The scariest thing about the game "Naughty Bear" I got yesterday on clearence is how much it sucks.

Naughty bear was fucking horrible and i preordered that shit also the origional condemned was scary as shit

Amnesia: Dark Descent, is a perfect example.

So Amnesia is considered an "ugly" game? I´m confused.
Btw ever played Condemned? Man, I had to take breaks, because I couldn´t go on!

And that's why Yume Nikki is the scariest video game ever.

@Pringao

Jesus, I remember when I watched a playthrough of that. Pretty fucked up. And the endings too. I think she killed herself.

Doom 3 was scary as hell. People who say otherwise never bothered playing it at 12am with surround sound, I can guarantee that.

I think that Dead Space is really just over-the-top fucking scary. A totally twisted genre in space is messed up. For example in Dead Space 2, nothing freaks me out more in that game than when you have to put the needle in your eye.

The problem is that good horror games are hard to make. Make things too ugly and it'll just look silly and lazy. Make controls too clunky and they'll get frustrating and make players angry, not scared.

I think with enough effort a high budget game could be scary. But user friendliness does kill the horror aspect of a game.

@MetalPorkchop
It is. Twisted and fucked up as hell.

I'd suggest you check it out, but I guess watching a playtrough has kind of spoiled the experience for you... It's kind of hard to explain how creepy that game can be if you don't know what to expect and you're lost.

So Im thinking uncanny valley right?

Great article Jim, totally agree especially on the film stuff. The best thing about low budget horror is there is also something intrinsically creepy in watching something few people knew about - especially back in the 80's when there wasn't IMDB to reference everything and reviews to look up. I remember watching Mario Bava's (Argento's one time protoge)Demons 1 and 2 at my grandparents aged about 8, looked upon as cult classics now but everyone else was watching freddy or Jason. They were films that were so non existant media wise that you almost felt like you were colluding in freeing the demons from the tv by watching the film. I ended up inheriting a load of the VHS's I used to enjoy around my grandparents and because of the memories of us enjoying them and their quite sudden deaths in a short space of time it gave alot of those crummy horror films a strange kind of aura.

I Do think that Demon/Dark souls manages to create an atmosphere rivaling old school silent hill. Not necessarily from enemies but definitely locations. There's levels in those games I rush through and i just don't like them at all. Valley of defilement In Demons and Tomb of the giants, Blight town in Dark souls- and my god- i was lost in the sewer cursed for about 3 hours. I played Dark souls for 100 hours over my 2 week holiday, really too much.

The secret is they are really very very boring and not scary at all!

Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 3 are still my favorite horror games. 1. they have a way of making the player feel very alone and "alien" throughout the game, mostly due in part to their use of the environments, the sound design, the clues other (usually dead) characters leave behind and how nearly all the creatures are extreme perversions of presumably once normal human anatomy. 2. can't say that I know of anything scarier than being methodically hunted after by Pyramid Head or the Nemesis.

Horror games are an amazing anomaly, they require the designers to approach the gameplay, art, sound, level design and pretty much everything in a completely different way to anything else. They have to be unorthadox.


The problem with Doom 3, Dead Space, RE5 and whatever else is that they're shooters at heart, you are far too empowered, and they aren't doing anything special to freak you out and rely mostly on jump scares. RE5 doesn't do ANYTHING resembling horror design, it's a gory co-op shooter (which is still very fun).

The only time I was creeped out in Dead Space is when the invincible monster popped up.

RE4 at least TRIED to keep the horror vibe strong even with the great, improved combat.



Amnesia is a visually great looking indie game, the reason it succeeds in being scary is that it is DESIGNED to be.

It's dark, you glimpse a twisted creature out of the corner of your eye, it hisses, it sees you, you can't fight back at all, you run, it chases, you hide, the music is headache inducing, your dude is freaking out, the monster gets closer...

The game is DESIGNED to be scary.


Crappy visuals DO make things seem more alien, and thus more scary as it's so hard to figure things out, however it is still the DESIGN that matters most. Your typical retro game isn't scary.

For example, Pokemon isn't scary.

And yet as a kid I got FREAKED OUT at Lavender Town in Pokemon Red, the change in atmosphere was so different, the threats you faced were so different, the music was creepy. The game shifted gears and it was unnerving.

That double chin coming out from underneath the Jason mask is amazing.

Good episode, by the way. :)

Your reasons are honestly why I can't stand modern horror films. For games, though, I'd honestly call Resident Evil 4 the last truly terrifying game in the series. The sense of tension and fear that built over the thought of dying was incredible.

great episode jim, i totally agree with you, nothing is gonna unsettle me more than Silent hill for the ps one, but i think that big budget titles can be scary, they just need to focus on the scary rather than the mainstream appeal, i think SH2 looks gorgeous and it is scary too, Dead space ISN'T SCARY AT ALL but it is a very fun game, but unfortunately big companies can't afford failure so they have to go mainstream. it's sad really.

