Create a "Survival Horror" game.

[Pulp Hero]

So the RE5 discussion got me thinking about survival horror games.

I've always really wanted to be scared by these games, but I'm just...not. I mean zombies and demons are cool, but they don't scare me.

In fact the only SH games that ever felt really tense were the Silent Hill games, otherwise its things like Splinter Cell or early builds of Day of Defeat.

Here is a "survival horror" game if I made it:

S.E.R.E.
First person shooter with no cutscenes or HUD. You are a US pilot shot down over Bosnia and have to evade Serb military. Its starts out at night with Serb patrols chasing you through the woods, using flashlights and vehicle mounted spotlights. You start out with a pistol and a spare magazine. The game is set up with enemy AI that reacts to your attempts to hide (they shoot up random bushes and spaces in houses, actually check crannies and hiding spots) and react to shoots at them (they protect their wounded and collect dropped weapons). Lots of innocent people get killed during the game as well.

The game goes through four main stages : Survive Evade Resist Escape.

***
What would you do for a "survival horror" game?

[Stark]

There's a crazy Norwegian rogue-like that puts you in like stoneage Finland where you have to do EVERYTHING yourself as some kind of crazy bushman; building shelter, cooking food, trading for things you can't make like salt and metal objects, amazingly harsh battle system including illness, infection and death. This is the sort of thing I imagine when someone says 'survival' game - whereas the RE games have no real ongoing consequences at all (not even a 'zomg in 4 hours you'll turn into a zombay' or 'tomorrow when the President wakes up he's going to nuke your town better get out hey').

You could horror this up by isolating the player and making locals extremely hostile/alien... which is all the RE games ever did.

As a side note the Thing game should have been in this vein and not a stupid pre-scripted pile of ass budget RE game.

[Ohma]

Well, reading the OP I came up with the following.

You play as one of the few surviving crew members aboard a space ship (no, there's no alien virus/parasites/evil AI, just like, fucked up stasis tubes and a nasty hull breach or five). There are various things wrong with the ship which have (along with killing most of the crew) rendered it incapable of supporting life for more than like, a few in game weeks or so. You have to find some way off the ship (there are probably life boats or something, but they're probably messed up too and in addition you'll have to get from the area you start in over to the area where the pods or whatever are). You must also deal with your fellow survivors along the way, some of them will be willing to work with you, some will be selfish assholes, unfortunately for that first group there are both limited supplies to support you all, and in the end limited room aboard the pod.

So yeah, that's what I've got so far.

[Stark]

It's amusing to me that all the suggestions feature more or less open, flexible environments and logical challenges to overcome in order to 'survive'. And not, y'know, gem-collecting statue-pushing corridor-strolling crap like RE.

Really, anything that puts you in a dangerous or hostile environment and expects the player to use a variety of options to manage their survival and escape would work, but it's a little more complicated than 'get the lighter to get the gem to push the statue to get the crank to open the armoury to get the other crank to turn on the piano to open the door to reach the garden' to set up in a game. The biggest issue is going to be players; many players are so blinkered and 'achievement driven' that they actually complain you can lose Fallout if the vault runs out of water, so they're not going to like a game where if you go to the wrong part of the ship and there's a failure and you get cut off, you're just fucking doomed. Survival has to be based on consequences, and I don't think players actually LIKE consequences.

Hell, System Shock was more survival than RE, and it was still limited and heavily scripted.

[Covenant]

The thing that scares me in these games are the critters that break the rules--unfair spawning locations, smashing through walls I thought were entirely safe and solid, messes with your visibility or HUD or such things. Normal zombies don't scare me since they're pretty easy to shoot the heads off of, it's just fun to do it. I wouldn't be all that scared about enemy soldiers either. I mean, what'll they do, shoot at me? There's something less scary about being shot at... it's less visceral, and it's also more expected, and you deal with it for a lot of the game. Someone with a Chainsaw looks scary because, if he gets you with the chainsaw, you're dead. Guns are fairly less scary, even in games where they're lethal, unless these are guns that never miss and always kill you.

Also, a key component is it needs to happen rarely enough that you're scared of it, and not used to it. If you get killed by a giant hideous creature, that might be scary once. If it happens 20 times it's just aggrivating, especially if it's in the same spot. In that case, you could probably ratchet up the scariness by making something other than life be your worry.

So regardless of the setting, what I'd do is this:

1) Player collects things during play: such as money, weapons, trophies, and gear.
2) Player can keep and equip anything they find and drag to the mission's exit point and finish the mission.
3) Player only has one life, and if they die, everything they had on them and had picked up is left behind.

