It’s that time of the year again at long last! And just like last year, all month long I will be writing about horror games. This is the perfect time of the year for it and I’ll always take an excuse to gush about one of my favorite genres of video games! Unlike last year though, I want to focus on recommending some horror games to play this month instead of just talking about what I enjoy about the genre. And as you probably guessed from the title, it’s not exactly easy to recommend horror games most of the time…

Game genres often times either describe how a game is played or the kind of experience you’ll have with a game. For instance, First Person Shooters are a genre that describes how a game is played while Action Adventure describes how a game is played out. If you play an Action Adventure game you should expect a fast paced action packed experience regardless of if it’s a First Person Shooter or a Third Person Shooter or anything like that. Horror games very much fall into the kind of genre that describes the experience you’ll have with a game, but even then it can vary wildly between games and this is where it becomes very difficult to recommend horror games.

First, it can be very hard to recommend a horror game to anyone who has written off the genre because of how scary it can be. And that is certainly fair but it also brings me to my next point which is that it can be hard to recommend horror games because how a game actually scares you can be very different and hard to define. Especially with genre terms. For example I’ve talked in the past that I’m not a big fan of horror games that rely heavily on jump scares. This is mostly because these games feel very much like Haunted House attractions where they are designed to take you from scare to scare with not much in between. I’ve always found games like this, such as Outlast or Layers of Fear, become very predicable with their scares and not only that said scares often lose that fear factor long before the game is over, a problem that honestly plagues most horror games but unlike other games of the genre these games have nothing to fall back on. No puzzles or gripping story or game play of any kind besides walking to get you to the end. However, all that being said, there isn’t exactly anything wrong with these kinds of horror games either. Like I have been saying, they are just one kind of horror game but that’s what makes this such a hard genre to recommend.

Outlast is a vastly different game compared to Silent Hill for example. And I don’t just mean in the way they are played since Outlast is a first person game with no combat and Silent Hill is a game with fixed camera angles and actual combat. Even when comparing Outlast to Amnesia, two games that share a lot when it comes to how they are played, they feel very different and it all comes down to how they go about scaring the player.

While we do have a couple sub genres for horror games like survival horror, we don’t really have any for describing the kinds of scares a horror game might have. When looking at the genres that describe Silent Hill you won’t normally see something like ‘Dreadful Horror’ listed despite the fact that I feel like that describes the kind of horror you get from the Silent Hill series.

To better show this though, let’s try comparing Outlast and Amnesia a bit more to really see why it’s important that people don’t write off the genre of horror games just because they’ve played only one kind and why someone should look deeper than just the genres that define a horror game before deciding to play it or not.

Outlast and Amnesia, specifically Amnesia: The Dark Descent, are both first person horror games that have no combat and require the player to run and hide from enemies while trying to figure out how to escape each crazy situation they find themselves in. Despite that they both have a very different feel to them, different kinds of scares. As I said before, I’m not really a fan of Outlast. The Haunted House formula is very much in full effect with it and I can only run and hide in a locker or under a bed from a crazy guy with a messed up face while looking for a valve or button or vent or whatever so many times before I get bored. _{And the game isn’t even that long!} Despite that though, I really enjoyed my time with Amnesia even though it is also a game about running and hiding from messed up looking guys. Now while I feel this is mostly because of the puzzles, story, and overall scary vibes of running around some mansion without any memory of how you got there or what’s going on, I think the main reason that I enjoyed Amnesia over Outlast was because Amnesia was going for a fear of the unknown situation while Outlast was going for more shock with it’s scares.

Outlast is a gory adventure through an insane asylum with some messed up looking people constantly chasing you from place to place while you try to escape. As I said before, it focuses on shock for a lot of it’s scares, meaning that it wants to gross you out, make you uncomfortable, or just get a jump out of you with it’s visuals for the most part. And to Outlast‘s credit it does a good job of that! It had some pretty stellar graphics when it was released back in 2013. And while they don’t hold up as much today, credit where credit is due. That all being said though, this is why I never really got into Outlast. That brand of horror has never gripped me. This is mainly because I feel like shock horror has very little staying power. It’s a kind of horror that cannot carry an entire game as you often get desensitized to it all before the end. The same goes for all the chase scenes you have as well. Once you get caught a couple times they completely lose that fear factor and just become an annoyance as you have to go back to the start of the chase again. It also becomes super predictable when a chase will happen as you’ll start to notice more hiding spots, like lockers or beds you can crawl under, suddenly appearing around. It’s a good thing Outlast is a pretty short experience overall so some players won’t hit that desensitizing feeling before the end but I’m not one of those lucky few.

