I'm the opposite camp. The Offices and labs freaked me out, the monsters didn't. I've this persistent fear of abandoned labs, hospitals and buildings in games especially those with poor lighting. More afraid of the environment than the monsters themselves. Same thing for the haunted hotel in Vampire Bloodlines. Not sure about real-life, never actually been to one. If the monsters were like the Silent Hill sort of disturbing, I'll get really freaked out.

So much so that I went to hell itself in Doom 3, I actually felt relieved as compared to the dark labs. LOL

You don't need to be Japanese. I'm Asian and their horror movies especially The Ring and Ju-On has left a deep scar in my mind. Long haired girls with their hair covering the faces instantly brings the creeps in. And both movies have shown that even in broad daylight, scares and creeps can be conveyed equally well.

Have you played STALKER:SOC then? Those underground abandoned labs were, unnerving...

Nope, didn't last very long in Amnesia. Doubt I will last long in Stalker.

It's sort of a graphics (or "realism") versus gameplay thing, I believe. And by gameplay I think I mean flow, which someone else brought up already.

Doom doesn't nail it perfectly (there are many community wads that do it so much better, through better level design and tweaked monsters), but it comes close. So close that the classic Dooms remain my favorite shooters of all time, and new releases consistently disappoint me with poor flow & lackluster gameplay. Yes, the flow in Doom is greatly helped by the abstractness of the levels, but I don't think it is the "novel abstractness" per se that makes me like it.

To an extent, Shadow Warrior and Blood suffer from the same lack of flow, likely imposed (at least in part) by the "realistic" environments. The other thing is the enemies. The first thought I have going into Duke 3D is that the enemies are goddamn bullet spongy. In fact, that's how nearly every game after Doom's release feels (Serious Sam being a notable exception).

In Doom, the levels are filled with low tier monsters that you can just chew through with a lowly shotgun or chaingun. Or take down a whole pack of them with the rocket launcher. Yeah there are bullet spongy high tier monsters too, and (except for the cacodemon) these seem to get a healthy dose of dislike from the Doom community. In Duke you get pigs that just duck when you thought they should've died two times over already. Shooting at the same two enemies for so long is a massive interruption to flow. And spending 10 seconds to kill 2 or 3 pigs is nowhere near as satisfying as mowing down a group of 15 imps and zombies. The same feelings underline the flying enemies you meet right in the first level of Duke3D. I just don't find them fun or satisfying to shoot.

Then there's flight? Nah, I'd rather run faster than a rocket on wide open flats (while evading projectiles) than hop from ledge to ledge with a jetpack. A rocket or BFG blast feels more inductive to flow than a pipe bomb that requires you to get close to them and back out...

But yeah, it is the games that get praised for realistic settings that often end up feeling lackluster in terms of gameplay. Take half life for instance. I was as immersed in it as anyone, when it came out. But now that I look at it, the puzzley/objetivey/story segments are boring as hell. The shooting should be fun, except that it's doing what every game preoccupied with immersion is trying to do: give you a bunch of corridors and no more than a handful of enemies to fight at once. Every once in a while. With such design the action is just really boring. Give me one big hectic & fast paced firefight with 50 foes scattered about and I'll be interested. Same goes for Unreal: I absolutely love the music, atmosphere & environment (which I think still holds up today because it's not stuck doing boring earthly realistic places with poor graphics), but the gameplay means fighting a few enemies every once in a while. Nnngh.

Quake has abstract levels but they're just starting to play with 3D and I don't think they have the flow of Doom (unless you learn the levels by heart and speedrun/rocketjump through them... but that's a whole different thing). As other releases from that era, all the enemies (except for the humans, which you see at the beginning of each episode) feel bullet spongy.

actually, I find it the opposite. Hell and Hellish portals are so alien and unrealistic that they never become really scary or unnerving (rather a bit silly and ridiculous at at times) the only thing they can do for me is jump scares.

Real life something is more scare as it is something that can actually happen to me.

I believe that. Sometimes it gets annoying though for "low-interaction running simulators" like Outlast, where you can't even try to fight back.

I believe I get where you're coming from, and certainly the less you are unconstrained by the demands of realism the more room to maneuver you have in creating creative levels while focusing on the flow of gameplay. I don't know the first Doom very well (only finished the first episode) but I played Doom 2 to death, and almost all (never liked [url=http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/MAP28:_The_Spirit_World_(Doom_II)]Spirit World[/url]) the levels were amazingly put together - [url=http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/MAP15:_Industrial_Zone_(Doom_II)]Infustrial Zone[/url] being my favorite.

Though at the same time I don't recall ever being annoyed with the flow of Duke 3D's gameplay. The only reason the flying enemies sometimes proved tiresome was because they would fly too far up for me to see them, specifically those pigs in their flying car things. The normal monsters with the jetpacks presented the same problem, but at least they had very little health and could very easily be brought down. The flying cars on the other hand were real bullet sponges. So here and there there were a few, annoyances I guess you could say, but I was having too much of a blast with it for it to have a noticable overall impact.

