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I'm really not gelling with SOMA at all, which is unfortunate because I usually really love sci-fi horror. I get the reasons why they made it the way it is but the environments still have a "haunted museum" quality to them, like they've been arranged and never lived in. That I'm 5 hours in and there's been a grand total of one immersive-sim style story progressing through the environment makes the whole thing kind of threadbare. Plus they hew just a bit too close to Bioshock in terms of both setting and the use of deep-sea life as a locus for biomechanical horror. But more than anything else, I feel like the sneak peeks kind've ruined things for me. On the one hand you've got that initial Cronenberg mindfuck factor but I feel like it wears off and doesn't get deeper because there's really no rabbit hole to fall down. The central mystery is so thuddingly obvious that I'm finding it hard to work up the energy to continue puzzle-solving and hiding from giant cyber-tortoises. Maybe if I found the central mystery of what's going on with the main character compelling it would all come together, but I don't. The slow-burn intro is a good idea in theory (it was used to great effect in Until Dawn, for example) but what should be a jarring and disorienting transition just… isn't sold. At all. The dude has the same faint bemusement at being thrust into a techno-nightmare as he has at showing up to an empty doctor's office. It all feels very flabby.
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Sep 24, 2015 01:23
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Yeah I remember seeing finding robo-Carl in some E3 vid or something, and it was a great hook, but it would have been so much more effective and immersive if seen in the first time within the game. My opinion of the whole game might have been much different.
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Sep 24, 2015 01:29
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It depends on what's disappointing you. If it's the pacing, well, it is what it is and it doesn't really change. If you're waiting for a plot hook to grab you I'd probably say to get to the first ocean walk sequence, and if there's still nothing there that you want to explore further, you're probably not going to get much out of it. I got a little farther than that before I realized it was always going to bore me, so I spoiler'd my way through it.
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Oct 7, 2015 19:02
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catlord posted:If I'm remembering my announcements right, Summer Camp was announced, and at some point gained Kane Hodder's involvement. Sometime after that, the Friday the 13th game was announced. I want to say that at some point between the two another similar sounding game was announced as well, but I can't remember at this point. As far as I know, there's been no merging or cancelling of the games. Their last update was a little under 4 months ago and concerned the fact that they had secured an additional ~$250k in private funding but were looking for a webdev to finish their website - apparently they were very keen about getting yet more money. I'd wager it's vaporware at this point. I'm wondering now if it's actually Slasher Vol. 1 now because it's basically the exact same concept and execution.
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Oct 8, 2015 01:42
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Imo you should watch a LP (with commentary, so there'll be something to keep you interested) and then play System Shock 2, the game SOMA desperately would like to be. SS2 is the Stooges to SOMA's Jet, if Jet saw Existenz one time and thought it was cool.
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Oct 8, 2015 04:14
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I was being a bit glib with SOMA earlier (it never hooked me) but I have no idea how anyone would say that SS2 lacks for horror. Jump scares were covered above, but stuff like the loving midwives and where they came from, or the way that the Many insinuates itself through the crew, are very effective. Where SS2 suffers is where most all stat-based RPGs (particularly 90's specimens) suffer - there are a lot of "trap skills" that are far inferior to alternatives. In this case, anything that's not hacking or strength is a pretty bad choice, and the only good weapon is the one people typically think of as the last resort. They presented the game like an RPG but it plays like survival horror in regard to strategy and the scarcity of resources.