It’s this style of horror that really separates Outlast from Amnesia despite the two of them having extremely similar game play styles. As I was saying before, Amnesia is also a first person game with no combat where you must escape from a crazy place you are stuck in. And yet it hits a kind of horror I love so much.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a horror game all about the fear of the unknown, which means that it’s very inspired by Lovecraft and his work. The horror is played out in a way that makes it hard for you to truly understand what’s actually trying to get you and it achieves this with some super smart techniques! First, the game actually plays around with the sanity of the player. Light is very important in Amnesia, it holds back the darkness and the fear. Stay too long in the dark and your sanity will start to give. When that happens certain sanity affects will start to occur and it will start to become hard to tell what is a hallucination and what’s really happening. The only way to get your sanity back is to hang out in some light for awhile, assuming it’s a strong light source, or to complete puzzles and progress in the game as that will relieve some stress. This is an ever present system and provides plenty of fear and stress without having the player be chased or spooked by a sudden and random jump scare. Outlast does something similar with it’s camera mechanic and needing batteries to power the night vision mode so you can see, but running out of batteries only does that, it makes it hard to see and nothing more. Keeping your lantern lit in Amnesia and making sure you have enough tinder boxes to light candles in certain areas provides much more tension for me as being in the dark doesn’t just mean you can’t see, it means you’ll go insane. Because of this, dark rooms aren’t just scary because you don’t know what’s in them, they are scary because they are an obstacle you need to over come. But that’s not the only thing Amnesia does better than Outlast! The way Amnesia handles it’s enemies and chase scenes are really a step up.

In both games, you are being chased around by freaky looks guys. In Outlast it’s patients who have been experimented on, and in Amnesia it’s closer to straight up monsters but it’s a little hard to tell. That uncertainty about what is actually after you comes from the fact that you’re never suppose to really see what’s shambling toward you in Amnesia! Your mind and sanity are both fragile things as I was saying before, and while sitting in the dark will slowly erode your sanity, looking right at the monsters hunting you down will destroy it! Your sanity will begin to nose dive the moment you start staring at a monster. This is a genius way to make sure the player never truly knows what’s after them as well as make them afraid to even try looking. This adds a whole new layer to running and hiding in Amnesia too. This fear of looking at the monster means the player can’t check where they are, they have to work with just sound most of the time to know if the monster has lost their trail and left the room or something. No peaking out of a closet to look or looking over your shoulder as you run. You need to hide, wait, and hope the monster has left! Which is very much for the best because if you ever get a good look at the monsters chasing you, you’ll probably notice they are pretty goofy looking.

However, that’s not the only thing that can make chases with these monsters intense. Unlike with Outlast where there are very specific hiding spots, in Amnesia there are not. There isn’t even a hide button or anything like that. If you want to hide in a closet you need to open it up on your own, hope there’s enough room and then crawl inside and keep that door closed! While something like this is certainly more clunky, it’s also more scary as well. It puts a lot more responsibility on the player to find or even make a hiding spot. I remember a very specific moment where I ran into a room and hid behind the open door and just hoped the monster wouldn’t look that way before leaving. That intense moment of hearing them right on the other side of the door as I held perfectly still was more scary than anything I experienced in Outlast. And even better is the fact that it worked! It was my quick thinking that managed to save me in that moment and not designed hiding spot that was made to help me hide. Not only does this make chases feel more rewarding when you manage to lose the trail of the monster, it also means that chases can occur much more organically because the game doesn’t need to provide specific ways to hide to make sure that this encounter is possible for the player to complete. And that means the player can’t see these chases coming, they’ll need to be on their toes at all times! Even when doing puzzles. Another specific moment I remember while playing was when I found a room with a puzzle inside. I knew it would take me sometime to figure it out but I also knew a monster was roaming around not far off. So, to help protect myself, I grabbed all the boxes and barrels I could find and piled them up on the door! And sure enough, when the monster tried to enter while I was busy puzzling, they were unable to. Another massively rewarding experience! One that you could argue kind of takes away some scares by giving the player that much freedom, but trust me, I was still pretty afraid of that barricade breaking as I heard the monster screaming and slamming against the door.

I hope it’s pretty clear now just how different Outlast and Amnesia are despite sharing so many game play defining mechanics. Not only do they both do things differently with these mechanics, they also tackle two different kinds of horror. And this is exactly why it can be so hard to recommend horror games. After all I needed almost this entire post just to explain how two games were different from each other. Now imagine how much harder this becomes when trying to explain these kinds of differences to someone who has already written off all kinds of horror games!

What I’m trying to say is, don’t write off every horror game because you didn’t like a particular kind especially when it comes to the games I’ll be talking about this month! They are games I feel like everyone should try or at least look into even if you don’t normally play scary games. Because can you really enjoy Spooky Month without a few scares? So be sure to stay tuned to the blog this month as I promise to supply you with plenty!

But what are some of your thoughts? Are you a fan of horror games? Have you ever struggled like this when recommending a game to someone? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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