I’m convinced horror games are the best medium for horror. I love reading horror fiction and watching horror movies too. I just feel like when playing a good horror game, the player is “in the drivers seat”. I’m open to hearing other opinions though!
Ok I have a bone to pick with horror games.
Most horror games are not actually horror games.
Most horror games are actually puzzle games with action sequences between puzzles. They may be thrilling and starting, but how many horror games just involve you solving a puzzle, which can be figuring out something in the environment to proceed or sometimes, like in resident evil, literal puzzles for no reason, and then OH NO OOGA BOOGA SCARY and you either have a fight or do a run and hide. And if you can fight the horror, it’s immediately not horror. It’s action.
Then you have horror games which are just another video game but with a horror twist oh no! I’ve seen these for fishing games and platformers and dating sims.
I’m not saying horror games are bad. If you like them, you’re totally allowed to like them. But there always seems to be a disconnect in horror games.
The problem always boils down to the inherent nature of games and mechanics. Because, by their nature, at their core, video games give you agency. You, using the controller, can control what happens on screen. You are in control.
Horror always must have an element of a lack of control and a lack of agency.
This is why horror games always give you a different feel than other media in horror. This is why there’s usually puzzles, which can slow pacing and have you have something to do, and while they start with a feeling of loss of control, you eventually get control over your environment. Which then the game has to take away, either by a chase scene, which gives you the least control, but mechanically it’s a puzzle or a quick time event, or an action part of the game, which is fun, but it’s action. Thrilling isn’t the same as horror, even if both have adrenaline pumping.
Some games do have clever ways of dealing with this. Perception took away agency by having your character be blind, and made it hard to see anything. The original FNAF was genius. Each action you took to ward off a monster put you in a position of vulnerability to another monster. It’s a timed resource management game sure, but there’s no loopholes, no exploits, and every action, even inaction, makes you vulnerable. That’s really hard to do in a game, and brilliant in it’s simplicity.
And to answer your question, in my opinion the best way to consume horror is being told a story, as a child, and having you think that sorry could very much happen to you.
Horror movies are best imo horror games do nothing for me
Mixed media that you don’t realize is mixed.
One time I was reading a webtoon, and out of nowhere it played a jump scare video. I didn’t realize it wasn’t just a series of images.
Not that jump scares are high quality horror, it was just something interesting.Imagine reading a book that somehow magically played creepy subtle sound effects to fuck with your subconscious as you read. An audiobook could maybe do something like that, although you’d be more primed for it. Maybe an ebook could do it somehow.
I remember playing the FEAR demo and it would subtly start mixing in a raising heartbeat prior to a jump scare to dial up your anxiety.
The original no longer works, but this is a remaster of what I think you are referring to. https://m.webtoons.com/en/horang/episode/page?titleNo=2185&episodeNo=10&webtoon-platform-redirect=true
I damn near ran out of the room first time I saw this.
Horror podcast for me. Loved the white vault
Oh man then there’s the Magnus Archives, Old Gods of Appalachia, and my favorite, Mabel
I’ll check that out! I’m really loving Bridgewater.
I also commented with suggestions if you’re looking for more!
VR
Agreed, at least when you define “best” by “scariest”. I’m unfazed by horror films and can handle horror games, but VR horror games are something else. Many of them I can’t even play due to being too scared to walk around the next corner.
I’m pretty hyped for the Steam Frame. Been waiting for a non Facebook standalone headset
Same, friend. I’ve been playing VR horror since the Vive and I’m itching for the Frame.
agreed on games. no horror movie or book has ever made me the same way as the time I found out the AI in alien isolation will learn your hiding spots and kill you if you resuse the same one enough.
You may be right about classic horror and jump scares, but I think psychological horror needs more space and introspection, and that fits better with literature. That’s my opinion, of course.
Idk, something like Dead Space wouldn’t work as a written narrative.
A video game allows a lot more space and doesn’t limit introspection at all.
The only thing that would maybe be better as vague would be eldtritch horror type stuff, that isn’t supposed to be able to be explained or “visualized”.
On the other hand, despite there being countless games based on H. P. Lovecraft’s works, none of them (that I’ve encountered) hold a candle to his written word.
There is just something about cosmic horror that only works when reading. The nature of the horror being about unknown and literally indescribable creatures, visual depictions just never come close to what my brain conjures up while reading it.
That’s what it was, is eldritch along the same lines? Those are definitely better as written. May have not been as clear as I should have been.
I haven’t played Dead Space but from what I read about the plot, a shooter with aliens, I don’t think it fits the type of horror I’m talking about.
That is a very simple summary that does not convey any of the actual horror (body, psychological, and jump scares) that occurs in DS. Reading the plot will spoil the twists, but is not the same as playing the game and reading thru the in-game journals, experiencing the cut scenes, the ultra vigilance the game instills, or the aura of dread from every corner of the ship as you walk thru it.
It’s not. Everyone saying it is hasn’t actually read cosmic horror, and don’t know what it actually is.
Which is something that can’t accurately be conveyed from one person to another, you just have to read it.
The nature of cosmic horror means that no visual representation can ever be accurate.
Though maybe you weren’t referring to Lovecraft when you said psychological horror?