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Oct 8, 2015 20:09
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I think people didn't react well to the bait-and-switch element - A Silent Hill exploring wartime PTSD is a pretty neat idea but why bother with that when there are big twists to drop? I played Dead Space 3 recently and it's only really a horror game in the sense that characters die in pretty bad ways (as a straight action game, it was more of the same as DS2 but not as good - weapon crafting didn't add much). That said, the first quarter or so of the game is all about flying around in Zero G and exploring derelict spacecraft, and I really loved that - when Alien is your favorite movie, you become a sucker for haunted house spaceships. Maybe I should give System Shock 2 another run-through. I'd love something more current though. (Before you say anything, yeah I've played through Alien Isolation about twice and I'm salty that we'll never get a sequel). Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 11:09
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woodenchicken posted:Sneak behind a guy, cave his skull in, repeat untill the road is clear. The Vosgian Beast posted:No, it's that first gang of survivors you meet after bald guy gets killed. There are three things that are worth realizing in regard to Alien: Isolation - 1) Only sprinting makes noise as far as movement is concerned and 2) In the absence of sound, avoid line of sight. 3) The alien, once it shows up, is not on a patrol route, it is actually hunting you. It gets smarter as the game goes on. Taken together, this means A:I plays a lot differently than most Amnesia-likes. First thing you'll need to do is shake off the learned habit of crouch-crawling everywhere. If you know the Alien is a safe-ish distance away, or its back is turned to you, walk. There is no benefit to crouching except breaking LOS. Note that the alien's LOS isn't established until its fully active - if it pops in front of you from a duct, you have a few seconds to get behind something. The second thing you need to do is not get comfortable with hiding. The longer you stay in one place, the smaller the zone of investigation becomes for the alien, and it will find you if you stay put. You need to keep moving and switch up your hiding places. On easier difficulties, the alien will periodically gently caress off beyond the range of your tracker and that gives you some license to explore and collect things and read DOS messages. But mostly you'll want to establish loose zones of safety - if your tracker picks up movement <20 meters away (or you hear the telltale thump and hiss of the alien dropping from a duct) , hide immediately. 30-40 meters should be your opening to move closer to your intended target (noting places to hide at a moment's notice). Never sprint, you will be heard and if the alien's not around to outrun you and kill you, you'll summon it from the ducts. In early levels, don't fire a gun, or you will be heard and you'll summon it. If you're hiding a lot it will learn to listen for the beeping of the tracker. In later levels, you should be prepared for the sound of opening doors to draw the alien out of a duct. It gets harder the longer you go. An awful shame that we'll never get a sequel. SEGA is such a shitshow. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 08:18 on Feb 2, 2016 |
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Feb 2, 2016 08:15
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Dave Angel posted:Bit of a shame, I loved AI. At least we should get a VR version of it as part of the Steam VR line-up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwLUHEG4oNs
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Feb 4, 2016 05:02
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To get the maximum amount of your A:I experience you have to be a huge nerd w/r/t the first movie. If the game does one thing well it's serve as an extended love letter to Michael Seymour and co's production and art design. It could have been a straight up walking simulator and I would have dug it just as much.
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Feb 7, 2016 21:48
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The problem with SOMA's VA isn't that he's present so much that he lacks affect. He's more Troll 2 than Alien. Speaking of which, A:I's VA wasn't awesome but it was a hell of a lot better than SOMA's
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Feb 21, 2016 20:09
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King Vidiot posted:Maybe it's just me and my childhood fear of dolls, but I really think horror games need to use more dolls in creepy scenes like that. Or more to the point, living dolls as enemies. They had something like that in that super-early scrapped version of Resident Evil 4 and I'm kind of disappointed they didn't keep it in. Vampire: Bloodlines didn't have a doll level but there's a fetish you have to retrieve with a neat little spooky story attached (squad of soldiers stationed in Africa goes to sleep one night and dolls are found in their beds in the morning)
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May 17, 2016 07:15
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I recall it was optioned for a film adaptation, but so have a lot of games (Bioshock, MGS. Deus Ex got to the "Willem Dafoe is attached" stage). Condemned made the mistake that nearly every *intense modern melee* game makes - adding guns near the end. Plus weapon degradation is more or less never done well and Condemned is no exception
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May 18, 2016 05:08
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Condemned's melee weapons were the focus of the first game, but iirc gunplay had a heavier emphasis in the second. But yeah you'd get either a certain number of hits or a certain number of kills before your weapons would break, and there were tiers of weapon durability, so there were cheap 2x4s everywhere but you could find baseball bats or lead pipes that would last longer. It was pretty pointless / didn't add much.
