Old horror games felt so eerie and unique. It's that lack of detail in the sky and the atmosphere with the subtle noises like footsteps and shuffling that put you on edge. It makes you feel like you're in some dark void. Almost like you aren't on normal planet earth or in a nightmare.
In my opinion, the old horror games are much more creative within the scope of their possibilities. I mean, Resident Evil, for example, is no longer a horror compared to back then and is more of an action shooter and has lost its appeal.
The fog from Silent Hill being the perfect example of this idea. It's a staple of the franchise, and it was made just to fix rendering issues with the game.
Not to mention we didn't have to deal with people spoiling the games and what to expect because there wasn't a lot of media to post or expose games and spoil them
@@JazzSicaa no kidding because the only way someone was able to spoil any type of video game back then was by knowing someone who either knows how to hack or having someone you know who worked on said video game to tell you
10:58 The fact that the OG older zombie cutscene has more “human” eyes makes it more unsettling. The remaster is clearly full zombie. But OG one here? My brain kinda questions back and forth whether if they’re fully turned or not. Crazy.
It looks wacky though, but the eye I just remembered some creepy guy who kept a corpse in his house and cleaned her saw her eyeballs being fine. But the slow was moves of the zombies in og is just nothing.
I think it had something to do with the culture of death in Japan, and zombies are (or maybe were) an eh topic back then. Instead of reanimated dead, they were "infected". I thought the US release had glazed over eyes, cus the Japan release had those human eyes. Cant remember whoops
Exactly. The new one looks loke a standard zombie. Dangerous, but just a standard braindead zombie. Keep your distance and you'll be fine. The old one looks straight at you with calm curiosity in it's eyes. You question if they are still alive, if they are thinking and if so, what they are thinking.
REmake 1 is THE remake that started the whole boom, and exactly what every fan of EVERY retro game has asked for since then. It's both a faithful, upgraded recreation of the OG, and a new experience for the veteran fans to try their claws at.
Very impressive how the game needed only a graphic improvement + removal of tank controls to feel like a modern title. The game was 30 years ahead of it's time and still can hold it's own even against RE4R and RE2R.
RE1make will always be the greatest in the series in my opinion. The perfect remake. Superior to the original in every way, yet perfectly captures everything that made the original so great.
What I don't like about nowadays horror games is that there is always a lot of ''drama'' in them. To me a horror game is not horrifying when there is a villain giving you a long speech or a main charactor that keeps cursing
real. everything is pretty hyperbolic and and they think overblown monologuing and grating villian dialogues during boss fight "enhance" the game when it only serves to make it feel "more realistic" to some people.
For me, it kills the mood when a game is made to be offensive. I mean Outlast with mutilating bodies for no reason. Outlast two has you walk across dead babies...like why??? It's not scary, it just brain rot!
@@pineappleparty1624 Seems you think it's excessive more so than it being brainrot, personally I think the mutilation in the first game makes sense since it's a mental institution gone wrong, and mutilation happened a lot in those in real life, can't say about 2 though; never played nor watched it.
@@trickydiagram5267 I think it's brainrot. If it doesnt actually add to the story OR the horror, then it shouldn't be there. You make an OK point about abuse taking place in the past, but here it was random and just inappropriate. At the end of the day games are games, not supposed to be something damaging to people.
@@pineappleparty1624ive just started outlast 2 and i disagree, the bodies add to the feeling of helplessness and anxiety u feel throughout the game, and also shows the brutality of the hillbillies. I havent played many horror games but this game has a really good atmosphere so far although it could just be bc i hate the idea of cults and thats why its scary to me. And also u have to remember knoth or smthn impregnates women then kills their babies saying its the antichrist which if you read the notes, you would know hence the dead babies
I hate seeing the missed potential of a beautiful horror game that has mediocre gameplay and a boring story. Spend less resources on graphics, and more on gameplay and writing and you end up with a superior game. Graphics really only carry a game so far, and honestly we're at the point where games can't really look that much better.
At this point, I find good graphics so damn ugly. I look at tekken 8, cod, and I don't feel anything cuz it's so overdone. Then I look at cruelty squad, and it somehow feels satisfying to look at by the second level.
What is even more upsetting with new horror games, is that they waste so much time and resources into graphics only to _completely_ turn off the lights because DaRk ScArY...
@@smugplush I wholeheartedly agree, an interesting art style will always, and I really mean always, trump powerful graphics, I mean, seriously, get a random place or npc from any game that goes for photorealism in the last decade, you'll be hard pressed to actually identify where it is from, they are all generically almost identical, but take a zombie from a psx RE or a crash enemy or even a heartless from kingdom hearts or enemy from R&C and you'll immediately know what it is.
I think one of the issues is that a lot of the models in games today are too focused on being grotesque and horrifying upfront and now it’s completely expected and lost a lot of its shock value. They’ve lost the eerieness.
a lot of good points. but I think familiarisation should not be overlooked. when we were younger those freaky monsters were all new, in weird unknown shapes and they moved in creepy ways. today after having played dozens of titles we have already seen a lot of different stuff. situations are similar, monsters are similar, it all feels similar. and a large part of horror is always the unknown.
I actually disagree. When i was young i was not allowed to play video games. Rrely played plattformers, puzzles and old rpg games at a family members home. I'm only nowadays playing all this old horror gems and i truely prefer them over modern horror. In fact there are so many other great games that are from this era which bring me so much joy and aren't even horror. Heck, even indie horror nowadays is often more scary than big horror titles. 😅
There I have to disagree. I played a year ago SH 1. Although I also like to play modern horror games, no game has challenged or awaken my survival instinct like this scary game.
I don't agree with this. I'm in my 20s and finally started getting into horror games and I can say none of the modern stuff has really been scary at all, but going through the first Silent Hill and Resident Evil games absolutely was.
triple A horror games arnt scary anymore indie is where its at. cry of fear for example is an amazing semi modern game since the game is like 13 years old now
Because most horror game these days are either a first person shooter or a repetitive walking in a loop paranormal game where you have to interpret the freaking ending yourself.
The idea of "something is not quite right" is also known as the Uncanny Valley effect, in which more realism makes human characters look inexplicably scary because they are just a little too realistically rendered for the brain to fill in the gaps, yet not realistic enough to make them seem familiar or human-like to us. Though it should be noted that this usually happens at a level of realism beyond what the PSX era described in this video could muster. There's also the notion of the abject, a phrase coined by Julia Kristeva, which means something that is neither subject nor object, but something in-between. Like a corpse is neither a living person but also not a mere thing, or like rotten food both is and isn't something edible, these things disturb us on a more deeper level than a simple tooth-and-claw monster can do because it forces us to reconsider the boundaries of the familiar concepts by which we make sense of the world.
Thank you for telling us about those terms and giving us some very interesting examples! Horror and the perception of it is a very intriguing topic. It's super nice to hear so many opinions on it!
@@RichFakhYou're welcome. If you want a more in-depth exploration of these ideas, I highly recommend the book _The Monstrous-Feminine_ by Barbara Creed. One word of warning: it's a pretty dense and academic piece of writing, but luckily it brings all the heavy jargon down to Earth by applying it to horror film classics like _Alien, The Exorcist, Psycho,_ and others.
This is why I'm always fascinated by aliens and other creatures in fiction that don't resemble any living being we know, like Angels in Evangelion and Septentriones in Devil Survivor 2.
