I’ve been throwing the idea of making a psychological horror game around for a while now, which got me thinking about fear.
Coming from a film making background I know there’s more to be had in what you don’t see than what you do see but how can we as game developers keep that feeling throughout a game?
I’ve come up with a few ideas, pretty obvious one’s i think, would love to hear your ideas/thoughts:
Sound effects - pretty easy to give players something to think about before they enter a room for example
One hit kills/very low health - adds to the tension (which could add to the fear?) but could come across as annoying
Make players think they saw something. This is used in movies a lot but in games im not so sure. eg. when you look around a room it looks like there was a figure at the window, but when you look again it’s gone.
All out jump moments - drop something on to the player to give them a fright, that sort of thing.
like in horror movies when you see blurry flashes of some beast shape go past the screen behind the character and they quickly turn around, or you see it past a window or something.
iKonrad: I read through your report and noticed that you used both the words “fear” and “horror”. There is a style of modern horror movie that is basically a “hack and slash” movie - which seems to generate disgust and revulsion through explicit gory detail.
On the other hand, we have the stories of 19th century writers which generate feelings of unease (Charles Dickens’s The Signal-Man or the stories of M.R. James ).
Subtlety - Don’t rub the monster in the player’s face constantly while screaming “oooooh so scary!” People are afraid of the unknown, and this is one of the complaints I heard about Outlast, how it gets very in-your-face with the horror.
Don’t rely on jump scares - There is a difference between fear and shock.
Atmosphere and immersion are important. Sound, visuals and lighting.
Look at Amnesia: The Dark Descent if you want an example of a great horror game.
Disempower the player - I’ll be a lot less scared if I’m holding a shotgun than if I wasn’t. Limiting ammo can be an alternative to removing weapons entirely.
To echo what a lot of people said, subtlety and atmosphere are going to be key in getting the player to be fearful, but as a game you also need to back up that fear with substance - people are less likely to be afraid of something they saw in the corner of their eye if that something can/will never hurt them. Take a look at the original Slender game for a good example of this effect.
I was thinking of some AI that can react to the player getting careless/noisy maybe they’re attracted to light if I have a torch in game, which would force the players to use it less.
This is what I find incredible in game design regarding fear. Also, the works of H.P. Lovecraft are free, so you can download them and read them - and get a great sense of terror.
My two cents is: what is extraordinary is frightening, but that depends on what your game shows as ordinary. Diablo (the first one) started in the Cathedral, with skeletons and zombies. Weird… but when the Butcher showed up, his room was full of bodies (some just half, others impaled, and so on). Until that moment, you hadn’t seen anything so bizarre before. But on Diablo3 you already start with everything completely bloodied and weird - so there’s no fear of anything.
I’m not a fan of fear games, but mainly because they do 2 things that aren’t fun:
Kill you without a chance to get out of the situation.
Jump scares.
#2 is just never fun or interesting. It’s just cheap. A game that results to that probably has nothing to offer me.
#1 is a style choice, but if I know I can’t prevent deaths (without having died there once already), how am I supposed to fear them?
What makes a great horror game for me is setting a creepy atmosphere, with the light low enough that you temporarily see things that aren’t there, but enough light that you aren’t reaching for the gamma so that you can see at all. When they implement eerie mechanics that may or may not mean things, like floorboards creaking and pipes rattling, but also actual movements sounds, so you can’t really be sure which it was.
Think about it: What’s the scariest part of a horror movie? It’s not the point where the girl gets stabbed. It’s the minutes before that, when she’s walking around, trying to avoid the danger, and just before the bad guy gets ahold of her. Once he’s got her, it’s all over but the stabbin’.
You need to feel like you have some power, but only the power to escape. Without it, there’s nothing to fear.
Oh, some people will. They’re just made that way. But if you want to scare the most people, you need to be better.
suggestion: have you seen unity’s evil? watch markiplier and avoid those mistakes. also try not using jumpscares . ive had a lot of them but they give me seizures. GOOD LUCK
I think you probably have to have psychological horror going on in your own mind in order for you to want to make a psychological horror game, but that’s just me. I don’t get why people want to deliberately be afraid. There’s already enough fear in the world.
Anyway… many games seem to use the mechanic of lots of things going on at once, being overwhelmed by sheer numbers of enemies etc which keeps on constantly increasing in intensity… as a way to create a sense of panick.
Fear is the most primitive of our Instincts. It has kept the human race going. Without it we would have been extinct long ago. It is not only us Humans that have an instinct to flee, in fact fear is the predominant instinct in pretty much every species on this planet.
