/games/ - Video Games

>>61348
I dunno, FEAR is pretty good. It is spooky and kind of luls you into trance. It's very trippy, at least it was for me.
Aside from that, the gameplay is top notch. With debris flying evewhere, clones chatting on the radio and trying to flank you. And then afterwards you see the aftermath, the smoke settling in from the chunks of plaster that were shot off the walls, etc
Then you proceed to the next area while also seeing some trippy hallucinations while listening to ambient.
It's very well made and no one has done anything similar to this ever since.

Amnesia series

>>61348
Signalis was breety good. Highly reccomend it.
Tormented souls ain't all that bad
Silent hill 1,2,3
some love 4 some hate it. 3 is my fav. Havent played sh 4 though

Evil within was also love or hate it. It is gritty, it gets to be quite good torwards the end

Evil within 2 is less gritty and grimy and slightly more cheerfull/ but it had its moments like the first proper bossfight cinematic.

Clive Barker's undying

I really enjoyed Condemned Bloodshot.
Had a really good first person hand to hand combat system and a lot of crazy and cool moments that you probably won't get out of any other horror game.
You will never look at homeless people quite the same way again, lol.

That said, I will warn that it ends on a cliffhanger that has and will never be resolved.

>>61348
DBD is fun for the first few hundred hours

Resident Evil and Silent Hill are obvious, both are good until the 4th game though some people liked SH Origins. There's a 2D pixel-scroller called Ib, I haven't played it nor know much about it so check it out yourself. Both Parasite Eve games. Rule of Rose.

These aren't horror games but may still scratch your itch. Max Payne had nightmare sequences and the game takes place at night and is lonely. Pathologic is a Russian walking simulator with some shooting, taking place in a town dying of a plague.

try rule of rose.
after watching a video about it, I want to make a horror game too

>>61348
Check out Markiplier's "3 scary games" videos for a lot of good horror titles.

>>61769
My thoughts exactly. Can't even tell if this was trolling or not.

Ib is a great horror game if you don't mind pixel graphics.

>>61348
If you haven't played it yet Outlast 1 is a good horror game, pretty memorable with some good characters and a very eerie atmosphere.

I'd also recommend eternal darkness for the Gamecube, great game. Its not as much of a hidden gem as it used to be so you may have played it but if not definitely put it on your list.

If you want something more lighthearted but still "spooky" I'd recommend Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion. It's pretty short and fun, I like to replay it around Halloween.

Devil Came Through Here trilogy. Especially Cat Lady and Downfall.

I'm going to say Silent Hill 1-4 especially 1, the gameplay isn't interesting like Resident Evil but the tone, plot and atmosphere is superb.
>>61610
>>61692
>Rule of Rose mentioned
I'm glad to see it get love after all these years (even at the risk of it becoming too popular) and I even played and beat it too.

>>61913
I like rule of rose but I heard the gameplay is old and clunky. I miss these kind of games japan made. kind of experimenting with original games. they don't do it anymore…maybe japanese indie devs do this, Idk.
I prefer more silent hill then resident evil

>>61914
The gameplay is serviceable and not as terrible as reviews made it out to be, for 2006 it was boring.

Space horror mouthwashing is the one I enjoyed lately.
Soma had an interesting story too.

>>61915
is the gameplay smooth?

>>61918
Yes.

>>61919
h-how smooth?

>>61348
Silent Hill 2 remake. It's actually breddy gud.

>>61914
rule of rose isn't even a game, it's an interactive movie. Don't gaslight people like this.

>>61937
yeah a video interactive movie-game

>>61937
Don't gaslight people by saying it's an interactive movie like it was made by David Cage, fuck you.

>>61350
>Amnesia
literal walking sim trash

I want to make a video game in the horror genre.

>You are a Hikkikomori NEET who is now homeless since you tried to go out to touch grass, get away from your horrifically abusive family, and try to get a job due to hitting 35 and having a midlife crisis.

>You are the ultimate truecel, the polar opposite of the gigachad in almost every way.

>You were born into an impoverished home with a separated pair of abusive parents who hated each other and you (whom they had as an accident), both of them had abused you every way but sexually, and they had also neglected you as a child (and switched to becoming possessive and controlling when you graduated high school).

>You were born with aspergers and placed into special ed starting from the first month of the first grade until the end of elementary, then you were in an alternative program to high school where you worked for free at local businesses during school hours instead of attending classes and getting an education, causing you to graduate without getting a diploma, you got a cettificate of completion, which was useless for anything except preventing you from getting into the high school system again.

>Throughout the entire stint of public schooling you were bullied in the worst ways possible, not just by your fellow students but also by the school staff members, you were hated for wanting to just be normal.