I was thinking of some Stephen King story (It, to be specific, which I think is his most Lovecraftian work) but I agree with you 100%, the charm of Cthulhu is largely the vagueness of its description, any drawing you see out there is ridiculous compared to what the novels do
It’s overarching plot is about a marker that slowly makes people go insane, the shooter is just a VERY small portion of the game.
okay, that’s not very shooter, but it’s still 100% body horror and gore, nothing even remotely close to psychological horror
What is your definition of psychological horror then? Because anything that messes with your mind, and stuff like that does, fits in it. Unless you mean a sub-genre.
According to your idea, everything is psychological since you process everything in your mind.
No, psychological horror is based on psychological damage, not physical harm: domination, psychological trauma, diffuse fears like the unknown or the indefinable, things like doubting reality and one’s own sanity.
There are movies and games that deal with it, but never as well as a first-person narrator who puts a partial vision into writing, that’s why Stephen King hates the adaptation of The Shining; it doesn’t capture this at all.
No, psychological horror is based on psychological damage, not physical harm: domination, psychological trauma, diffuse fears like the unknown or the indefinable, things like doubting reality and one’s own sanity.
Which dead space does…… and that’s what “affects the mind” means. Why did you think I meant just using it? Lmfao.
Video lacks the context, but you’re doing the surgery on YOURSELF to figure out if you’re insane or if it’s the marker making you.
That’s textbook psychological horror, there is of course other types, like HP and Stephen king as well.
Short stories.
Horror novels bring me down. Horror games too scary for me to deal with, the movies are either dumb or too, well, horrifying.
But short story horror is phenomenal. I have read every edition of “The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror” and holy crap short horror stories are some of the best writing I have ever encountered, ever.
My favourite medium for horror is audio readings of written stories
it’s film and it’s nowhere near close. but just to use an obscure choice, a binaural radio play is very effective. sadly the only one i know of is deadhouse by the bbc
you have to lie down flat and wear headphones. the first episode concerns two people working on your corpse, while you become aware of what’s happening. i thought it was terrifying
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09zr1dk/episodes/player
https://archive.org/details/bbc-deadhouse
would love to know if there’s anything else like this
Oh wow, this is very cool. Thanks for the recommendation!
hope you enjoy :)
games imo, but only if you are properly creative with what you do, otherwise you end up with comedy at best. Watched a streamer play some horror game with friend where if you make too much noise at microphone, you die. Biggest difficulty they had was they kept laughing too much at everything. At the end streamer also commented about the design of the game and how it would have been better if there had been for example, monsters that react to your sound differently; maybe some have to be yelled at to stay away or some are attracted to sound or whatever. But instead the game was just “if sound exceeds certain treshold you die and thats it”.
With games you can do so much more than any other media, since its possible for you to “be there” and have more at stake than just reading or watching things happen to someone else. But you have to be creative about the game and cant be lazy on the gameplay design, otherwise might as well just not bother and do some other genre.
Film or books or other passive mediums. IDK, video games just don’t build the same tension or hit the same. The lack of control in the other mediums makes a huge difference in feeling scary.
Video game horror never makes me feel unfomfortable or frightened. Jump scares don’t even make me jump (often because I end up not looking in the right direction at the time).
I think video games are good for terror. Subnautica for example, reaper leviathans are terrifying, but not horrifying. You encounter a reaper, and it’s a spike in adrenaline, but you don’t lay in bed that night staring at the ceiling about it.
Subnautica is a special outlier and shouldn’t be counted because it triggers thlassophobia :P
In all other games, I feel more like when you see the characters being dumbasses in a movie and go “I can survive longer than these numbnuts.” And you do.
I assert that terror is terror.
I agree I feel like games have to rely on jump scares toouch which always feels cheap
I’m with you which is why I’ve only ever played a handful of them. I know dead space isn’t like a true horror game cause other than a few jump scares it did not elicit much fear in me. But fuck silent hills, like all of them. Resident evil is kinda hit or miss like 1 was ok but 2 scared the fuck out of me, while 4 just felt kinda like an on rails shooter.
For me, movies/tv or novels/short stories because games just don’t make me feel afraid. Seeing something happen to someone else is actually mkre immersive for me, because most games have game engine limitations that remind me I am playing a game.
It can still be good as a game, just hot as horrifying. Also, gore and violence are not horrific to me on their own either, they can compliment the real horror I find terrifying which is powerlessness or losing a sense of self.
For horror fiction, I’d say games or books, depending on what you’re going for. Visual, you could go with film, but games are more interactive; otherwise, the same thing (visual). Psychological, like getting inside someone’s head, like Pet Sematary does, I’d say the book is the superior option — or the audiobook narrated by Michael C. Hall (Dexter).
For real life/true horror, life experience. I’d say there’s not much scarier than not knowing if you’ll survive the night because you live with a psychotic partner (or parent). For the partner, watching the violent partner drink and trying to control the mood with the TV or music trying to keep the atmosphere fun or at least safe, and them teetering on a violent outbreak, or being a child witnessing this and huddling in a closet or under a bed having to listen to one parent being beaten and hoping the violent one doesn’t come for you. Or they pull one of your siblings out and you hope you’re not next. Stuff like that, I think is worse than any fictional horror. There was a video game, Alien Isolation, that tried to put you in a situation like that, but it was just a video game, you could pause it and get up and take a walk (or, if you couldn’t pause it (the Mass Effect trilogy was great at not respecting your time, despite being amazing otherwise), just turn it off). In real life you can only wait it out. Or make a run for a window or the door and hope you can get help or something.
