This is just a ramble plurk

I don't even play a lot of horror games

But the ones I have played

Or watched people play

Rely a lot on like darkness and ammo scarcity and sound design to make it scary

Resident Evil and such

sound/visual design

And the thought I'm having is like

fundamentally

they're still third person action games

I agree

Horror games generally have a second genre - some are action, some are puzzles...

And I think that after going through a few it would start to feel stale

So like

Here's my thesis statement for this plurk

If you want to make a horror game truly terrifying, you don't just need horror aesthetics

You can't just be really creative in how fucked up your monsters are

You need horror mechanics

Resident Evil does also enforce resource scarcity via inventory space restrictions

it does

But there definitely comes a point at about the 2/3rds mark where the game becomes a shooting gallery

yup

which leads me to my horror game pitch

You're on a spaceship

sits here, vibrating, knowing So Much about horror games, but that's not what this plurk is about exactly alkdjfsda

a big one

that's like a city flying through space

and HORRIBLE SPACE BUGS have gotten loose and are killing everyone

but

here's the thing

the bugs are very slow

and not that strong

like you can deal with them

The problem is that you are not the last survivor

The ship is still populated

But a combination of alien space pheremones and fucked up ship culture

has made it so that people refuse to acknowledge that there's a problem

You can actually get in trouble if you're caught fighting

slight shades of late Majora's Mask

Everyone's just frantically trying to pretend everything is normal

where the situation is getting visibly more dire and people are getting agitated but not about the situation

so they just get angry about other unrelated things

So the challenge of the game is not "how do I stop this bug from killing me"

as the sky caves in

it's "How do I navigate my ship's labrynthine bureaucracy to make people acknowledge there's bugs killing eveyrone"

You have lots of conversations with people while there's a bug in the background

just

slowly inching towards them

But the guy won't help you if you're RUDE

social anxiety game

So you gotta go through the whole routing with him as fast as you can before he starts to get eaten

As you progress through the game the bugs start eating the hull so entire segments of the ship get exposed to vacuum

But there Is No War In Ba Sing Se

I think I would find this experience to be

WAY more stressful and unnerving

than creeping through dark corridors with a flashlight and 8 bullets

Waiting for a zombie to jump out at me

ANYWAY I'm certainly not saying "ALL HORROR GAMES ARE REPETITIVE SCHLOCK"

That's definitely not true

And, as I said, I'm not TOO into the genre

This was just a brain blast I had based on my limited exposure

i think you should play Mother

if you're looking of Anxiety The Game

Mother, the NES game??

trilies:MOTHER Trailer Final - Psychological Horror Gamethis DOES look like it hits on some similar themes

aha

i watched my favorite horror lper play that and he got So Stressed Out. great game that did what it meant to! he never wanted to play it again :v

but yeah i have so much horror knowledge, so i was like "wait, i remember something that fucks with people's multitasking stress like this is describing"

the trailer has a gun but it is less involved than you'd think iirc

I'd watch someone else play it because I would be too scared of this one

SAME

To be clear I am a huge horror weenie

I would not be able to finish the game I just described

this only makes me want to make you play Mother (the horror game) even more tbh :v

anyway
1. cjugames is a good calm but still funny horror lper, if you ever want to dip your toes into that, no jumpscare screaming from this brit
2. i have so much horror game knowledge, if you ever want to dip your toes into something more directly, i am always here

I did not know this about you

but if I'm in the mood I'll check cj out

oh you must have missed last year when I posted a giant google spreadsheet of all the different horror games you could get on steam for different prices alkdsjfalsf

but yes it's a special interest of mine, although I've not kept up to date too much for this year. I need to get back on it tbh, i know we've got some good ones