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I only played the first Amensia game. I felt it was kind of a weird fit. It was a horror game in that you were in a horror environment with entities that were s

I only played the first Amensia game. I felt it was kind of a weird fit. It was a horror game in that you were in a horror environment with entities that were scary. But the lack of consequence for death made it feel kind of gamey. Horror is hard to get right. The amnesia monsters are horrifying, yes, but in the context of a horror game, not especially memorable in my opinion. One thing I think the resident evil series has done well especially in number 7 and the number 2 remake, is realize that players won't be scared for the whole game. In the first half of these games, you tend to be weak and there are genuinely frightening moments. Towards the end you're pretty desensitized to the nature of that game's fucked up shit, and you just want to mow them down or get by the efficiently. My absolute favorite horror moment is in the original Silent Hill. You enter this giant hospital and you know its going to be a huge daunting task if its full of monsters, but its not. So you go through the elevator to floor one. It's empty. Floor 2 is empty. The final floor, floor three... is empty. So returning the the elevator you're feeling like you missed something and then, ta-dah, the elevator eerily has acquired a bloody fourth floor button letting you know you're about get shat on.

bitdizzy 6y ago
I enjoyed how scared I felt in Amnesia until the first time I died and reloaded. After that the edge was gone.
teawrecks 6y ago
IMO "consequence" is the epitome of "gamey". Which is why Amnesia didn't seem like it was targeted at the resident evil/silent hill players who were used to "mowing" through enemies. It was for people who wanted to be scared, and have a scary experience, so they didn't give you any way to defend yourself besides hiding and covering your eyes. More like a movie or...a haunted hay ride. Very Lovecraftian. That silent hill example sounds cool. They used anticipation and your own imagination to scare you. Amnesia is like 95% this.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  By consequence, I mean, you have some sort of reason to want to avoid death. Amnesia as I recall had very frequent checkpoints, and dying set you back a minute or so, only to encounter the same scare puzzle shortly after. Doing the same scene twice in the same pattern breaks any immersion (which is, again, a very difficult problem to solve in game design). One of the design principles in the movie Alien was that you do not want to show the monster. I think that's a good rule, and is doubly true in games where death means you do it again. An enemy you can only hide from is cool, but frustrating when said enemy follows a scripted pattern and its secretly a puzzle rather than something where you actually feel like you're hiding from a being (Alien Isolation does this well). Haunted hayride is a good descriptor. Resident evil and silent hill have tried to tackle this problem by inducing resource scarcity. Most scary encounters will not kill you, but they'll force you to expend resources which make you feel more hopeless about the future. It's far from perfect but it sort of works. It is vulnerable to players taking the opposite mentality, whereby they purposefully die to try and clear sections with lower resource loss. Silent hill games (the good ones...) aren't action games btw. Most people consider the second one to be best psychological horror game ever made. Horror's pretty dope these days. Next Resident Evil lookin slick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSapXD9vxYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSapXD9vxYA
  - galimaufry 6y ago
    Have any games tried frequent savepoints + only allowing the player to reload 24 hours after dying? Seems like that would make reloads feel a bit more fresh/consequential, and also prevent addiction.