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May 18, 2016 05:57
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I'd probably make a case for Dark Souls 3 as a good horror, though I suppose there's a thin border between horrific and surreal/doom-y. Bloodborne does a lot more work in putting the horror elements up front and out of the impenetrable lore / oblique environmental storytelling. Anyway, Soma was really good if you'd never read or played I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. It borrows a vast array of interesting elements from pulp literary (Ellison, PKD) and game (Irrational/Looking Glass) sources but it never really rises above particularly pensive homage. More sincere than an Asylum Films knockoff, for sure, but it's a slave to its influences in a bad way. I was way hyped for it back when the first encounter with the broken robot was released as a teaser, but the mindfuck horror of it was almost completely lost in context, once I realized it was part of yet another humdrum puzzle. Plus the fact that I was mostly going around and unearthing backstory about dead people with no strong drive to the plot made it feel like more like an atmosphere delivery system (aka a "walking simulator") than anything with real stakes. I like my tone poem games as much as the next guy but if I had a choice I'd rather have plots and characters in those plots. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 04:58 on May 23, 2016 |
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May 23, 2016 04:54
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Bloodborne and DS3 tap the same vein of metaphysical / apocalyptic horror within their settings. But the games are very much linked by theme, too, mainly in that they both feature worlds that are slowly dying / collapsing due to curse or entropy, and both are largely populated by the mortals who are corrupted or driven mad by futile, desperate attempts to avert disaster (the blood of the Gods in Bloodborne / the various attempts to keep the Flame alive in DS3). As has been said, Bloodborne leans a bit heavier on the explicit horror vibe with its out-and-out Lovecraftian imagery, but the level / art designers at FROM are just so, so good at evoking the elastic space of dream / nightmare. Vistas that are incredibly vast from afar but incredibly tight up close, impossible architecture and placement (Lothric surrounded by massive sheer cliffs, towers jutting up from rough stone in the Profaned Capital, etc) and the sense of places as well as people being infected and corrupted. Everything is effectively weird and menacing. There's an argument to be made that the darkness in DS3 is physically crunching the setting and causing places and objects to merge into the same space. It's a lot like Pathologic, in some sense. Also, they both rather ingeniously lean on obscurantist language cribbed from the Key of Solomon and other occult / mystic works, using it to hide or misdirect the true meaning of things. "Insight", for example, or the Healing Church. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 20:50 on May 23, 2016 |
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May 23, 2016 20:46
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Surprised no one's posted about the Prey... thing. Not a remake, or a sequel, or even a spiritual sequel to the original. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q38yi0NmAm0 Promo materials go as far as they can without openly mentioning System Shock. quote:"You are Morgan Yu, the subject of morally dubious experiments designed to improve the human race. You awaken aboard the Talos 1 in the year 2032 and must uncover the secrets hiding in the depths of the space station while being hunted by the mysterious alien force that has taken over. You’ll have to rely on the tools you find on the station—along with your wits, weapons, and mind-bending abilities—to combat the growing threat and, hopefully, survive." I'm over black oil as an antagonist in anything, and while the eye thing's an effective visual flair it's ripped more or less entirely from Prometheus (there's a lot of Prometheus in it, honestly), beggars can't be choosers. Arkane Studios are making it and they're basically the guys when it comes to dedicated immersive sim (it's being developed alongside Dishonored 2) but the other notable thing is that Video Game Story Guy Chris Avellone has been working on it too, so.
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Jun 14, 2016 01:00
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To me it's not Resident Evil unless you get to kidney punch a boulder in the middle of an active volcano In all seriousness, we were all bummed when Silent Hills died on the vine, but Resident Evil has always been a creature feature / gore-based horror franchise. That's great for some people but when I get a first person walking simulator-type game, I'm looking for dread. SH / PT drew from hauntings and environmental / cosmic horror, which deliver dread in spades, but RE has only ever worked for me in terms of jump scares. I haven't played all the way through the demo but it seemed to lean heavily on gore/gross-out horror (dirty dishes, rotting meat, etc), which doesn't work for me. If RE7 works it will do so in spite of its pedigree.
