Horror games for the season (and beyond)

[Ash]

Silent Hill 2 is indeed an interesting example in this case. It's ridiculous how the mediocrity of its combat, puzzles, and often (but not always) exploration has been overlooked by most people singing its praise

Thank you for recognizing this. Very mediocre gameplay, though SH1 is only a little better. What gets to me on top of that is also the horror and believability element. SH2 completely failed here. Enemies that are all slow as shit, as opposed to flying and running enemies in SH1. What is there to be afraid of? Triangle head? the dude has a fucking triangle on. his. head. It just leaves you with questions more than fear. Barely noticeable otherworld presence for much of the game, when the otherworld is pretty much the main character of SH. Ammo & health in extreme abundance, which removes tension by letting you know you can take on a small army. Why does the protag have to go through the apartments, it doesn't make sense except because we have to make a silent hill level and have no ideas...even the one brief time you have to go through that one house in SH1 to get to the street on the other side it is explained in a spooky and believable manner (mysteriously collapsed roadways). Characters that are mentally handicapped more than they are mysterious or sinister. A lot of the gameplay-specific things not only makes gameplay boring but also sullies the horror element. A lot of the game's unbelievable events are simply explained by "because the protag is insane/guilt-ridden!" and that is a crock of fucking shit. Humans don't even experience guilt remotely that extreme. Nobody ever in the history of humanity was driven crazy by guilt in the same way they have been anger/love/envy/self-resentment. Unfortunately it is simply one of the weaker human emotions (because the victim is not the self of course), which is a shame because the world would be a much better place if it were not.

People that claim this to be the best horror game of all time does not know horror and does not know games.

Now, Resident Evil 4 is also completely retarded in a lot of similar ways (story, horror element, characters, believability), but the gameplay is worthwhile, hence good game, and the story of RE never that amazing in the first place. SH2 cannot be forgiven because it is boring as fuck as a game, and the horror/immersion/story/characters of SH1 were very well done indeed.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Pathologic 1 or 2, one or more Silent Hill games, one or more Stalker games, Undying. They are all very autumnal in mood. Undying evokes melancholy more than anything with its warm colours, locations like ruinous chapel on the seaside cliff bathed in afternoon light, lonely ruined tower, ruinous monastery fort where you can see the echoes of its doomed monks etc. SH1 evokes more of a deep, dark fall slipping into winter.

 

[schru]

Thank you for recognizing this. Very mediocre gameplay, though SH1 is only a little better. What gets to me on top of that is also the horror and believability element. SH2 completely failed here. Enemies that are all slow as shit, as opposed to flying and running enemies in SH1. What is there to be afraid of? Triangle head? the dude has a fucking triangle on. his. head. It just leaves you with questions more than fear. Barely noticeable otherworld presence for much of the game, when the otherworld is pretty much the main character of SH. Ammo & health in extreme abundance, which removes tension by letting you know you can take on a small army. Why does the protag have to go through the apartments, it doesn't make sense except because we have to make a silent hill level and have no ideas...even the one brief time you have to go through that one house in SH1 to get to the street on the other side it is explained in a spooky and believable manner (mysteriously collapsed roadways). Characters that are mentally handicapped more than they are mysterious or sinister. A lot of the gameplay-specific things not only makes gameplay boring but also sullies the horror element. A lot of the game's unbelievable events are simply explained by "because the protag is insane/guilt-ridden!" and that is a crock of fucking shit. Humans don't even experience guilt remotely that extreme. Nobody ever in the history of humanity was driven crazy by guilt in the same way they have been anger/love/envy/self-resentment. Unfortunately it is simply one of the weaker human emotions (because the victim is not the self of course), which is a shame because the world would be a much better place if it were not.

People that claim this to be the best horror game of all time does not know horror and does not know games.

