Create a "Survival Horror" game.

[chitoryu12]

If you're going to have a survival horror game, it needs the fear of the unknown. You don't know what's around the next bend. There might be enemies. There might be monsters. There might be a big deep pit into the abyss, or there could even be candy. You don't know. Like Stark was saying, you hear a sound and go, "What the hell was that?"

A little girl singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", as the room slowly goes dark.

Just about anything with nursery rhymes or little kids singing sounds creepy, even in the daylight. Maybe after it remains dark for a bit, the lights flip back on and the room is covered in blood, symbols, and writing on the wall. If you have other people in the room, you see that they've been brutally murdered (eyes missing, guts ripped out and plastered on the ceiling, stuff like that). It remains like that for about five seconds, then the lighting slowly turns red, and in a flash it returns to normal. You're freaking the fuck out and everyone is wondering what happened.

[Zixinus]

In other words, a way to fuck with the player. I think there should be more to it than a that to a horror game.

I mean, we can create a list of "10000 ways to scare the living shit out of people" but those alone will remain scripted sequences.

For example, these things happening while you do not expect them. FEAR (again, I refuse to write all those fucking periods) failed miserably because you KNEW there is going to be a horror section followed by a shooting section than another horror section. Almost no matter what happened, that was the result.

I'm not saying that making this list is stupid, I'm just saying that such events do not necessarily tie with idea of this tread, or rather, they would be much more fun to do in a separate topic.

What you need, is dynamics or devices that tie these ideas together with gameplay.

For, example, take this idea of corpses and blood by chitoryu. Why not make this a warning dynamic of something nasty coming in and wanting to make that vision a reality, turning it into a tension-building device?

[Hotfoot]

An Idea:

Frequency

You play an average guy, working in an office building. You live alone in an apartment, and every night, you come home and do utterly boring things. One day, things start getting strange. You start hearing things coming from nowhere, seeing flashes of something flitting around the edges of your vision. At first, it seems odd, but explainable through mundane means.

Then there is a fire in your office. The alarm blares, and as you try to escape, you open a door that backblasts into your face. You pass out.

When you wake up, you are in your office building, it's late at night, the lights are off, and nobody is there, but everything seems different. Subtle things have changed, and the odd sounds are now louder and clearer, but still unintelligable, and now the sounds of the fire are whispering in your ear. The sounds get louder and clearer as you approach various objects, each one with something that can be understood if you listen carefully. Get near a phone, and you hear numerous conversations all at once. Get near a TV, and hear several channels all at the same time, and so on. As you get closer to the way you got blasted, you hear more disturbing things, screams of terror, roaring flames, and you start seeing wisps of smoke flashing past you. Closer still, and you see fires flying through the air as screams echo through the halls. If you press on to where your body is, the flames and screams get louder and more prevalent, and soon you're trying to avoid them as they start to light you on fire. Finally, as you see the door where your caused the backblast, the fire comes into the hallway and starts to chase you. You can fight back in limited ways, by using fire extinguishers, fire hoses, etc. If you get damaged, your flesh peels back to reveal a charred corpse's flesh, hidden underneath. As you go through each floor, the voices near the phones stop pleading for help and start screaming in pain, or lamenting that nobody is coming to save them. The flames are getting more and more intense, and there seems to be a common voice behind them.

Finally, you reach a room where the flames are at their greatest, and inside is a child, howling for help, screaming in terror. As you finally beat back the flames, you open the door...

And there you are, back in the "real world", fire extinguisher in hand, looking straight at a beaten down husk of a man who looks up at you in surprise. The building isn't burned down, nobody is dead, but your clothing is scorched where you took damage earlier on.

So the game progresses. At every corner, things seem wrong, and as you get closer to things that are tied to certain common emotions, you tune in to important clues about what needs to be done and so on.

Anyway, just a thought.

[RazorOutlaw]

Just about anything with nursery rhymes or little kids singing sounds creepy, even in the daylight. Maybe after it remains dark for a bit, the lights flip back on and the room is covered in blood, symbols, and writing on the wall. If you have other people in the room, you see that they've been brutally murdered (eyes missing, guts ripped out and plastered on the ceiling, stuff like that). It remains like that for about five seconds, then the lighting slowly turns red, and in a flash it returns to normal. You're freaking the fuck out and everyone is wondering what happened.

Thing is, anybody who has ever played through FEAR or The Suffering has already seen that kind of imagery and that's not counting any other horror games that might have tried the same bait-and-switch tactic. There's no real fear of the unknown there. And all they had you do was walk to the end of an alleyway when the "real scare" came at you.

All there is with your description is a blunt whack over the head of blood and guts and then *poof* it's gone. That's not scary, unless you get terribly scared by gory images. Silent Hill had one of the better "fear of the unknown" moments in the beginning as they used sound, setting, and light. First off the engine was shit-tastic so that's why you couldn't see most of the background. So the fog obscured the shitty graph- most of the monsters who would come lumbering up to you in that white miasama. It was often the case that you would hear first and maybe see them second. There was also a variety of creatures to avoid or combat, some of which could fly and otherwise tail you until you reached a safe location. Again not being able to see them creates a certain amount of anxiety. Not being able to get away from them completely helps too. Third, the setting was presumably innocent if abandoned. Some areas looked looted, some cars stayed in the middle of the street, but otherwise you were left wondering just where everybody had gone to. Many of the interiors of buildings were left untouched as if to drive the point home that the townspeople had just left.

The game relied on its fair share of gore but, unlike FEAR, it never substituted a room covered in blood or strange symbols or flash imagery OF CORPSE WITH A GAPING MOUTH as an actual scare. Its an interesting effect, but sadly not all that thrilling. Hell, The Suffering never really caught on that its *FLASH* INK BLOT *FLASH* *SHRIEKING NOISE* could get just as tiresome as its heartbeat and heavy breathing that accompanied your character no matter where you went.

[Yogi]

My idea: Your character wakes up in an unfamiliar room. Doesn't know how they got there, no combat skills, full of creepy crawlies, need to survive, blah blah blah. The twist: your character is completely Blind.

Since it's unfair to have the player rely on his ears, the world will be represented something like this. If the player touches a wall or something with his hands or a stick, a "ghost" of it will appear to remind him that it's there. However,there's no guarantee that it will REMAIN there. He can hear voices, scuttling, and the clomping of feet and they will be represented graphically on the screen at the location they occur. However, you have no idea WHAT that big thing clomping towards you is, or even if there's anything between you and it, or if it even sees you. All the information you get is the clomping of footsteps as the "Loud footsteps" sound marker gets closer and closer.

This takes fear of the unknown to a whole new level, as everything "known" is what you can touch with your walking stick. As for things beyond that you can guess, but you're never truly sure what's out there.

[Zixinus]

That is actually a pretty good idea.