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I have a thought...
Speaking for myself, I find zombies, done well, can often be scary in games. Admittedly, I find zombies scary generally - in fact, they are the only thing I regularly _do_ find scary. However, I think they work well in games because the things that often break scene in games - jerky animation, poor AI, distorted facial features - are actually pretty par for the course with zombies. This doesn't mean they have to have poor AI, of course - watching the mawmen in Half Life 2 interact with objects shows that - but it doesn't shatter the illusion if they move towards you in a relatively straight line, not making use of cover, as it would if they were meant to be special ops troopers.
See Half-Life 2, Bloodlines... of course, it doesn't work out totally - for example, the zombies/vampires in Judge Dredd: Dredd versus Death are an embarrassment, but so is the game as a whole. Also, I may be a soft touch, as I found the demo of the game of Dawn of the Dead scary and it really wasn't very good.
I think ghost stories also work well, because the game world is often not physical to start with, and because, since ghost stories are rarely told through a first person narrative - I mean, the ghost doesn't turn up and narrate the story, or if it does it tends to do so elliptically and allusively - like Lauryn in Deadly Shadows, by the sound of it. Which was, on reflection, a pants-wetting bit of Bloodlines - particularly impressive given that it is almost impossible to die during the episode. You are sent to exorcise a ghost from derelict hotel in order to allow the property to be developed. The ghost throws things at you and makes things explode, but you can generally just wait for a bit to heal at worst. However, by newspaper clippings, children's drawings and glimpses of ghostly figures the story unfolds (essentially, an homage to The Shining and the way it does so is tremendously atmospheric. There is a bit near the start where you find an article in the laundry in the basement about a child's head being found in a washing machine, and shortly thereafter you hear a click and one of the washing machine doors opens of its own accord - there is no explosion, no physical threat, not even a gory payoff, but it was very successful in occasioning a sense of trepidation - the sense that, this being an adventure game, you _had_ to look in there, but you really didn't want to.
I guess I am thinking about ways that a scenario can be induced to work with rather than against the "box" that it is put in by the hardware around it. What scenarios lend themselves to scary gaming? |
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