>Never had any education past primary school, never had any employment or education, never had any training, your hobbies were 4chan and related pursuits, and you have no known skills or talents beyond the most basic self-care.

>No wonder, no matter what you do you can't find the job you set out for.

>Of course, you were a kissless hugless handholdless virgin without ever having a single friend whose name or face you knew.

>And now you are a hobo bum whose only perks (aside fron being a straight white male with blue eyes and blonde hair) are what you lack: a criminal record, a history of addictions, any outstanding debts etc.

>You also lack any psychotic issues, or so you thought, you start having encounters with horrors both natural and supernatural, there are a variety of encounters and events that begin innocuously but lead down a plotline where you see things getting more and more fucked up.

>Each time you begin as a nobody intruding into a situation, stumbling into the story by accident, are you going to be a heroic badass? or a victim to the terrors hidden beneath the surface of civilization? or maybe, you will find a way to become the monster, and gain a power to wreak your havoc upon the world that hurt you.

>Your life status and history are what enable these encounters, as everyone else is an NPC preoccpied with their lives, but you have no life, and are thus able to explore an discover the hidden horrors of the city.

>There'd be multiple timelines that lead to different endings.

>You begin with a tutorial story wherin you receive the "curse of the everyman", all your capabilities are reduced to the minimum value, leaving you as weak stupid and generally all around disabled as any human could possibly be.

>However, there is a blessing hidden in this curse which makes receiving it something that others had sought out: While your present actual abilities were reduced to zero, your potential furure abilities were maxed out, and the curse would ensure there was always some way to improve yourself, and that you'd instinctually know what it is.

>So spending five years in the hospital allows you to miraculously recover back to what you had started off as, and now you are where you began, as a homeless autistic loser, but with a massive hospital debt you have no way of paying, but also with a hot-ass social worker assigned to you, and the ability to become the most powerful man in the world by becoming the best human being in every way, even genetic traits about yourself that are known to be immutable, such as height or intelligence, can be improved upon, you can also completely alter your personality through the customization feature, cure your autism or make it worse, become a better person or take points to up your dark tetrad to become the meanest sonuvabitch you can be (this will change the options presented to you).

>Depending upon the events that occur from that point, you are also able to acquire other, more blatantly extranormal abilities.

>This isnt some power fantasy modern rpg, this is a horror game set in a version of our world that is as dark as every imageboard had ever perceived or imagined it as being, and then made even worse until they are as bad as can get, all of the fears of /pol/ and /x/ are true, all of their monsters real, but within that also exists opportunities you can seize upon, and you are desperate for whatever you can get in this life.

>Just like a game where you are an unconventional protagonist, a background character who inserts themselves into preexisting conflicts wholly unrelated to themselves for the purpose of opportunistic self-benefit, and no matter what you do, heads will rolls and lives shall be taken, flesh may be eaten and blood may be drank, just hope for all these its never yours.

>watch as you go from homeless bum to the secretly most overpowered creature in the city, and possibly the country, then world if we get a sequel and trilogy (you can use the mc from the first game in the second and third).

>I want being the evil dick who makes innocents suffer and die into a fun option, into the most fun option, I want the player to relish in being the monster made of man borne of monstorous (wo)men.

>Game name: NoLife.

>>62094
No one wants to play your autobiography.
Author self inserts are cringe
And I think you fundamentally don't understand the point of video games nor of horror.

>>62095
Thanks, I needed that.
Was throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks.
Yeah, there will never be a game about us, huh?
Not one where someone like me becomes all cool and shit.
That can only happen in real life.
JK it can't happen out here, either.

>>62096
People don't play games to see reflections of themself.
They play games to have fun and as escapism from boring shitty real life.

Also the story arc described doesn't fit with the horror genera.

>>62094
how does it play/ what's the gameplay?

https://itch.io/games/tag-yandere
You could always get into the horror romance genre

Also https://www.youtube.com/@ManlyBadassHero/videos

>>62141
I have actually played a few "yandere" games. But I wouldn't call them horror romance.
Like I played Saiko no sutoka. It's basically a escape/chase type game where you happen to be running from a crazy anime succubus instead of a standard monster or something. Nothing romantic about it. It's escape or get stabbed.

They finally added rafts to sons of the forest

>>62094
you should make a life simulator of a hiki in his room and you must manage him to not die or getting kiked out of the house. why do you think?

>>62232
I have the forest downloaded but still haven't gotten around to playing it.
Once I play it, if like it then I will pick up sons of the forest.

>>62235
Uhhh ok.
Do you mean in the game or in real life?

>>62238
Yes

>>61935
>Silent Hill 2 remake
Pleb taste.

>>61509
>Tormented souls ain't all that bad
Post trauma, echoes of the living and mute house. Liminal point might be decent, too.

