Making monsters of Silent Hill

[Froge]

Someone I know from another forum had the following to say about Amnesia and Silent Hill:

Spoiler below!

"As I said before, horror is an art of subtlety, timing, tact, and countless other things. Horror isn't a formula, or a 12-step process, it's an inexact science. To understand horror, you need to understand what people are afraid of. A few bases that most horror games touch upon are darkness, isolation, uncertainty, and atmospheric ambiance. Breaking down these elements allows us to understand generally what people are afraid of. The darkness may be scary to one because humans aren't well-adjusted to seeing in the dark, therefore it creates an element of uncertainty. This uncertainty is what causes tension. Because they can't be sure of what's in the darkness, they could imagine that there might be something there, and become more wary as a result. The element of isolation is crucial in this regard, since the absence of company is what removes a sense of safety, causing a feeling of vulnerability. I mentioned uncertainty before, because that's something that's really important in horror. If you know for a fact that there isn't anything in a room, then you don't have a reason to be afraid. If there MIGHT be something in a room, then you'd be a lot more careful. There are a few rare occasions where you might be surprised by the sudden entrance of something in a room that was previously empty, and I guess that's scary in its own way, but that's a different type of fear. Ambiance is something that increases the level of fear and discomfort one feels. If someone's standing in a dark room, and believes that the room isn't secure, it would be scarier if they suddenly sensed something in some way. I know this is all somewhat vague, but that's because this is a basic template for a horror situation.


Now, let's take a look at some of the things that make Amnesia scary. We've got the monsters, darkness, isolation, and ambiance. The monsters take the form of the grunts, the darkness is present in most locations, isolation is almost constant, and ambiance is quite strong at points.


An important part about the monsters is their role. In this case, the grunts have the role of finding you and tearing you down. Since Daniel can't fight the monsters, his only option is to run and hide. A person might be afraid of getting found by the monster, and they might feel afraid when they're getting chased by the monster. Now, another element adding to the monster's scariness level is the grunt's disturbing/grotesque appearance.


The creators of the game, however, knew that something gets less scary with familiarity. That is to say, if you were to spend too much time examining a grunt, you'd become less afraid of it due to an increased level of familiarity. This is the same reason why Alien has a heavier element of horror than Aliens, which has a heavier element of action. In Alien there's only one Xenomorph that darts about the ship, while in Aliens there are a whole bunch of them that are much more straightforward in their attack. So, in order to combat this, the creators of Amnesia implemented the sanity drain mechanic, which makes the controls more awkward and changes some things in the game when you have less and less of it. Since you get punished for looking at the enemies, you avoid looking at them for too long.


For most people, their goal would be to not get caught. However, if you are caught, there's hardly any penalty. In fact, I think in some areas it removes the enemies entirely. This can hurt the immersion factor, since there's a jarring transition between dying and getting resurrected with a small message telling you to be more careful next time.


That being said, I never really felt afraid of the gatherers after I got good looks at them. I still wanted to avoid them, since that's the key to progressing, but I never felt afraid of them.


Moving on from that, it was also easy to tell when a grunt would show up, usually. Most of the time they would be activated when you took a key item, but there are a few areas that they actively patrol. Their paths are actually pretty easy to figure out, and it just becomes a simple stealth game if you remove the horror element. That being said, this game is kind of easy when you think about it.


I'm starting to ramble, I think, but you should get my general idea. Now, let's look at a typical gameplay of Amnesia:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKTrW6Ko5k


Now, there's also the matter of survival-horror games. In survival-horror games, you normally have the ability to fight the enemies, the catch is usually that you have limited resources with which to do so. There's a fine art to making a survival-horror game scary, since being able to fight the monsters and defend yourself would normally make the game less scary. An example of this could be Condemned, since that game allows you to fight crazy hobos with sledgehammers and whatever else you can pick up, or Dead Space, where the horror is offset by how you can just shoot the shit out of everything. However, there has always been one game, one shining example of the survival-horror genre, that I have hailed as being a perfect example of how to pull this off, and that game is Silent Hill.


You could call that an obvious example, but I feel that it plays a lot of elements well. It gives you the ability to fight back, it's just that you can't fight very well. I wouldn't say that sub-par controls should be staples for horror games, but it's something that the more recent games in the series have done away with in favor of action-oriented fighting. I could keep on talking about Silent Hill, but I think I would avoid rambling if I were to just leave it as my example of a "real scary" game, since that's what the original question was.


So, my list:


Silent Hill
Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 3
SCP Containment Breach
SCP-087-B


Those are the only ones that come to mind, but at the very least they're scarier than Amnesia."