Quote:The fact that you have a fighting chance is partly what makes it so terrifying to die.

Or at least the illusion that you have a fighting chance. :D

Quote:In terms of monsters, I like doubt as a vessel for fear. Wavinator's opus dealt with it on some level, where deteriorating sanity (via drugs, stress or mind control) would lead to things like horrible monsters being rendered in the game at the coordinates where your squadmates are standing. So you open up on the "monster" and kill your friends, and next time you see a horrible beast you hesitate. That's good fear.

It wouldn't induce fear in me as as this would seem artificial. It might induce confusion or make me second guess the decision to fire, but not fear.

Eventually I would learn to recognise the difference between the behaviours of a real monster (ie leaping at me to rip my head off) and that if the hallucinated monster that is really my team mate (ie just stands there). So this might, the first time it occured cause some confusion, but ultimately it won't actually be effective.

Used in moderation, it would be a good idea, but not as the main mechanic for causing fear in the player.

As far as multiple endings goes, look at the way that many RPGs have handled it. In particular, consider Fallout 2. The game was huge, many bugs existed, and you as a character couldn't often change very much. But, at the end, a sort of laundry list of the effects of your actions (no matter how small in some cases) was presented, and this really encouraged me to replay it and try to make things end better (or worse!). Something like this in a horror game might be nice--and it isn't neccesary to make each thing some majorly obvious plot point. Knocking up Bishop's daughter didn't seem to me to be that important, until the end.

As for horror...

Let's compare three games: Half-Life 2 (HL2), Doom 3 (D3), and Silent Hill.

HL2 had several parts that should've been scary. Ravenholm, for instance. Zombies? Check. Gore? Check. Crazed denizen? Check. Then, why wasn't it scary? I ran out of ammo at many points... but the gravity gun let me bail myself out. I had to methodically clear houses... but I expected something to be in them at all times. I was jumped upon by crazy creepy leapy thingies... but I was well-armed enough that I wasn't afraid.

As creepy as it may have been, Ravenholm was never scary. The thing that actually bothered me was that I would see some really mangled corpses, but it all still felt fairly cartoony, and not actually scary.

The only other thing that was remotely scary in that game was some of the fights where you are entirely outgunned, by either airships, gunships, or striders. In those cases, the fighting was suspenseful, tense, but never scary. I really just thought, "Okay, how do I get out of this mess without dying?"

Doom 3, on the other hand... Zombies? Oh god yes. Gore? Wherever there is room in the map. Crazed people? Calling Dr. Betreuger--yep. But at the same time, you were also given enough weapons, and large enough weapons, to deal with almost anything the game threw at you. That said, why was it still scary?

Scene: Walking along a corridor, which flashes a deep red every few moments, accompanied by a big *clang*. You come across a door, and it opens, and a gigantic... thing... reaches through, knocks you against the wall, and then goes back into the door, which promptly locks. The knocking ends.

Scene: Crouching in a vent shaft, a skeleton suddenly levitates and flies by you and smashes into a wall.

Scene: Right after Hell is unleashed, you stand looking at the monitors and watch as the base is taken over... not noticing that the guy in the room with you has become a zombie, who swipes at you and surprises you seemingly out of nowhere.

The reason, I think, that D3 was scary was simply knowing that the game was going to mess with you, and not only that, you couldn't stop it. After a while, even when the action had become more prevelant, I felt that the game was toying with me, and I became scared, not of the easy traps (seeing a pile of armor shards a third of the way into the game... c'mon, nothing good can come of this!), but of the fact that sooner or later, the game was going to hit me with something I couldn't see or expect to happen (at least until afterwards).

Also, at no point in HL2 did I ever feel really bad for any of the resistance fighters buying it... but damn it, when Bravo squad was ambushed, I became really pissed. When the first Lost Soul spawned from that poor lady, I was shocked. I mean, it just gets to you after a while. The characters in Doom, at least for me, weren't just nameless people biting the dust. I felt genuinely bad for them (the guy on the Monorail, for instance).

As for Silent Hill 2... I really preferred the first game. It seemed less... contrived. SH2 took itself far too seriously, and when it finally ended, I was somewhat unimpressed. I mean, fighting got to be pretty easy, if you went around town and picked up all the boxes that were thoughtfully left for you.

Pyramid head... bah. The section in the prison and the afterbits ruined him for me. I mean, they'd pop up, oh no!, now, run to next ladder, and we're safe. As someone post previously, it's Pac-Man all over again. Tense, perhaps, but not scary. Nemesis and the Tyrant were both far scarier, simply because you knew they could be beaten, and they'd follow you relentlessly.

The first game, with the elementary school and the hospital, and the amusement park, was far more disturbing. The hospital in the second game was not really that scary; tedious, but not creepy.

The two games that I really think pulled off horror the best? Alone in the Dark, and System Shock 2.

Alone in the Dark, the very first one, was creepy. It had monsters that would kill you quite easily, and only limited resources to deal with them. What's more, the house you were in was pretty messed up, and many of the puzzles were just demented. You were focused on "not dying"--anything after that was gravy.

System Shock 2 was a good horror game because, though it was bloody and gory, you also felt a sense of connection with the people you saw getting owned. The logs left by the crew (shamelessly knocked off in D3, but to good effect) gave you a perspective, a context, that really helped show just how messed up and horrible things had gotten. Some of the monsters were themselves really scary--the spiders were usually in dark places, cloaked, or otherwise hard to see. All you heard was their sound, and the next thing you knew you were being chomped down on. And even if you killed them, you could still die, frantically searching for an anti-toxin to use. The moans of the zombies telling you to run while they shot at you was downright disturbing, as was the chattering of the midwives. The atmosphere, the context, is what made that game so scary.

I'm amazed no-one has listed the Thief 3 mission in the Shalebridge Cradle yet.
For me, this is still one of *the* scariest bits in a game I've *ever* played.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it's a mission in an old asylum/orphanage that *oozes* atmosphere and has the gamer on the edge of his seat the whole time during both parts of the mission.
A quick google found this in-depth review and dissection of the level (be warned, it's rather spoilerish).

Um... I usually don't like to be so lame and simply name a game, but...

Preliminary research: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. For the XBox. Made by Bethesda.

Comes closer to capturing Lovecraft (and CoC gameplay) than any other videogame ever as.

There is no health gauge or sanity gauge, but you can die or go mad. Cues of madness include muttering to yourself, auditory and visual hallucinations (though it's hard to tell in some places, which is the point), nervous twitches (at the more severe end including things like pulling out or holstering your gun without the player's volition), sound of breath and heartbeats, the controller beginning to pulse to each heartbeat, and distorted vision.

There's also a very very slight (almost unnoticeable) blur effect every time you move in the game. This seems to intensify as you go more insane.

Health is a bit trickier, but the sound of your breathing, the slowing or increasing erraticity of your heartrate, and the draining of color from the screen are all excellent cues. The game also sometimes seems to go into slow motion during your last thirty seconds or so before death.

Gameplay, so far (I started playing recently) is a fusion between classic adventure gaming and first person sneaking. There's an escape sequence near the beginning that's more scary than anything else I've ever seen in a videogame... I and my friend died a dozen times at least before pulling it off, and it was the first time we'd ever had to reload.

Also several hours in, and no guns yet, though the game does give them to you. It'll be a relief, seriously.

This game wins at creepy.

EDIT: Oh, and the journal entries you find in the coroner's office are beyond terrifying after you've been fleeing from demented townspeople for a while and your controller/heart is pulsing so fast that it makes your heart beat in sympathy. VERY creepy. Even with three people in the room.