@@Diabl0Mask If you haven't already, I highly recommend you read the novel _At the Mountains of Madness_ by H.P. Lovecraft. It deals with precisely that theme.
Atmosphere, limited mobility, and imagination all made those older games scary. Now, everything is so smooth and pretty that your imagination doesn’t get to work. Also, seeing the entire room vs just part of it via locked camera angles also added to the experience. Great video.
Yeah when he said that it's not our imagination, I was like wut??? You don't need to limit the analysis to games. Look at movies where definition hasn't changed much. Good monster movies hide the creature and show glimpses. Although his point of the uncanny valley playing a large role is something I agree with.
That thing started already in the late 90s. Just compare between RE 1 -> RE2 ->RE3. Re1 had some ammo and inventory management because it could be stingy with ammo, but RE 2 & 3 throws so much ammo everywhere that you can pretty much go guns blazing. Didnt become uncommon to end RE2 with 100s of pistol rounds in the box because why use it when I could main the shotgun and magnum later.
That really just depends upon what kind of character the story is following if it's a soldier or a person with experience with battle more than likely the gameplay mechanics will be a more action packed experience and if the character is a little girl like from little nightmares than it become a survival game but if put someone like doom guy in that situation it would still be survival but not for the player in that case if u get what i mean
Yes, this! The main diffrence between the best horror games and the mediocre ones is based alot on how helpless/Badass you as the player are. The first resident evils up till 3 are a good example where you are still a capable fighter, but you feel the helplessness. 4 was alright, but in 5 you punch boulders and stuff. Outlast is a very good horror game because you have zero chance to fight back. The terror of the need to sneak, hide or run. A constant feeling of being in danger. Same as for example the first slender man did well. That said there is still good horror games where you can somewhat fight back, but itd only working out if ammo and weapons are hard to come by. The moment you feel powerful in a horror game it's no longer horror.
a good horror game cannot be "fair", because once we know the game is "fair" we can never be scared. because we know for a fact, that no matter what the game throw at you, it will be "fair"
Well it can't be unfair either, because then it just becomes frustrating. I think what you meant was that it should be challenging. A challenge can still be difficult but fair.
@@earthbound_one I think the idea is, when you understand how the game works, and always follows those rules its being fair. You can play it over and over or explore and know its fairness. but when it throws a curveball or utilizes unexpected game elements that's when you fear what's next.
It should still be challenging though ,otherwise it would be too easy and there is no fun in when the victory is basically given into your hands. But on the other hand it shouldn't be so ridiculously hard that you rage quit and never want to try again because why bother if you are just going to get screwed over and over with no realistic chance of winning. It should not be fair but not so unfair you have no chance of defeating the enemy
I think the reason why old games are more scarier because of the limited controls making the players panic more because of how slow the controls are, in addition the limited camera angles
100% !! I played CANNIBAL ABDUCTION and the platinum trophy wasnt hard but very spooky... u dont know where the killer is, limited saves (no checkpoints, only 3 tapes to make a save) and the static cams... tank controls too. Im 19 and never played PS1 games so.. it was my 1st time playing a survival horror game with tank controls💀 panic over 9000
@@GugureSux It's a fact that "tank controls" and "fixed cameras" were kept in survival games even after better methods exists simply because they take control away from the player. Taking control away from a person is an effective way to cause dread. It may not be a great control scheme or camera angle but the developers have stated this as the case. Horror games have mostly sucked and lacked scares outside of uump scares ever since Eeaident Evil 4 changed the landscape of survival horror. Love the game, but it was the first step in a terrible move for survival horror.
Great video. The way I like to describe it is that the older games like Silent Hill are predicated on "terror" instead of just "horror". Shit that makes your skin crawl, and scared to turn your lights off instead of just disgusting you with sheer gore and action. There's a section in Silent Hill 3 after the subway car section where you're just wandering through empty, pitch black maintenance tunnels with no monsters and no ambient music. And then all of a sudden you hear in the distance really unsettling noises and movement but nothing is actually there. Or the stairwell in the Historical Society of Silent Hill 2, where you desend the stairwell for so long you forget if you're actually going *up* the stairs or *down* them, all the while a fog horn is sounding off at irregular intervals making you all the more uncomfortable. And when you reach the bottom, and the horns are playing over themselves at incredibly different time signatures you open the door to... silence. *THAT* is terror. It's not unlike the difference between Western and Eastern horror movies. Ju-On and The Grudge feel entirely differently, with Ju-On opting on not using a soundtrack and lingering WAY too long on unsettling frames all the while not really showing you anything, while The Grudge is mostly in your face "bleeeehhh" type scares.
100% agreed! I've been saying this for YEARS! Atmosphere is _everything_ when it comes to horror, and atmosphere comes from so much more than just making things look a certain way - they have to _feel_ a certain way, and that comes from a lot more than just graphics. As you pointed out, sound design must be complementary to the visuals in order for the visuals to work. You could take any of those Silent Hill scenes and suck all of the terror right out of them if you put, say, the Benny Hill theme or Doom Eternal soundtrack over them. Music is great at eliciting emotional responses, but can also be misused to elicit the entirely wrong response and the utter lack of music in those scenes leaves the player alone to simply experience their own raw, genuine emotional response to the situation.
Silent Hill needs much more love, for the creativity they brought to the table. I like Resident Evil, don’t get me wrong, but Silent Hill deserves more love. I just feel like people don’t have patience these days, for brilliant ideas or for slow burners.
I think a lot of it is just that old horror games generally have harsher consequences for dying. Supplies are scarce, there are no checkpoints, and you can't save-scum your way through the game.
Agreed, I chickened out of Dead Space 1 and RE1 Remake almost immediately b\c my ammo was so low and I had no idea how far I could get or would have to go to save. Returned to them both years later, but the strees & panic was real at the start.
Less horror and more survival it sounds like to me. Usually the save points is what resticts the save scumming since you have to run back to an area instead of saving every 3 minutes
Agree. A lot of games these days feel too refined, where there are no real consequences for dying. Checkpoints are good, but are overused in AAA games to the point of garbage.
It doesn't feel like a "horror" type of fear. More like tension when you haven't saved in a while on classic RE. Still, fear is fear, and it's genuine if dying means losing 60mins.
Another thing in the old days you entered a room, you had to check out every item in that room, but now whatever is interacitve is immediatelly higlighted, so you pick those 2 things up and the room is cleared, it loses all its mystery.
I was shit-grinning when you got to the part about horror games back then just not caring about your skill level. It was sink or swim. I played RE2 OG before RE1 OG and nearly stopped playing it altogether because I kept dying AT THE VERY START. Too many zombies. Not enough bullets. No way to indicate if my aiming was okay. Couldn't run fast enough. Tight camera shots. Cramped space. Zombies played dead and lunged as you run past them. Worst, TANK CONTROLS. But strangely enough, once I FINALLY got through that one specific area it was all smooth sailing for me LOL - I was hooked and finished the game not long after. Good horror games back then were brutal but rewarded you once you died enough times and established the 'rules'. Even as I write this, decades later after my initial RE2 experience, I realize what a genius bold move Kamiya made in starting RE2 that way. He told gamers exactly what to expect if they didn't adhere to the 'survival' horror aspects of this world. Those who did the work and followed the 'rules' survived. Those who tried to blast their way through and ignored the rules ended up back in square one. I think difficulty spikes and challenges is part of the horror experience. When Ripley took on the Alien in the first film, she faced an uphill challenge straight up until the end. You're not supposed to feel like the Punisher by the end of a story - you're supposed to feel ALIVE, having just survived a complicated and horrific ordeal. I think a lotta horror games today missed that memo because, in this quest to appeal to a more wider and inclusive audience, many of today's games have you feeling like an armored tank than a survivor at the end.