I can't in good faith recommend this game. But it's quite different from anything I expected, so I'll try to avoid specific spoilers when criticizing it.

The difference goes all the way up to the first thing that made me look at it with any interest. It's not a fucking gamemaker or rpgmaker engine game. The three men who put this together used the EBitEngine, which is a low level image arrangement and event receiver engine. Most gameplay was likely scratchbuilt, including the social combat system. Lots of people who use Windows and particularly Windows 11 have complained about instability, and it's probably for that reason.

The daytime gameplay loop is extremely familiar point-and-click adventure stuff. The night time loop is where the devs changed things up, and where it becomes obvious why they'd chosen an art engine with few restrictions even at the cost of requiring additional labor. Most games with the title of "dating sim" have something of a dual structure, typically either a puzzle or combat system and then a conversation system. Saeko has an adventure game section and then a high lethality dialogue-combat section.

Social combat has been tried in a lot of games, and I'd include Monkey Island's insult fighting in addition to the old text adventure things. It basically never works. Sometimes it's turned into a normal RPG spellcasting mechanic in which case why didn't you just make it a spellcasting system, it is never ever a good idea to make social combat as something that tries to capture the feeling of a real social interaction. In this game your nights with Saeko are very, very different from other such sequences that I've seen, and they do feel exactly like extremely high tension social interactions with a particular type of person. You are never allowed to feel in control of the conversation nor to be at ease. It is easy and likely to get within inches of one of the good endings and then to damn yourself to the bad end out of last minute cowardice because the game does condition you into a spineless enabler through both the day and night gameplay loops. And if you allowed yourself to be conditioned into an extension of Saeko's will like that then you do deserve the bad end. I don't think this high lethality dialogue system could work in any other game, and even though I think it achieves what it is going for I don't know if I would say it works in this one.

It's billed as a "psychological horror game" with significant erotic elements. Unlike many indie psychological horror games it is not about depression, or narcissism, or loneliness, or obsession, nor even lust. It's kind of about abuse but not from the perspective of the abuser nor from a real victim, which are the expected perspectives. This one's about being an enabler, which is typically only a minor theme instead of the core. If it's "horror romance" then that's in the sense that H. P. Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep" could be expanded into a horror romance rather than the horror romance of vampire gothics. Except Lovecraft's Asenath wasn't particularly charming. The villainess here is not strongly nor deeply written but she is sufficiently written for the game's themes to land. You'll be disappointed if you expect to either hate her or to fall for her. She's a monster, and not ever a tragic nor sympathetic one. She's a demiurge, Schopenhauer's Antichrist, but hating her feels as pointless as shaking fists at the sky. The game goes pretty far out of its way to make sure that you understand that her psychopathy is not a sufficient explanation for her actions by having a functional psychopathic character as one of the day 3 companions. That character crosses a lot of legal and social boundaries but it is clear that she had set several hard lines for herself and does live according to her own principles rather than full abandonment of herself to her own will to power.

The game's atmospheric, but it is far too tightly written for its own good. Shorter stories are either an author's best works or they collapse on as little as a single flaw, and the writing in Saeko has several. Character writing is mostly decent if stereotypical, but Maru is the worst-written character and undermines anyone's confidence in the rest of the character writing in the story. That particular sour note is struck so early and so badly that the entire rest of the game suffers. The story also undergoes choice compression immediately before the third act so that there are no mechanical or narrative consequences to any choice you might have made for the first five sevenths of the game. There is in theory the consequence of the player having not learned the lesson or absorbed the theme that any of the dead characters were supposed to impart, but that feels very unimportant when all three endings are still technically open on day six. If there were as little as a dumb noncanon "UFO ENDING" easter egg that you could lock yourself out of based on early choices then the part of me that cares about the game part of narrative games would rest easier.

Overall, Saeko's best qualities are also its worst qualities and I don't really know if I can say that I think it's a good game or a bad one. I don't regret it personally, but I think it's more likely that other people would regret it than not.

Alan Wake

>>62985
I dropped that game because the gameplay was mostly boring, the story was a annoying mystery plot where nothing made even a tiny bit of sense and you are suppsoed to slog though the boring parts of the game slowly collecting every single thing on the map and not missing a single thing to get a vagie nonsense ending that is more about feels then have any logic or actually be mystery related.
Oh, and it's not scary besides some jump scares of LOUD NOISES as something pops out.

Such a bullshit game.

>>62993
That sounds like it's got mostly the opposite of the problems I had with Saeko: Giantess Dating Sim. So maybe I should give Alan Wake a shot.

