[Feedback/Opinion wanted] What creeps you out or un-nerves you?

Hey,

We are working on a cooperative horror game that is focused around investigating a series of different paranormal events. We have been brainstorming within our team but I think there can be a lot of benefit from hearing what other developers and more importantly gamers have to say.

Here's a screenshot of what we have been playing with so far:


Have you had some moments in games? What bits of movies get you going? Any scary events in real life?

For me, here are a couple;

I find the thought of being hunted terrifying, it's what made alien isolation one of the best horror games out there for me personally.

The bit on the conjuring where she is playing blind man's bluff was also pretty creepy for me, I've had some bizarre experiences as a kid, one of them was very similar to this and it really spooked me. For those that haven't seen it;

So the question is this, what creeps you out, scares or un-nerves YOU ?

 

Moths and the death of the earth.

 

My view has always been fear is not real. It's just in your mind and people give power to these fears by thinking about them. Although there seems to be actual phobias so I am not making light of that. Though I do believe they are in our control. Anyway the point of that is since it is in our mind and not rational I would think there must be thousands of fears. There are probably even people out there who are deathly afraid of trees and other things the majority wouldn't ever give a second thought.

When I was a kid I had an extreme fear of heights so much I would get dizzy / lightheaded when up just a ways and looked down. I made myself climb higher and higher and look down til finally I no longer felt lightheaded etc when looking down from even very high up.

Anyway not sure if people would appreciate it but I suspect if you had a 3D game where the view changed to show the ground far below it would be disturbing for some people. On the bright side it might also be a very safe way for them to get rid of that fear. Oh and I have needed to "save" multiple women in my life from a spider so that might be good too. I know people who are crazy spooked by clowns for some reason. I think maybe they watched IT one too many times. Lol

 

Dying and not having my family taken care of (which is why I'm currently in the process of getting life insurance)....and exactly like Murligod, death of the Earth. I was just thinking about that last night. If it was announced tomorrow that a meteor would hit Earth while my children were still young or Yellowstone was about to blow, I legit started having a mild panic attack trying to figure out how I would manage my children.

You want to know what scares parents of young children? Check out Babadook. I barely made it through that movie. If it had been a game, I would have uninstalled in the first 30 minutes. I woudl then spend the next year re-installing and trying to get further each time before stopping.

Hmmm, also the anxiety and crushing defeat of having your company shutdown unexpectedly when you are responsible for others. It's happened to me twice now and the fear is a core part of me.

The fear is strong in me.

 

Monsters, wild beasts, savage killers, these are all things I can deal with coldly, for I am the greater monster.

But should you take my internet away... this... this is terrifying.

 

Fear is about being powerless. Take the power away from a player, and they will feel fear.

That covers everything from getting down to your last few pistol shots in Halo, to wandering about in a dark environment.

For me specifically, I get most terrified by things that I can't explain away with rationality and science.

 

Thanks for the replies so far guys. I am looking more for what creeps/freaks you out, I will change the original post up a bit.

 

I usually don't feel scared playing a game or watching a movie. For example, jump scares don't have the intended affect on me.

What does feel scary is being powerless. Not having an adequate weapon is an obvious example. Beyond that, a player can feel powerless when there is a lack of useful information. Reduced lighting can restrict information, which can make the player feel powerless.

Alan Wake did a decent job of making a player feel powerless at times. In addition to being dark and creepy, there was the gameplay mechanic of requiring a light to allow enemies to be vulnerable to gun fire. That made the guns feel powerless at times.

Another form of powerlessness is reduced mobility. Slow running and weak jumping can make a player feel very weak and vulnerable, especially if a player is used to power fantasy games where the player can quickly sprint and jump really high.

 

Another way to play on the powerlessness aspect is to reduce the players power. Riddick did this well. It started off with the player running around with a machine gun. For the majority of the game the player uses fists against enemies that are armed with machine guns. You know exactly how deadly your opponents are for the rest of the game.

 

The only game that managed to scare me is F.E.A.R, thanks to little Alma's similarities to Sadako and other japanese/asian ghosts.... Doom's Hell Army? Meh... DeadSpace Necromorph? Repulsive maybe, but not scary... L4D's Witch? Okay, maybe her cry is not something you'd like to hear in the middle of the night...

 

Don't make player slow and clunky as hell. Just make the boogie monster faster and stronger. Derned if I ain't tired of slow-ass horror games.

Ahem, sorry. Yeah, for me just let the boogie creature remain unseen but let it kill player real fast if it spots you -- and give it legit senses. Alien Isolation is the only game that ever scared me (that I remember anyway.) If you respect the monster, you fear the monster.

Another good example of terrifying horror creature : the night mutant monster things in Dying Light. They're dangerous as hell, and only come out if you make lots of noise -- like set off explosions or shoot guns. You don't even have time to look at them. You hear them coming, you have to go as fast as you can to a safe spot. Very hard to escape = terrifying.