Now, Resident Evil 4 is also completely retarded in a lot of similar ways (story, horror element, characters, believability), but the gameplay is worthwhile, hence good game, and the story of RE never that amazing in the first place. SH2 cannot be forgiven because it is boring as fuck as a game, and the horror/immersion/story/characters of SH1 were very well done indeed.

I wouldn't agree about the horror aspect. I think nowadays we're a bit too much habituated to horror being just about delivering visceral scares and a palpable sense of dread, though environments, aggressive enemies, and such-like. Silent Hill 2's take is slower and more about the atmosphere of desolation and decay as the player gradually discovers that this time around the town is responding to the protagonist's own guilt and resignation. The psychological approach is handled well and what is generally not noticed is that it's much closer to the traditional and religious understanding of the demonic, as it is through the psychic that human beings most directly come into contact with infernal influences.

The choice of urban exploration of decayed buildings and sites as the main style for the levels matches the theme pretty well, so I think the use of largely incidental locales goes well with how the protagonist basically lets himself be drawn in and lead around by the town in response to his forlorn state, while the player isn't aware of all of his motivations or what he knows from the start. The apartments were pretty decent in terms of exploration, I think, as they opened up just enough for you to explore them actively, rather than just to follow the obvious way forward. The way the town was limited to brief and very guided walkabouts was quite disappointing, though. Then the prison and the connected labyrinth were done in just a bit too obvious a way, given the psychological symbolism; such abstract ‘psychological scapes’ can be interesting, but here it was rather awkward.

Same goes for the monsters, thematically. The designer was pretty inventive with them, but it indeed doesn't excuse how weak the combat is and how, despite the attempts, you don't really feel cornered or claustrophobic when facing the enemies.

I also agree that the supporting characters aren't that good. The point their involvement in the story builds up to is made too obvious later on and they're not that interesting in themselves. When I wrote in the previous post that the characters were good, I just meant the central ones. The interesting part, like in the rest of the series, is the idea of using a loved one or an otherwise close person as a kind of ambivalent phantom chased by the protagonist, one time offering some sense of normality and contact with another person, but then hinting at there being something malefic at work and gradually suggesting that there's some chilling realization to be made.

All in all, I agree that Silent Hill 2 disappoints as a survival horror, in terms of its gameplay, but Team Silent really showed some inspiration with their work, so I think it's worth recommending for the immersive experience. If it seems to you that I'm underplaying the problems with it as a game, it's just because that I think they're so glaring that they need not be gone into here.

 

[Alienman]

Alpha Polaris is pretty cool if you haven't played it. Adventure game set on Greenland on a desolate research station. Spooky weird things start to happen! OOoOoo

OOoOOoo
Feels a bit Lovecraftian. I liked it. But I'm also a sucker for half-abandoned research stations in the middle of nowhere, it's just a setting I can't get enough off.

Another classic I recommend is The Lost Crown. Another adventure game with a nice atmosphere. I thought the game felt very British, bit like Tv-shows from the 90's. Cozy feeling and spooky at times. You are a ghost investigator and well, you have to investigate a town and its hidden stories.

 

[Riskbreaker]

no mention of Scratches? annoying puzzles, but unsurpassed atmosphere.

Aye, atmosphere-wise it is top-notch. Like a playable classic British ghost story.

Speaking of point & click stuff, Dracula games are worthwhile. The first two have a bit a cheese to them, a bit like the old Hammer Dracula sequels. Great atmosphere tho. The third one is an independent story, very different vibe, considerably more restrained. I'd say it's the best one too.
Just stay away from the Steam releases. Rather than just, you know, putting the original PC games on there, their publisher had their stripped down smartphone ports ported to PC.

 

[Ash]

I wouldn't agree about the horror aspect. I think nowadays we're a bit too much habituated to horror being just about delivering visceral scares and a palpable sense of dread, though environments, aggressive enemies, and such-like. Silent Hill 2's take is slower and more about the atmosphere of desolation and decay as the player gradually discovers that this time around the town is responding to the protagonist's own guilt and resignation. The psychological approach is handled well and what is generally not noticed is that it's much closer to the traditional and religious understanding of the demonic, as it is through the psychic that human beings most directly come into contact with infernal influences.

