Super late to the party but.. Hi.

You know what genuinely scared me? The teleporting chest near the beginning of Elden Ring.

--Minor spoilers for anyone who hasn't played the game and wants to experience everything blind.--

So at the beginning of the game, you are chucked unceremoniously into an open world. You see a giant armoured knight atop a steed in the distance. If you're a Dark Souls vet, you likely run straight at it to engage in combat, and promptly get your ass absolutely handed to you.

That Tree Sentinel is placed there to encourage people to fuck off in another direction, come back stronger and then put the beat down on him. You're meant to fight, lose, and realize you can go anywhere you want! A lot of people, travel East of this area, to a shallow lake. Aside from getting attacked by a fucking dragon if you get too close to a bonfire, you can explore some ruins and generally get used to the mechanics.

Until you come across a particular treasure chest, submerged in one of the ruins.

The chest opens. Smoke billows out, and your screen goes black. You come to in an entirely new area, a crystalline cave. You venture out thinking "Wow they're pulled out all the stops for this game!" and you immediately get one shotted by any of the enemies lurking in the cave. You might die a few times before deciding to just run for it; it won't be long before you realize you are stuck here. You cannot fast travel underground. You have to escape to keep playing.

You make it out, into Caelid, and wish you hadn't. The sky is blood red, the ground is rotted, and giant heaving creatures roil in the distance. The music kicks in (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZCD5iPByFA&ab_channel=dudewhereismyspoon) and you understand this is going to get worse before it gets better. This is an area that is so far beyond your characters capacity that you cannot accomplish anything. Birds the size of elephants aggro you from across the map, half the area is covered in poisonous rot and the rest is laid with traps and enemies. So, Australia.

So you escape (eventually). You go back to where you found that Tree Sentinel and you're fucking pleased he's there, something normal. A dude in armour with a halberd. Excellent, I can handle that. Give me more of that.

This teleporting chest, so early in the game, so ready to nab newcomers, was peak fucking horror for me.

Like, no jumpscares - nothing cheesy. Just atmospheric terror and the visceral understanding that you are NOT meant to be here.

I spent the rest of my playthrough knowing I would have to return to this bloodstained land, and dreading it. Even now that music makes me shiver. There were darker and creepier places in that world that I experienced but nothing hit me harder than the surprise Caelid holiday.

The absolutely most terrifying game I've ever played is Kuon for the PS2. I'm getting chills up my spine and on my head just thinking about this fucked up masterpiece. You can either play as one of two sisters. One's a melee character, aka you get a letter opener (yes, literal letter opener) to fight with. The other is a magic user. You get the world's worst fireball, or some other craptastic spell. You're investigating some Japanese manor where things aren't going so well for anyone. There are gaki, Gollum-esque demons that comprise the majority of your enemies at the start, gooey, pink masses of bones and organs, and, of course, the typical long-black-hair-over-face ghost girl. She lives in a trunk or something.

I was probably 14 or 15 when I played this game. Found it in the corner of an EB Games and picked it up immediately. I'd just run through a few Resident Evils and Silent Hills, but this was a whole new level of insanity. The atmosphere around this mansion just screams at you to either run away or become an arsonist, but neither of these are options, sadly. Pretty much everything will kick your ass. There's about no sound except for your tiny feet against the wooden floor. The whole game makes you feel helpless, at least up until the point where I quit and didn't look back.

The first boss of the game is this guy who has had his arms and legs broken. He crawls around on the ceiling and shit looking like a spider. Oh, his throat is also slit and his head is rotated around 180 degrees. After dying to him a couple times, I bailed on the game.

