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Well heck, if we're talking about horror games, let's look at the game that the sort of person who fancies himself a game historian would probably say invented the whole survival horror genre: Sweet Home A group of documentarians enter a famous abandoned mansion to photograph the frescoes, but are trapped inside by an evil spirit and its monster minions. They must explore the house, solve puzzles, fight monsters, watch doors open, and face down the evil master of the house in order to escape. Each character has a particular tool they carry, in addition to a couple of inventory slots and a weapon slot, and each tool has a use. The nurse character, for example, can cure poison, while the character with a vacuum cleaner can clear away broken glass debris. Characters who die are no longer available, though the house contains a substitute item that can be picked up by another character to fulfill their function- of course, this is at the cost of half of their inventory capacity.  The game prefigures Resident Evil, and a line in one of the notes you find lying around the mansion (see? totes survival horror) describes the mansion as a house of "residing evil", providing the later series its American name. It was never ported to the US, and English-language screenshots of the game are due to a fanpatch that came out... oh, maybe ten years ago? I remember originally you had to download the Sweet Home ROM, download the translation patch, and download a program to apply the patch. Major pain in the rear end. Nowadays I think you can just get the ROM prepatched.  As to why it never came to the US, well, aside from its being a film tie in for a cheap Japanese horror movie, there's also the graphics:   Nintendo wasn't ever going to let that poo poo get published for the American NES. So basically it's a game you probably never played, but the folks who made the 90's survival horror games, particularly Resident Evil, did. Even if the JRPG style isn't your thing, it's still very worth taking a gander at. If you're not up to playing it, there's a goon screenshot LP. There's also some Youtube Let's Plays, but they've all got some rear end in a top hat nattering on over them.
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Jul 12, 2014 15:08
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 01:06 |
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Volt Catfish posted:Hello maybe it's because I'm watching it in LP format (Hell, that's definitely why) but Fatal Frame doesn't seem anywhere near as scary as I remember people saying it was like 8 years ago. A lot of the impact of fatal Frame comes from being the person who's doing the thing. I hate to babble about immersion, but it's really about getting part of your brain to forget that you're not really standing in a haunted house letting a ghost rush you to get a better shot of it.
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Jul 12, 2014 22:01
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al-azad posted:Capcom announced another remake of Resident Evil RE2 for N654 had tank controls, but it also had the option of just pushing the stick in the direction you want to go. If you crossed a camera angle boundary, it'd keep the same joystick->in-game direction mapping until you let it return to neutral, so you didn't have to whip the stick around every time you entered a new camera angle. It worked really well.
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Aug 7, 2014 05:44
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The Dark Id's LPs of PSX/PS2 horror games are all hilarious and worth reading. Also From Earth's Silent Hill LPs are pretty good. They're all from the early days of SA LP's, before the LP forum, I think.
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Aug 14, 2014 05:39
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PantsBandit posted:Condemned is incredible and Condemned 2 somehow managed to make a horror game multiplayer and have it actually work? Which I'm still convinced was some sort of witchcraft. There's supposed to be something coming out soon where one player is a ghost and the others are being haunted, but I can't recall the name.
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Aug 14, 2014 06:22
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Realized that lately a thing I've been getting into is little indie horror games- I'm absolutely taken by World of Horror (I have a composition notebook full of notes that's basically a homemade strategy guide), I loved Faith (and am waiting for the New Blood release to play 2), and I'm working my through Dread X Collection after thoroughly enjoying most of DXC2. Right now I've got eyes on The Enigma of Salazar House, but I don't know what else is out there. Are the Puppet Combo games any good? They all kind of a seedy grindhouse look to them that puts me off.
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Oct 6, 2020 21:12
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I don't mean like film grain or whatever, there's just, IDK, a certain tone to what I've seen of Puppet Combo's stuff that I find offputting. Seems like a nice dude on Twitter though. Now that you mention it I got Night of the Consumers in the Itch bundle so I think I'll check that out tonight, thanks!
