I have just played the co-op mode in Cry of Fear, but I can say with certainty that it has some very very scary monsters in it. It’s also a mod by the same developer as Afraid of Monsters.
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in general horror posting i found out today that Uzumaki had a licensed simulation game for the Wonderswan in which you play as the spiral entity and try to take over the town.
apparently it comes with a virtual pet game in which you feed and raise human/snail hybrids to compete in racing competitions, which raises even more questions than previously existed about the chao garden.
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Huh that’s interesting. The wonderswan was a prolific system. Looking at some of the pictures on mobygames, I am curious to know more about what it means to play as the curse because it still seems like there is a You that can do typical You things like Look or Talk or Run Into Someone On The Street.
I watched a bit of a let’s play and the impression i got was of adventure game protagonist as malevolent fate, you do things like collect a snail as an item from a field and place it in a certain location so that a character who lives there gets spiral ideation i guess. Couldn’t find much info on the snail raising system so perhaps it’s just an elaborate joke by a Spriter’s Resource person.
Have also been watching a Siren longplay that’s like 15 hours long and somehow still seems less strenuous than actually playing the game. But there’s a lot to like about it and I’m interested in the way they sort of went back to a kind of arcadey-ness as means of getting around the horror game conventions of things like inventory management. Each stage seems to be about 10 minutes long once you know how to do it and I guess both the narrative design and objective system seem based around the idea of playing things over and over, slowly getting used to the layouts and noticing more things about them, picking up on small changes when you return to the same place as different characters or the extremely underplayed little narrative beats. No desire to play the thing but a really inspiring commitment to obscurity.
A favourite detail about it is the way the archive gradually comes to look like a scattershot quadrat sampling of the popular occult - cheap new-age magazines about UFOs or ESPers, tv show listings about urban legends, pop music posters, space alien themed board games and creepy children’s toys, old photographs with strange things happening in the background. Most of these are red herrings in the narrative with at best an inaccurate relation to what’s going on! But I like that the game includes them and their strange sense of buried presence, I don’t think the real plot would be as effective if it didn’t have some of that slightly crazed eclectic feeling in the background to balance out the relentless focus.
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One of my favorite aspects about Siren’s commitment to obscurity is the way it moves you through the chronology according to a pattern that I, in my time playing it, could not discern any kind of significance in. Cause and effect is a huge part of how you progress in that game but it tries so hard to make you believe there’s no such thing as cause and effect when you’re lost in time cycling randomly through and returning to events. It inspires a really strange break between the player and the game when you get through like three levels and then the third level just sends you back to the play the first level all over again. In a very time-looping in-fiction sort of way I remember vaguely noticing what just happened and saying to myself “wait, this is all wrong… something about this isn’t right. I’ve been here before, i’ve done all this already in the past.”
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the retro effects are a bit much and it’s no paranoiascape but i like the abstraction involved in this game’s trying to tell a relatively straight horror story as a series of breakout dioramas
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How in the world have I never heard of this game it’s so damn cool
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Silent Hill for the PlayStation cuz it gives me the heebie jeebis!!
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the rpgmaker game Ib is great, i think the first time i played i was more hung up on whether it was scary or not, but going back to it after awhile of mostly checking out very drab and self-serious 3d horror games is a real pleasure. feels closer to the illbleed mindset of a Virtual Horror Land full of small surprises and gimmicks and jokes that pop out at you as you move around. also interesting how many of those depend on the expanded field of view + abstraction of the overhead perspective - being able to see things in the corner of the map, having strange effects overlaid on the screen. less directly tense than the restricted field of view of flashlights, fog, first person etc but more amenable to a kind of general depersonalised creepiness that i find a lot more engaging.
also very funny whenever one of the stock rm2k3 sound or weather effects pops up in this context.
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Tis the season for scary games and a scary games thread.
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I have finally played Corpse Party on the Switch.
Despite few lines that are somehow sexist/silly, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The music is great and, while the story is a bit standard (an issue I have with 99% horror stories), it’s very well told, the atmosphere is good and so are the locations.
By the way, the Switch version has several quality of life adjustments, such as test skip and the quick save function.
I quite like the subgenre of low budget adventure/rpgs, and this game is among the good ones (Nanashi no game, Mad father)… I will be looking around for other RPGmaker gems (e.g. The Witch’s House, that I saw suggested by Broco in another thread).
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