IMO "consequence" is the epitome of "gamey". Which is why Amnesia didn't seem like it was targeted at the resident evil/silent hill players who were used to "mowing" through enemies. It was for people who wanted to be scared, and have a scary experience, so they didn't give you any way to defend yourself besides hiding and covering your eyes. More like a movie or...a haunted hay ride. Very Lovecraftian.

That silent hill example sounds cool. They used anticipation and your own imagination to scare you. Amnesia is like 95% this.

By consequence, I mean, you have some sort of reason to want to avoid death. Amnesia as I recall had very frequent checkpoints, and dying set you back a minute or so, only to encounter the same scare puzzle shortly after. Doing the same scene twice in the same pattern breaks any immersion (which is, again, a very difficult problem to solve in game design). One of the design principles in the movie Alien was that you do not want to show the monster. I think that's a good rule, and is doubly true in games where death means you do it again. An enemy you can only hide from is cool, but frustrating when said enemy follows a scripted pattern and its secretly a puzzle rather than something where you actually feel like you're hiding from a being (Alien Isolation does this well). Haunted hayride is a good descriptor. Resident evil and silent hill have tried to tackle this problem by inducing resource scarcity. Most scary encounters will not kill you, but they'll force you to expend resources which make you feel more hopeless about the future. It's far from perfect but it sort of works. It is vulnerable to players taking the opposite mentality, whereby they purposefully die to try and clear sections with lower resource loss.

Silent hill games (the good ones...) aren't action games btw. Most people consider the second one to be best psychological horror game ever made.

Horror's pretty dope these days. Next Resident Evil lookin slick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSapXD9vxYA

I vaguely remember a dev commentary or interview about Amnesia.

If I remember right, one thing they said was close to what you said about "you do not want to show the monster" -- but changed to "you do not want to show what happens when the monster gets you".

If the player dies, you either have a gamey consequence (you are set back a long way, you lose resources), or nearly no consequence (you restart quite close to where you died with the same resources). Either way though, the player's fear of this monster is now based on that game mechanic, and could be better described as annoyance than fear. You've lost the visceral suspension of disbelief where on some lizard-brain level the player still thinks "this thing is going to GET me".

So it leads to kind of an ironic balance where the devs are trying to come up with things that are very effective at scaring the player while not really being that difficult to evade for a reasonably competent player. Their ideal is for the player to get through the whole game always feeling like they're in danger and just barely surviving, but never actually dying.

Again, wish I could actually find the source, because it's been years, but the idea stuck with me. I want to say they gave an example of some trick they pulled on the memorable "water monster" level, to amp up the terror while not actually increasing the player's chances of failing. Maybe something like the water monster moves slower while you're looking away from it, so when you hear it behind you while you're turning a crank you think it's about to get you but you actually have enough time to succeed. I don't remember.

That is interesting. I do remember the water monster. That was a great segment. Probably the best part of the game. Sounds like a good framework, but that's pretty darn tough to execute.

Letting the world end in Majora's Mask comes to mind for me. As a kid I was terrified of the ever present timer and never let it hit 0, even once. There's probably something about agency there. I wouldn't ever choose to let the monster get me in Amnesia, but when I did it was because I misjudged something and got myself into an unwinnable situation. If you're going for the strategy they're describing, I think you need to reduce the tree of possible mistakes that leads the player without them realizing they're taking a risk...

One mechanism that really got me ... maybe not "horrified" but uh, anxious as hell, was the Dark Souls games.

The "you better survive until you find your corpse or you lose everything" mechanism worked really well when I was new at the games.

Also in the "not horrified but anxious as hell" gameplay was the original Bioshock and seeing the Big Daddy character... still remember hearing him before he came around the corner... so cool. :-)

I didn't find that aspect of Dark Souls too tense or stressful, maybe because I'd played salt and sanctuary and Hollow Knight first and was used to it.

Dark Souls did have some good creepy moments though. The first time entering the catacombs with the giant skeletons, the first time you face the ghosts of anor londo especially if you stumble in there early, seeing the guardian at the top of sen's fortress and knowing you're going to have to face him after you get by the archers and giants after getting through that hellish trap filled nightmare. Going back to the undead asylum and falling through the floor to face that demon. The giant rat before blight town. There's more, Dark Souls had a lot of those that worked well on the first playthrough. The did lose some of their impact on subsequent ones though.

The Dark Souls one is interesting, because losing a big stack of souls sucks. But at some point you're probably gonna find an easily grindable stack of enemies and just farm them for a few minutes for 15 minutes and get way more. So it's not that big of a deal.

But it still works pretty well in spite of that. The emotional harm of loss stings.

> Amnesia as I recall had very frequent checkpoints, and dying set you back a minute or so, only to encounter the same scare puzzle shortly after.

It worked great for Limbo, Inside and I loved those. Just different tastes.

TBH I only died twice on my first and only Inside playthrough, zipping through it in a couple of hours: it was enjoyable, and I found my experience of it very different from Limbo.

At first I was disappointed, but then I also vividly remember feeling fully immersed during those few hours since I basically did not run into checkpoints.

Have any games tried frequent savepoints + only allowing the player to reload 24 hours after dying? Seems like that would make reloads feel a bit more fresh/consequential, and also prevent addiction.