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Oct 7, 2020 02:02
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dogstile posted:VR makes everything more unnerving because its to a scale that makes your brain go "oh no, gently caress that". I did a Vive demo at a Microsoft store a couple of years ago, the one where you're standing on a sunken ship under the ocean and a blue whale comes by and checks you out? Consciously/intellectually/whatever I knew it was just a game but my low-level brain completely bought it and was going "there's something huge next to us, oh gently caress oh gently caress". Which is pretty goddamned cool!
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Oct 8, 2020 13:01
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Kuon is also crazy expensive because very, very few copies were released outside Japan. Pretty decent if you like Resident Evil but want it to be occultists fighting ghosts.
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Oct 8, 2020 23:27
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My experience so far with Phasmophobia is that if your group is friendly and on voice chat, you're going to have a good time, and if not, complete whatever objectives you can and be ready to leave once they all die in the first three hunting phases.
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Oct 10, 2020 21:01
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sigher posted:Those must have been some weird games, I can't imagine how it would work if you guys weren't talking to each other and they weren't calling the ghosts' name. It doesn't! Like I say, get what objectives you can, make your best guess based on what evidence you can get, and bolt when they all die.
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Oct 11, 2020 04:52
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It's not a product of Japan, but World of Horror is basically the boardgame Arkham Horror implemented as a roguelike, set in Japan in the mid 80's and heavily influenced by Japanese folklore and horror manga creators like Junji Ito (whose visual style is the most direct influence on the game's art style) and Kazuo Umezu. Aka Manto and the Scissor Lady are both in it. It's in Early Access but I feel that what I got when I bought it a couple of updates ago was worth the $15 and it's only been expanded and improved since. There's a Halloween update due, well, Halloween that's going to add more stuff and improve modding capabilities- the game is built to be modular and there's already a bunch of custom content for it. Also, Dread X Collection 3 is out, with $1 off the $10 sticker price for launch. Dread X Collection 2 is $7 and the first Dread X Collection is $5. Pope Guilty fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 23, 2020 22:48
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They're not great about respecting the withdrawal of consent, that's for sure.
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Oct 26, 2020 01:49
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Manager Hoyden posted:I love World of Horror and play through a standard game probably once a week at least. Guns are very rare- off the top of my head the only ways you'd get them would be stealing one from the dead cop in the 410 Billion event, as a drop from the Cultist Sniper, or by playing the hidden unlockable character, Moriko. Even if you have a gun, you won't use it often- they do a bunch of damage but ammo is scarce and any time you fire a gun you get a debuff that lasts until the current mystery ends that makes all your combat actions slower. (Also, it's Japan in 198X. Guns should be very rare.)
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Oct 26, 2020 16:17
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The biggest thing with WoH is that it's a roguelike implementation of Arkham Horror in Junji Ito clothes first and foremost. Meanwhile, Fanatical has Blood for $1!
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Oct 26, 2020 20:41
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Morpheus posted: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. Nah, what's really scary about Cthulhu has nothing to do with being a huge green monster that could eat you, though of course that's scary if you're right in front of him. What's scary about Cthulhu is that he's the leader and representative of an older order to the world, in which our values and civilization and lives mean nothing whatsoever, a being that loves reveling and shouting and killing, and so are we. Cthulhu isn't actually the threat! The story specifies that the way you can tell the stars are coming right is that humanity will become like the Old Ones: The Call of Cthulhu posted:That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. That was written and published ten years after the conclusion of World War I, which had senselessly killed millions and laid waste to huge swaths of Europe. The true horror of Cthulhu isn't that he'll rise up and destroy civilization, it's that we're already doing it, that order is already collapsing into violence and madness and chaos; Cthulhu rising doesn't bring the end so much as it's something that happens once humanity does it to each other. He only rises to rule the world once humanity becomes like him. I don't know how you actually communicate that in a video game; you can easily extract the racist parts and the tentacle aesthetics and slap them on 3D models and point the player at them, but I don't know how you make "society breaks down into chaos and violence" into game mechanics. e: Basically the horror of Cthulhu is "What if Thomas Hobbes was right, except even his solution doesn't work?" Pope Guilty fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 14:07
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I started playing the Dread X Collection 3 games and Submission is... I really want to gush about how cool it is, but there's like multiple hard twists and even talking about the mechanics would risk spoiling it? Each of the Collections has had a couple of standouts and if Submission doesn't turn out to be a standout for DXC3 I'll be shocked.