Noises and visuals don't have to be over the top gruesome and all that. In fact, when horror becomes a caricature of itself, that's not scary at all. Gruesomeness does not equal horror. Just a basic dark environment, uncertainty, and swift punishment for carelessness is all it takes to get into a horror game for me.

 

Adding to this, you can actually make the player as mobile as you want, if you make sure that the stakes are high in any encounter with the enemy. Can the player vault over walls? The monster can smash through them or climb over them. Can the player jump? So can the monster, only it might jump to try and intercept the player over pits. Making a situation feel threatening is more important than just making the player feel limited.

 

Horror does not work while the players can communicate.
Cooperative? You want fear? Separate them and cut all communications except very subtle ones (like shadows on windows from other players, etc). It's important that you should make it clear that it's not technical issue, like internet problem, but it's in the game (like radio static noise, some talk coming through, etc). And on the top of them try to scare them with your stuff.

I know my people, whom I play with, if we can communicate, we joke out from the horror, it becomes comedy big time (which is not a big problem for us, but if you take your game and your stuff seriously it becomes kind of sad).

 

On that note, I recommend making enemies impossible to defeat, rather then difficult to defeat.

If a player can win, you've built a power fantasy. It might be a difficult one, but its still a power fantasy.

If the player has no hope of defeating their enemies, you've moved into stealth games.

If the player has no hope of defeating their enemies, and no possible way to understand their enemies, you are approaching horror.

If the player can see themselves reflected in the enemy, you've mastered it.

Disclaimer: Repeating stuff I've read about horror. I actually find the genre disturbing, and seldom do more then dip my toes in.

 

Afaik the process of eliminating a phobia through gradually exposing the subject to the trigger and teaching them that it is "safe" is called "flooding". What you did for yourself with heights sounds pretty much like that. I think in games that only has a chance of working in VR, at least for heights.

Regarding a horror-game context and having "flooding" or "desensitization" occur as a byproduct in a horror-game, that is not going to happen according to what I've read/heard on the subject. To the contrary, if the trigger is presented in a context of fear (e.g. legitimate threat in the game context), then it does the opposite, it reinforces the idea of "trigger = danger" in the brain and further entrenches the phobia.

I think games that rely on phobias to scare, are not actually scary, because they only work that way on people with the specific phobias, and might be completely dull for those that aren't affected.

 

Interesting. Actually has a chance to make it worse, eh? I guess movies are probably doing that... negative reinforcement.

 

If I recall correctly it was in the audio of a video-recording of one of the anti phobia VR apps for the occulus go, where you go through slowly increasing "levels of exposure", that you can pace yourself. They stressed that for success of the treatment it is very important to not "quit mid-level because of your fear", because that would reinforce the phobia. They said the correct way is exposing yourself to each new level of exposure to the phobia trigger long enough till the fear response that you have goes away. So, apperently every time you run away from the phobia trigger in panic, it makes it worse.
They also went to great lengths to make sure the user knows what is coming next and won't get surprised in any way.

Afaik "flooding" doesn't work for everybody.

 

I would research common phobias for that.
I really hate a game that use jump scares, is a cheap trick, but youtuber's seen to love it, so i guess it would help to have a few videos of the game.

To me, is all about in how immersive is a game, if i forgot my surrounds and get focused in the game, even a door slowly opening can be scare to me.

 

That scene is fantastic and deeply creepy. But why?

Most people are hard wired to be deeply sympathetic of others who are unaware of danger. There's a certain kind of innocence or naivety, especially in the face of danger, that affects us. So, it's important that she's smiling. She's innocent and having fun while something horrible is waiting for her just around the corner.

This is a weird vicarious creep. We aren't creeped out for ourselves, we're creeped out for someone else.

The sensation is even stronger because she is wearing a blindfold, it's so easy for her to avoid the danger. She just needs to be aware of it. I think this is a key role in many horror flicks. The potential victim being completely unaware of the danger lurking moments away. This is when someone in the audience yells out "don't open the door!".

This combines both the characters vulnerability with our powerlessness. We know what's going to happen, we don't want it to happen, it's so easy to prevent, but we can't do anything about it. This trope works because it renders the audience powerless. Instinctively we want to stop the terrible thing from happening, but we can't. We are forced to...painfully slowly... watch as it unfolds.

I think @Kiwasi hit the nail on the head with the "impossible to understand" thing. Once you understand how the threat works it just becomes a mechanic. This can be threatening and scary, but creepy is different.

I tend to think that "creepy" is powerlessness + phobia. What you want to look at is what kind of phobias are so common and so deep that we don't call them phobias anymore. They're just "human behaviour". Being afraid of being powerless is so common that we don't call it a phobia, its just part of being human.

 

There is a veeeeeeeeery wide gap between a phobia and a regular fear (like e.g. fear of death). Unless someone has a proper phobia, I don't see how they'd be capable of remotely grasping the extend of fear that a severe phobia can trigger. You typically don't experience things in life that max out the fear scale, so most people don't even know how far it goes.