As much as I fucking love playing Dead Space Remake, your description at the end is spot on. Isaac is the real monster once he has an upgraded rig and CONTACT BEAM. It’s the classic, “I’m not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with me!” However, I played on impossible mode without allowing myself to use any node upgrades, no prototype stasis module, only the plasma cutter with no upgrades as a weapon, and that really helped to up the ante.
Very good point. Also, in the 90s, I personally didn't have many games. So if I got a difficult game for Christmas, I was basically forced to adapt lol
Sometimes, there's more fear from non horror games than jumpscare games, i love dark souls for having horrific themes, hell those screaming crucified people in elden ring was very unsettling
I think that comes down to horror vs. terror, and precisely why jumpscares are “terror” and not horror. Terror gives you a quick spook, but horror unsettles you, makes you think, and sits with you in the darkness.
Vintage Story captures survival and horror combines into one game due to this. It helps the game has a very slow, but tension filles pace. Limited graphics, beautiful music, and somewhat low voxel enemies.
Old man here🖐🏾 one of if not my favorite horror game moments of all time.. lisa garland transformation scene.👏🏾👏🏾 Honorable mentions -RE 1st dog window -RE initial zombie cutscene -D opening - SH1 beginning alley -SH1 bird window diner -SH2 pyramid just standing there in the hall
During PS1 era, Resident Evil series scared the shit out of me despite the graphics are obsolete in today's standards. Especially the appearance of Nemesis was very scary because he could appear from nowhere.
It was the eeriness. Didnt rely on scare chords when something crossed a hallway. The limited tech and low poly helped considerably, sure. But the old games played up the isolation, and taking an everyman/woman and seeing how they would logically react. Thats where i think alot of the cheesiness and campy style came from. It was absurd, but oddly believable.
I think it's because most modern horror games tend to lean into a more action aspect, like Resident Evil 6 did, rather than focusing on the horror aspect like the first Silent Hill, to me Resident Evil 4 is a perfect example of horror and action, because I both had moments where I was scared, and moments where I was just having fun blasting the Ganados.
Resident evil going more action already happened with RE2, even more with RE3. Yes Nemesis was dangerous and scary but they even added a dodge button. RE2 remake is actually more survival horror than the original because Mr.X is a threat you cant just remove by killing him like the original.
@@NisseDood Code veronica reduced the fun and action, so they was like "now you must really be careful with your ammunition" and then Re 4 happened and they were like " Hey, I got merchant who can always give you health and enemies that can give you ammo :D"
I agree with all the things said. 1 - Its was because of imagination completed the "bad graphics", since in the time look at this games was like looking at something that never existed before, 3D was pretty new, no one ever saw triangle breasts, and such stuff, and that is even a thing that they use strategically. the CGI, all openings and important scenes was rendered with better graphics because we can relate to those character in a more realistic manner. Then our imagination completed the 32 bit graphics along the way. 2 - The difficulty was in fact a big thing, if you lose, you lose everything or almost. No games were "fun" they were challenging and stressful. 3 - Originality was the thing. With such small teams and low budgets, every game was little world, with their design, control schemes, music, voices, vibes. Nowadays its all the same thing in diferent franchises, because more worths more than passion. Old games was more a thing of a small department stores, it was a trip of adventure in all kinds of sources, technological, artistic, idealistic...
I agree. Another thing (maybe item #4) is that many old horror games had a detective-ish quality to them. There was a main premise and you had to find your way through it by looking for clues, reading docs and surviving long enough to watch cutscenes, all wrapped in a crude yet fascinating set of rules.
Yeah 3D was still new back then, so every game kinda reinvented the wheel. Like "look what we can do with this technology!" and you'd have a game that simulates looking down the scope of a rifle, or another game that simulates driving cars, or another rpg that simulates becoming part dragon and never having a remake after 25 years (but who's counting?) So yeah all those studios were basically working in the dark without knowing what other developers were doing. So even if two companies made the same driving game, they would need to do it from scratch and independently reach a similar solution using different methods. When you're creating something, like a game, and you hit a wall, you need to solve that, either by changing the formula or creating a work-around. After you've done that so many times, you have a creation that's unique. But now there's an industry standard that solves the need for work-arounds. No more department stores, you get Walmart now
How does no one ever bring up the fact that we were kids when these games came out ???? I would be surprised if I was scared by any of those old games as an adult, I have gone back and replayed a lot of horror games that scared the crap out of me as a kid, but have absolutely no affect on me now.
Bro, Regeneradors are scary as hell in the OG RE4. Especially when we didn’t know they were coming. Something seemingly unkillable, moving erratically and unnervingly, breathing strangely and clearly intending to do something quite uncomfortable to you. Then the Iron Maiden which can just one-shot you if you aren’t careful. Not scary my ass.
Fixed camera angles may have been born out of technical limitations, but they are a legit form of art, too. They can invoke so much atmosphere and put the emphasis of a scene exactly where the developers want it to be. Using fixed camera angles, one can play with perspective to a degree one never could with first person or shoulder camera.
What kills me is when people say that switching Resident Evil to an over the shoulder camera made the series "better". No, it just made it different to what came before.
What killed me in Resident Evil 6 was switching the camera during action sequences where the controls were sometimes inverted or area3D triggers were sometimes disabled for no reason.
And then you turn the corner and get grabbed by a zombie because the camera hasn't switched yet and you can't see shit. I enjoyed RE1 and 2 back then, but only because it was a novelty. I've never touched another game with that crap again. It only adds artificial sense of vulnerability.
I think the reason old horror games are so good is their limitations the fixed camera angles allow you to hear an enemy but not know where they are, the door animations in resident evil make you wait a few seconds in suspense for what feels like the perfect amount of time before you know if there will be a new enemy behind it, the tank controls also make you feel less in control especially when you first pick up the game, and the manual saves can bring all of this together if you haven't saved in awhile you're not super familar with the controls yet and your waiting those dreadful few seconds opening a new door not knowing what's behind it.
Regarding the graphics part, i think what your theory meant is the uncanny valley theory, it's like it's trying to be real and human but you can tell it's not, which gives the uneasy feeling.
And that's because Silent Hill 2 remake will not be able to do the same as the original, since the enemies and animations are "stiff", "weird", unnatural, and I love that. Seeing Pyramid Head in a remake would feel like watching a cosplayer dressed as Pyramid Head... The original one scares me even at this time of day. Silent Hill 1, 2, 3, and maybe 4, are really great in horror because it's "weird" and "bizarre" at purpose.
Not only that. Silent Hill 1 and 2 are so good because they were made by people who know OCCULT concepts, and these things impact us on a very deep level. They don't do this kind of game anymore.
Not to mention they are scarier because we didn't have to deal with people spoiling the games and what to expect because there wasn't a lot of media to post or expose games and spoil them
True. Nowadays, before the game is even released publicly, there's 100 let's players on youtube with complete 100% walk throughs and every ending discovered. Usually with spoilery thumbnails and titles
What is wrong with losing all customers when the next-best dolt thinks such allows monetizing a video-stream??? Human Rights for fans and players are not part of modern programmers. Only supremacy by unresolved teenage Xual issues is.
