» Sun Dec 11, 2011 8:55 am
I remember seeing a lot of videos talking about what to do and what not to do on the Escapist. Not just Zero Punctuation (who seems to go into this in every supposedly "horror" shooter), but others, like Jimquisition, too.
Anyway, what makes people afraid in horror situations is, ultimately two things, *the unknown and powerlessness*.
The sense that they are losing all control over the situation, or that they have no idea what is going on is terrifying to people.
If you want to make a creature scary, never show it to the player until it's too late. A monster you can see and fight is not scary, it's just more XP waiting to be grinded. A monster you can't see, but know is stalking you is terrifying.
I actually get most scared when playing games like Thief specifically because I often have quite a deal of trouble finding my enemies in a way that doesn't get me, myself found. I feel safe in the shadows, but if I have to leave that glorious comfort of mother darkness to bolt across a well-lit area to reach the next point of safety, and I haven't ascertained exactly where every threat is yet, my anxiety is going to shoot up.
Likewise, you can never really be scared of a threat you know you can take in a fight. You need to take away the player's ability to kill the enemy, at least until they meet some sort of special condition. Alternately, make killing the enemy meaningless because more will just spawn, and you've functionally just given away your position to try to fight - but even then, you need to make it take so many resources that no player can take on more than a couple of them. However, this hurts the above principle that the less you see of the monster, the more scary it is. The more you see the monster, the more you understand how it works, and people fear the unknown for they have no control over it, but regain some of that control and power when they start to know. That's why people keep saying they're scared of deep water - you can't see the monster in it.
Some games that really get down the notion of terror really well actually go all the way - you get no weapons at all, you can only run and hide. You can only complete the quest and escape the monster by completing puzzles while the monster is looking the other way. Look at games like Amnesia: Dark Descent for that.
In fact, if you want an ultimate scary monster to throw at a character who laughs as he cleaves dragons clean in half, make the monster a completely invisible ghost that cannot be harmed by weapons or magic at all and that walks through walls. (Enemies that go through walls always creep me the **** out.) Make the player capable of hiding from the ghost, but having only a vague sense of where it is. Make it do something like kick debris on the floor around or have a set of footprints in the snow or the like that give the player something to look for, but make it silent so that the player can never feel safe unless they can see exactly where those footprints are leading right at that moment. Then, make it so when the ghost has spotted the character, and is sneaking up on him and getting very close, make it SCREAM. Something nice and fingernails-on-the-chalkboard awful. Something that would be annoying normally, but when you have someone flipping out about not knowing where the ghost is, the will completely void themselves and start diving in a panic for the nearest hidey-hole.
It's actually probably preferable if it doesn't kill the player - dying then reloading breaks the immersion, and horror depends more than anything else on making the player being immersed in the world. Of course, if they completely forget about stealth altogether, and just stand out in the open, waiting to die, you have to kill the player, but the longer the player can just keep running away and hiding from the monster, and less they are reloading quicksaves, the more your immersion can start to make them stab at their own shadow.