Suggestions for Future Horror Games

[Sexbad]

A more complex game just gives you more ways to get into the player's head. There are plenty of ways to fuck it up, but a designer worth his salt can keep a multifaceted experience intriguing and engrossing. Tight scripts and unique setpieces can definitely have their place, but they need to be tied together by lots and lots of challenge.

I'm not so sure about that - or maybe I just misunderstood your post. Challenge is good in general, but it can get in the way of immersion if it is too game-like. If the player has to focus on tons of controls or a lot of complicated game mechanics it will be much harder for him to believe that he is truly in the game world, as he is thinking about the abstract mechanics behind that world instead. The same applies if a challenge is too hard and the player needs to constantly reload and start over - the whole immersion is lost. A monster that appeared as a horrifying threat at first simply becomes an annoying obstacle if you fail to get past it for the tenth time - like a difficult jump in Mario.

The classic challenge-reward scheme of game design does not work well for horror games in my opinion...which of course doesn't mean there can't be any challenges at all. But I think they need to be of a different kind - and of course not action-oriented (reflexes, dexterity etc.). Right now puzzles seem to be the only way to present a challenge to the player without putting him in a "game" mindset. But I'm sure there's more ways.

I expected this sort of reply. Lots of people who fawn over games that focus on some kind of immersion have a very limited view of challenge and often consider it a bad word. In most games, challenge comes down to a formula of "do it right or you will die and restart the course" with little intricacy. And of course, this doesn't work well in a horror game because horror has to be meaningful and deep. If the only thing that is noticeably endangered is the health of some guy carrying a pistol and a flashlight, the developers are doing it wrong. More "conventional" challenge, like an increase in monster population density or a limited sprint bar, can be daunting or frightening at first, but surely enough it can make the experience extremely stale when overdone. Cry of Fear has a lot of this, with enemies that are just monster-closet bullet-sponges and very out of place platforming bits, and it ends up feeling less like survival horror and more like a survival gauntlet sort of deal.

What good horror needs is more ways for you to invest yourself in a game so that your health measure isn't the only thing that matters. Frictional have done this in some very effective ways that not many people really acknowledge. Penumbra's point-and-click adventure side was a pretty nice challenge by itself, but it became special because of how it connected with the history of the world. When you read notes, you came for the puzzle hints and stayed for the layered backstory full of interconnected tales, none of which ended well. The puzzles were part of a challenge that actually had little to do with surviving (except for when you were getting from place to place) but they still built upon a very rich setting and atmosphere.

I really think Amnesia suffered a little because it sort of cast away more complex adventure game elements where it was possible to get stuck in exchange for more flow when facing immediate physical threats, but Amnesia had its own strong unconventional challenge in the form of sanity and light management. Keeping your lantern off had a better guarantee of safety, as monsters were less likely to spot you, whereas turning it on allowed for more clarity and, in a sense, security. Light was a limited resource too, so you really had to judge when it was appropriate if you were stumbling through the campaign the first time, and this was an especially hard decision because no light meant draining sanity and less clarity, leading to more unsettling occurrences.