Horror videogames are rarely really scary if you strip out moments of shock. At that point they often become dark walking simulators with neat consistent gory aesthetics. Jumpscares still manage to cause a response, and serve a purpose beside the obvious. Jumpscares deflate tension and that allows tension to be built up again. Saeko's one of the horror games that never does anything remotely like a jumpscare. And the closest thing it gets to an audio jumpscare is when the BGM stops playing. Some people might appreciate the artistic integrity of focusing on constant unalleviated dread with no catharsis, but it also feels like the game lacks punctuation.

A horror game is expected to deliver all of its fundamental emotional experience on a first full playthrough and for replay value to yield interesting but unnecessary lore items. That sounds like what Alan Wake does, that's the way it worked all the way back in Alone in the Dark, it's fine. Saeko doesn't tell you nor show you everything you need to know. Lots of lines of dialog look like they might be unnecessary. They aren't. Saeko's insecurities in the damn earring shop explain why she chooses death, but only in a way that makes sense if you read through the ending where she kills everyone else instead of herself. This is a flaw and demonstrates that there SHOULD be fluff, unnecessary dialog, red herrings and skippable parts in a game like this. Even if only because that's what's expected.

Additional Saeko complaints only from this point in the post onwards, if you don't care about that then congrats you're done reading.

The conversations in Saeko are tense only on the first playthrough, but if you scored a mechanically correct bad end then you get way more context on those conversations the second time through, and following up on that context shows the ways the game rewards mechanically incorrect behavior. This is normal for dating sims with veteran teams who want to produce serious tragic romances with replay value, but seems less normal for "looks like a dating sim but is actually just horror" games. Most of those, the writing is complicated rather than complex, and the additional information is just lore and background notes rather than critical information to understand fundamental main character motivations. Saeko's save system is structured to reward horror game type replays where you do the minimum necessary to get the alternative endings, all of which are still available immediately prior to the start of the final chapter so you don't need to revisit the early game at all. That's incorrect game design for this story and there are reasons dating sims lock you out of certain routes at seemingly arbitrary points in their early games.

And complex writing makes for clunky translations in conversations where the whole thing changes on the shade of meaning of just one word. I am one of the many, many people who did not understand that Saeko doesn't kill you just for having a different opinion than her, she tends to reward polite disagreement and kills you for being rude, for denigrating her perspective, for insulting her, and for harping on differences of opinion after you've each said your piece. The gameplay relies too heavily on writing that was wound too tight around single word choices which were often suggestively ambiguous in the original language. And the visual design, while really good, is not varied enough to create visual replay value, so all the replay value lies almost exclusively in translated lapidary prose.

Anyone who did not preserve the obvious psychopath character or who wound up on the suicide path instead of genocide route will be under the incorrect impression that Saeko fears arrest and incarceration, because she says a fate worse than death awaits her in the normal world. Anyone who does intentionally make the mechanically incorrect choice of saving the psychopath will learn that there is no physically violent nor forceful path towards any good end, but may still wind up on the true or good endings where Saeko expresses that fear of "a fate worse than death." The idea that that fate involves imprisonment makes little sense for two reasons. The first is the full scope of her power as shown in the previously mentioned paths, which is only revealed if you're not on the path where Saeko expresses any dread. The second, more mundane reason is that Japan of 2008 had a notoriously spectacle-oriented death penalty which was given to high profile murderers with mental disturbance defenses. Even the anthology film "Tokyo" included a millennial Japanese execution spectacle, this is not obscure knowledge. The mode of death Saeko chooses is more painful, less dignified, and more emotionally ugly than the long drop hanging that the law would provide. A weeb audience or the japs themselves ought to know that, given that '08 when the game is set was when the "Akhibara Massacre" killer was put on death row. Until and unless we take her nighttime dialog very, very seriously prior to each ending we're left to wonder what she fears, since it isn't law enforcement. Almost nobody will give the game more than one playthrough to bother to learn since there's no real reason to assume it is learnable rather than poor writing. And anyone who does go through that exercise will find out that the answer is "love," typical of the dating sim genre that the game is otherwise trying too hard to escape from. The game wants to be something to fascinate and motivate close readings, but the problem is, this is a translated horror giantess dating hentai sim as demoed by ManlyBadassHero. Not goddamned Hemmingway.

>>61348
Evenicle series. Or anything in star wars setting, most notably sw:kotor 1/2. Practically anything based on the material application of concept of kegare and/or christian morality has the potential to be most horrifying.

>>61348
Well… for me? It's Corpse Party, as in the whole IP. I'd recommend starting out with the more simple RPG Maker titles from the early days, even the wide variety of fan titles, since they're SOVL, though the peak is probably the PSP and PS Vita titles, I'm excited that it seems the IP's getting revived on consoles this year, hopefully it's good, at least the artwork looks promising…

>>63143
corpse party has been such a iconic japanese horror game that it is still known to this day (game was created in 1996!!)