Thus, the fear is multiplied by what you risk rather than just the fear of a monster. Since every mission is you adding your current gear to the ante, players artificially limit their gear to only what they can afford to lose or must bring with them, increasing the difficulty to the most highest level they can tolerate and still attempt to successfully complete the mission. Players may behave erratically, grow tense, and panic based on the fear of losing hard-fought gear even when they normally would have no fear of combat.

Obviously, this only works in a nonlinear game, but linearity is a crutch in any circumstance except story, and story is almost fucking irrelevent to survival or horror. Here's the story: don't die. If you want to be extra brutal, let the game give the player a limited number of lives total for that entire run, similar to Diablo's Hardcore mode. If the setting was a spaceship crew like Ohma said, let the number of surviving crew be your supply of lives. If one guy dies, the next has to go pick up where they left off, with whatever gear was left behind. This allows you to go 'get back' your stuff, but with the fear of death still quite real. Once you run out of crew, that's it. Difficulty level can, then, also effect the number of crew you have. And at various places you could gain extra lives by rescuing crew and adding them to your pool.

Avoid the temptation to give some special powers or usefulness, since if they die they have an undue effect on the game. At worst, make the death of a crewmember slightly inconvenience some things. The least problematic way to make people want to keep all the crew around is to allow storyline or comm chatter from all the members, perhaps helpful chatter. A slightly more problematic, but not a big deal, way to do it is to allow the player to "leave" a body. IE, you get Sally the Baker all the way to the Power Room where you control which areas have power (only one at a time) and then "radio back" and leave Sally there, and take control of Ron the Zookeeper instead, moving him to the Cadaver Processing Lab elevator, call Sally and request the power come on in this area, and then head forwards. If you let too many people die, you'll be forced to do it manually. On the hardest difficulty you might only have one crewmember.

No matter the setting, you need a few types of enemies to keep the player's mood alternating from fear to gleeful revenge, so that they never stay frustrated long. If you kill the player often and don't present easy objects to take out their anger on, they'll get fed up and stop playing. If you let them come back from a death and make up some losses while also punishing some enemies, they'll feel better. IE, you need both dangerous threats and gankable newbs.

1) Fearful, common enemies that cluster together and pose rather little of a threat. These are objects for player retribution to make them feel powerful and enjoy themselves, but also occasionally do things such as shut down doors to block passage, run to alert larger enemies, disable or destroy beneficial resource locations (medkits, ammo dumps) so that the player develops an intense dislike of them which leads to that aggression which keeps the cycle going. Encourage aggression, reward brutality, and occasional frustration. In a best case, seeing them should prompt very quick action, so that players are forced to rush out from cover to handle it fast.

2) Large, tactically interesting enemies who reward the player greatly for taking them down. Lots of games have these--they're the Big Daddies or the Dark Troopers or the Boomers, guys who are generally dangerous but able to be taken down economically and drop some sort of extremely handy loot. In this game, a few enemies of this type would be the main quarry for the player, who would attempt to navigate the levels and take out these sorts of miniboss enemies with the least possible damage. Inventive strategies and prep work should be encouraged, which makes players feel clever and powerful, again, while also making the large rewards hard enough to get that they're worth it. It should only be easy to take these down in certain contexts, as the danger and suspense of stealthily tailing a Treasure monster until you're ready to strike is often part of the fear factor.

3) Lethal, extremely dangerous hunter enemies which make the player feel as if they must be cautious, and which encourage the player to panic and run if encountered. These are useful threats, especially if they wander randomly, as they encourage players to nurture a sense of paranoia. They should be noisy enough that they can be heard before they're seen, as encouraging players to turn up their speakers and strain to hear noises allows room ambience and other factors to ratchet up anxiety. It also allows other sound-alike sounds to cause tension. They should be rewarding to take down, and require specialized tactics, expensive equipment, or rare ammo to do effectively so that you threaten the player to choose between profit and their life.

These types, mixed in with enemies of other random fodder forms, will keep the player alternating between excited moments of violence, eager anticipation and plotting, and frenzied running. You want to keep people from settling on one aspect too long, so they're equally as eager to run out shooting, pause and consider options, or bolt from a room screaming. The most important thing, however, is to continually pressure the player to act. Once a player in a survival horror game learns that they can keep a single rhythm, they cease to be fearful. If you can take your time and snipe enemies, creep slowly clearing out areas before advancing, and constantly be rewarded for calm, prudent action then nothing will be scary. If the player is rewarded for constantly moving and avoiding enemies (as in Resident Evil you can often do, simply running past Zombies you don't want to fight) then they develop a steady pace and learn not to worry about what's behind them.