Honestly it's a weird combination between "Nostalgia bias", older games having much more love than modern, and modern games wanting to sell you a game instead of offering you a more than good experience. Alien Isolation is definetly one big horror game and is modern
I think it's 99% nostalgia + playing them as an impressionable kid. I refuse to believe that that ""horror"" beat em up could be scarier than alien isolation or re4make to someone playing them today for the first time today.
It's bias The OG resident evil games didn't actually make you feel scared, actually, who's scared of slow zombies? Nemesis can be scary, but he's an exemption rather than a norm. Silent hill is disturbing, but you can't actually fear as much as with alien isolation for example. The survival horror genre had to evolve from what it was, because it was rather bad, the controls were bad, the camera is dog shit, and the only reason those games got a pass on that was because of the date they were made
Sorry to break it for you but games have always been products. They needed to sell back then as much as they need now so saying that back then games were made just to give you an """""experience""""" is beyond stupid. Games were scarier to you back then because you were a kid that was even afraid of its own shadow, that's all.
It's just people being young. Of course a 13 year old will be way more scared on his first horror game than that same person at the age of 19 after having played dozens.@@gabrielscoccola5960
It worked so well because you weren't expecting it at the time, and after getting chased by clearly visible zombies and being greeted by what seems like a moment's respite from terror in an empty looking hallway, you've relaxed your guard just a smidge. Nobody knew what rooms was safe or not back then, so not seeing or hearing any threats in a new room allowed your brain to get a slightly false sense of security right before it betrays you and hammers home the subtle message to "always be on guard"
@@cocodojo Also old games let you take some time to process what you just witness. An your imagination is just running at full speed. For example playing the OG 3 Silent Hill games, every time you see a weird monster. Your minds processing you don't wanna see what the next monster you might run into next. An every room you enter has a weird and disturbing thing that can happen. The fear of the unknown is more terrifying then one that is known, you kind of know what to expect. Like say Alien: Isolation the one you should fear the most is obviously the Alien but you kinda know what to expect from the get go. But dealing with monsters that don't give away their presence and makes you guess what you in for if you run into them thats scary.
@@silentecho92able You've pretty much hit the nail on the head right there. Back then, we didn't have the nonstop insane over the top action set pieces of the current "modern" games so you had plenty of down time to process and give a moment to try to think what your next steps should be going into the next room or area. Also, not knowing ahead of time what's going to happen plays immensely towards the uncertainty factor. Fear of the unknown as well as building the proper atmosphere and setting plays a huge factor in those games.
The Silent Hill nurse's scene made me cry as an 12 y/o. Not because I was scared.. I sure was, but it was more so how surreal that moment was for the characters and story. The buildup wth the music that was chosen too.. all just.. chefs kiss.
I still find the Half Life 2 Zombies one of the scariest enemies in gaming despite the dated graphics, it's something about their screams and the fact that they're still alive and conscious
those random third person pov were scary af monsters weren't pi~atas, they didn't drop ammo resources and saves were limited you had to think before you made a move If you guys want to play a fun modern horror game with old feels, give "Fear and Hunger" a chance.
In Resident Evil's case for the camera angles, it was absolutely a result of limitations as well. All the areas are literally sets of photos with collision and sprites laid over top of them. It's why all the legendary door transitions are set in the void, so it could pull the next sets of photos, collision maps, and sprites for the next area from the disc. However, the benefit of this was making a massive length story, that looked good for the time, and have it all fit on one disc. It was an ingenious solution, and managed to simultaneously create the light tension that you don't know what you're getting yourself into with each transition of the camera.
One thing that I liked and miss from old horror games was the fact that you had limited manual saves or reach a certain point to save your progress if you had luck and that factor added an extra fear and tension since you don't wanted to die and lose all your progress and you don't know what's going to happen (if you played the first time). Nowdays thanks to the checkpoint system that tons of horror games have, they actually made the games a glorified trial-and-error and removes that fear a lot and instead it gives you frustration if you die a lot in a certain place or in the entire game.
you hit the nail on the head when you described the motion and look as something recognizable as real but not quite so realistic. what you touched on is the uncanny valley, which is this strange place between something looking realistic and not. it's the same reason that porcelain dolls are creepy...they're human enough to recognize as human but somethings just a bit off.
Older videogames took their to portray the decay of life (like zombies) better. What I mean is that modern videogames make zombies like super powered paranormal entitities and the player character never flinchess or is himself an absurd parody of a human. And older horror videogames had more effort put in colours and sounds then in animation and story because of hardware limitations.
I am in full agreement with ya. I may not be a full, purebreed horror gamer, but I've been into the retro gamer lifestyle for a LONG time. Sometimes having less is considered good, in my opinion. As a tradition for Halloween, I play Lament of Innocence. The game is from 2003, on the PS2. I enjoy the game a LOT, but when it comes to graphics and story, it's a bit strange. Sure, they do look odd, but my mind does the rest in filling certain blanks. It tends to go overboard in certain environments, and I get pretty freaked out. Certain environments and bosses look more grotesque, and it works quite well.
Dopamine consumption is the short answer to the question. All those who played the old horror games are 32 years old or older. Back then, in the 1990s, the only source material for horror was movies and TV shows, and when I started playing video games for the first time, I played Atari and Sega. For our generation, it was like a Neil Armstrong moment when video games went from 2D to 3D in just a few years.
I remember the first time i heard of survival horror as a kid. My dad had rented Resident Evil for the PS1 and I honestly thought he was watching a movie with bad actors. When i saw what it was he was playing, i was immediately drawn in and saw how frustrated my dad was with the tank controls and trying to fight that first zombie with a knife. Good times. 😄
All valid points and maybe this is a cop-out answer and it could just be me getting older, but i also genuinely think people are harder to scare than they used to be. After being bombarded with so much horror media and constant exposure to real horrific shit just being a google search away, people just don't scare like they used to.
I think the things that horrify me as an adult is not the monster, but often the themes. A monster that moves in an unsettling way is startling, but seeing a protagonist slowly wear themselves away with each act, falling apart not just physically but ideologically as the story continues until the thing that comes out the other end is unrecognisable, that makes me unsettled long after the horror game ends. A monster isn't enough, but most horror games generally bring only the monster, not a story that will make me hurt long after the game departs.
i believe the biggest plus for the older games is that the clunky controls and no hand holding put you at a disadvantage so when certain events would happen and you felt like you were not on the winning side all the new games the controls are easy to use and makes you feel more powerful , going back to re1 that first time you kill a crimson head and he comes back to life and is faster was terrifing and trying to turn around with the tank controls added desperation
The first time walking slowly through The Depths. The only sound is your footsteps echoing in the cramped passageways. You turn a corner and see two basilisks with their big eyes crawling towards you from the darkness. They leap forwards and cover you in a cloud of poison. Boom you're cursed.
Dark Sousl also benefits from the uncanny valley effect. You're frequently meeting people whose suits of armour look grotesque and impractical. The demons look like they've been malformed and evolved to be worse than they could otherwise be. Everything looks diseased or injured. Human opponents are 16 foot tall for no reason.
silent hill 1 3d models and cg cut scene is only worked by 1 legend, Takayoshi Sato himself. Sato described the experience as "hell", working 15 hour days 7 days per week Sato was the sole member of Team Silent to work on the 3D cut-scenes in the first Silent Hill game, taking him nearly 2,000 hours to complete, and during much of this time period the schedule would be so demanding that he would sleep under his office desk.