Maybe if I hadn't played SH1 first which as a horror experience makes its sequel feel like a normal early morning trip to downtown (just fittingly swap the slow-ass dumb zombie monsters for crackheads, except crackheads can be unpredictable!), I may be able to appreciate whatever they were going for. Aside from creepy-looking enemy design here and there, or a few moments where it goes dark, and the very start before I realized the game had nothing on SH1 horror-wise, I barely sweat a drop.

The apartments were pretty decent in terms of exploration, I think, as they opened up just enough for you to explore them actively, rather than just to follow the obvious way forward.

That's the least I'd expect, given this is SH1 design. But yes, they delivered in this regard at least. Shame it didnt extend to the town exploration though.

The way the town was limited to brief and very guided walkabouts was quite disappointing, though

exactly. SH1 town design is better in pretty much every way that matters.

Same goes for the monsters, thematically. The designer was pretty inventive with them, but it indeed doesn't excuse how weak the combat is and how, despite the attempts, you don't really feel cornered or claustrophobic when facing the enemies.

Thematically or visually they're fine. Gameplay-wise they're boring and do not enhance the horror experience to the extent they should. Only ever encountering slow enemies makes them zombies, and zombies are one of the least scariest in the horror bestiary (amped up a little when they're runners though!).

I also agree that the supporting characters aren't that good. The point their involvement in the story builds up to is made too obvious later on and they're not that interesting in themselves.

Well said, though they're not bad either. Just don't creep me the fuck out like many SH1 characters would. But they do create mystery at least, which is classic SH.

All in all, I agree that Silent Hill 2 disappoints as a survival horror, in terms of its gameplay, but Team Silent really showed some inspiration with their work, so I think it's worth recommending for the immersive experience. If it seems to you that I'm underplaying the problems with it as a game, it's just because that I think they're so glaring that they need not be gone into here.

Nope I don't think you're underplaying the shitty gameplay, but rather the impact the weak gameplay has on the horror; fear, tension, atmosphere, dread.

 

[schru]

Well, I played all four games one after another and I did find SH2 creepy at times in its own way, but like I said, I found it interesting more for its brooding, slow exploration of the sense of isolation and decay, so it didn't feel like it had to be as visceral and unsettling as the first game. Though obviously all the instalments were inspired by Lynch's works, SH2 in particular is more Lynchian rather than like a horror film or game in the typical sense.

But anyway, I agree with everything else you say. I'd very much like it if the game employed actually good mechanics to complete the effort Team Silent put into the atmosphere and story. A shame they didn't get another proper chance, what with SH3 having less development time and SH4 being a rather awkward experiment.

 

[toughasnails]

SH2 great game imo but in the long run it was deleterious to the series and I would even say that it killed off SH1 in a way. SH2 overdid the psychological side to the point where the popular interpretation is p much it is all in your head bro, it is all your inner demons bro, it is all Freud and Jung BRO. That carried on to sequels and retrospectively impacted the first game. I never played the Wii remake of SH1 but it was clear to me from reading reviews that they took it wholly in that direction. SH1 did have that element and it did show the influence of movies like Jacob's Ladder. But that was just one side to it and one of its influences, you couldn't do the SH2 interpretation on it without doing violence to the plot. There was a promise of Twin Peaks like fictional universe and mystery in there... But then SH2 proved to be far too successful. And SH1 never received a PC port, wasn't included in the HD collection. I imagine that many continued to start with SH2.