So you need to constantly give the player the impulse to stop and to attack at the same time, so they're constantly acting and keeping their mind busy. This allows any interruption, such as the ever-important "run now" enemy, to cause the player to lose track of themselves and possibly get into a great deal of trouble. Follow this basic principle and no survival horror game will be a complete stinker, but I recommend one with lots of dark, tight environments that offer lots of hiding places for friend and foe. I especially like settings that includes strong doors (underwater, military and space settings work well here) since this allows the player a sense of temporary safety by letting them shut and lock doors behind them, and a sense of paranoia if they know that eventually something is going to come and break the door down. Combines well with the idea of monsters chasing/hunting you down.

[Stark]

Any situation with roguelike death (where your shit is left where you die and you 'become' someone else) would be pretty awesome in many environments, delivering great consequence possibilities like not only losing someone and their skills, but losing the equipment (due to radiation, a stiff drop, enemy mobs picking it up, etc). Combined with environmental interaction (whether it's ordinary stuff like doors, windows, cranes, etc or other stuff like dangerous liquids, radiation, or enemy awareness) you'd be able to totally fuck shit up and have to do other things just to adjust the environment to get the essential resources back. This would be super-annoying in a linear, story-driven game, but in a dynamic game allows much more flexiblity in action and response, giving the player more buy-in to their fate and increasing the tension.

[Guardsman Bass]

I'd actually like to give the "Haunted House" type of thing like in the movie "Stay Alive" another shot, but add non-linear-ness, limited lives, and a more physical world. Meaning that you can do things like make barricades out of common objects (or use them as various weapons), run anywhere (but have a stamina limit, so that if you run too long you start slowing down and breathing heavy, which makes you noisy and more noticeable to creatures), blow holes in walls to get out of rooms, and so forth. Just add a layer of realism to any of these games and you would probably improve a lot of them, or at least make them more interesting (although the controls would be more complicated).

[JointStrikeFighter]

I know it's not really relevant to a survival horror game per se, but Penumbra was FUCKING COLLOSALLY SCARY HOLY SHIT HIDE. If you could make a gmae as scary as Penumbra but with an open non-linear enviroment [ie less locked doors blocking your progress, more HELLS DANGEROUS areas instead that whilst you can go into them DONT]. Add in some form of goombas that can be killed all day long to let some tension off and you probably got a good game.

[Zixinus]

I have several game ideas that are tied to the story:

Foremost, you are a medieval-like fantasy setting. Dark fantasy maybe. Either way, instead of a well-trained and pumped spellwarrior, you are a mere scribe who's hands quickly tire by holding just a broom and who's idea of the arcane is "its magic, duh, its what other people do".

You wake up with weird dreams in a cellar that appears to be made into a makeshift home. Above you, is a house that has large candlesticks with blue flames that seem to be placed all around the house. There is a kitchen in the innermost room with allot of dried supplies. The house is otherwise empty.

When you go outside, the whole place looks like something that would happen if you gathered up every nasty creature or thing that can be described as "shadowy", "nightmarish", "horrible" and "likely to rip your face off or worse". Then took a misty, swampy landscape littered with plants from "botany gone horribly wrong". Add some ruined villages, some old underground shit and an old castle.
In other words, everything that is related to darkness is here and made a cozy, terrifying hole. Some will leave you alone if you leave them alone, others will attack you as soon as they see you.

The game is about figuring out how the hell did you get over there, what the fuck you are doing there, how the shitfucking hell do you get out.
Oh, and figure why do you have vivid recurring dreams on the way.

From what you can gather, they aren't planning to doom the world, they just want to be left alone and found this place to live. As you play, you learn that the earl or whatever of this land found some book about dark magic and in a depressed moment, enclosed this area you are in to dark forces. Hence why the scary shit. Your only way to leave is to disrupt the spell that makes this area a heaven for dark shit. The focus is within the earl's castle, in the very vortex of the area.

What makes it survival horror? Once you get trough the tutorial, you have are left to your own devices. There are no chapters, no points of plot. Some scripted events, yes, but those are necessary. Everything happens because you make it happen. For example, the blue flamed candles I mentioned? Wards. Anything nasty that comes into the house will receive a faceful. However, that does not prevent the nasties to stay AROUND the house. Escape into the house too often and you may find a small army of zombies standing guard outside your door.