Its the graphics for me , older games have this raw , dirty looking like visuals to me , nowadays games look too clean also it applies not just horror games
"I never felt as scared as back when I was playing on my Playstation 1" I mean.. you were a kid, or generally young & inexperienced with the horror genre. It's not weird to be scared by the first few horror games you see and become less & less scared the older you get, the more horror you play. I personally didn't get to PS1 and PS2 horror games until recently, and they were more funny than anything resembling scary.
Tank controls and crazy camera angles are what perfectly sell so many of Silent Hill's best scenes. The first alley you venture down is the perfect example, the camera swings around unnervingly and follows you from odd angles as you venture deeper and it gets darker and the things you encounter get increasingly disturbing. It plays like a scene from a movie and the player is in control for almost the entire scene because the tank controls are relative to the player, not the camera. The camera in the first 3 Silent Hill games IS the character of the town itself, constantly hiding in the shadows and watching you from all angles. The game simply wouldn't be as scary with a modern camera and camera-relative controls.
I miss those gut churning moments when you need to run but can’t. You turn around only to remember you have no where to go to get space and that you only a few seconds to defend. Dead Space 1 +2 and Left 4 Dead.
old games characters also creep us out because sometimes they move like skinwalkers trying to mimic human behavior yet you can clearly see that something is off thus creating the uncanny valley
Scary is subjective, I've never found old horror games scary like you have. In fact the only horror game I actually been terrified of was Darkwood (2017) This is coming from someone who is still obsessed with Silent Hill since he was a kid btw.
I hate how frequently this conversation is minimalized by people who just want the most black and white interpretation. The truth is, horror games weren't the problem. The industry was. RE4 came out and not only popularized a new genre of Action Horror, but showed how promising third person gunplay could be. The focus AKA the goalpost shifted away from things like "Atmosphere", "Cinematic Cameras", "Inherently Eerie Situations" and "Compelling Stories", things that MAKE you care about dying in game and fear monsters. What did it shift towards? It shifted towards money and profit. Not that games haven't always been a product, but after Halo 2 the mainstream went from looking at videogames as this "dumb little kids trend that will die out" to "wow, these dumb little games can make a LOT of money". Remember RE4? Well that was also one of the most popular and successful RE titles ever that got countless remasters and ports and as long as you follow the money you can see why. And once again, if we just stick with the RE franchise, we can continue to see what the modern problem is with games like RE7 and RE8. It's NOT that games aren't still capable of doing these things, let me make that clear. The PROBLEM is that corporate suits don't WANT them to. We can see that in RE7, a game Capcom considers a middling success. Why? Well it's not because of the pace breaking second half like what you might think, it's because when they sold it to Japanese audiences, they found out most people didn't even get past the first house section because the game was THAT scary to them. Think they didn't do anything with that information? Wrong. They came right out and stated they made RE8 more casual and less scary ON PURPOSE because of that, which is why the only legitimately scary segment is the baby section. When you keep that in mind and pay attention to indie horror games like Crow Country, Signalis, Amnesia the Bunker and SEE how good they are at evoking oldschool fear and tension while Triple-A games fail at every step with titles like Callisto Protocol, Alan Wake 2, Alone in the Dark Remake, etc, you see a consistent issue where the games lean HARD away from horror into incredibly predictable and formulaic Hollywood-adjacent storytelling. Modern Triple-A gaming is an extension of Hollywood. That's the problem. The only people that can seemingly escape this are Capcom, but even they stumble a lot with games like RE3 Remake and RE8. Making a "horror" experience isn't the objective. Making money is. And they will sacrifice whatever meat they have to in order to maximize profits. ... And before anyone says it, this isn't a black pill. Just play Indie Games. Independent studios are killing it right now and for far cheaper.
I think another aspect is how movement compliments the experience similar to having a nightmare where your movements are stiff as this abnormal creature moves with no problem. Yet new games try to make you move super human like, if not, more inhuman than the zombies you're killing. Especially when you add parry, movement like RE6 where you dynamic dodge, better camera controls, 8 way movement, better lighting, etc. At that point, it's not a nightmare, it's a fantasy.
The real reason is age, experience/exposure, technical limitations, and psychology. If something isn't explicitly detailed or defined, our minds fill in the gaps and usually use our worst fears to do so. True horror is in what's left unsaid and unknown.
The main exception of new horror games not being scary, in my opinion, is Lethal Company. Yes, you're often around the company of your friends and that really puts the horror in the backseat for a while, but the brilliance of it, is when you get so used to hearing the voices of your friends, that when you no longer do, it's truly one of the most unsettling and terrifying experiences I've ever felt in a game, new or old. The tension is immaculate, and that's what's so brilliant about it.
I think what you're referring to with things looking sorta realistic yet "off" is the "uncanny valley": "As the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it becomes almost human, at which point the response quickly becomes strong revulsion."
I want to add an option to the design perspective. I believe that the reason for older designs being scarier than todays high res designs is that developers grasped the archetype of a specific scary thing. It deeply referred to primeval anxieties that existed in our genes for millenials. Whereas the modern designs trigger the dopamine system - like everything else in nowadays media. It makes you 'think' wow that looks scary, but you feel nothing, let alone something deep.
I do agree with all your points, but imo the key element here is the clunky gameplay. New game try and succeed in replicating Silent Hill's fog and uncanny animations, but no studio would dare making a clunky gameplay. The way I see it, a key distinction between action and horror is control. Horror thrives in taking your control over the situation away, taking your power away. If you go out in the wild and find yourself face-to-face with a wolf, you'd be scared shitless - but not so much if you have a gun. A gun gives you power, and power gives you control over the situation. Having no control means the other can more easily decide your destiny for you - there's nothing you can do, and that's terrifying. Nowadays studios want to show off their skills, their technology, their animations. Gameplay needs to feel smooth, responsive, snappy. That gives you more control over you character. If you're supposed to have a gun, that scales even higher, because now you can use this fluid gameplay to defend yourself, and not just run. If you can defend yourself, you have control over the situation. You can use your skill to thrive - your destiny is defined by your own capabilities, and not by the power of the threat in front of you. Old games are the opposite of that. Turning around is so slow it's painful - you don't have much control over your movement. There is barely any aiming system, sometimes you just need to pray you are looking at the right direction - you don't have much control over how you will defend yourself. Ammo is scarce, you can't just go around shooting everybody all the time - you don't have much control over when you can defend yourself. The camera is bad, and in some cases they are even fixed at a single direction - you don't have much control over your field of view, you can't peek from the safety of a corner. All of that make these old games play and feel more like you have iron ball chained to your feet. If something drops on you, you can't turn around and run quickly. You can't shoot it 'til it's dead before it reaches you. You have to drag your body away from the thing, and that itself is pretty hard. Your reaction speed runs faster than your body, and oh boy isn't that dreadful when a monster is right behind you, you want to run but you can't move fast enough. For this reason, I think the most successful horror games aren't the ones with more gore, but the ones that take control away from you. P.T. gets you stuck into long and narrow corridors which limit your range of movement, your field of view, and the monster can only come from behind you, where you have the least control over. Outlast doesn't give you a gun, so you have no control over your self-defense - and worse yet, you are constantly forced to see the world through the camera, which limits a lot your field of view. I still remember playing Exmortis and being scared shitless - it was just a point-and-click flash game, but for the very reason you have no control over your character, it was terrifying. Once you go into a room or click on something that will trigger an event, done, you can't do anything until the event is over - or if you die because you did something you shouldn't. On the other hand, while F.E.A.R. was pretty scary, it felt much better knowing that I could transform whatever came at me into swiss cheese. Anyway, you get the idea. I feel the lack of control is the key aspect of horror games, but I might be totally wrong since, actually, I'm not really into horror games so I haven't played a lot of them. I just tried distilling what makes them tick since that's part of my job. So I really hope I'm onto something here hahah
Haven't watched the video yet, so you might have mentioned it, but the title really got me thinking about The Suffering. That was my first horror game back in the day and I swear it was so damn good - could probably use a remake but there's almost no chance of that happening lol Edit: Just finished the vid, and it was great. Threw you a sub :)
You perfectly nailed why I think the Silent Hill 2 remake is doomed to fail. Silent Hill games have these bizarre cutscenes where something's always off - the characters are talking to each other but not QUITE like real people do, it's all stilted and uncomfortable. I don't think you can properly replicate it with modern graphics, because just copying that same off-ness would look silly, but if they're made "properly" then suddenly the horror factor is gone. I think "less is more" in general applies very strongly to horror. I replayed classic RE games recently and I think the original RE2 is scarier than its remake, and so is RE4. The silence, those iconic loud footsteps, the monsters not having this weird hyper-realistic rubbery feel to them.
