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

[WALP]

I had a couple ideas the other day which could possibly deal with this.

There are 2 major issues with the current approach.

1. Players go into horror games like this, with the basic horror sneak and hide gameplay in mind, and while you can scare the player by going against the expectations, there's only so many ways you can do that.

2. You are also very limited in regards to how much you can betray the players expectations, because if you go too far you risk making it too hard for a lot of players, resulting in them failing or getting killed so many times the fear elements disappears.

My idea is that to counter this, you cannot simply make the game with a fresh player who has basic expectations in mind. Instead you should 1. spend a very large portion of the game building up new expectations for the player, while focusing less on scaring it. And 2. make use of all this time to learn the player more complex/hard gameplay.

This would mean that when you get to the point in the game where you are truly trying to scare the player, you will have a brand new set of expections about the games world and how the gameplay works, which you can play with and as such scare the player with. What kind of gameplay this is you have a lot of freedom with, but you probably want it to fit in. It could be something like giving the player a gun, which he has expected to use entire game, only for it to not work at all, or having the player somehow learn to do a lot of intense running, so when he encounters an enemy he wont just run around the corner but try to put as much distance as possible between him and the enemy.

Theres no perfect example of a game that has done this right, but if I were to give some examples I would say (spoiler alert for Rayman 3 + Quake 4)

Spoiler below!

The part in Rayman 3 when you fall down to the knarren, or when you are captured and stroggified in Quake 4(this part is the most I have ever been scared by a game, left 9 year old me shaking on the couch)

Learning the player the gameplay as you build up expections is also important, because now that the player has needed to go through difficult sections to get here, he has an expection of how hard the game is, and what it will take to fx Survive, meaning the player will never halfass anything. And as mentioned before the fact that the players are doing their best and are way more skilled means you have to worry far less about player failure when you betray their expections.

In short you should spend a lot of time building up expectations in the player, and your expectations for the player. Especially in the gameplay.