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General discussionArticle: All Kinds of Scary(45 posts)(45 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted April 28, 2017
A look at the different ways in which games give us nightmares.

Horror. Horror never changes. Wait a minute, yes it does! If it's to stay effective, it needs to tap into our deepest fears, while finding fresh ways to expose us to them. This week, Outlast 2 and Little Nightmares, two diametrically different horror games, came to stalk GOG.com, offering us the perfect reminder that there are plenty of ways to be scary.

Where is my mind?

All horror games worth their salt will mess with your head to some degree. Some of them even make it their mission to upset you without actually putting you into any dangerous situations. It's the promise of something sinister lurking in the shadows that gets to you rather than any monsters physically threatening to drag you away with them. Layers of Fear, The Park, Stories Untold, Fear Equation, the Dark Fall series, and Dracula 3: Path of the Dragon are all examples of games that pull this off with gusto.

A heart attack waiting to happen

Raw, gory, occasionally violent, and very very effective.

They're the games that combine the horror of getting killed with having to face the nasty face of whatever delivers the blow (if it even has one). Plenty of jump scares are waiting for you around each corner but if the game does its job right, some of the most intense moments come from the buildup leading to them, not because of your pursuer's ugliness. Outlast 1+2, Amnesia, F.E.A.R. 1+2, Dead Space, SOMA, and Clive Barker's Undying are all great examples of such scary deadly games.

Beautifully unsettling

Every once in awhile a game comes along that doesn't aim to make you jump in terror but slowly creeps under your skin, making itself cozy next to your nightmare-inducing glands. The grotesque imagery, the haunting sound design, or the disturbing setting are enough to create this lingering sense of unease that makes your skin crawl and your bed feel unsafe. Little Nightmares, Sanitarium, Pathologic Classic HD, The Last Door, Sunless Sea, Fran Bow, and Oxenfree among others, have pretty much mastered this art.

So what's your favorite type of horror? Did any of your scary gaming experiences cause you to keep checking your closet for glowing eyes? Do tell!
Post edited May 01, 2017 by maladr0Id
Posted April 28, 2017
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GOG.com: So what's your favorite type of horror? Do tell!
The one that doesn't involve jumpscapes; a few of them are welcome but using them extensively is just cheap. A succesful horror game should mess with the player's mind, not their reflexes.

Favourite horror games: System Shock 2 (great atmosphere, a f***** up ship with creepy stuff going on), Alan Wake (great atmosphere & writing), Sanitarium (creepy atmosphere filled with all kind of lunatics), STASIS (superb atmosphere and story), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl (creepy atmosphere, great setting), F.E.A.R. plus it's expansion (one of the creepiest games ever made).
Posted April 28, 2017
I was hoping for an insightful article about horror games :( This may as well just be a list of horror games on Gog, but with a few sentences added in.
Posted April 28, 2017
Beautifully unsettling + Where's my mind?

Scratches does this very well! Too bad nowadays you can't buy the game anywhere! Hope Agustín Cordés solves this soon!
Posted April 28, 2017
GOG you seriously need to bring the 2 Zombi games from Ubisoft. The original and the recent remake.
Posted April 28, 2017
Personally, I find that the best way to scare me is with game mechanics.

For example, toward the end of Dragon Quest 2, random encounters become probably the scariest I have seen in an RPG. Among the enemies fought in Rhone is one enemy called a Blizzard, which can cast Defeat, which attempts to (and sometimes succeeds) to kill each member of your party; I have had it kill all 3 characters in one cast. There's also Gold Batboons, who can cast Sacrifice, which is even more dangerous; it is *guaranteed* to wipe out your party if cast by an enemy. The final dungeon also has a miniboss that can cast both spells; it is pretty scary knowing that you could be killed at any moment.

There's also other situations, like when you only have one character left behind, are near a save point, and a random encounter starts before you actually reach that save point.

I remember seeing a video of Dragon Quest 2 in which the player goes through the Cave to Rhone (a dungeon that's infamous for hidden pits and 4 Green Dragon encounters), reaches the plateau, gets one step away from the monument (where you can get healed and save), only to get into an encounter, fail to run from it, and get wiped out. *That* would qualify as a scary moment.

This can also happen in other games. Roguelikes are one case where this can happen; in Torneko and Shiren games, for example, you can easily get into a situation where you are scrambling through your inventory in the hopes of finding an item that you can use to avoid dying. (I would not be surprised if this sort of thing is common in traditional roguelikes.) Or you are playing an action game and get to the boss with one unit of health left. Can you win the battle without getting hit (or find a way to heal before you *do* get hit)?
Posted April 28, 2017
No mention of Doom? It's the first computer game that scared me and I was 29 when it came out.
Posted April 28, 2017
No horror list is complete without mentioning Alone in the Dark (the grandfather of all horror games) Resident Evil and Silent Hill are my favorite franchises, RE for the cold, slow build up to fear and SH for the sheer psychological shock it delivered. The Suffering is worth to be mentioned and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth as well.
Posted April 28, 2017
Get Fran Bow.
This public service announcement was brought to you by a fan.
Posted April 28, 2017
Where is my mind? would be my thing.

I like a "slow creep" in my choice of horror games and movies, a persistent suspense.
Games like Scratches, Stasis, Dark Fall, Sanitarium, and System Shock 2.

However, a suspenseful atmosphere is not enough, the game must also have appealing gameplay. There are plenty of atmospheric horror games around, but the majority of them don't have gameplay I would enjoy.
Posted April 28, 2017
CENSORED BY GOG
Post edited July 22, 2017 by Serren
Posted April 28, 2017
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Serren: System Shock 2.
Play Dead Space, the real successor (not BioShock)
Posted April 28, 2017
I "hate" all FPS horror/scary games. They terrify me. Which I find very interesting because in my time in the army in 2003-6, I was often in situations where most of my fellow brothers cried with terror while I was feeling like having a picnic. All horror/scary movies make me laugh (I got kicked out of a theater once because of that).

Clive Barker's Undying. Amnesia. There were so many moments I just wasnt able to press the W key to move. I finished Undying somehow but I gave up on Amnesia. I was literally shaking. :)
Posted April 28, 2017
I've always got the chills to play something that makes me doing the things I don't want to. For example, Silent Hill series is one of my type of horror, if not THE favorite. In SH1 the Elementary School part was too frightening for me when I was younger. To wander on those aisles, everything dark, hostile and creepy. I knew I had to go there, but I was too afraid of the dark back then. Happens the same with SH4, I knew some creepy ghost was waiting for me on the room at some point but the idea of ''where'' and ''when'' could it spawn is what creeps me out the most.
Posted April 28, 2017
No Amnesia sale?
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Community
General discussionArticle: All Kinds of Scary(45 posts)(45 posts)
(45 posts)