PS1 always had the creepiest games, to me. Those eerie, early 3D graphics, and the generally sluggish controls (adding to a feeling of helplessness) have never been topped.
As far I can tell it boils down to things: 1. Limitation breeds creativity(like it was said before on another comment), limitation makes you strive for freedom an only trough limitation can you do that, you have to have fun in other to move forward with you idea. 2. Is sacred geometry, as we live in world or reality rule by phi and fibonachi sequences, geometry planes a very important role in what we define as beautiful if you notice the games of old, did not have a high poly count, yes but that made them use what they could and make things that resemble other things, this in fact adds to the fear factor, by simple design that render image on that X game, is not a figure you find out in nature, its outside of it even of the supernatural framework of esoteric knowledge and add into the lore and shape, the symbolism which is power by consciousness it takes life of it own, just like an egregore. Is just that fear is based upon the unknown and an unknown that follows its own design outside of the sacred geometry, its not life what you look at but rather something outside of it.
Id say japans censorship of gore. Example re4 was brutal because they didnt censor gore. Now one look at violent anime and youll see black blurs over everything. Also Over consumption of gore and horror media. Fear is like a drug and after you use it too much you need far more as you go along.
7:38 I kind of disagree here, on opposite I think this is exactly what is happening. When we look at this monster at 6:14, it is so well defined that our imagination can take a step back. If we are chased by it we know exactly what is chasing us. We see this creature has menacing claws, looks imposing, we can make unconscious assumptions on its weight, its strength, the likely way it will attack us etc. In the end it looks scary but it's an identified kind of scary which, in a sense, diminish the threat. On the other hand, When we look at a low poly monsters with janky movements, they are much less defined so we are not completely sure what we are dealing with. We have to extrapolate, fill in the gap , our imagination naturally goes overboard in the process and in the end we are still not sure, which end up making the monster looks a lot more menacing imho.. Because the monster keeps a large part of unknown. And the human brain fear the unknown. I think this is the same reason why darkness is such a big component of horror. Darkness shroud otherwise well defined monsters in an aura of mystery, uncertainty and menace where our imagination is solicited and will unconsciously work overboard to increase the potential danger posed by that threat, just in case. Low poly monsters kind of recreate that same effect imho.
The design of the creatures got way too complex as time went on. The creatures of most modern horror games are just too noisy. Simpler shapes and distinct characteristics is the way to go. Good video btw. Subscribed.
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Nothing can compare to the first time feeling. Therefore, these old games always have a place in our heart regardless of how many newer games we play
As someone who got to experience both the old and the new generation of horror games, I respectfully do not agree. Sure, older horror titles are absolutely timeless masterpieces when it comes to gameplay and creating atmosphere, but there are a lot of newer games that can make you "shit your pants" just as much if not even more. Just think about the Amnesia series, Dead Space 1 and 2, Resident Evil 7, RE2 Remake and even more action oriented titles such as RE8 and RE4 Remake have their scary moments (especially RE8, house Beneviento has been the most scared I've ever been in a game, both in the base game and the DLC), and when they don't, they succeed at creating a lot of tension. In fact, I do think it is more a matter of gameplay loop and creating (sometimes) the same type of anxiety that older games had. "Remaking" the PS1 RE formula with RE7 and the actual remakes of the older games has proven to be succesful, and it's just an example of a succesful modern horror game. You know, I do think that for their time, almost ALL older horror game succeded (and still do) in creating the eeriness and fear of the unknown, other than that kind of "uncanny valley" that you mention. But as of today, there are a lot of titles that manage to do that too, in my opinion. It has to be said that with modern titles there was a period where mainstream horror games really only focused on action (the RE5 and 6 period), but I think this has changed since RE7 came out, although even now, some developers do think a lot about the action side of a videogame (and that's ok in my opinion as long as pure survival horror titles continue to exist). That said, I do think that something has changed in all these years: we grew up. In fact, I do remember not even being able to look at horror games when I was little, I was too scared. Growing up made me appreciate this genre of videogame a lot more, but I was still little and scared to death when I first got into it.
Hey friend! I really appreciate that you took your time to write such an elaborate comment. And I do agree with you on a lot that you pointed out. There definitely are modern horror games that are very scary. I think at the end of the day, it always boils down to a personal taste or preference, too. To me, nothing is more uncanny than those weird and bizarre ps1-era monsters were, but I do agree with the statement about resident evil 8 and 7 specifically. It seems that horror games are on a good path and I'm excited to see what is next for the genre.
you always have some idiot on youtube coming up with a bad take "old good, new bad"....re2 remake, dead space remake, alien isolation even something like P.T for example things weren't scarier back in the day theings where just being done for the first time that's all....how are low polygons scary anymore that's just retttttarded
Back when I played SIlent Hill for the first time, there was a point in the game were I didn't want to keep advancing. It was when I made it to the morgue in the hospital. Heck, basically the whole hospital made me not want to continue playing, specially after I went down the first stairs and then tried to turn back to save, only to find that there was now a wall were the stair was.... good times
Resident Evil 3 Nemesis scared the life outta me my older brother got me in to gaming so i played any game i could. Too bad the Remake was a dumpster fire The Pursuer and choices is what made it great that an cutting 1/2 the game was probably not smart smh.
Back then we also did not have any kind of safety devices outside of running to our parents and turning our bedroom lights on aswell. Nowadays if something scares you, you can just distract yourself with TH-cam or FaceBook with the lights on and that fear will go away, you can also have TH-cam playing in the background to make you feel safe. There are many more safety devices nowadays. Plus back then the bad quality audio and visuals kind of added to the horrific experience. We also tend to focus on the graphics alot too which breaks the immersion if we're sitting there like "damn the details in that model is insane" but back then we focused more on the gameplay aspect than the actual graphics.
I think we’re more easily scared when we’re children. That plays a big part, I used to get scared of things that don’t hold up. But now that I’ve “seen everything” it’s not as easy to get scared
An older game now but I recently played the evil within 1 which by 90s comparison has all the updated elements and found the game to be quite good horror on par with a RE1 PS1 experience. I think one aspect is also the saving with modern games which seem set up so you can’t fail. Playing RE1 on PS1 knowing you forgot to save and invested a lot of time wandering makes the penalty of an in game death worse than just rebooting from an automatic save point.
