stewmull

How far will you go for a scary game?

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I have a weird relationship with horror games. I'll watch horror movies all day and night then sleep like a log. Jump scares do nothing to me, in any medium. On the other hand, my ability to psych myself out is tremendous, so things like Steven Moffat Who episodes are pretty good at utterly ruining me. A grossly overactive imagination doesn't assist these matters. So when I tried to play Amnesia for the first time, just having heard shit, I managed to psych myself out so badly that I quit something like ten minutes in, before even seeing the bad guy. Dead Space 1 did more or less nothing to me whereas System Shock 2 managed to freak me out like crazy, though I didn't quit it. It's a real overthinking issue for me, because I'm usually busy thinking of way worse shit than is happening.

I did manage to finally play Amnesia but I was at the time liberally liquored and it was midday.

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Could you give some examples in cinema or gaming of good cosmic horror? That sounds intruiging. I assume it has Lovecraftian overtones, rather than a butchering monster doing the rounds. This might be one of the types of horror I am strangely comfortable with.

Yeah Lovecraft is the poster boy for cosmic horror, but there are others. It's tough to answer your questions because so many games and movies borrow elements from cosmic horror without going the whole hog (making the player/viewer as well as the protagonist feel insignificant and unsafe in the face of the terrible reality of the universe). It's easier to pull off in literature than it is in other mediums.

Cinema with strong cosmic horror elements - well Prometheus seems to be heavily based on Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, but doesn't seem to have the conviction to go all the way. Event Horizon has some strong cosmic horror themes if you pay attention. 2001 Space Odyssey too, although it plays down the horror in favour of awe. Cabin in the Woods is a kind of post-modern cosmic horror played for laughs, as is the Evil Dead series. The Mist has a good crack at it (Stephen King's weirder stories about things from other dimensions are very Lovecraft-inspired), especially with the downer ending.

Games are even harder to pick out because devs love Eldritch Abominations, but they also like you to kill them. System Shock 2 is like a microcosm of a CH story (microcosmic horror?) The Silent Hill Games likewise. The Reapers in Mass Effect borrow a lot from it as do the Markers in Dead Space but the games themselves are action-orientated .

Games considered to be proper attempts at CH are Amnesia, Eternal Darkness and, of course, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

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I've never really been able to qualify what will scare me in video games, because some concepts or executions of things will happen in two games, but only one of them will have that fear effect on me. Silent Hill got me with a combination of its abruptness, unexplained nature, and the aesthetic of things. Plus the audio - in which there was none whenever you were inside of places.

(Aside: Silence freaks me out in real life, I mean true silence; even the hum of power calms me)

Then there's things where I'm scared to play a game because of the consequences a character faces. I didn't even touch Resident Evil 4. I was watched a roomie pick up on the game, starting to play through... and then chainsaw guy happened. I felt the blood leave my face and I had to leave the room.

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Thanks, Dan. I guess I was on the right track. Maybe it's something I should start pushing for in my work, getting a vibe of cosmic horror in there. Dark Corners of the Earth is fantastic.

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Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was awesome, although i don't know how well it'll hold up today. I only ever got halfway through the game

i was in a distillery and a werewolf was chasing me

, i'd love to play though it again and actually finish it. the game was hard as nails, really unforgiving.

It's a weird mix of stealth and shooter, there are times where it plays like Dragon's Lair where you are in these scripted chase events when (even though you have full control) if you make one mistake you are dead.

Now this is a game that desperately needs a xbla hd upgrade

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In a way, that game had shades of Amnesia (even if it predates Amnesia). The whole beginning parts, not giving you a way to fight back. And 'the chase'. That was really tense and scary when I last played it. I'd say when you do start getting guns, especially towards the end it kind of falls apart. I still remember it as an interesting game though.

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I have to admit that I still haven't finished it. I am very near the end, but a massive bug in a boss battle is making it next to impossible to continue.

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Haha, almost no one I know has finished that game, including myself! I got about halfway and then it just faded from my life. I always intended to return, so maybe one dark winter morning I will find myself in the position to visit Innsmouth again.

