Have you tried The Walking Dead game ?

I have not, though that one did spark my interest purely because of the character relationships and moral choice aspects.

Cry of Fear takes place in a nighttime deserted city, with a mix of indoor and outdoor environments. A very late section of the game takes place in broad daylight in a suburban street.

Anyway, I am curious, how can a normal bright outdoor daylight location be scary and be classified as horror? Are you hoping for some sort of surrealistic occurrence? Or is it something else? Not sure how that works.

Just to contrast the constant slew of dark gloomy sewers and tunnels. It's like why the Hell would you even be in such an environment to begin with?

Also, I've seen some of Cry of Fear's gameplay. It's largely pretty dull and the enemy models are hilariously bad.

FEAR is not a horror game, neither is Dead Space. They're action games with horror elements. A bunch of amateur HL2 horror mods do not define a genre, that's a pretty poor choice for examples.

I'm no authority on horror games (Strider is), but if you really want to experience the genre you should probably point yourself towards Amnesia or Silent Hill. I don't know of any "normal" environment horror games, because by definition, normal isn't scary. Sounds like you want a horror game that has no horror in it However, Strider might know of some games like that.

Incidentally, as somebody who doesn't like being scared by games, I blogged about my experience with the more actioney horror games last year.

2much: It's partially about psychological horror; taking a familiar and safe environment and warping it. Dark environments like sewers do not seem safe in the first place.

Sadly, most horror games rely on dark environments, low ammo, and jump-scares. Which results in annoyance and startling, not actual fear. It's quite hard to make real fear in a game, I think, and basically impossible to do it in such a way that allows a second playthrough to be as tense. I'll admit, I don't have Urby's nonchalant "yawn" attitude to horror games, but they tend to be more annoying than scary, and never worth a second playthrough.

Actually, come to think of it, the scariest moments I've had in games come from non-horror games like Fallout 3. Most of these times I've found myself thinking either "Oh my god oh my god I'm gonna die I'm gonna die oh my god ..." or "HO-LEE SHIT!!!"

EDIT: I just remembered that I played Amnesia at a friend's place once. That was pretty good. But more for the lore and sanity elements, rather than the "horror" itself.

Urby has given me new purpose: to make a horror mod set in bright daylight

Jumpscares do not make a horror game; they aren't scary, they're just startling.

To achieve real horror, you have to do either of these things:

1. Give the player a complete alien feeling. Older horror games are considered scarier because it was back when video game animation was very poor. So the creatures moved inhumanly, and was very unsettling. But now, since everything is based off of human movement....

And something unsettling can be gained from complete silence: watching an old sound-less projector show footage of people being murdered, hearing nothing but the rattling of the projector.

2. Make the player feel hopeless. Not completely hopeless, even though that can and will make players shit their pants (like Amnesia), but hopeless enough. You know that tension you get when you have to run away from the gargantua for the first time in Half-Life? Isn't it fucking horrifying? Well extend that--stress it more, like having to escape from a gargantua while having to linger in the same room, forcing you to run away to draw it somewhere.

Or you could do the 'not fit enough approach' where you take a single, dull enemy that you could easily take on alone, but then make a dozen of them. So many that the player won't be able to take any of them on, even if they do have full ammo and health and everything.

I do feel that most modern horror titles are not up to par with what they used to be. For me the best horror title I've played recently is Cry of Fear because it mixes so many elements of scare into it. It managed to stay away from common horror game complaints too, it only had a couple of jump scares from what I remember, did not make you conserve ammo all that often and most certainly did not continuously use the same scare tactics.

In general however, when I'm in the mood to be scared I don't play a game, or even watch a movie. I find myself most scared by reading scary material simply because it leaves a lot to your own mind, which most often will make it much scarier. That is the main reason I think modern horror has gone off track, they don't leave anything to your imagination anymore. They directly show you what's supposed to be scary when they should let you stress it out for bit.

Lovecraft said "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." and I like to think he knew what he was talking about!

We are scared of what we can't see and don't understand and nothing conceals something better than darkness. That's simply why it's used, and it works. Flashlights or lanterns aren't just there to help you see, they're extensions of your character. Tools for him/her/you to try and make sense of, and fend off a world that's growing increasingly alien.