Or worse, you might even find that the house is under assault. The wards are powerful, but with enough zombies, they can be overloaded. Hence brief siege sequences where the player must defend the house or let it be overrun. If that happens, game over. However, if you are careful, you can avoid such sequences.

Of course, it can work the other way around. A way to escape a nasty is by leading it into another, bigger nasty. If you are clever, you can even kill big nasties forever. You can hide, you can bribe some by meat or other stuff, etc. In one case, you can even get a witch trapped in a raven's body by your side to help you out in exchange for meat.

The starting basement is your home: here you can heal by resting and cleaning yourself, restoring your powers by eating, save your game by writing into your journal and work out thing.

There are two key elements that further survival: improvisation and magic.

Improvisation means that you can pick up allot of things in the game and make use of them. For example, you can pick up some tools from the haunted house of a carpenter, thus allowing you to make your own mini-workshop at your sanctuary. With this, you can take certain items like a chair and turn it into arrows or an improvised shield. Or if you take your time, you can even turn it into a charm that will scare away certain kind of monsters, or into magical tools you can use to trap a ghost, to be unleashed at a desperate moment.

Yes, you can take any weapon you can find and TRY to use them. However, you are a weakly scribe after all, so you won't be killing dragons any time soon with the rusty broadsword you found. It can chop off a zombie's head real nice though.

Magic is a bit similar. There is a reason why you are there and that is because you are a half-breed, who's powers have been artificially suppressed until this point. However, while you may learn some abilities that will be useful and neat, you quickly find yourself that you are still the prey in the wolfden. Your abilities serve you best in regards of stealth rather than in combat.

Some abilities or items would serve as Zelda-stlye keys: things that allow you to access previously unexplorable areas while functioning as tools.

So overall, the game would be more of a sandbox than a jump-up-pissing session. The key would be the enemy design. The core element is that they don't really have anything against you, they just want to tear your face off on principle. They can easily be persuaded one way or another that you are not worth the trouble. You have to learn about them and think against them to fight them, rather than just wave a broadsword around them till they drop. But you also have to be careful, as if you do the wrong thing, you might piss off something that otherwise gave you little trouble.

Here is something else though too:

STALKER (I refuse to type that many periods) could easily be turned into something that would truly fit "survival horror". Add more artifacts, remove about 70%-90% of the human population of the Zone, bring back sleeping and eating, add allot more scary mutant things and truly widen the area you are in. For example, you can use a fictional area rather then a real one, thus eliminating the need for emulation.

Thus removing Chernobly and area from the map. Personally, I never understood what the cause of weird anomalies and super-mutations have anything to do with an age-old, meltdown nuclear power plant that was shit before it was even built. Especially considering that the power plant and associated radioactive materials in question is resting under several tons of cement. Thanks to the X-ray engine's acute allergy to me having fun, I will likely never know.

Going back, the Zone could truly be turned into a pants-wetting experience if you add more realism (that's what survival horror is about in some twisted way). If you bleed, any predator with a nose will be suddenly on to you. You have limited ammunition and you have to very careful where you lay down your head as you may find yourself woken from your dearly dreams by a zombie, snorker or bloodsucker.

Take away the predictable terrain, take away the many people whom you can nap ammunition off of, take away much of the faction-related bullshit and you will find yourself in a truly terrifying environment.

[Covenant]

Amongst the reviews of Dead Space, most of which call it "meh" I found a little paragraph that sounded like something I would write, and it furthers my point about what really scares people:

Consider the original Resident Evil, a game that managed to evoke a very particular sort of abject terror that few games have been able to create since. It wasn't the presence of a monster that struck fear in us -- we knew there were evil things residing nearby, because it said so on the box. It was the careful monitoring of resources, scrambling about for ammunition and healing supplies, and finding the best way to defeat an enemy, which in most cases was to run right past them. The zombies were slow and loud. You weren't terrified because you could hear a group of them shuffling toward you -- you were terrified because you only had half a clip in your pistol and two shotgun shells left. Take them on, and how would you fight the next group? Survival meant making these difficult decisions.

Future developers take note of this thread! Scaring people isn't about scary monsters, but scary choices. Every bullet you fire is one less you'll have for the rest of the game, and that should mean something very concrete and scary. Ammo stores are the bane of horror, as they allow people to remove their feeling of desperation. The fear of losing gear, wasting money, squandering your precious rare ammo... those are the things that make people freak out, not the boojum in their bedroom closet.