I don't know. We should also ask some yound people who play a modern horror game as their first horror. It might simply be that us old folk have been desensitized enough by now which is why new stuff isn't scary.
A big thing that made older RE games scary was the fixed camera angles. Not being able to rotate the camera and scan an entire area gave enemies more places to hide and kept you on edge with each new area.
Remake regenerators are much scarier, their movement makes hitting the weak spots a lot harder, and it's a race to get them all before they can grab you.
I feel like so many old horror games also had such unique artstyles. There's nothing wrong with video games now trying to strive for realism as much as possible, but I much prefer a horror game to have a unique artstyle rather than the most realistic graphics possible.
Because you where a kid when you played those old games. Now you're older. Have you wonder why newer games are not scary to you but kids playing them are terrified? The more you love something, the more you go for it and the more desensitized you become to it. I have never, ever felt the same kind of fear I felt while playing silenthill 2 (mi first horror game) so now I feel games are not scary anymore. My cousin is 10 years younger and he played the original slender games (those where not scary for me but he was terrified of them) turns out he doesn't like the newer games. It's not the world, it's you. That's getting old.
Yeah now that we played too many games we just essentially become desensitized to it. But there are many horror games out there that still retain the core horror elements and not just deteriorate into a fast-paced thriller action game. Psalm 5:9-13 is a prime example!
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There is also a difference between gore and horror. At some point, it just seemed to me like gore became more of a substitute for horror.
We're scared of the unknown, seeing the same stuff over and over again gets tiring after a while.
You are right. Gore is a cheap substitute for true horror and not only games, but also movies, are abusing it.
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Probably the best comment I've seen here...
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I think the biggest blight on horror games was actually the dumbassery of trying to turn every horror franchise into action
I recently watched both the original Ju-On film and the 2020 remake and the remake is precisely that, they substituted horror for gore & jumpscares.
Old horror games felt so eerie and unique. It's that lack of detail in the sky and the atmosphere with the subtle noises like footsteps and shuffling that put you on edge. It makes you feel like you're in some dark void. Almost like you aren't on normal planet earth or in a nightmare.
The footsteps were what got me. Nowadays, you barely hear any footsteps or much of anything through the "ambiance."
Ya older horror games had a more grimy and decayed atmosphere that felt more oppressive
just like in silent hill 2
silent hill 4
In my opinion, the old horror games are much more creative within the scope of their possibilities. I mean, Resident Evil, for example, is no longer a horror compared to back then and is more of an action shooter and has lost its appeal.
Old horror games relied on the idea of "limitations breed creativity".
Not just horror games, really. The limitations is graphics used to result in such a wide variety of aesthetics and art direction.
The fog from Silent Hill being the perfect example of this idea. It's a staple of the franchise, and it was made just to fix rendering issues with the game.
Not to mention we didn't have to deal with people spoiling the games and what to expect because there wasn't a lot of media to post or expose games and spoil them
@@demongodking6681 Exactly!
I miss being able to play games without being spoiled everywhere.
@@JazzSicaa no kidding because the only way someone was able to spoil any type of video game back then was by knowing someone who either knows how to hack or having someone you know who worked on said video game to tell you
10:58 The fact that the OG older zombie cutscene has more “human” eyes makes it more unsettling. The remaster is clearly full zombie. But OG one here? My brain kinda questions back and forth whether if they’re fully turned or not. Crazy.
It looks wacky though, but the eye I just remembered some creepy guy who kept a corpse in his house and cleaned her saw her eyeballs being fine. But the slow was moves of the zombies in og is just nothing.
Yea the Og looks more creepy definetly
I think it had something to do with the culture of death in Japan, and zombies are (or maybe were) an eh topic back then. Instead of reanimated dead, they were "infected". I thought the US release had glazed over eyes, cus the Japan release had those human eyes. Cant remember whoops
agreed
Exactly. The new one looks loke a standard zombie. Dangerous, but just a standard braindead zombie. Keep your distance and you'll be fine. The old one looks straight at you with calm curiosity in it's eyes. You question if they are still alive, if they are thinking and if so, what they are thinking.
I still feel like the Resident Evil Gamecube remake was the perfect balance of "new and old"
REmake 1 is THE remake that started the whole boom, and exactly what every fan of EVERY retro game has asked for since then.
It's both a faithful, upgraded recreation of the OG, and a new experience for the veteran fans to try their claws at.
Only scary re game imo
Very impressive how the game needed only a graphic improvement + removal of tank controls to feel like a modern title. The game was 30 years ahead of it's time and still can hold it's own even against RE4R and RE2R.
RE1make will always be the greatest in the series in my opinion. The perfect remake. Superior to the original in every way, yet perfectly captures everything that made the original so great.
@@jerrodshack7610 Agreed!
What I don't like about nowadays horror games is that there is always a lot of ''drama'' in them. To me a horror game is not horrifying when there is a villain giving you a long speech or a main charactor that keeps cursing
real. everything is pretty hyperbolic and and they think overblown monologuing and grating villian dialogues during boss fight "enhance" the game when it only serves to make it feel "more realistic" to some people.
For me, it kills the mood when a game is made to be offensive. I mean Outlast with mutilating bodies for no reason. Outlast two has you walk across dead babies...like why??? It's not scary, it just brain rot!
@@pineappleparty1624 Seems you think it's excessive more so than it being brainrot, personally I think the mutilation in the first game makes sense since it's a mental institution gone wrong, and mutilation happened a lot in those in real life, can't say about 2 though; never played nor watched it.
@@trickydiagram5267 I think it's brainrot. If it doesnt actually add to the story OR the horror, then it shouldn't be there. You make an OK point about abuse taking place in the past, but here it was random and just inappropriate. At the end of the day games are games, not supposed to be something damaging to people.
@@pineappleparty1624ive just started outlast 2 and i disagree, the bodies add to the feeling of helplessness and anxiety u feel throughout the game, and also shows the brutality of the hillbillies. I havent played many horror games but this game has a really good atmosphere so far although it could just be bc i hate the idea of cults and thats why its scary to me. And also u have to remember knoth or smthn impregnates women then kills their babies saying its the antichrist which if you read the notes, you would know hence the dead babies
I hate seeing the missed potential of a beautiful horror game that has mediocre gameplay and a boring story. Spend less resources on graphics, and more on gameplay and writing and you end up with a superior game. Graphics really only carry a game so far, and honestly we're at the point where games can't really look that much better.
At this point, I find good graphics so damn ugly. I look at tekken 8, cod, and I don't feel anything cuz it's so overdone. Then I look at cruelty squad, and it somehow feels satisfying to look at by the second level.
Graphics can in fact look way better, have you seen U5? But yes gameplay should be first instead of graphics
@@mobious01 Shouldn't say "in fact" when something looking better is purely subjective.
What is even more upsetting with new horror games, is that they waste so much time and resources into graphics only to _completely_ turn off the lights because DaRk ScArY...
@@smugplush I wholeheartedly agree, an interesting art style will always, and I really mean always, trump powerful graphics, I mean, seriously, get a random place or npc from any game that goes for photorealism in the last decade, you'll be hard pressed to actually identify where it is from, they are all generically almost identical, but take a zombie from a psx RE or a crash enemy or even a heartless from kingdom hearts or enemy from R&C and you'll immediately know what it is.