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Nov 2, 2020 17:26
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Played three more Dread X Collection 3 games, thoughts: Reactor is really more of a movie you're kind of inside? There's not really a game to it- all you're doing is just sort of walking to the place it tells you to and clicking on the thing. And that's fine, since the story and presentation are really on point. The title screen says it's a "feature", like a short film, and that's pretty descriptive. Chip's Tips is really fun! I'm a bit old for Blue's Clues but saw some of it thanks to having little cousins, so I get what he's doing, and the whole thing's right in line with the "Spoopy" theme of the collection- cute and spooky at once. It's a pretty dead-on emulation of early CD-ROM FMV edutainment garbage, though the "puzzles" all make even a little bit of sense- so in that respect I guess it's kind of inaccurate.  The one so far that I've strongly disliked is Nice Screams at the Funfair, mostly because the mechanics don't work. You're supposed to be clicking on tubs of icecream to pick up scoops and put them on a cone (and then one on the first scoop), but most of the time the scoop just bounces off the cone or the first scoop for no readily apparent reason. It'd be fine if it happened occasionally but twenty times in a row, just bouncing off the thing you're supposed to attach it to, is just frustrating and unfun. Combine that with a lot of the space you're supposed to click on to make things happen being unresponsive to clicks and it really feels like this one wasn't done.
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Nov 3, 2020 06:35
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Sometimes the ghost in Phasmophobia isn't feeling very responsive, and sometimes you ask the spirit box "Where are you?" and the ghost replies "BEHIND" and then a second later the lights go out and it immediately kills you. A++, would get exactly what I asked for again.
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Nov 11, 2020 08:27
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Thundercracker posted:People focus on the pachinko, but Konami also realized they could safely make far more money with gachas almost immediately vs Kojima's years long gamble. Pretty much the same reason Valve mostly stopped making games- why spend a moderate amount of money to make a lot of money when you could spend less money to make more money than god?
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Nov 15, 2020 00:32
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sigher posted:I wish they would make the game not look like a lovely asset flip and have a neat visual style. It's one dude that makes it, is the thing.
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Nov 30, 2020 09:33
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al-azad posted:All I have is a concept where you go through the house in three different time periods of 1980, 1995, 2010 which are rendered in Atari/PS1/the actual asset pack in visual style but I have no ideas on what the game itself should actually be about. If there was more time to work I'd say it would be funny to come up with a core concept and implement it as it would've been in each of those eras- a la Haunted House, a la Resident Evil, a la Amnesia - but maybe that would just be triple unoriginality.
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Nov 30, 2020 22:19
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Actually you could do a Day of the Tentacle thing where, for example, the Atari version has fewer walls (gotta keep things simple!) so maybe you could hop back to 1980, step through a wall that just isn't rendered, then jump forward to 2010 to get the Heart Key, then back to 1995 to use it to unlock the Heart Door.
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Nov 30, 2020 22:43
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Incidentally Horror of Salazar House (renamed for the Steam release, apparently due to fears that people would think it was more of a Myst-style game?) is pretty good! You're stuck in a ruined house where something obviously occult is going on and trying to figure out how to complete (or stop!) the ritual so you can escape, while eluding a murderous ghost who gets faster and more aggressive as you get closer to solving the mystery. It's not quite as faithful in its use of early-80's graphics as, say, Faith (there's a few effects that I don't recall that era of PC being able to accomplish) but makes excellent use of the visual style to create a creepy atmosphere. My only really significant complaint is that the mechanics of how hiding the ghost work aren't really clear and aren't well-communicated, though I don't know if that's intentional or not. I'd call it 7/10 and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what the dev does next.  
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Dec 1, 2020 01:00
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World of Horror and Phasmophobia are both games where yeah they're EA but both of their devs could abruptly quit and I'd feel like I got what I paid for.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:54
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Cardiovorax posted:Horror is what happens when a hairless money sits awake in the dark of night and starts imagining monsters for all the horrible screeching sounds that echo through the forest. It's really just a deer mating call, but god help me if something that looks like a deer should sound anything like that in a sane world. You ever hear a female cougar screaming? It sounds like a human being tortured, it's absolutely goddamned unnerving.
