Yeah, yeah Resident Evil isn't scary anymore (and when it tries to be it just comes off as derivative, see RE7), Team Silent gave up and Konami are jerks. The Siren series is dead and lord knows if we'll ever see a new Fatal Frame...
We may have 'something' akin to horror with whatever Death Stranding is... but really, who knows what's gonna come of that.
I've been reading a lot of Junji Ito recently and i just cant help but wonder why no video game has attempted this kind of horror or even just a fresh take on horror. Everything we have is so dull...
So this makes me want to ask; what kind of horror would you like to see in a new IP horror game?
What kind of horror elements would you like to see and interact with?
I'd like a horror game that doesn't plateau on the horror side of things, i want it to escalate further and further to keep you off your balance and stop you getting complacent about it, i'd like to see a horror game use a consistant stream of horror instead of relying on scarejumps bring in tension make the player know exactly what you are doing and derive the fear from that, most importantly make it so that it doesn't matter how well the player does even if it's perfectly played they can still lose at the end i want to see a protaganist do everything right and still lose.
Something that lulls you into a false sense of security, then shock you (See Doki Doki Literature Club), avoid jump scares, and focus on peoples fears and a sense of helplessness. (Silent Hill Shattered Memories). With a combo of those it would be scarier than Downpour for sure.
Body horror has always had a powerful effect on me. Whether it's disfigurment, deformity, or straight up The Fly ****, I get very uncomfortable when it comes up.
System Shock 2 was very good in this regard. The first enemy you find is called a Hybrid. It's a human who's been infected with an alien worm. The worm, when grown, burst out of the human's stomach and stretchs up to their head where the worm bites into their brain and takes control of them. The first time you see one of these guys running at you with this fleshy tube running from his head to his belly you won't soon forget it. The cyborg midwives are another great example. They're women who've been butchered, most of their bodies replaced by crude mechanical parts and their faces removed. They're absolutely horrific.
Even relatively tame things get to me. I was reading Career of Evil by Robert "JK, I'm really J.K." Galbraith and a woman gets attacked and loses two fingers. The thought of not having those two fingers made me feel physically ill. It's worse in a game like Dishonored. There are weapons called springrazors. They're little mines and when an enemy walks near one it 'explodes', sending razors in every direction and slicing the enemy to pieces. Almost every time I use them, even now, I end up just staring at the scattered arms and legs and I get chills and feel sick, absolutely disgusted with myself. Similarly, when I cut an enemy's arm off, I nearly always have to stop and try not to fixate on it. It isn't the same in games where, say, a grenade reduces an enemy to just a patch of blood. In Dishonored you can see the bone under the flesh. Cut someone in half and you can see their severed spine and the open tubes of their bisected guts. It's too real in that regard, I can't help but imagine it happening to me and I just feel intense despair. Dishonored 2 also has bloodflies which attack people and use their bodies to make nests, and it's very disgusting.
Even things like the J'Avo in Resident Evil 6, with all those eyes in their foreheads, itch my skin. While a lot of the body horror in Resident Evil is too fantastical to have as pronounced an effect on me it still ranks up there generally for me. For starters, just the thought of having your flesh eaten is sickening. Hell, in one of the Song of Ice and Fire books, a man with sharp teeth bites a chunk of flesh from Brienne's cheek, like a full chunk, and I was wincing in my seat the whole time. The cultists in Resident Evil 4 sometimes have a tubular worm-like plaga erupt from their mouth and their jaw breaks and their head just flops back all limp and loose and it's so horrible. There's an enemy in Revelations that twists you like a soaking cloth, breaking your spine, and it makes me recoil. People's heads being turned the wrong way, like Chris when Wesker breaks his neck if you fail a QTE in Resident Evil 5. The way Birkin's face is hanging off the Second Stage G monster's chest like a loose flap of skin in Resident Evil 2. Irving after he transforms in Resi 5. Alexia turning into an anthill and then a dragonfly in Code: Veronica. Carla's marshmellow goo form in Resi 6. The Chimeras in REmake that are insectoid but still visibly once human. The Duvalia in Resi 5 that has a sack of organs and bones hanging from its waist. Rachel Foley in Revelations. There's some ****ed up **** in the series and it's the stuff that gets me more than anything else. It's part of why I never felt the series lost anything when it transistioned from zombies to Las Plagas. Those parasites are worse if anything, knowing there's this thing alive inside you, waiting to burst out, to warp your body into horrible shapes. It makes for fun games, but God damn.
There's even a guy in Spy Kids who gets transformed into a freak with four faces on his head and I hate it. I can't stand it. The thought of having these things on my own flesh turns my stomach.
A game that goes hard on body horror will always get to me. I think the key thing for it to hit me hard is for it to be something I can imagine happening to me directly. It's not a matter of gore. More gruesome doesn't make for more scary. It has to be more specific and real. The thought of being altered against your will, of something consuming you like meat, of being transformed into something else with no way back, it all creeps me out and frightens me. Some games (not necesserily horror games) do it well. For me, an effective horror game would be built on it.
Resi 4–6 makes body horror mechanical. Given how enemies can mutate based on damage you deal, 'killing' your enemies might just make things a lot worse, particularly in Resi 6 with the sheer wealth of mutations and the fact enemies can mutate more than once. There's a game called Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and, while it's not exactly dismemberment, you could injure specific parts of your body, resulting in gameplay changes. Injured legs slow you down, broken arms stop you from fighting monsters, etc. Bodily integrity was something you had to be aware of in that game, and I've never been so afraid after finding out I sprained my ****ing ankle as I was when running from a gang of fish people screaming for my blood.
That's what I'd want to see in a horror game. Well, not exactly want but you know what I mean.
Also, it took sheer force of will to not use the phrase 'it gets under my skin' at any point in that post.