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Yeah Lovecraft is the poster boy for cosmic horror, but there are others. It's tough to answer your questions because so many games and movies borrow elements from cosmic horror without going the whole hog (making the player/viewer as well as the protagonist feel insignificant and unsafe in the face of the terrible reality of the universe). It's easier to pull off in literature than it is in other mediums.

Cinema with strong cosmic horror elements - well Prometheus seems to be heavily based on Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, but doesn't seem to have the conviction to go all the way. Event Horizon has some strong cosmic horror themes if you pay attention. 2001 Space Odyssey too, although it plays down the horror in favour of awe. Cabin in the Woods is a kind of post-modern cosmic horror played for laughs, as is the Evil Dead series. The Mist has a good crack at it (Stephen King's weirder stories about things from other dimensions are very Lovecraft-inspired), especially with the downer ending.

Games are even harder to pick out because devs love Eldritch Abominations, but they also like you to kill them. System Shock 2 is like a microcosm of a CH story (microcosmic horror?) The Silent Hill Games likewise. The Reapers in Mass Effect borrow a lot from it as do the Markers in Dead Space but the games themselves are action-orientated .

Games considered to be proper attempts at CH are Amnesia, Eternal Darkness and, of course, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

It's a very existential kind of horror, a protagonist confronted with being an insignificant bug in bigger happenings that are in their scope unknowable.

To harp on Condemned again, i think the first one of those has shades of it.

Also, It still kills me that we very recently just barely missed out on getting a Guillermo Del Toro-directed adaptation of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was awesome, although i don't know how well it'll hold up today. I only ever got halfway through the game

i was in a distillery and a werewolf was chasing me

, i'd love to play though it again and actually finish it. the game was hard as nails, really unforgiving.

It's a weird mix of stealth and shooter, there are times where it plays like Dragon's Lair where you are in these scripted chase events when (even though you have full control) if you make one mistake you are dead.

Now this is a game that desperately needs a xbla hd upgrade

CoC:DCotE kind of implodes about half way through, it just turns into a really awful FPS. (Then back into a stealth game for its wacked out climax.) It's a game i would still recommend highly, though i understand the PC version is extremely troublesome on modern hardware. There's apparently a bug that can cause the timing on the chase sequences to be impossibly tight.

I'm also a sucker for needlessly elaborate health systems, and that game does that in spades. Break a leg? Stab yourself with morphine so you can muscle through it and sprint away from the monsters in pursuit.

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The best part about it are the details. Exploring Innsmouth and just being able to peek into a cellar and see a corpse. That sort of thing. Fucking awesome.

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The best part about it are the details. Exploring Innsmouth and just being able to peek into a cellar and see a corpse. That sort of thing. Fucking awesome.

The series of events concerning the girl in the attic were particularly great.

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I had a weird bug on my PC which made everyone's eyeballs bulge out of there face, everyone in the game looked like this

eye.jpg

....which was pretty terrifying

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I'm pretty sure the eyeballs were clipping through there eyelids. But when I google this phenominum there is no human record of it ever occurring

Spooky shit huh

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I recently got Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth from Steam and I've started to replay it. Originally I had this as a physical copy, but I too got stuck somewhere in the middle of the game. I think it was due to some bug so I just forgot the game.

Amnesia I also have in my Steam library, but I haven't had the courage to start it yet, I've heard that it is the scariest new game in a long time.

Still my worst memory of playing a scary game is when I played Doom3 after it was released in 2003. I was playing it in the winter darkness period of Finland and I had my headphones on so I was totally immersed in to the world of Doom. While I was sneaking around in the dark corridors of Mars, my mom decided to pay a visit, I was at that time living at the family house, but in a separate downstairs apartment.

She decided to walk slowly and silently in the darkness behind me and tap me on the shoulder without turning the lights on or shouting or anything. I seriously almost got a heart attack when she touched my shoulder.

She said she had knocked on the door, but as I had not replied and she saw the light from the monitor through the window, she came in using their spare key.

I did yell at her quite a lot because of that.

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