[Stark]

Like JSF said, in the Penumbra demo there are TWO monsters. TWO. I only ever saw ONE.

But the game used sound, limited resources and environmental puzzles to create a fantastic atmosphere - you could hear a distorted, strange sound through a door, and RUN IN TERROR, BLOCKADE A DOOR AND HIDE UNDER THE TABLE, because of the sense of vulnerability created. It even had a fantastic mechanic where the game told you that your torch battery was limited... but there was no display. It was just a regular torch. So you instantly used it as little as possible, relying on glowsticks instead, thus making the game far more claustrophobic than it had to be (you can easily finish the demo on a single torch battery). This kind of player 'buy in' (which is what made RE scary, even though in retrospect there is no fear there at all) is almost totally lacking from 'horror' games.

Penumbra also used physics to create a non-stupid physical environment where you could do very natural things (like pile crates behind a door, hide in a closet etc) that many games would not allow. The control system was even a 'Wii-like' system with gestures etc, to further concrete the sense of strangeness and versimilitude. Desperately searching thrrough lockers wasn't 'e,e,e,e,e,e,e,e,e', it was ARGH FUCKING DOORS WHAT'S IN THERE SHIT IT'S DARK FUCK WHAT WAS THAT NOISE.

All the ingredients for a successful 'horror' game are out there and have been done before - they're just ignored.

[Academia Nut]

Thinking about the comment on 'survival' as part of the survival horror genre being rather de-emphasized, how about a sort of 'rats in the walls' style game, where your characters are the titular rats hiding from forces beyond your comprehension, just trying to survive.

The game could run something like this: the world has been invaded by aliens, demons from hell, Lovecraftian horrors, or whatever sort of flavour-thing you might like. You take up the role of a band of survivors of the initial attacks, trying to just get them through the storm of destruction. The main character's most important duty is to go out into the wastes and search for supplies while evading the monsters that have done this to the world and dealing with all of the implications. There is no overarching storyline, just backstory you can find out by talking to other survivors, finding reports and the like, and the objective is just to get your people to survive for a certain number of days, at which point the enemy leaves and then you get a little judgement on how well you did and whether or not your little group survives after or not.

Key points:
1) A massive, detailed resource management system. You need food and water, badly, and medicine close after that. If you do not get your group enough of the basic needs, people will start to get thin and get sick. And we are talking the most horrifically depressing sorts of things too. If you do badly, people will start dying on you, starting with the old and young. So if you fail to find supplies for your group, expect to eventually have to hear the wailing of mothers because their babies starved to death, or having to go up to the most elder person in the group and asking them to leave because you can't afford to feed them anymore and they don't contribute enough to the group's long term survival to keep around. Or imagine killing in cold blood another survivor out in the field, knowing that he or she might have their own group they need to support, but damn it, you need those cans of baked beans to live, and your people come first.

2) Stealth and creative thinking emphasized over brute force. There would be three types of enemies: grunt invaders, your fellow man, and HOLY FUCK RUN! The stealth aspect however would not just be your basic hide in shadows sort of thing, it would also include in a large part not being noticed. So sure, you could start killing lots of grunts, but that will attract the attention of the things you can only run and hide from. And if you start killing too many grunts, you're going to notice increased activity as the enemy searches for the ones attacking them. It also means things like keeping your base hidden, so if you're being chased by some sort of horror from beyond, getting back to home will not help, it will only kill everyone you know. This also means that you can't expand too much and too fast, lest you make concealing your activities harder, not just from the invaders but from other survivors who might see you as a resource to be exploited.

3) Interesting NPCs, some just generic people, others with interesting or useful skills, but also with wants and needs beyond the bare essentials. So you could have guys like an experienced military special forces officer who would make a valuable contribution to the team and who you probably don't want to face in the wild, but he's got some personality issues that could cause problems later, and you have the choice of picking him over the agricultural engineer specializing in hydroponics but he's not much use unless you can find him the parts he needs to start growing food.

4) A decent sort of crafting system where you can find things you might find in the real world and do things with them. In fact, this is the sort of thing crying out for the world's first sophisticated chemistry engine, in that you can mix and match together house hold or industrial products to get useful materials, although probably for legal reasons the real world names and formulas for a lot of the stuff would have to be removed so that you're not including the Anarchist's Cookbook with every copy of the game. Still, it would mean that you've got maybe crude chlorine bombs and molotov cocktails and other stuff when the bullets start running out.