The reason is not so much that technological limits spur creativity-- the problem is that the more expensive a game's production is, the more the studio is going to want it to be Call of Duty or Gears of War. Back in the PS1 and 90s PC days when game budgets were low, we had more game genres than we could count. Now we only have four major genres-- Call of Duty, Gears of War, Madden, and Need for Speed. If a game can't be shoehorned into one of those genres when you strip away all its unique gameplay attributes, good luck getting it funded. With current game budgets, if a game doesn't sell 5 million copies your studio is going to go out of business, and that means you can't make anything other than shooter, sports, and racing games.

Disagree.

Just because a lot of modern games get it wrong, doesn't mean it's not possible.

I'd say condemned certainly isn't an indie game, it's controls don't suck and it's not graphically ugly all that much, it just uses nice graphics (for its time anyway) to make thing realistically ugly.

I found condemned more scary than amnesia because it didn't rely on cheap camera effects for a lot of its tension, and it didn't wrestle control away from you as often. Due to control issues (moving shit in amnesia is clunky and imprecise) I found it not as immersive and so not as scary. Also knowing not being able to fight back meant you didn't have to, you never really had to face you fears/demons, it's takes more bravery to stand and fight than to run and hide. It like silent hill shattered memories, you knew there was no combat so you never feared it.

Not saying amnesia isn't scary btw.

Thank you Jim! I am a big fan of the old-school horror movies, and could never put my finger on why no movies really had it for me anymore.

As for games, I disagree on one title, Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare managed to scare and unnerve me so bad I put off trying to finish it until the last two weeks. I think what stomped on me was the sense of hopelessness that title had. The world was big, but the world was full of zombies.

Palpable fear is really a result of feeling, isolated, helpless or desperate. I remember feeling helpless against the Zombies of Resident Evil because the gun you start with... you use half a damn clip to take down ONE... and guess what! Ammo is pretty limited and the threat of being bitten is there with each new room. Add in that the background music for Resident Evil conveyed a very solitary, melancholic feel, and you have everything you need to feel isolated, vulnerable and edgy. This is why the ever-famous hallway scene almost without fail scares the living crap out of everybody... the first time.

You see, after you've played a game, you know what to expect... You know where things are and you know what's in the room. You've been given a hunter's edge and it's as if a character in the horror movie is told that the killer's weakness is fire. It just removes every last bit of "oh my god, he's coming to kill me!" from the situation.

It is in this vein that games of today just aren't scary to us. Let our 5-year-old selves play them and see the reactions. Dead Space would make our child selves cringe. But many of us pick up games with the expectation that we will win and kill things. That these games put us in the roles of the likes of Secret Service Agents, International Arms Police who seem to have a pump that constantly supplies steroids to his body or former military, blah blah...

These people know how to fight outright or they hide some secret weapon or trait. There's always something special about them, and that makes them a little inhuman and more trustworthy to survive threats.

In games like Resident Evil and Demon's/Dark Souls you'll find yourself carefully checking corners before running around them because death is probably awaiting... with big, sharp, pointy teeth. It's games that fundamentally change the way you play them that are actually instilling fear. But, as in pretty much every game, your character gets stronger or you find better guns that waste the zombies with one shot and even kill the big-claw f*ckers pretty quick too. You know, assuming they don't insta-decapitate you... should have been more careful.


But as you play more games, you make a shift. This shift is very much like the shift from Alien, where a single, dangerous threat causes paranoia, death and even uses peoples' bodies against them to make more. Alien took advantage of feelings of isolation, desperation and helplessness. Aliens changes this formula a lot- now we have hardened soldiers going against the enemy. This is much like how Chris Redfield is a head-shattering beefcake battle veteran instead of a relatively inexperienced close-quarters fighter. Put Redfield of RE5 in RE1 and you wouldn't need ammo, just a power punch to the head of any zombie within 3 feet. While we're at it, we can forget the rocket launcher at the end. We're just going to use our bare hands... C'mere you pale, externally hearted bastard...

See how much a change of character can change how you look at a game? (or movie for that matter)

First of all, you sound like a camp, depressed Dracula at the start of the video.

Secondly, you make a damn good point about stop-motion feeling scarier than CGI.

Fianlly, I really must play Amnesia.

The funny thing is, I am more terrified in non-horror games than actual horror genre games. The original Halo scared the piss out of me with the Flood. The infections forms and the carrier pods were more terrifying than any of the combat forms. Still are too. Halo 3 had one level far superior in horror by making you walk through an organism and the doors looked like alien buttholes. It was disconcerting to say the least. Gears of War 2 looked to gooey to make the giant worm seem all that bad from the inside.