Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror

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I did not know there was an earlier V:tM game. I loved Bloodlines and I dig the P&P game, I better give that game a looksie.

Spoiler because kinda offtopic:

Spoiler below!

Well, it's not bad at all, but unfortunately the single player part has a much greater focus on combat, with almost no alternative ways to solve quests through other skills. It has a more rigid structure in other aspects too, for example you cannot customize your character (apart from stats and disciplines) and the story is the linear life story of this particular character instead of the more personal and immersive approach Bloodlines had. What I really liked though, was that you get to play in both medieval and modern times (so by the end Christophe is ~400 years old) which makes for a quite interesting storyline.

Anyway, another game that I like to look at for inspiration whenever it comes to the problem of immersive multiplayer is Journey. That game is immersive as hell, even though you play with other people and I believe that, since they managed to evoke emotions like joy, desperation, sadness, relief and sometimes even love, they could have also evoked fear if they had chosen to.

What they did, was systematically remove everything that could disturb immersion:
- There's no chat or voicechat available, only form of communication are your characters body language and ingame sounds.
- You cannot choose who you play with, the game connects you to random players, so there's no talking or joking with someone who's in the same room.
- You never see the name of your partner(s) until the very end.
- There are no menus or HUD elements.

I think some of these ideas could be adapted in a way to make them work for a horror game. Think for example of a world like in Limbo (only in 3D of course). You're stuck there in this dark world, as are other players, somewhere, and you have to find your way out. Now you could make this a co-op experience and try to reinforce cooperative behaviour (like Journey did it), but I think a cooler thing to do would be to try and make players distrust each other, like you already mentioned.

For example you could use the fog, darkness and graphics style to make other players almost indistinguishable from enemies. So sometimes you'd see some strange thing scurrying away from you, sometimes you're unknowingly hiding from another player who's just as puzzled as you were before... of course there's the danger that players would try to find a way to signal each other so communication would need to be entirely removed. Also you could leave players in the dark about what their character looks like, so they don't know how they'd even identify another player... still, I guess it would probably be noticeable because players move differently than AI driven characters...