As the game progresses resources would get increasingly scarce and the activities of the invaders more intense. So in the first few days you would have lots of unaffiliated survivors running about, some of them recruitable, some of them hostile, with maybe some grunt invaders on patrol and one big nasty in the area. By the mid game most of the survivors are in their own little competing enclaves with the occasional Mad Max character wandering about and invader patrols are more intense. By the end you and the other survivors have picked the exploration area clean so you have to hope you have enough stockpiles to survive and maybe even scavenge out of the burnt out shells of less successful survivor enclaves that were exterminated by the invaders. On the last day the invaders all leave as suddenly as they arrived and the game then looks at your supply situation, the health of your group, and other factors and decides whether or not you survive to help repopulate the planet or if you just become another group that dwindled away to nothing even after surviving the invasion.

[Pulp Hero]

Academia Nut, you gave me an awesome idea- An RTS/Survival horror game.

You play from a standard isometric viewpoint as the controller of a band of humans after a demon/lovecraftian invasion of earth. You have to do all the RTS things- gather resources, climb a tech tree, hoard resources to support more survivors. However there are the THINGS FROM BEYOND that are basically invincible and other human survivor bands- some might be willing to join you, though many are hostile.

The key to victory is key your base of operations hidden, but self sufficient.

[Academia Nut]

Yeah, although I was actually thinking of something more along the lines of a sort of RPG/stealth game with either first or third person perspective, with an in-depth crafting and conversation system tying into a policy based fortress building system. I think first person would probably be the best, although I understand it tends to be a pain in the ass for stealth games. The reason for that is if you've got all of these horrible, gribbly creatures, the horror from them is diminished with each step you take away from the protagonist. When you're looking through someone's eyes, you're seeing the world as they see it, as if you were the one in this situation. When you're looking over their shoulder, then its clearly not you, but you emphasize with them. While its possible to make a horror RTS work, the over-arching perspective reduces the ability to empathize with the characters. To really get the horror going, people should have backgrounds and faces and stories to tell you about their grand children who they hope got away... and then you have to tell them that the group is running out of food and they have to leave, turned out into the storm of destruction. Yes, this should be the sort of game that makes you kill kindly old grannies and make you feel like a complete fucking ass for letting it get to this point, but it was that or tell the young mother that her two year old was going to be the one condemned to starvation. That sort of gut punching horror. Its not just the horrific monsters, its what the horrific monsters do to people psychologically to survive that should be scary.

[HippyRipper]

Think something like a Resident Evil virus clusterfuck meets Silent Hill. Horribly bad mojo is going down in your town. You can hide in your house. You can run into the streets. You can try to find other people and figure out what is going on. Monsters like Covenant mentioned above. Maybe you're out all day finding supplies and survivors, go into your house, and your wall is missing. There's god knows what in your house and you either need to roll the dice and sleep that night or go back into the hellish world to find somewhere else to stay. If your survival skills suck shit, too bad bitch.
When you die, either a "lose all items, respawn system," or a slow pan out to the beast eating your guts to the perspective of someone else. Mutate into a beast, watch as you slowly become less and less human, and more and more monster.

[Adrian Laguna]

I really liked how in System Shock 2 your resources were extremely limited until the late game, forcing you to fight shotgun armed zombies with a wrench to conserve ammo for something really nasty. Then when you do have enough ammo to go around, the bastards you have to deal with take a lot of lead to bring down. On top of that, it was impossible to do anything with the game paused.

There is a mod for the game which is even scarier because it has infinite enemy respawn. Unfortunately every spawned enemy knows exactly where you are, and will come looking for you at full speed, which is retarded and made the game so difficult I couldn't finish it. However, a toned down version of it would be nice. One of the things that take the edge off many survival horror games is that you can clear an area and then just hang out there in perfect safety, or even clear an area and then come back there to catch your breath. It would be cool if the enemies in the map were slowly replenished over time and wandered in random patterns, such that you would never know where exactly they are, and no area, with a few exceptions, would remain safe forever. So, if you clear a series of rooms, you could likely retreat into the middle of it and take a breather to reorganize your inventory in safety, but you'd still need to make sure you didn't have your back on any doors.

[Mr Bean]

Speaking of from a design standpoint something like what Zixinus is pitching is possible but would be to much of a wander and die fest unless we bring back that underused but still popular(In movies) convention...

The voice over
Or rather, the internal voice over.

Take Half Life II Episode I and II, Alex is a semi internal voice over, making comments, drawing you deeper into the game and providing you with vital information. What if we make that an internal monologue.