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Dec 16, 2020 00:25
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al-azad posted:HEEEEEEY! I'M HORNY!! WHO WANTS TO gently caress?!?! The Flatwoods monster is absolutely a barn owl, yes.
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Dec 16, 2020 11:05
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Really digging the core concept of "what if you used Breakout as the mechanics for a horror game?" Looks pretty neat! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTE7HEWgwG4
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Jan 19, 2021 03:47
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They're definitely not making Resident: the Evil Descent.
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Jan 22, 2021 19:12
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Terror is the fear you feel when something horrible is happening, dread is the fear that something horrible is going to happen, horror is the disruption of your understanding of the correct order of the universe. You think somebody is about to jump you with a knife: dread. You're being chased by somebody with a knife: terror. The guy with the knife is dead and rotting and is shouting your secret shames that nobody could possibly know: horror.
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Jan 25, 2021 01:27
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There's Dread X Collection games that I don't think work as well as I'd like them to but the only one I thought was actively bad was Nice Screams at Funfair, because it's fiddly and uncommunicative about what it actually wants from you.
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Jan 26, 2021 20:29
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Software patents are weird anyway- you can't patent an output, only the process/device used to achieve that output, but for some reason when it's computer programs you're allowed to patent vague concepts and end results?
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Jan 30, 2021 22:57
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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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I mean, you CAN play Phasmophobia solo, but, uh, I wouldn't. World of Horror is built from the ground up to be modular and moddable. When you're starting a game there's an interface where you choose which unlockables to use, and the UI is boxes of cards in a game store, like you were buying a card game and choosing which expansions to get. Everything is a "card" not because it's actually a deckbuilder but just because that's the way the modularity is framed. Custom events have been in for awhile now, and custom enemies were added in October. The plan is that eventually you'll be able to make everything up to custom Mysteries. Right now the game's in a bit of a limbo because the dev's disappeared again like he did last summer when he moved; I'm sure he'll turn up again at some point, though TBH I feel like I've already well got my $15 worth and new updates are cake. You might check the subreddit for info on already-released mods, though be aware that some of them aren't coded quite right; I downloaded some custom events awhile back that I had to go in and debug because they had errors in them. The Discord has multiple channels for modders, so you might poke around or ask there.
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Feb 9, 2021 09:08
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Lifeglug posted:Why wouldn’t you? Too spooky.
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Feb 9, 2021 14:53
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The Chad Jihad posted:I've thought that, have the cleanup crews equipment be based off of what ghost you picked during investigation so you could end up with a easy bust or a hard one depending on how accurate you are. And if not that, routing player speech through Windows speech recognition feels like a gimmick other developers are going to steal.
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Feb 10, 2021 00:11
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al-azad posted:I still vividly remember a dream where I'm in bed in a large, empty gray room with a single door attached to nothing and a Freddy Krueger type guy in a baggy coat and fedora busts down the door while instantly growing impossible large to loom over me in bed. Oh yeah it's one of the most common descriptions sleep paralysis sufferers provide of the shadow people. e: "A person is angry at their nightmares and goes into their own mind to beat up their nightmares and finally get a good night's sleep" sounds like a baller action-platformer.
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Feb 12, 2021 19:37
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I feel like if the protagonists are facing horrors and just being kind of blase about it and overcoming it like badasses, that's not horror, that's horror-themed action. You're talking about Castlevania. (This is not a complaint, I love Castlevania.)
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Feb 19, 2021 23:09
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Did Alone in the Dark invent that? I remember obsessing over that game when it came out and I don't think there's anything that really did what it did previously. (Still bummed that the sequels abandoned the tone of the original and leaned harder into action and combat, neither of which the engine was capable of doing well.)
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Feb 19, 2021 23:28
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 01:06 |
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Well, I'm hyped. https://twitter.com/DreadXP_/status/1364281850886299649?s=19
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Feb 23, 2021 21:02
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