 

[schru]

That is unfortunately the popular interpretation, but it's a misconception in that the presence of a psychological significance doesn't equate to the reduction of all these things to the psychological level. Even if Team Silent took inspiration from Jung, his interpretation of the nature of the things he studied doesn't change their nature, in terms of what they might have to do with the soul (which, despite the modern notion of ‘psychology’, is what the word refers to) or influences affecting it; at any rate, Jung's tendency to seek meaning in the unconscious and a kind of collective psychism is eminently suitable for horror that involves the demonic (consider how that which is below the ‘conscious’ relates to the ‘infernal’ in the literal sense).

The link is in the traditional notion of the correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the inward and the outward. We know from the first game that an occult ritual created an opening for infernal influences to affect the town and already there the manifested entities and places the protagonist was lead to had various significance for the character that happened to be the medium for the summoning of these influences. In the second game we're shown that the town and its entities respond to and haunt the individuals drawn to it, somewhat like an outward manifestation of their demons, and this correspondence is very exact in that the element which constitutes the psyche in man pertains to those modalities of our world which by analogy may be termed the ‘psychic’ or incorporeal (or again, ‘subtle’), and the devil is said to have direct influence only on the latter. Referring to hermetic notions is not out of place here, as the first game especially made use of cabbalistic symbolism, which incorporates elements of the hermetic tradition.

At any rate, Team Silent didn't go for a resolution like that in Jacob's Ladder, and even there the matter isn't simply reducible to ‘it's all in your head’. The protagonist in the film was given a psychoactive drug and, in reference to an inverted significance of the title, experienced a kind of descent to lower reaches of his soul before he could free himself of the attachments that were holding him down. The common assumption is that psychedelic substances just distort the regular operations of the mind and create illusions, but it's worth noting that this is not what people who use them on a more or less regular basis seem to make of their experiences, and furthermore, it's more significant that substances from which some such drugs have been developed were, and in shamanic traditions still are, used in various rituals to induce trance and facilitate encounters with non-human entities.

Twin Peaks doesn't do something altogether different from SH2 either, in that the influence of the ‘inhabiting spirits’ is basically possession.

This article offers some interesting insights into how various traditions related the psychic to the demonic: https://www.themathesontrust.org/papers/comparativereligion/coomaraswamy-satan.pdf

Anyway, Silent Hill 2 or not, it was inevitable that other studios brought in to continue the series could have only produced poor imitations and would have done things from the fandom's perspective, like using that psychological interpretation because it was current and seemed like clever, more ‘mature’ story-telling to them.

 

[Machocruz]

Not strictly horror, but the season isn't complete without Splatterhouse.

I'd say it is strictly, exactly horror, no question. I considered putting it, and 2, in my 2D category, but I don't enjoy playing them much. They were rental games, never something I'd buy and play past a couple evenings. Same with Friday the 13th on the NES, which I think has a remarkable atmosphere for an 8-bit game.

 

[Puukko]

Beat FEAR. It's refreshing to see a game that has this little bloat and doesn't overstay its welcome. They also got probably as much mileage as they could out of the settings, considering it was all just variations of offices, storage/industrial areas and labs. I think cutting down and pacing those flashback sequences a bit better and dialing the action-horror balance a bit forward by incorporating more soft horror (creepy sounds etc) would have been good. As it was, the cut between action and horror was fairly rigid, and decidedly leaned towards action with maybe a 75-25 ratio. Also, they really only gave you one enemy type at a time and I can't believe how little use the invisible dudes got. Seriously missed opportunity to sprinkle them in there amidst the regular clones. They appeared in one section of one level and never again. Mechanical enemies were my least favorite categorically.

I then started XP and damn, I can feel the lack of MMod. I didn't realize it had this much of an effect because it fit the game so well. Some guns got hit worse than others, the SMG in particular made me wonder if I was actually hitting anything when I first shot it in the church. Shotty meanwhile is still the most fun.
I like the change in locales though they're dragging out the introduction of these other invisible dudes for too long. The very first glimpse was great and made me question what I saw, and the clones are out of their element too and got taken by surprise, but by now they've been all but revealed yet they keep running away.