    - klmadfejno 6y ago
      24h sounds like a turnoff, but in general, I think that's a great concept. You just need something that the player can do while unable to try to scary part again.
      - lloeki 6y ago
        To relieve the frustration, it would need to be a game where a) death truly feels like your fault, not some jump scare QTE, and b) with enough information to leave you with a way to think about how to go through the challenge while not being in front of the game during the downtime.
watwut 6y ago
I bought the game in some bundle and then watched it on youtube. It worked well as horror that way. I had no motivation to play it after and ended in some entance hall right after start.
101008 6y ago
The original Silent Hill was a masterpiece of horror games. But mainly because it was all in your head. The creatures weren't that bad, but the sensation that they were coming at you is what it counts. Also, the radio that started every time you had one close to you was excellent, because it made you feel horrible even if you weren't doing anything. I played a few games after that one in the next years (I was only 11 when I played Silent Hill) and nothing made me feel the same.
- k__ 6y ago
  *"the radio that started every time you had one close to you was excellent, because it made you feel horrible even if you weren't doing anything." Haha, same with Aliens vs Predator, where you had either radar or night vision, but not both at the same time. The beeping made you crazy.
  - ehnto 6y ago
    Have you tried Alien Isolation? It's a masterpiece, similar mechanic to that in place too.
    - k__ 6y ago
      I think the last Alien game I tried was "Alien: Colonial Mariens". It was so bad, that I stopped playing games from thaz franchise
      - otachack 6y ago
        Alien Isolation is seriously my favorite in the franchise next to AvP. It's a bit derivative of Amnesia series but I still highly suggest picking it up. The atmosphere alone of the game is scraped from Alien 1 where it's got this retro futuristic setting. You won't regret it but you can find it for cheap in a sale just in case.
- StillBored 6y ago
  The first couple Penumbra games were the same way. You knew there were monsters about, but mostly you crept around and if you heard them the only sane strategy was to run like hell. I think the people who enjoyed the games were the ones that could get sucked into that mental model early and didn't want to die in game.
ehnto 6y ago
I think maybe you met the game mechanics too quickly and that might have ruined it for you. For me it was very non-gamey because I had no idea what the consequences of meeting one of the monsters was so I spent almost the entire game petrified. Once I had died a couple of times and learned how the monsters worked, the spook factor wore off quickly. But I still far preferred that to the classic weapons based horror games where the spookiness is derived from how tough an openent is in combat. You should really, really try SOMA though. They dialed in the non-combat spookiness and even once you figure out how the monsters work, the few there are, it's the story and atmosphere that drives the spookiness anyway so it doesn't detract from the experience. Much less gamey, and quite a good mystery mixed with some existential dread.
- jariRG 6y ago
  +1 for SOMA. That game was amazing emotionally. It was left me thinking for days what i went through in it.
- cannedslime 6y ago
  SOMA was a great game, especially the last hour or so of game play kept me on my toes. The monsters were not the focus of the game at all I recall you could even disable them entirely.
baby 6y ago
The most horrifying moment for me was the hospital level in the last of us 2. This and the night where you play abby and save the girl and the boy. I had to switch from hard to easy or I was going to have PTSD. Didn’t remember that the first game was really scary.
- NateThePirate 6y ago
  The hospital basement is such a creepy level, and the rat king was terrifying.