I think phobia triggers will rather turn people with severe cases of that phobia away from the game entirely. You can occasionally see examples on steam forums of games, where people inquire about specific game content to know whether it's something they can play or not. There are websites that do that for movies to. There is nothing pleasant about having your worst fears triggered by a game. Regular scary games like Alien Isolation, Outlast, or Amnesia work on an - imho - much more suitable level of creating tension without relying on specific phobia triggers.

 

When I was young I had a pretty severe fear of heights. When I was a kid, we had a multi story mall that had a toy store on the 4th floor. The problem was the floors and elevators were all glass. I couldn't physically walk on the glass floors and had to literally crawl (to the annoyance of my buddy), the vertigo was insane.

That fear of heights got less intense as I got older and finally ended after I went skydiving (as a way to end my fear of heights). Skydiving was terrifying to me in a way that "terrifying" does not adequately describe. It was true terror on a level that I didn't know possible. So I agree with you, maxing out the fear scale is something most people don't comprehend. The effect was so intense that it lingered for weeks after. Every day life had an intensity level of zero. It did work. I'm nervous around sheer drops now, but it's on the normal scale not the phobia scale. The experience had a permanent effect on me.

That said, it's looking at those things that we're hard wired to be afraid of, the things that make us deeply uncomfortable that is at the heart of "creepy". Avoiding that for fear of alienating some audience is why very, very few games (and even movies or books) are actually truly creepy.

Is inducing physical vertigo in the player pushing it too far? Maybe. Maybe not. It certainly needs to be expertly executed.

I do think fear of freefall is under utilized in horror, perhaps because it's such an intense and visceral feeling. I've also never seen it done well in any medium, it's generally only used in movies to accentuate action sequences or shown as "approaching the edge" with fake vertigo effects.

 

I remember right when Skyrim was released someone made a mod that replaced all of the giant spiders with wolves and bears. Several forum commenters thanked this person specifically. There were actually some people who really wanted to play the game, but their fear of spiders put them off from even buying it.

 

Things that have creeped me out in video games:

1) Hearing but not seeing something that is dangerous to me
Half Life 2 did this pretty well in their zombie level. You'd hear the sounds from one of those things in a nearby area and would have to figure out if it was down the next bend or shuffling outside. The guesswork heightened the tension

2) Previewing the danger
Another take on the same thing - when you see something through a window and know it's waiting on the other side.

3) Loss of power
It's an FPS and you ran out of bullets. It's an RPG and you don't have the special whatist to hurt the monsters. It's Silent Hill and you are pretty certain even having weapons is a trap. Knowing that if I encouter the monster I can't deal with it head on is huge and something missing from a lot of FPS horror games.

 

LOL! I understand and kudos to you for facing your fear head-on. That's great stuff.

Yeah I also don't know if it is a good idea to try to really throw phobias into people's faces in a game although movies surely do it a huge amount.

I often thought it was interesting to maybe explore playing with peoples' heads with things like shadows and such. Perhaps have their own shadow occasionally move but only for an instant. A tree seem to take the shape of something but again only briefly and always extremely subtle. Basically feeding a player's imagination so they actually start seeing things that aren't even happening at all.

 

Being in a car, knowing there's a giant huntsman spider in there with me:



And I can't find it.

 

I still get mild vertigo when playing assassins creed games. I know that its all fake. I know that the character controller won't let me misstep. I'l still slow down to a crawl while walking along high ledges.

Nothing like what you've experienced. But it is a device that can be used in games.

 

My dumb phobia isn't anything to brag about (although skydiving was a hell of an experience), just saying that, just because people have phobias doesn't mean entertainment shouldn't explore those fears.

Not all entertainment needs to 'feel good' - and exploring the things that make us feel the worst is interesting material. Every decision you make in game design is going to displease/lose some portion of the potential player base, literally every single decision. Just make sure that you pick the right ones for your target.

About a month ago I tried to write some short horror stories and posted one on reddit, my story got deleted because it was about mental instability in the first person and that was a little too much for the subreddit I picked (they really wanted more traditional scary stories). To each their own.

 

Damn @frosted that was some seriously deep insight into game design. It's the truth too.

 

Clowns, fast moving water, Dams, uhhhhh... small holes, awful exam scores, the list goes on...

 

Some really nice feedback, thanks so far guys.

We are fans of garry's mod's multiplayer horror maps; although you would expect the fear to diminish in a group, it can often result in people picking straws as to who goes first down a hallway or crawling into a vent. I think as long as there is some form of fear and suspense, players can be scared even when with someone else.

The game we are working on aims to creep players out to try make them stick together and then have in game events force a split. There will be jump scares but not the cheap image-on-screen kind. More intercomms squeeling and TVs turning themselves on at random when you are near. We are taking a lot of inspiration from maps such as GM_Ghosthunt2 as well as games like outlast.

Players will NOT have any form of defense, no guns, no ghost vacuums or anything, just themselves and a camera/lamp.