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Jun 16, 2016 19:28
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Song of Horror, a good modern love letter to classic Alone in the Dark
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Nov 4, 2019 08:29
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FirstAidKite posted:Which classic, the oddly scary lovecraft horror from the original, the hilarious wacky action movie thriller of the 2nd one, or the similarly wacky-but-not-quite-as-wacky-as-the-2nd jew's harp-filled action movie western of the 3rd? First
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Nov 4, 2019 19:56
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Yeah they kind of played themselves by giving the fuses themselves colors, I spent about five minutes saying "which of these is supposed to be blue" before realizing that it was a math problem and not a color matching puzzle
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Nov 5, 2019 16:45
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Wow posters in this thread really not shy about having not seen Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows
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Nov 6, 2019 17:43
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Pretty sure Skyrim did it too
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Nov 8, 2019 16:30
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Jesus that’s a blast from the past. I’m getting a used copy on Amazon, hopefully it still works.
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Nov 10, 2019 01:29
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play Call of Pripyat, it's their third do-over of the game and just as good but friendlier to new players
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Nov 12, 2019 20:31
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tbh I think it’s a lot to assume that highbrow appreciation of SH2’s psychoanalytic aspects were ever part of its commercial appeal
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Nov 13, 2019 19:14
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Just read Junji Ito
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Nov 13, 2019 19:33
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I mean the obvious answers are Ligotti and Prey :coolguy:
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Nov 13, 2019 21:28
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There are several books to that effect. Broken Hours, Ballad of Black Tom, etc. read those
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Nov 13, 2019 21:42
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Oxxidation posted:that thing is supposed to represent the protagonist's guilt over letting his brother drown, why is it a big-titted lady? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. When’s that Ito tribute game due? All it says is “2019”, which seems optimistic. I’m expecting something like The Daily Cthonicle, more of a horror board game than anything.
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Nov 14, 2019 19:19
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It is absolutely worth trying. Actual fighting games are way harder to learn. Just lean into using your pebbles, and if you need a little bit of a crutch, the windup attack for the halberd form of the axe you can get at the start stuns / knocks over basically everything
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Nov 15, 2019 00:34
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you seem troubled, friend
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Nov 15, 2019 01:49
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At the very least, the two BBBs (big brick boys) in the shortcut between the first lamp and Father Gascoine are very reliable for dropping 2 blood vials each, and they have a very generous counter window. If there's one thing about Bloodborne that really sucks it's that they included bloodtinge / gun dude as a build you can work toward when it's really not good for anything, and the magic build, while eventually very strong (when your opponent's not fire resistant, anyway) takes awhile to receive a weapon that uses it.
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Nov 26, 2019 18:41
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Even given the tangential relationship to Witchblade, very little involved with Garth Ennis ages well, he really mined that intersection between Todd McFarlane aesthetics and Bill Hicks pseudophilosophy
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Nov 26, 2019 21:23
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Speaking of tangential relations to Garth Ennis,Zushio posted:Maybe it's just my playstyle, but I get get a tonne of millage in Souls out of pure aggression and non-stop pressure. Dodge if you have to, but never leave weapon range.
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Nov 26, 2019 21:28
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Dying Light is boring if you go out looking for fights. The real intended play is pursuing some other goal and treating the zombies as a complication to that goal. Making runs for supplies at night, etc.
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Nov 27, 2019 19:51
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Yeah it’s kind of a heartbreaker, you can see the perfect open world zombie apocalypse game somewhere at the heart of it, but on an indie budget / management they only got so far. To see the sequel so scaled back in ambition was a bitter pill. If it had started off with Rockstar or Avalanche or even Ubisoft, it could have been an iconic game
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Nov 30, 2019 16:21
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There is a stealth game called "GTFO" that showed up on my Steam list, looks like Prometheus??
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Dec 15, 2019 02:49
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Apparently it’s not the kind of game (at least currently) that really lends itself to pub games. It’s not as forgiving as like L4D
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Dec 16, 2019 00:01
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just play FEAR
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Dec 16, 2019 00:14
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