You mentioned Unreal. Incidentally, that was my next FPS after Duke 3D I believe, and it instantly made it obsolete. They had more license for abstract levels in Unreal since it was an alien world, but each level still looked and felt like an actual place with some purpose : a downed space ship, alien temple, alien fortress etc.
The enemies were of course very bullet spongy in Unreal (definitely too spongy in some cases - mercenaris), and a lot of people had misgivings about the weapons (except the Flak cannon of course). Lacked a certain 'oomph' I once read a reviewer claim. As for the flow. Yes, its much slower an more intermittent compared to something like Doom or even Duke, perhaps because of the aim for a realistic sci fi environment. They placed enemies more or less where you wouldn't be surprised to encounter them in 'real-life' : eg. perhaps a few in the valley, some guarding a door, and one chilling in a certain house in the village. That kind of approach. What that does for the flow I can't say, but it adds massively to immersing you in the narrative.

I suppose then, if the game manages to grab you in an immersive way then those, what would otherwise be senseless pauses / protracted periods of inaction in an oldschool shooter like Doom, could very well become part of the flow. For example walking down a valley towards a castle with a surrounding moat in Unreal. Its a very long walk, but at the time I was fascinated all the way by this steadily growing image of an alien fortification of some sort as I got closer and closer. What's the history of the castle, who's in control of it now etc. This will only happen in a game that actually makes you care about the world it has created, which Unreal managed to do for me with its incredible atmosphere.

This is all highly subjective of course and a balance of different things for each person. For example you also loved the atmosphere and environment, but the sparseness and health of the enemies wasn't to your liking. But for me on the other hand I consider the game close to perfect.

How much do you value replay?

The thing is that I value it a lot. And when I find games like unreal, half life, etc. and the gameplay feels lackluster, that really discourages me from playing them again. Story gets old, atmosphere is something you can take in only for so long until you've had enough, same goes for immersion and so on. At some point these features sort of .. well they don't quite *go away* but if you get what I'm trying to say ... they sort of take the backseat. They're "done" and gone. What is left is the core gameplay, the action. And this is where flow, good gunplay, challenging & action-packed enemy placement makes all the difference.

This is why I can pick up Doom over and over again after all these years and have fun playing it starting from the first minute. The other games, not so much. There's just not much going on, and the action is boring. So e.g. Unreal is a game that I can maybe play once every year or two (or three), but not more. It takes time to "shake off" the atmosphere and story and stuff enough that the next playthrough feels fresh enough that I don't get bored by the lackluster action.

I wouldn't say I value it to the extent that it becomes a deciding factor for me when deciding what to play next. Perhaps because I tend to replay, or at least want to replay most games I play with only very few exceptions. Unreal I've finished 3 times I think. Not one after the other of course, but several years inbetween. And each time the atmosphere grabbed me by about the same degree. I doubt I'd want to play through it even once per year. Perhaps quite right, the mechanics aren't that interesting to warrant it in such a short time since I soaked up all the atmosphere in a previous playthrough. The power of the atmosphere, the magic of the world wanes after too long. All that remains is the fun contained in the core gameplay. So yes, at one point I habitually played Doom 2 levels (with the Brutal Doom mod) only for the fun of it. I wouldn't ever do it with something like Unreal or Half-life.

Actually come to think of it, I probably would be able to enjoy playing random single levels of Unreal or Half-life just for the fun of it, tough not as much I'll admit as a quick romp with Industrial Zone in Doom 2. Still, I rather enjoy the mechanics in both Unreal and Half-life. I don't find it boring at all. Unreal is a bit flawed compared to Half-life in this regard I think, but it's still an enjoyable challenge to dispose of a difficult monster, or small group of monsters in a cold and efficient way. I often reloaded quicksaves in Unreal just to try to take down a strong monster again in a better way. When I did it could be very gratifying. But that's straying a bit.
So why don't I play Unreal right now when I'm bored? I'm just not hungry enough for its atmosphere yet. I know I will be eventually and I don't want to spoil it by playing it too early. Shit, it's almost like a drug I suppose, except for the addictive element. I suppose you could say I'm aiming for that gaming 'high' and I'm fully content to wait patiently until I feel I can experience it again.
I have this 'problem' with certain films I'm a massive fan of as well. Star Wars most notably. I'm a massive fan of I through VI but I haven't really seen the films that many times.

By the way I don't know how you feel about QuakeIV? That is one game that I find manages to be wonderfully atmospheric while also maintaining a pretty good pace of action. It's miles ahead for me compared to its contemporary Doom 3. I especially love how it feels like you're part of an actual invasion force against the evil Strogg

I haven't played it. So far it looks decent, and it doesn't have all the audio logs that slow down Doom 3. But I can't tell if the rest of it is enough to make it more enjoyable.

I will say that one quick time-killer for me when I need a bit of game action and don't want to get involved in story is to fire up Unreal and play some botmatches. The botmatch feature of Unreal gives it endless replay value compared to a game that only has a story mode.

There's one particular location in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series that gave me the creeps: Red Forest, at night.

It reminds me a lot more of Quake 2 the way it plays, except that the narrative does take over in 2 or 3 places for a short while - walking around in a space cruiser or something on the way to a briefing. And there are two or three trivial puzzles similar to what you might find in Half-life.
Doesn't sound like that's your thing, but bear in mind it isn't spread out all over the place like in Doom 3 or Half-life. It act more as a few interludes between the incessant action.
I think there is a Quake 4 demo floating around on the internet for anyone who want to try before buying.
Oh yes I used to play the botmatches to death back then. Decapitating bots with the razorjack/sniper rifle was the ultimate treat :D Curious though that I wasn't concerned about getting tired of the atmosphere back then... Perhaps these days it's also an issue about preserving the nostalgia of it or something.
Yep, hated that place. Couldn't leave quickly enough. Probably one of the locations I died the most :P