I think you're right on the atmosphere. It really does have to play into our primal fears. Darkness, isolation, unknown and/or unassailable predators. Less is more, as well. Less light, weapons, friends, information, sound, direction. Obviously, you can't just put a person in a pitch-black room and say "here you go, time to be scared!" The game has to be engaging enough to make the player want to continue forward. I think that the original Resident Evil did pretty well with that. Ammo was fairly limited, your team was separated and dying, this giant mansion had traps galore that you'd trigger accidentally, plus zombies and friends. The notes gave you glimpses into the backstory, just enough information for you to form a picture of what may have happened. There wasn't a big, glowing "go here" arrow, just what you could deduce from your surroundings.

The only way I can imagine a broad-daylight horror game working is if you, the character, knew something was wrong, but nobody else believed you. Could be that he's having a break with reality. I don't know how the whole story would work beyond that, though.

More than just generic jumpscares. There's a reason why people still remember Silent Hill 1-3 whereas people already forgot about Slender.

I love horror games and movies. Ive been absorbing as much of it as I can for as long as I can remember, from the old 90s tv show "Are you afraid of the dark?" through stephen king tv movies and 90s Doom Clones, zombie survival games and the beginnings of what I would call "modern horror". I love trying to dissect them and figure out what makes them great. Horror is easy to quantify in non interactive media like tvshows and movies. Its easy to set the tone and bring the viewer to the edge of their seat. Games have a harder time with this though, giving the user some agency, but still denying them the ability to "run the fuck away" for want of a better phrase can make or break its whole atmosphere. You have to find a way to coerce the player into wanting to pursue the goal of the game of their own accord, not just forcing them down a path and throwing boogeymen at them.

One of my all time favorite horror games is Condemned: Criminal Origins, on Xbox 360 IIRC. The general gist of the story is that you're and FBI investigator tracking a particularly grotesque serial killer, and through misfortune and the planning of this elusive serial killer, you are framed for his crimes. So you end up on the run from the very people you work for, with no safety net. (You still have one friend within the Bearu, who as the game progresses loses confidence in your claim of innocence.) You're in a populated city, a normal city, but you're keeping off the main track, moving through shuttered train stations, decrepit and abandoned shopping malls forced into forclosure by desperate economic times, desolate business parks that echo the once thriving industry, underfunded inner city schools that shutdown overnight due to budget cuts. It perfectly captures the seedier side of an otherwise normal American city, it hilights the shadows cast by the light of the american dream.

The combat of the game is visceral, it feels almost real. Guns are sparse, but nearly always kill immediately. Melee combat is the core of the game, rebar pulled from crumbling walls, rotten 2x4 planks pried off boarded up windows, rusted pipes and plumbers wrenches, your enemies the addicts and mentally unstable homeless people that hide unseen in the shadows. (The game does have a backstory to hint at the hightened agression and psychopathy of these people, its not just criminalising the homeless) Combat is a frantic dance, you're trying to anticipate enemies swings and block or dodge them, while landing your own hits. You're unlikely to survive in a brawl with more than one opponent. It touches that primal part of us, the fight response that grabs the nearest heavy object and bashes in the brains of our agressor with fanatical agression we didnt know we had. I often found myself physically shaking after a fight in the game, the very real adrenaline surging through me after the virtual junkie suprised me in the virtual alley and tried to cave my head in. I think what the game manages to achieve in horror is the isolation. A lot of horror games attempt this, but few put you in the position of being surrounded by people (In a regular city) yet being totally alone. You feel like the last sane person in a world thats succumbed to introversion and narciccism. Games like Penumbra and Amnesia capture the isolation well (And I love them), but in those. you're physically isolated too. True isolation is being alone while not "being alone" if that makes sense. Condemned makes your feel like the whole world has forsaken you, cast you out to live on the fringes fighting for scraps from the dinner table.

