Some suggestions for Frictional's next game, and what makes Amnesia work so well

[GraphicsKid]

I literally just picked a paragraph in your post, and read THAT.

But I liked what I read, and I'll expand on it a little bit here.

I like the idea of having the environment being a bit more... "alive". Have things that are there one second, then disappear when they leave the screen, and you look back at where they were.

Another thing that works EXTREMELY well is if you get the player to walk into a trap... and let them realize it before the trap springs. A bunch of good examples of this is in Doctor Who... the ones written by Steven Moffat. He's really good at setting up a situation where suddenly the doctor will point out something fundamentally WRONG with it, and the viewer has an "oh shit" moment. For instance, there is an episode where there's these robotic monsters who sound like ticking clocks. Well he's in some room, and we keep hearing this ticking sound, nothing out of the ordinary until we realize that the only clock in the room is broken (and we were shown this in the beginning!) So what's making that noise???? AAAHHH. Another example, there was an episode with these creatures that imitated shadows. After a few wide shots we realize that somebody has an extra shadow... 4 main light sources... but 5 shadows... OOOHHHHH... lol Of course we don't realize it until after it's been that way for a while

Anyways, If that's TLDNR, then it boils down to this: you know what's scarier than seeing a monster turn around and start to chase you? What's scarier is when you realize that a monster HAS BEEN coming after you... for instance maybe you have some sort of monster radar, it isn't making any noise, then suddenly you realize it's turned off, so you turn it on, and WHOA, CLOSE PROXIMITY ALERT! Queue high-pitched scary music.