24h sounds like a turnoff, but in general, I think that's a great concept. You just need something that the player can do while unable to try to scary part again.

To relieve the frustration, it would need to be a game where a) death truly feels like your fault, not some jump scare QTE, and b) with enough information to leave you with a way to think about how to go through the challenge while not being in front of the game during the downtime.

this would be boring as hell because it relates to mobile games: they will tell you can't do something for X hours, unless you pay them some dollars. Even if you don't charge, the memories will flow I can guarantee you

I never played any of the silent hills. I played resident evil 4 and 5 years ago, and recently played resident evil 7 - which i felt had a lot more horror elements then emphasis on shooting/exploding enemies like 4 and 5 did.

I REALLY enjoyed RE7. I felt like it kept me on my toes and I played it way faster than any other single player game in recent times.

What is the best entry point and order for the silent hill series?

Resident evil is a weird series the branches into different genres over time. The first few were survival horror and played on the dread of not being well equipped enough to get through the rest of the game. Then Numbers 4-6 become action games with unreasonably sexy badass characters. They were good games, and some great co-op, but not scary at all. 7 was a horror masterpiece (or at least the first half). 8 looks like it'll continue along that trend. The recently reimagined Resident Evil 2 is phenomenal and finds an unexpected sweet spot between all 3 of them where it's still action-y, but has a bunch of things that are suspenseful and scary.

Silent Hill struggled to get out of the original playstation and hasn't had anything good in years. Remakes and remasters of the originals are generally perceived to be lower quality. I would try to grab an emulator and just play the first 4 in order then pretend the rest doesn't exist. Number 1 and 2 are the treasures of the series.

> Number 1 and 2 are the treasures of the series.

3 and the constant pressure of the big bad guy is great too, the pace contrasting massively with 1 and 2. Code Veronica is really nice too. I don't like 4.

But the "tank controls" really are some relic of the past.

I just played SH1 for the very first time on an emulator, last month, and had a great time with it. Getting used to the controls and game mechanics took a little bit, but I got up to speed quickly. Finished the game in about 7 hours.

It's creepy, weird, kind of funny, and ultimately an interesting game. Definitely recommend a play through.

I think maybe you met the game mechanics too quickly and that might have ruined it for you. For me it was very non-gamey because I had no idea what the consequences of meeting one of the monsters was so I spent almost the entire game petrified. Once I had died a couple of times and learned how the monsters worked, the spook factor wore off quickly.

But I still far preferred that to the classic weapons based horror games where the spookiness is derived from how tough an openent is in combat.

You should really, really try SOMA though. They dialed in the non-combat spookiness and even once you figure out how the monsters work, the few there are, it's the story and atmosphere that drives the spookiness anyway so it doesn't detract from the experience. Much less gamey, and quite a good mystery mixed with some existential dread.

+1 for SOMA. That game was amazing emotionally. It was left me thinking for days what i went through in it.

SOMA was a great game, especially the last hour or so of game play kept me on my toes. The monsters were not the focus of the game at all I recall you could even disable them entirely.

I enjoyed how scared I felt in Amnesia until the first time I died and reloaded. After that the edge was gone.

The original Silent Hill was a masterpiece of horror games. But mainly because it was all in your head. The creatures weren't that bad, but the sensation that they were coming at you is what it counts. Also, the radio that started every time you had one close to you was excellent, because it made you feel horrible even if you weren't doing anything.

I played a few games after that one in the next years (I was only 11 when I played Silent Hill) and nothing made me feel the same.

The first couple Penumbra games were the same way. You knew there were monsters about, but mostly you crept around and if you heard them the only sane strategy was to run like hell.

I think the people who enjoyed the games were the ones that could get sucked into that mental model early and didn't want to die in game.

The dogs in Penumbra: Overture can be killed with just the pickaxe - it's a bit akward due to the controls but not too hard. Not sure about the spiders, but they are only a small part. The giant worm is unkillable afaik but it's only there for one chase sequence.

Definitely takes the edge off the horror aspect when you figure that out. But then again, I like both the Penumbra series, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and SOMA more as exploration/puzzle games with a scary atmosphere than for the actual horror aspect.

*"the radio that started every time you had one close to you was excellent, because it made you feel horrible even if you weren't doing anything."

Haha, same with Aliens vs Predator, where you had either radar or night vision, but not both at the same time.

The beeping made you crazy.

Have you tried Alien Isolation? It's a masterpiece, similar mechanic to that in place too.

I think the last Alien game I tried was "Alien: Colonial Mariens".

It was so bad, that I stopped playing games from thaz franchise

Alien Isolation is seriously my favorite in the franchise next to AvP. It's a bit derivative of Amnesia series but I still highly suggest picking it up. The atmosphere alone of the game is scraped from Alien 1 where it's got this retro futuristic setting. You won't regret it but you can find it for cheap in a sale just in case.

The most horrifying moment for me was the hospital level in the last of us 2. This and the night where you play abby and save the girl and the boy. I had to switch from hard to easy or I was going to have PTSD. Didn’t remember that the first game was really scary.

The hospital basement is such a creepy level, and the rat king was terrifying.

I bought the game in some bundle and then watched it on youtube. It worked well as horror that way.

I had no motivation to play it after and ended in some entance hall right after start.