Do you remember the game F.E.A.R.? By and large it was a First Person Shooter with the occasional jumpscare, tied more to the FPS part than the Horror part, but one segment will always stand out to me; At the beginning when you're investigating the hospital, you get separated from your team as you pick your way through the abandoned building. Outside you can hear the regular sounds of traffic and people, as the paranoia and tension builds. You hear yoru teammates tempers rise and (spoiler) witness the apparent and sudden suicide of one. Did I mention the scene is set sometime in the mid afternoon too? Its not hidden in the shadow of perperual darkness (I mean really, who goes to investiage a haunted hospital at night time? Thats bad mission planning) That scene for me is fantastic, because you're trapped in this little pocket of terror and fear in an otherwise normal urban environment, you can see and hear the world around you carry on as if everything was normal, unaware of whats lurking unwatched just feet away. Thats the feeling of true horror.

Other posters have touched on things Ill briefly mention here too. I don't personally think you can make a horror game in anything but first person. (Sorry, Dead Space and Silent Hill!) theres a loss of connection with the game when you can see youre plucky character running about in front of you. In Silent Hills defence, they use some fantastic camera angles to bring an almost cinema-esuqe sense of horror to the field, but I cant ever connect properly with the theme of the game because of it. My biggest grip with that game, and resident evil is guilty of this too, is the 'human tank' control scheme, where you have to turn and face your character like youre driving a tank and the direction of movement shifts constantly scene to scene. (Holding down as you transition to a new area, where down now means you move up) I get why they've done it. It adds to the tension and induces panic in extreme situations when you can't immediately react to the situation, but I hate it. I think in horror, its faux tension, making an intentionally awkward control scheme to induce fear. If someone handed me a remade verison of the orignal silent hill, but set entirely in first person, Id love it, but by and large I can appreciate those games for what they did but I cant bring myself to play them again. Sound is a big part of horror games, even penumbra started out as a student project in sound design if Im remembering correctly. It runs the risk of being overdone though. I dont think horror games should rely on spooky music for atmosphere, its too cliche. For me, the ideal horror game would be relatively silent, save for enviromental sounds (This touches back on my earlier point about being alone while surrounded by people). Using just regular ambient sound, and only occasionally relying on 'unnatural sounds' heightens the reaction to those sounds.

This turned into more of an essay than a comment, and got a bit rambly, but I hope it at least sheds some light on what I think is true "Horror" in videogames. I've been working on my own horror game for some time, mostly trying to dissect the idea and build concrete scenes and narrative. Im planning to use the unreal engine for it with the help of a buddy who has more experience with it than I do. I'll leave you with one of my favorite albums of all time, which is a fantastic inspiration for any aspiring horror game devs.

F#A#∞ - Godspeed you, black Emperor!

POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR ALIEN: ISOLATION AHEAD.

I think a feeling of helplessness is a major factor. In Alien: Isolation, while you do get more items to try and fend off the Xenomorph, you never get strong enough to actually kill it. The fact that you can only fend it off momentarily and not destroy it gives an extra level of terror, since you know you have a limited amount of time to find a hiding place before it comes back after you've scared it off. Add to that the scarcity of items for crafting these distractions/weapons and you have the issue of whether you use the item now or hold it for later and just try to hide quickly.

Atmosphere is another huge part of it. Building tension is a difficult thing and horror games that do it well can achieve incredibly results. I agree with you and TheVenerableCain that a broad daylight game would be difficult to implement, because when you can see everything it's less scary. Darkness is a primal fear and the fear of the unknown or what might be there can add a lot of tension. I know in Isolation there were a couple points where parts of the scenery looked somewhat like the Xenomorph when viewed in half light, which did a great job of spooking you.

For a broad daylight game to work I think you would need some mechanic that made seeing things scary. Maybe something like in the Slender games where looking at the enemy causes difficulty with your vision and damages your health or something like the Eternal Darkness sanity effects, although I don't know how effective those would be in pure daylight.

Sound effects do a great job of building the atmosphere as well. Sitting in a hidey-hole or walking through a hallway hearing the Xenomorph stomp around could be terrifying. Isolation did a great job with the sound effects, especially when you would hear something walking outside or crawling through vents. It made you concerned that you could be dropped on at any time.

