Why are some games capable of scaring you until your heart turns cold and others miss the mark? There are some horror games that are clearly capable of scaring you to the core like Slender and Amnesia, but what makes them so scary? I've looked into Slender after hearing about it from a friend, and the way it was described made the game sounds absolutely terrifying. A monster that is constantly stalking you? The constant chance of a jumpscare weighing down on your head? The fact that the game is almost designed to make you believe the game is real in some way because of how the monster creates a static effect on your screen? Those aspects made Slender so terrifying for me I got killed while playing because I was too scared to check if Slenderman was following me. I believe that the secret to making a good horror game falls under columns of immersion, anticipation, and constant pressure. Immersion in terms of how real the game feels to you, anticipation in terms of fear of what will happen next, and pressure in terms of how much anticipation the game can force on you, like how afraid the game can make you of what happens next. Pressure has to be constant in order for pure fear to be possible, it would be a boring horror game if there wasn't always a risk of being scared. However, it is possible for a game to mess with your head and make you think that it's about to jumpscare you when it doesn't, and when it's able to trick you it is a sign of a good horror game. The game must be able to deceive you, trick you into a false sense of security and then pull the rug from under you. Right now, I'm actually thinking about changing the pressure aspect to deception, because a game doesn't always have to put pressure on you if it's tricking you into thinking your safe when it's about to scare you to the core. Hopefully, horror games will learn from games like Slender and Amnesia and surpass them someday.
What makes a good horror game?
Posted by SuperNormalful on
