Monsters, and Why They Aren't Scary.

[dreadi]

Very good points in this thread and I agree with most of them. The most important thing in a horror game (or movie) is the initial build up of the atmosphere. Overture and for example the Shalebridge Cradle mission in Thief 3 do this really well. Also the fact that your first enemy in Penumbra is a ferocius dog instead of a zombiemonster keeps the credibility factor up. I've never progressed as slowly in a game as in the beginning of Overture because I was so nervous.
But because it's a game and a game always works according to simple mechanics, you quickly learn how the enemies act, how fast they can run, wether they can see you in a certain situation or not etc. Thus the horror factor decreases rapidly in accordance with how much you have to deal with a certain type of hostile entity. Overture of course had many other events to help keep the atmosphere up but the patrolling dogs and spiders got rather old towards the end. Although the ending of overture was quite cheesy, it still worked for me perfectly. It really felt like the whole game had been a build up for just that short sequence and it left me shivering. This is because you are introduced for the first time to a new entity in the game. It looks like a human but the situation screams that everything is wrong about it.
Having variety is really important in a horror game. I mentioned the cradle earlier for it's good atmosphere build up, but after confronting the first (and only) type of enemy in the mission you stop being scared really fast.
What I would like to see are completely unique enemies everytime. Not just in how they look but how they act should be radically different from eachother. This way if the game never used the same trick twice, the player wouldn't be allowed to simply learn the gameplay mechanics to avoid danger. You would be on your toes all the time because you would never really know what's coming and the game could build the atmosphere for the next enemy substantially better. Of course this would require more time from the developers and I can imagine it's not really an option for a small dev like Frictional.
Another option would be to introduce different kind of behavior than what the player is used to from an already known enemy. For example if you have a tuurngait you know it's gonna be prowling around on its two feet. What if one of them was suddenly crawling towards you on the ceiling (which is always creepy)?. The player would be surprised having to rethink what to expect from already known enemies.

Also, I thought Condemned wasn't scary at all. It was just far too gamey and silly. It also always bothered me how a guy with supposedly superhuman strength runs out of breath after 10 seconds of running.