bitdizzy 6y ago

I enjoyed how scared I felt in Amnesia until the first time I died and reloaded. After that the edge was gone.

teawrecks 6y ago

IMO "consequence" is the epitome of "gamey". Which is why Amnesia didn't seem like it was targeted at the resident evil/silent hill players who were used to "mowing" through enemies. It was for people who wanted to be scared, and have a scary experience, so they didn't give you any way to defend yourself besides hiding and covering your eyes. More like a movie or...a haunted hay ride. Very Lovecraftian. That silent hill example sounds cool. They used anticipation and your own imagination to scare you. Amnesia is like 95% this.

klmadfejno 6y ago
By consequence, I mean, you have some sort of reason to want to avoid death. Amnesia as I recall had very frequent checkpoints, and dying set you back a minute or so, only to encounter the same scare puzzle shortly after. Doing the same scene twice in the same pattern breaks any immersion (which is, again, a very difficult problem to solve in game design). One of the design principles in the movie Alien was that you do not want to show the monster. I think that's a good rule, and is doubly true in games where death means you do it again. An enemy you can only hide from is cool, but frustrating when said enemy follows a scripted pattern and its secretly a puzzle rather than something where you actually feel like you're hiding from a being (Alien Isolation does this well). Haunted hayride is a good descriptor. Resident evil and silent hill have tried to tackle this problem by inducing resource scarcity. Most scary encounters will not kill you, but they'll force you to expend resources which make you feel more hopeless about the future. It's far from perfect but it sort of works. It is vulnerable to players taking the opposite mentality, whereby they purposefully die to try and clear sections with lower resource loss. Silent hill games (the good ones...) aren't action games btw. Most people consider the second one to be best psychological horror game ever made. Horror's pretty dope these days. Next Resident Evil lookin slick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSapXD9vxYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSapXD9vxYA
- galimaufry 6y ago
  Have any games tried frequent savepoints + only allowing the player to reload 24 hours after dying? Seems like that would make reloads feel a bit more fresh/consequential, and also prevent addiction.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    24h sounds like a turnoff, but in general, I think that's a great concept. You just need something that the player can do while unable to try to scary part again.
    - lloeki 6y ago
      To relieve the frustration, it would need to be a game where a) death truly feels like your fault, not some jump scare QTE, and b) with enough information to leave you with a way to think about how to go through the challenge while not being in front of the game during the downtime.

watwut 6y ago

I bought the game in some bundle and then watched it on youtube. It worked well as horror that way. I had no motivation to play it after and ended in some entance hall right after start.

101008 6y ago

The original Silent Hill was a masterpiece of horror games. But mainly because it was all in your head. The creatures weren't that bad, but the sensation that they were coming at you is what it counts. Also, the radio that started every time you had one close to you was excellent, because it made you feel horrible even if you weren't doing anything. I played a few games after that one in the next years (I was only 11 when I played Silent Hill) and nothing made me feel the same.

k__ 6y ago
*"the radio that started every time you had one close to you was excellent, because it made you feel horrible even if you weren't doing anything." Haha, same with Aliens vs Predator, where you had either radar or night vision, but not both at the same time. The beeping made you crazy.
- ehnto 6y ago
  Have you tried Alien Isolation? It's a masterpiece, similar mechanic to that in place too.
  - k__ 6y ago
    I think the last Alien game I tried was "Alien: Colonial Mariens". It was so bad, that I stopped playing games from thaz franchise
    - otachack 6y ago
      Alien Isolation is seriously my favorite in the franchise next to AvP. It's a bit derivative of Amnesia series but I still highly suggest picking it up. The atmosphere alone of the game is scraped from Alien 1 where it's got this retro futuristic setting. You won't regret it but you can find it for cheap in a sale just in case.
StillBored 6y ago
The first couple Penumbra games were the same way. You knew there were monsters about, but mostly you crept around and if you heard them the only sane strategy was to run like hell. I think the people who enjoyed the games were the ones that could get sucked into that mental model early and didn't want to die in game.

ehnto 6y ago

I think maybe you met the game mechanics too quickly and that might have ruined it for you. For me it was very non-gamey because I had no idea what the consequences of meeting one of the monsters was so I spent almost the entire game petrified. Once I had died a couple of times and learned how the monsters worked, the spook factor wore off quickly. But I still far preferred that to the classic weapons based horror games where the spookiness is derived from how tough an openent is in combat. You should really, really try SOMA though. They dialed in the non-combat spookiness and even once you figure out how the monsters work, the few there are, it's the story and atmosphere that drives the spookiness anyway so it doesn't detract from the experience. Much less gamey, and quite a good mystery mixed with some existential dread.

jariRG 6y ago
+1 for SOMA. That game was amazing emotionally. It was left me thinking for days what i went through in it.
cannedslime 6y ago
SOMA was a great game, especially the last hour or so of game play kept me on my toes. The monsters were not the focus of the game at all I recall you could even disable them entirely.

baby 6y ago

The most horrifying moment for me was the hospital level in the last of us 2. This and the night where you play abby and save the girl and the boy. I had to switch from hard to easy or I was going to have PTSD. Didn’t remember that the first game was really scary.

NateThePirate 6y ago
The hospital basement is such a creepy level, and the rat king was terrifying.