Which game did you find scarier?

[Adny]

Something that's been bothering me, guns/being able to fight back=/=not scary. Silent Hill 2 is considered one of the scariest games ever (the scariest to some) and it has weapons. Sometimes it can even make a game scarier, watching your ammo slowly go away and realizing you won't be able to fight back soon. It's all in the execution, but saying "this game is scarier than this game because you can't fight back" is stupid.

**I've never played Silent Hill 2; I tried, but aside from the strange camera/movement controls (which I thought made it unplayable) it continuously crashed, so I can't offer any input there.**

It's just my observation. Typically when games implement weapons (especially guns), they rely on things popping out at you and try to classify that as horror; that's fine for some people, but I find jumpscares more "fun" than scary, as in after a jumpscare, you laugh at yourself, but when you are genuinely scared, you want to turn off the game.

DCOTE couldn't even manage to keep any horror element after they implemented weapons. It had plenty of resources and made it so you never really felt "in danger" when enemies appeared; they were far too easy to kill and could rarely ever hit you as long as you weren't standing still for 5+ seonds.

A game that I think does a good job of balancing resources and using subtlety is Metro 2033. I started playing it a few days ago and I had to stop a few times, it got too overwhelming. It has a lot of "NOPE" moments, and really does well with ambient sounds. I found the enemies to be genuinely scary; they were difficult to kill and often forced the player to use up a lot of resources (i.e. the "Librarians").

tl;dr - weapons/fighting back is fine, but developers usually can't do it right. Players will always take the easiest way out of a situation with an enemy; if that means blowing its brains out after 1-2 shots and there is no real cost to the player, it's no longer scary in my eyes.

[Nyarlathotep]

Silent Hill sticks in a very standard survival horror formula for its gameplay. What made the first four so great was the content that they fit inside that wrapper though. The stock survival gameplay wasn't as important for the horror. It was all of the build up with the sound and imagery.

They would be even better games if they had more unique game design in that area. And hell. Silent Hill 4: The Room took that experimental step. Half of the game is first person and has you in an apartment room that slowly gets more and more corrupted until the end of the game.

[The Rock Worm]

After hearing all of your comments, I tend to agree that Amnesia is scarier than the other games. I did get scared and plenty nervous in Amnesia 1.

What would be good and scary to play is one with a direct Lovecraft universe locations/people/monsters.

[Oswald Mandus]

i dont understand what people find scary in silent hill. its creepy yes. scary? no.
it has creepy disturbing environments, great music and sound but the enemies are slow , almost do no threat to the player, you can easily fight back. plus third person view destroys all the horror

[Bridge]

After hearing all of your comments, I tend to agree that Amnesia is scarier than the other games. I did get scared and plenty nervous in Amnesia 1.

What would be good and scary to play is one with a direct Lovecraft universe locations/people/monsters.

Unfortunately H.P. Lovecraft is a cult phenomenon (even though he is considered one of the finest American writers ever) and so there are never going to be big budget companies throwing their money at a Lovecraftian game pitch. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is about as close as you get though it's not modeled after any story in particular.

@TheRockWorm: Why don't you just play it? You've made a lot of threads and posts on here asking about how true it is and what not. Why don't you just decide for yourself?

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DCOTE couldn't even manage to keep any horror element after they implemented weapons. It had plenty of resources and made it so you never really felt "in danger" when enemies appeared; they were far too easy to kill and could rarely ever hit you as long as you weren't standing still for 5+ seonds.

Not true. Getting shot basically means delayed death because either you start limping uselessly, have trouble aiming or have hopelessly blurred vision. Yeah, you can sustain a few hits and if you're quick you can kill everyone and heal, but combat is incredibly tense. Scary, no, but quite thrilling. I personally think it has a fairly consistent sense of dread throughout but it would have been much more effective with more limited combat (like only the knife).

[PixelHurricane]

Here's the way I see the concept of guns in horror games.
The gun or weapon gives you a sense of security because you know the moment a monster arrives you can just shoot his face off and lowers the amount of fear goes into the game.
this is why amnesia is better, you KNOW you can only hide. it makes you fear the monster a WHOLE HECK of a lot more.

[Kman]

Here's the way I see the concept of guns in horror games.
The gun or weapon gives you a sense of security because you know the moment a monster arrives you can just shoot his face off and lowers the amount of fear goes into the game.
this is why amnesia is better, you KNOW you can only hide. it makes you fear the monster a WHOLE HECK of a lot more.

But with guns, if done right, you don't KNOW you're still safe. This is why I was saying that games with guns can sometimes be even scarier, because you don't know that your gun's reliable. Maybe you'll run out of ammo in combat, maybe you have to reload when you're in a dangerous area. Also if a game relies on guns then the devs aren't required to make sure you can escape from every enemy. My point is, it can add a whole new layer to the game. Sometimes giving the player a choice can make it even more scary, they have to judge the environment and decide how to deal with enemies. With that said though, very few games do this right (Overture came very close in my opinion), so yes I agree in general being left weapoless is better.

[The Rock Worm]

After hearing all of your comments, I tend to agree that Amnesia is scarier than the other games. I did get scared and plenty nervous in Amnesia 1.

What would be good and scary to play is one with a direct Lovecraft universe locations/people/monsters.

Unfortunately H.P. Lovecraft is a cult phenomenon (even though he is considered one of the finest American writers ever) and so there are never going to be big budget companies throwing their money at a Lovecraftian game pitch. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is about as close as you get though it's not modeled after any story in particular.

@TheRockWorm: Why don't you just play it? You've made a lot of threads and posts on here asking about how true it is and what not. Why don't you just decide for yourself?

I would love to play it, but things are busy at my end so I can't really buy it.
Besides, the Frictional Games Penumbra and Amnesia are Lovecraftian-like.

Still... I will find a demo for starters.

[Zgroktar]

For me personally, there is still no scarier game I've played than Amnesia. Silent Hill was awesome, but it was not generally that scary to me personally as it was really disturbing. I never felt the sheer dread like in Amnesia. Considering DCOTE, I really love this game, although I admit there were many over the top moments like fighting with Dagon using cannons from a navy destroyer, and it didn't deliver everything it could by far. But it really did have some frightful moments, and it did a solid job with recreating the feeling from Lovecraftian lore, it is a shame that Headfirst Production, the developers had bankrupted, because they had the potential to create masterpieces. I wonder what Jens, Thomas and rest of the Frictional think about DCOTE.

[rtjhbfvsrry]

I was too busy yelling at how stupid Call of Cthulhu was to notice if it was scary. The part where you are being chased by fish people in the hotel is going to be my personal hell if I don't live a good life. Not because of how scary it is, but because of how angry it makes me for making me play it over and over and over. Seriously, worst game ever. I know horror fans are starving for good horror games but the amount of people calling that bugged out disaster a masterpiece is far scarier to me than the game was.