 

[Wunderbar]

SH2 great game imo but in the long run it was deleterious to the series and I would even say that it killed off SH1 in a way. SH2 overdid the psychological side to the point where the popular interpretation is p much it is all in your head bro, it is all your inner demons bro, it is all Freud and Jung BRO. That carried on to sequels and retrospectively impacted the first game.

The whole "main characters are a sinner with repressed memories, and the town is their own personal hell" thing was brought back by w*sterners. SH3 and 4 are mostly free of that stuff.

 

[kites]

not sure if it's been posted around here, but this is the first i'm hearing of this

The Japanese horror game, FATAL FRAME: Maiden of Black Water, originally released on Wii U in 2014, is now beautifully resurrected as a multiplatform title (...) Experience all of the horror from the original FATAL FRAME: Maiden of Black Water with new remastered visuals, new costumes and photo mode features.

out on steam Oct 27th!

 

[Puukko]

Mite b cool; though correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think KT has a history of porting over their PS2 titles to PC? So even if this does well, I don't see them putting in the effort to remaster those FFs, but it does still show they've not given up on the series even if this game did poorly on the Wii U (shocker).

 

[kites]

i'm not sure they have very many ps2 games worth porting? atelier iris would be nice. considering their ports of ninja gaiden 1-3 this looks like a little more care is being taken.. i've only played FF2 a couple times, so i can't speak to the quality of the rest - but if the series is being relegated to pachinko machines why not do some bare-bones hd ports at least, easy money

also worth noting that their pricing policies on steam are pretty horrible in general

 

[Puukko]

The standard KT practice is to make a barely functional port of an older AA game and price it like it was a new AAA release.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Not much of a horror game player, but I happened to own a GameCube for a while and played Eternal Darkness. Didn't really expect the GameCube to have a horror game at all, but it was pretty good, might have went under people's radar due to the platform. Story that stretches out about 2000 years and featuring a wide cast of interconnected characters, replayability featuring somewhat-differing routes that unlock depending on your choice during the game. Spellcrafting that allows players to unlock their own spells through trial and error, etc.,

 

[Puukko]

Oh yeah, Eternal Darkness has piqued my interest more than once. It does some creative stuff with the sanity mechanic too.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Looking back, Eternal Darkness had a very specific vibe. The way it mixed the present day investigation, sword & sorcery in various historical settings and Lovecraft, it reminds me of some of Robert E. Howard's stuff.
Been years and years since I've played it tho, so I've no idea how much I'd enjoy it today or would that comparison hold.

 

[Machocruz]

I played ED the first Halloween it was out. Good times. Back when console games were console games, not watered down PC games.

Writing was pretty competent, faithful to it's literary inspirations. Very interesting structure with two different layers, the mansion and the historical chapters and how you'd gradually "unlock" progress through the former via progress in the latter.

I figure the writhing and structure would allow it to hold up today.

 

[destinae vomitus]

Thief might not be strictly horror but the first game and certain fan missions are ideal october material if you ask me.

 

[Beowulf]

Thief might not be strictly horror but the first game and certain fan missions are ideal october material if you ask me.

Well, some official missions were also quite frightening (looking at you, The Cradle).

 

[Riskbreaker]

Thief might not be strictly horror but the first game and certain fan missions are ideal october material if you ask me.

Fan mission-wise, Sensut's Dracula campaign for Thief 2 and his Cryptic Realms would fit the bill for that Octobery, classic horror movie vibe eminently well.
DrKubiac's "A Better Tomorrow" is superb too, for something more conductive to underwear-soiling.

 

[Machocruz]

Serendipity. Was considering Arkham City for October, and all the Arkham games happen to be on sale. That settles that then.

 

[molcandr]

FAITH is a cool indie horror about the satanic panic in USA during the 1990ies. Some jumpscares, several different endings too. Some of them quite dreadful, others are intentionally funny.
https://airdorf.itch.io/faith
There is supposedly a Steam version that is a bit bigger and better.