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.
Re:Amnesia is now open source
by klmadfejno on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @02:11PM
(#24570070)
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.
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. :-)