[IDEA] punishment for look at the monter's face in Amnesia

[Zaffre]

That SCP-096 creature is pretty awesome, but it would only make the problem worse. If the player has a 100% chance of dying as soon as he sees it's face we're arriving at the problem of breaking immersion again. It would be extremely terrifying - but only once.

What I really like about the concept however, is the inevitable delayed reaction, the fact that it directly reacts to the players actions and the whole thing that it works over distance.
I have no idea how one would implement it into an Amnesia game, but imagine: You're in a room with security cameras and upon inspecting one of the monitors you look into the face of that thing. And since the game has fed you some information about it beforehand, you know it's inevitably coming for you now. You don't know how far away it is but it's coming.

That would make me paranoid as hell - the game would probably have to pull some tricks behind the scenes so that the monster never really catches you (to avoid player death yaddayadda...) but as long as I believe it is constantly coming closer, always knowing where I am, I would be scared shitless.

The downside to the whole concept is that it has already been tried in a game and it didn't work at all. The Endermen in Minecraft have exactly that AI (you look at their face and they keep teleporting towards you until they have killed you) and before they were released everyone thought they would be scary as hell - but they weren't. Something about the fact that you could control the monsters behavior by simply not putting your crosshair over it's face killed the scaryness.

Now of course, Minecraft isn't a horror game so you have to take that with a grain of salt, but I still think there is something to be learned from that: Maybe if the player notices that something that seemed like an incomprehensible threat is actually under his control to some degree, he is compelled to switch into a "gamey" mindset and try that mechanic out. It's the same effect that occured in Black Plague, in the scene where you had to exploit the AI of one of the infected in order to drop something on it's head and kill it - it showed you that that thing was nothing but a puppet, controlled by a set of instructions, not a real monster.

Agreed. It would break the immersion because if you accidentally turned and saw it, you're dead. Something along the concept of "look at me so I can't move" seems kind of overdone (Slenderman in Slender, Enderman in Minecraft, SCP-173 in SCP Containment Breach, the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who, etc.) and it would probably just cause me to sigh and shake my head. Don't get me wrong, a more complex AI instead of a simple "follow you and hit you" algorithm is preferable.

A punishment for looking at a monster could be something along the lines of SCP-372, or Peripheral Jumper. It always stays in your blind spots so you can never see it. When you turn, you just see it flicker out of sight. Something like that would make me terrified and I'd probably quit the first time I saw it. But in the end, the creature doesn't do any damage to you, just stares at you out of sight, but not out of mind. The punishment for this could be sanity drain. I'd like to see something like this in a custom story.