EVILEAGLES'S PROFILE

Yes the real horror lies within the situation in which you have to sit through such a bad game.

author=Archeia_Nessiah
The closest RM game that I experienced this was Sayako

Reading this depressed me a little. I've tried so goddamn hard to revive this project so many times and failed, for many reasons, personal ones and not. Maybe this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but to some extent I do feel like it's a cursed project. Perhaps it's about time I gave it another shot ...

My take on this topic is, horror games in general are kinda heading down the rabbit hole of "why reinvent anything when we can stick to the tradition that has worked for years"—which at best will only scratch an itch and give you a nostalgia trip, instead of the experience you once had playing horror games for the first time. This plagues JRPGs too and it's worrying.

There are certain other spaces you can explore with the horror genre, and none of them has anything to do with the intention to SCARE people. If you've ever read Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, you know that they're never called horror stories or whatever. They're just stories. Edgar's stories. And yet there's a persistent creepy feeling engulfing the atmosphere. It comes from Edgar completely abandoning the intention of giving people the heebee-jeebees, and just getting on with creating a thing that is as disturbing as his mind can come up with. It comes from the reader's understanding that Edgar does not intend to scare them, and it's just that his head is simply twisted.

Translating this to video games, one thing you can try is to set out to make a horror game without ANY jumpscares at all. With that limitation, you can find certain nuances in some other unexplored spaces. And you'll be surprised by human's ability to form patterns amongst chaos.

Another thing to remember is that once the player has seen the worst that could happen in a horror game, eventually they'll get used to it and it'll lose its effects. This is the reason why a lot of horror games like Outlast and the newest Resident Evil do not work, especially for people bad at video games. Because they keep dying and death gets old. Fast. So make sure that death does not come cheap, or that people never find out that it is so.

Also, the new Resident Evil is GROTESQUE. Not horror.

Hey Camilla, it's Alex here! Good to see you and Long Gone Days on RMN. Wish you all the best!

Any of you play any X-COM games before? And of course I don't just mean the Firaxis 2012 reboot, but also UFO Defense, Terror From the Deep, Apocalypse, and even Xenonauts. X-COM is the utmost agony when the last soldier - the last ray of hope - misses a 95% shot, and gets the entire squad killed (the professional term is squadwipe). It is also the satisfying feelings of pride and joy when you've overcome what seemed to be the hardest setback and come out victorious.

NewBlack introduced Xenonauts and X-COM as a genre back in July 2014, and I've been madly in love with it since then. Still playing either XCOM2012 or Xenonauts until this day, and not sure when I'm gonna graduate.