New Game Design/Gameplay needed for dealing with Enemies in future games

[Science Bird]

I think adding new factors of behaviour is what we need to make future horror game iterations more interesting - not so much ways to "deal" with enemies. The simplest way is to make the video game character more like a real human. The addition of "tracking if you are moving your controller around to see if you are flinching" (Until Dawn) or giving you control over blinking and breathing (SCP:Containment Breach) are examples of that. Assuming future technologies we might be able to track Owhat a player is doing with individual hands, where his head is turned in relation to his body or even what he is doing with his entire body. Think "you have to stand absolutely still now for 20 seconds to not trigger it" on the simplest level.

In these cases, it is important to not make it a gimmick. If it is a unique selling point, it likely isn't really the right thing for scaryness. It needs to be ingrained in the non-horror gameplay so much that you know all about it by the time it becomes serious (for example: Turning levers and opening/closing doors in SOMA, which is only a required factor very late in the game, using it earlier on is emergent (fleeing from construct/proxy).

I don't think the solution is adding new ways to "deal with" monsters. Anything that empowers you takes away from the scaryness. But we may not always be stuck just holding the crouch key looking at a wall until a monster goes away. Maybe we'll huddle with our actual body, or we might be holding a door closed to try and make it seem locked (btw, I tried that in the CURIE, it was a bad idea).

There is also one more option: Making horrors that just don't work like "thing that walks around". Think of a Memetic concept that causes haunts in you. You have the option of talking to other people about it, but if you do, they only become infected. Think of all the shiz that the SCP wiki thought of that conventional horror hasn't done yet. We can probably still find new ideas.