Making a game scary is all about keeping people immersed. So no heath bars, no ammo accounts, not a hud, nothing. Kind of like what Alone in the Dark tried with inventory but better thought out. So when you give out story hints do it through an internal monologue.

Example, your crossing country trying to find transport and are running low on provisions, so the following lines of text play soon after loading that area.

"Damn walking this is taking forever, I need to find some wheels, anything that flies gets taken out by those bastard "villians here" so I need some damn wheels. Fuck I'm out of water, need to see if I can find some water to."

Now start adding in context dialog of things you expect to say people to say in a horror situation, when you turn the corner in the beginning of the game and run smack into a zombie you expect "JESUS CHRIST!" or "MOTHERFUCKER!" some other expletive shout or even just a girly scream. When your gun clicks open and empty mid fight you expect a "Sonvabitch!" and when you stumble into a big bad you get a "shitshitshit shit!" or in true Shroom fashion "Whorewhoreswhores!"

I want a horror game which does not feature a slient gruff protagonist, if it's Joe Everyman then lets hear him scream, shout, swear, curse, cry and when he stumbles into temporary safety after almost dieing I want to hear his breather slow down and hear him mutter "I thought I fucking dead, dammit I think I might have pissed myself" before slowly stumbling back to his feet and trudging on

[Stark]

Penumbra does the same thing using text, and it works (unlike in many, many other games) because of the versimilitude of the game both aurally and physically. It's really hard to relate to a protaganist in a shooter (especially one with horror like FEAR) where shit keeps happening and he NEVER SAYS ANYTHING.

Like maybe, 'hey boss there's a spooky girl trying to kill me with magic and a ghost zombie of that guy who disappeared and ps I think I'm having a psychotic episode'.

[Academia Nut]

Oh man, a voiceover track with a bunch of clips cued to certain events would be awesome if done right (although probably annoying beyond comprehension if done wrong). Best of all, it could replace the cliche "monster jumps out at you and roars" to get a scare. Imagine if instead of the monster scaring the pants off the player, it was the PCs reactions. Like you turn a corner and spot some sort of terrible beasty, and the thing just sort of stares at you while your character cries out "FUCK!"

Or worse yet, instead of a health bar, your only clue as to how your character is doing is by reactions. So if he's messed up in the legs he'll start limping, his arm is screwed his aim will be off, etc. etc. as per usual, but the only thing you get to figure this out is the reactions. And if he's really bad he'll start commenting on it, swearing, crying, or just begging for his mother. Can you imagine the tension if you've just beat a boss monster sort of thing and get really screwed up in the process, and you're barely limping along, looking for a first aid kit; first you're swearing and cursing and hissing in pain, but eventually it degenerates into whimpering and begging. Maybe your vision gets blurry with tears or blacks out around the edges. And then you see it: a crashed ambulance! That should have what you need! So you limp as quickly as you can towards it... and there's nothing inside. The character screams out, "FUUUUUUUUCK!" (the player too probably) and wonder how much longer this can go on before death arrives.

[Stark]

Even fucking GETAWAY did this in an effective (ie, hilariuos) manner. No ammo readouts, just the character saying FUCK I'M OUT OF BULLETS. No super gory death animations, just the character saying 'fucking muppet' derisively. That was boss.

In horror it will be far more difficult; the sort of thing Academia describes has been tried before, and unless the audience is already sold on the game, it'll just be annoying as fuck and probably be modded out. Character feedback has been used effectively to sell an atmosphere in games as old as Eternal Darkness and Operation: Flashpoint, but making something tedious (moving slowly) even MORE tedious (annoying noises) will only work if the game already works. This sort of thing should really be a part of the game 100% of the time (in various states of injury) instead of 'drop below 10% health = game becomes tedious', but even little things like your character being frustrated with failing puzzles or respond to the environment would make a nice difference.

In how many games do you enter an obviously spooky room, and the lights go out, and your guy just stands there, doesn't bat an eye, or anything? In a shooter this is fine because it breaks player reactions, but in a game going for a sense of real-ness it's crazy to have a character who never says or does anything in response to the giant tongue-beast or whatever.

[Mr Bean]

That's why you in our hypothetical game you need a good context engine. Somewhat like the Call of Duty games built for your squadmates in announceing where the enemy was but instead for the player only. And as time goes on the player can be "clued" in and respond with less WTF and more oh fuck.