I think that Perspective is important too. The First Person perspective of Isolation lends itself to better tension building and horror because you can only see what you would actually see in real life. You can't switch to Third Person and see something sneaking up behind you. You have to use your "senses" (vision and hearing) and the somewhat unreliable motion tracker to get an idea of where anything is located. The motion tracker especially gives you a false sense of security at times since it only tracks things that are moving and when enemies stand still they don't show up. This adds in to your feeling of helplessness, since you don't have complete information about what's around you.

There are few games that I can remember that were truly as terrifying as Alien: Isolation was. I think it did a great job with all of the disparate elements needed to make a good horror game.

Resident Evil, the first one. That game scared the crap out of me. The sounds, the darkness, the moans, the creaks, not knowing what's coming up behind you or to the side. Zombies suddenly, arrrr, brains, moan, hands reaching out. Only game I ever quit in the first hour of playing due to how scary it was.

I haven't played many horror games really but I have seen a few let's plays that make me feel the exact same way you do. Jump scares are lazy and easy to accomplish in any medium. The games that I have played that terrified me were bloodbourne and PT. PT gave me the build up by forcing me to go through the hallway multiple times and putting me into a pattern and then suddenly changing it. BloodBourne did it artificially by making me try over and over again to kill a monster. There was nothing objectively scary about fighting that monster but because I had been doing it for 2 hours everything depended on that one punch.

I'm not a big fan of horror games. Given the choice to be scared or not, i'd rather not.

This line of questioning reminds me a Extra Credits episode so I wanted to share that. The episode talks about using uncanniness to instill fear. Note that the playlist contains all the shows they did that touch to horror (broadly construed).

I'm not sure darkness is necessary to a good horror setting but it does help a lot in creating creating horror. First it blurs the line between the uncanny and the unbelievable, I believe you'll register first what is familiar and then what is out of place, the uncanniness, but you won't be able to see how ridiculous or over the top what you are looking at is. Second if you create a setting where the player never have a direct encounter they'll fill the void with their own fears, which is more powerful and more universal than anything anyone could design since each player brings in the game what frighten them the more. To do that you need to give a place for the player to put their fears and a dark environment is a good way to give it to them.

An illustration of that limited perception as a vector for horror is how the experience of Silent Hill 2 was transformed when in the remake removed the fog.

Every successful species has one or more successful environmental adaptations. Tools given to them by nature with which they can control their environment. Speed, agility, or size are some examples.

Humans on the other hand are blessed with incredible intellect. Our problem solving skills are (from what I know) unmatched in nature. So much so, that we stand a good chance of destroying our planet with it.

What is scary, you ask. The removal of those very tools which allow you a greater degree of control. Because of this, anything unknown, foreign, incomprehensible or strange is scary to us. We need knowledge, in order to have control. Remove knowledge, and you introduce chaos.

I would wager a guess that to make a successful horror game, which doesn't implement the typical dark and tacky theme, you would need to find a way to present something vexing. Then remove the player's ability to understand it. Sure it could pose a challenge or a threat, even. But ensure that the player does not know what it is.

Take a look at the aliens in Metro 2033. Sure they can kill you, but once you understand them, they aren't frightening. Even though that doesn't dampen their lethality. Or watch the movie "Cube." Sure there's lots of gory killing involved, but once the story unfolds and the mystery is solved, the film stops being scary.

I agree. Today, what we have, is not terror or fear - it's surprise, startlement, discomfort.

There ARE a few legitimately terrifying horror games I've played, or terrifying segments - most notably, a fan "remake" of Killswitch, a creepypasta of a possibly demonic game that deleted itself and the data on it's floppy upon failure (which is why it's not available today according to the myth - no one thought of copying it over to anywhere else, and they didn't expect the deletion). Hilariously (and relevantly enough), I can't find it anywhere right now.