As for jump scares, there's a reason they're used, but it's not an excuse. Our lives are (typically) built on routine, and when something disrupts it, that's when we panic. It works in games, too. Sadly it gets taken too far, with now-predictable jump scares breaking up long periods of silence or puzzles. I completely agree that it's stale and annoying.

I believe it's possible to make a game where you spend days just going about your usual routine, with the game learning and planning ways to destroy that. The best horror games I've played, and films I've watched subvert those ideas. A horror game set in sunny, everyday locations would at some point have to flip those comforts on their head. It may be possible to avoid it with some inventive thinking, but I haven't seen any game do it yet.

For an example, Silent Hill. This is a fog-filled, living, breathing town. Not the people in it, the town itself. It looks into the very being of it's visitors and punishes those who deserve it with manifestations of their deepest shames and fears. Surviving on the streets, exploring and learning, becomes routine. Almost comfortable. Then the game plunges you into the Otherworld and all bets are off.

It literally subverts the typical horror landscape by throwing you into something unpredictable even by horror standards. And yet it's still dark and grungy. But don't pick out the darkness and use that as an example of it's quality, look at the psychological tools it employs. I hadn't heard of those maps until now, so I'm going to give them a shot and see how they fare, thanks!

Fear is being out of your comfort zone. It's not seeing or understanding the threats ahead of you, and not knowing when an end to the madness is in sight. I love it.

Wow. Thanks for the input guys.

I guess I'm like Pb in that I don't particularly enjoy being scared, but as I said, so many games and mods fail to achieve it.

I'll certainly look at things with a more open mind though. I downloaded Grey last night and started playing through it. A few startling moments in the opening level and several disturbing scenes (At least I believe they were meant to be disturbing but I thought they were pretty tame). I'll let you know my thoughts when I get into the thick of it.

Also, I'm glad JeffMOD brought up the fallout games. They did genuinely make me fearful quite often. The deathclaws are a good example. You hear about them a few times during the game, but then one day whilst wondering around the wasteland and you see your first one, you freeze. Worst case scenario is it sees you before you see it and the music changes to a more tense tribal drum beat. You desperately spin around on the spot trying to work out whats spotted you, and then you see it, barreling over a hill a few metres away, straight towards you.

Shat a brick.

I think it plays on the uncertainty like you mentioned in your blog post Pb.

I would definitely like to see some more horror games that 'try harder'. Darkness and jump scares are probably the most easy and effective ways to produce fear and uncertainty, but they are definitely not the only ways.
And Urby, play Eversion. Don't look it up beforehand, just download it and play it.

And I think the fear of the deathclaws was somewhat ruined for me as I had the dart gun for my first deathclaw encounter. And every deathclaw encounter after that come to think of it.

Kinda have to look it up to play it. What is it. Searching for "Eversion game" came up with some kiddy platformer involving sheep. Help a gamer out!

Also, Grey... yeah. It's not helping the genre for me. Been startled a lot now that the action is kicking off but the environments are more of the same dark grunge. I understand the concept that these environments are meant to be alien and threatening, but I've seen them in every other mod... so they're familiar and dull...

What you should do is get Amnesia. It's considered one of the scariest games of the time.

Sure, there's darkness, but the game is also about avoiding the darkness, or having enough materials to brighten it up. It basically punishes you for standing in it for more than 5 seconds.

System Shock 2 is in my opinion, one of the scariest games I've ever played. Its got EXTREMELY dated graphics (looks worse than half life but came out after it, what?) and it isn't a dark game in terms of environment at all. (There's no flashlight nor any need for one)

The real thing that makes it scary, is randomly spawning enemies. As you backtrack through corridors you thought deserted, and you hear noises, and wonder if those are just scripted, or if something is really there with you, or having that moment of "OH HOLY SHIT" when you happen upon a creature that wasn't there in any one of your other 9000 play-throughs.

It also creates a creepy atmosphere without overusing darkness, which contributed greatly.

EDIT: And then literally seconds after I posted, I clicked on PB's blog link and realized he already talked about SS2 to some length. So just go read that.

This is Eversion.

And speaking of horror games, I just saw this, and while they were obviously laughing and having fun they did seem quite scared at points. Maybe the secret to horror is multiplayer?

On that note, this video has some moments where there seemed to be some genuine fear in there.

P