So the first time you hear a loud moaning and dragging sounds the PC asks what the hell is that? Or maybe hello? Or "who's there?" by the tenth or twentieth zombie you might be saying "Identify yourself!" or "If that's a zombie I got a bullet with your name ready". The biggest key to avoid being annoying is both varaity and a good context engine. Your not a non-stop chatter-box, but your not silent. You don't say the same things over and over again and respond as the situation dictates. IE sounds coming from above? "Is that a zombie up THERE", below "DOWN there", in a closet "Would you kindly come out of the closet so I kill you again?"

What if it's not zombies what if it's say a Vampire(Example monster), first encounter "Oh hell another survivor am I glad to see y.. what the fuck?" "Are you kidding me? I just shot a godamn vampire? Zombies yes, Vampires, what the fuck? Later on your character would see a group of vamps "Shit bloodsuckers, gotta stay quiet, stay calm, stay cool"

And how about the great horror from beyond, "What the fuck are you?" When your fighting one and behind you another thing begins growing "OH shit! Another one!"

[Stark]

It'd buff up replayability too; most of this stuff extant in games is scripted for the specific levels in the game, so you can't drop the PC into 'haunted house #4' and have anything dramatic happen. Building that sort of context into a game at a basic level would may extending it much easier.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Whilst it was a pretty mediocre game, PREY handled the character talking pretty well; "holy shit" and "maybe if i look around for a switch" and "wtf gravity" and "wow that feels good [health pickups]."

Oh and his voice wasn't annoying either.

[Zixinus]

Speaking of from a design standpoint something like what Zixinus is pitching is possible but would be to much of a wander and die fest unless we bring back that underused but still popular(In movies) convention...

The voice over
Or rather, the internal voice over.

Point of the journal partially. Sure, having internal voice over would work too.

Thing is, a scribe is something that surprisingly many people can emphasize with because in a way, many people today are scribes. Except we call them secrateries or just office bitches.

*reads more of the topic*

Hmmm, I see what you mean.

Well, I did mention the raven before. She would help you scout the area you are in and give you clues, however in very archic form (she would say "That house is haunted" like "That hovel yonder be taken", or "watch out for the gravekeeper" like "the keeper is wrathful") or would use other medieval-stlye hints ("black is that road", "the panther walks the streets" = "demons on the streets", etc). The raven of course is erratic or unpredictable, therefore something you can't always rely on. She also has a degree of common sense, going away when she can't help you.
So when she suddenly flies away without warning, the player is left wondering whether she left because she was hungry or because something nasty is on its way.

Also, I mentioned the charecter is a half-breed. A half-breed of what? Shades, bizarre and disturbed creatures that just wish to leave the area you are in. They are not that much different than any creature you met. Regardless, they sometimes appear or drop hints.

This is done in the form of whisperings, massages in your dreams or they sometimes just appear. Thing is, not all shades are nice so you can't always know the one that appeared is here to help you or rip you a new one.

The basic idea is to always keep the player on alert and never allow him to fall into predictable and reliable patterns.

Chased by a werewolf-like-thing? Not a big problem, just hide in your house and let the wards splatter him on the wall. Oh, wait, he's not coming in. He's waiting outside. Fuck. Oh well, might as well freshen up and eat until he gets bored and leaves.

Dum, dum da dum wait, he's still out there? What? He's just waiting form me. What am I gonna do? Perhaps if I scare him away with something. Is there wolfsbane down there? Or silver? Fire might work, right?

*player goes and confronts werewolf with a burning torch and a spear, almost gets mauled*.

FUCK, FUCK, FUCK! WHAT DO I DO? Think! Think! Think! What can I do? Perhaps I can taunt him into the wards?

*player tries to lure the werewolf into the wards only for the werewolf to step between the player and thehouse*

*player hears a voice whispering "run away"*

That sort of thing.

As for player communication ,the best forms are purely visual. Voices can get annoying, but gestures or small sounds less so.

The player charecter jumping away when something comes out of the closet without you telling it to, is good. After all, you aren't in control of your actions when you are scared?

[Commander 598]

Sandbox zombie game. Objective: Survive for X days in a city filled with zombies. They can bash down doors of a certain strength after awhile, you'll need various supplies, and there are literally thousands of them across the entire map so you may find yourself trapped, starving, and perhaps even dehydrated on the top floor of an apartment building as several hundred zombies slowly break through the barriers you set up to get to you all because you just HAD to take a car in broad daylight through the ruined city instead of trying to quietly sneak around in the after dark hours.