What makes terror, however, is things that are wrong usually. And not like "I killed a puppy" wrong. Like, ever so subtly yet so definitely incorrect (like TheVenerableCain 's comment about Kuon). Amnesia: The Dark Descent had some aspects of this, but still relied too much on the panic and startling of something appearing and running at you to entice a reaction.

Another example (it's not horror technically, but with just a few minor tweaks could become): Jawson's Bog in Bastion. Those who played might know what I'm talking about. But for those who haven't (spoilers ahead): at one point you pass out (I can't remember why). The game makes you think you start at the beginning. But already then something felt off. As you progressed, the narrator, instead of being somewhat gleeful and positive, was negative and remorseful, making the character look like a terrible murderer instead of a victim of circumstances (and at that point I thought maybe this was like, the real point of view of the game). Twist that a little and it can become the stuff of nightmares.

Another example of what I consider to be horror (and I'm sure most would agree): No Russian.

Or in games that allow it, pushing yourself to do a true Evil quest and systematically killing everyone can delve there.

There was for me, as well, the ending to StarDrive. You discover all of the advanced technologies. You build a fleet that could break anyone else - not like there is anyone else to oppose you except the Remnant, because your empire spans the whole galaxy. Then you finally find more ancient tech... in the form of a mother ship that most likely blows up the scouts that found the planet where it was hidden, and a good portion if not all of the fleet you most likely have stationed around a non-colonized world (unless you, for some reason, happened to use that system as a rally point for your whole fleet or, bless your crazy heart, decided to colonize that whole system). You finally manage to break that ship... and what do you get? It sends a last signal, and the whole galaxy gets flooded with ships just as advanced as your mothership, destroying one by one your fringe colony... and the only way for you to survive? Rally every single ship you have around your core empire, have all worlds that are not your most reinforced, powerful world produce as many warships as they can pull off, and hope it'll be enough to buy you enough time to construct an ascension array... to ascend to another dimension/existence, alone, while fully knowing that whoever doesn't also manage to get the array to work will be annihilated by the Remnant to make a clean-slate galaxy once more. The endgame specifically tells you that you left a whole galaxy to die to save yourself and ascend.

Then again, in my opinion, TRUE horror is a very niche thing. Today's horror is more of an adrenaline hit - the same type of thrill you get riding a rollercoaster. True horror makes you think, and you don't feel right for a while afterwards. In true horror, you are the monster, and you terrify yourself.

Tropes TL;DR: Games use too much of Horror Tropes while they should be using primal fears or creating nightmare fuel.

I think you can make a broad-daylight horror game that would terrify the player, but it needs to be something subtle, something that throws the player off, and something that hits close to home for a lot of people. Abduction, for instance.

The issue with horror games, and making people scared, is that... people are scared by different things. A spooky camp night in a murder clown factory is one person's biggest fears, and another person's "meh." These change, too, as you grow -- when I was a kid I was afraid of the dark, I was afraid of monsters attacking me from the woods. I'd have nightmares about them. Now? I have nightmares about being late to work and getting fired, or nightmares that I've never received a job in the first place and I'm still languishing in unemployment. That wouldn't make a very good horror game, though.

On jumpscares -- there was a great quote by someone that I sadly can't remember, and therefore can't credit them, but it was "Jumpscares are to horror as tickling is to comedy." Jumpscares rely on a very primal instinct in humans -- we are started by things suddenly rushing at our face -- but I wouldn't necessarily call it horror. I love the FNAF series, but the jumpscares aren't why I like the games.

I think the overall issue you run into with horror games, is as you get older, subtler terror is more appealing, whereas when you're younger, very visceral blood-and-guts-murderer-jumpscares are more likely to scare you. You're going to get one crowd going "That's not scary" no matter what sort of game you make.

Personally though, I think one of the more successful horror games to come out was PT, though I guess that's not really a "game." It's both subtle and in-your-face at the same time. It's not enough to keep me up at night, but I thought it was really good.