening, only for the reveal to be that the killer is a silly sick gently caress who intentionally finishes their victim’s journals?
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Mar 24, 2019 23:45
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Black August posted:Had any game done a thing yet where you keep finding journals with “Oh no he’s gonna he m-“ stuff and it keeps happening, only for the reveal to be that the killer is a silly sick gently caress who intentionally finishes their victim’s journals? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJfowXTXOfU
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Mar 25, 2019 00:02
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Morpheus posted:Y'all are talking like people writing "he's going to kill me! He's right here next to me with the blade coming down! Oh no I'm about to be stabbed!" hasnt been a thing since Lovecraft himself put pen to paper. We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying-ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. Looking toward the giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnamable” and “unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology—preferably those of the Congregationalists, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.
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Mar 25, 2019 01:19
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 02:01 |
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:Kinda off-tangent but there’s a Poe story “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and the follow-up “The Predicament” where he parodied what was popular in Gothic Horror at the time. In the first story an editor for a famous magazine suggests an author go have a brush with death, in the second story the author does just this via a huge clock tower and keeps narrating the story despite losing her head. I'm going to also recommend this because the two stories, especially back to back, are hilarious. I kinda get a Mark Twain feel from them. Never Bet the Devil Your Head as well.
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Mar 25, 2019 02:42
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