I think one of the issues is that a lot of the models in games today are too focused on being grotesque and horrifying upfront and now it’s completely expected and lost a lot of its shock value. They’ve lost the eerieness.
a lot of good points. but I think familiarisation should not be overlooked. when we were younger those freaky monsters were all new, in weird unknown shapes and they moved in creepy ways. today after having played dozens of titles we have already seen a lot of different stuff. situations are similar, monsters are similar, it all feels similar. and a large part of horror is always the unknown.
I actually disagree. When i was young i was not allowed to play video games. Rrely played plattformers, puzzles and old rpg games at a family members home. I'm only nowadays playing all this old horror gems and i truely prefer them over modern horror. In fact there are so many other great games that are from this era which bring me so much joy and aren't even horror. Heck, even indie horror nowadays is often more scary than big horror titles. 😅
There I have to disagree. I played a year ago SH 1. Although I also like to play modern horror games, no game has challenged or awaken my survival instinct like this scary game.
I don't agree with this. I'm in my 20s and finally started getting into horror games and I can say none of the modern stuff has really been scary at all, but going through the first Silent Hill and Resident Evil games absolutely was.
I agree, ppl just like to glorify the past.
triple A horror games arnt scary anymore indie is where its at.
cry of fear for example is an amazing semi modern game since the game is like 13 years old now
Because most horror game these days are either a first person shooter or a repetitive walking in a loop paranormal game where you have to interpret the freaking ending yourself.
Don't you dare talk crap about P.T.
@@DrJones20 p.t. Barely counts as a came.
@@roygbiv9038 How narrow minded you are
@@DrJones20 nah, you’re a simp.
@@roygbiv9038*as i came.
The idea of "something is not quite right" is also known as the Uncanny Valley effect, in which more realism makes human characters look inexplicably scary because they are just a little too realistically rendered for the brain to fill in the gaps, yet not realistic enough to make them seem familiar or human-like to us. Though it should be noted that this usually happens at a level of realism beyond what the PSX era described in this video could muster.
There's also the notion of the abject, a phrase coined by Julia Kristeva, which means something that is neither subject nor object, but something in-between. Like a corpse is neither a living person but also not a mere thing, or like rotten food both is and isn't something edible, these things disturb us on a more deeper level than a simple tooth-and-claw monster can do because it forces us to reconsider the boundaries of the familiar concepts by which we make sense of the world.
Thank you for telling us about those terms and giving us some very interesting examples! Horror and the perception of it is a very intriguing topic. It's super nice to hear so many opinions on it!
@@RichFakhYou're welcome.
If you want a more in-depth exploration of these ideas, I highly recommend the book _The Monstrous-Feminine_ by Barbara Creed. One word of warning: it's a pretty dense and academic piece of writing, but luckily it brings all the heavy jargon down to Earth by applying it to horror film classics like _Alien, The Exorcist, Psycho,_ and others.
Thank you. The whole time I was watching the video, I knew what they were talking about. However, I couldn't remember the "uncanny valley."
This is why I'm always fascinated by aliens and other creatures in fiction that don't resemble any living being we know, like Angels in Evangelion and Septentriones in Devil Survivor 2.
@@Diabl0Mask If you haven't already, I highly recommend you read the novel _At the Mountains of Madness_ by H.P. Lovecraft. It deals with precisely that theme.
Atmosphere, limited mobility, and imagination all made those older games scary. Now, everything is so smooth and pretty that your imagination doesn’t get to work. Also, seeing the entire room vs just part of it via locked camera angles also added to the experience. Great video.
I think it’s the idea that the human mind comes up with things more scary than the devs could ever make. Low poly count feeds into that
the creepiest ff games are 7, 8 and 9, not 6 because it looks beautiful
Yeah when he said that it's not our imagination, I was like wut??? You don't need to limit the analysis to games. Look at movies where definition hasn't changed much. Good monster movies hide the creature and show glimpses.
Although his point of the uncanny valley playing a large role is something I agree with.
nah its cuz u were a kid when u played them horror games arent scary period
Which explains why people go to these indie low poly horror games and why those are so successful not just as a title but as a genuinely horror game.
@@Offisian that's a reach
Lisa Garland's death is always a gut punch
The little eye-twitch as the blood runs down her face 😢
Most horror games today try to be too flashy and action packed instead of just being what they are. Survival horror.
W comment.
That thing started already in the late 90s.
Just compare between RE 1 -> RE2 ->RE3.
Re1 had some ammo and inventory management because it could be stingy with ammo, but RE 2 & 3 throws so much ammo everywhere that you can pretty much go guns blazing.
Didnt become uncommon to end RE2 with 100s of pistol rounds in the box because why use it when I could main the shotgun and magnum later.
That really just depends upon what kind of character the story is following if it's a soldier or a person with experience with battle more than likely the gameplay mechanics will be a more action packed experience and if the character is a little girl like from little nightmares than it become a survival game but if put someone like doom guy in that situation it would still be survival but not for the player in that case if u get what i mean
Yes, this! The main diffrence between the best horror games and the mediocre ones is based alot on how helpless/Badass you as the player are. The first resident evils up till 3 are a good example where you are still a capable fighter, but you feel the helplessness. 4 was alright, but in 5 you punch boulders and stuff.
Outlast is a very good horror game because you have zero chance to fight back. The terror of the need to sneak, hide or run. A constant feeling of being in danger. Same as for example the first slender man did well.
That said there is still good horror games where you can somewhat fight back, but itd only working out if ammo and weapons are hard to come by. The moment you feel powerful in a horror game it's no longer horror.
Because the soft ass stank cheese butts gen z is the reason why game are less scary 😒🍵.....
a good horror game cannot be "fair", because once we know the game is "fair" we can never be scared. because we know for a fact, that no matter what the game throw at you, it will be "fair"
Well it can't be unfair either, because then it just becomes frustrating. I think what you meant was that it should be challenging. A challenge can still be difficult but fair.
@@earthbound_one I think the idea is, when you understand how the game works, and always follows those rules its being fair. You can play it over and over or explore and know its fairness. but when it throws a curveball or utilizes unexpected game elements that's when you fear what's next.
Horror games should require skill to beat, that way it's not too easy or too hard and dying is always a threat
It should still be challenging though ,otherwise it would be too easy and there is no fun in when the victory is basically given into your hands. But on the other hand it shouldn't be so ridiculously hard that you rage quit and never want to try again because why bother if you are just going to get screwed over and over with no realistic chance of winning. It should not be fair but not so unfair you have no chance of defeating the enemy
I think the reason why old games are more scarier because of the limited controls making the players panic more because of how slow the controls are, in addition the limited camera angles
Nah.
Oh! Good point! Limited options in controls and angles tend to keep you on your toes, and sometimes, improv is needed to keep you going.
100% !! I played CANNIBAL ABDUCTION and the platinum trophy wasnt hard but very spooky... u dont know where the killer is, limited saves (no checkpoints, only 3 tapes to make a save) and the static cams... tank controls too. Im 19 and never played PS1 games so.. it was my 1st time playing a survival horror game with tank controls💀 panic over 9000
@@GugureSux It's a fact that "tank controls" and "fixed cameras" were kept in survival games even after better methods exists simply because they take control away from the player. Taking control away from a person is an effective way to cause dread. It may not be a great control scheme or camera angle but the developers have stated this as the case.
Horror games have mostly sucked and lacked scares outside of uump scares ever since Eeaident Evil 4 changed the landscape of survival horror. Love the game, but it was the first step in a terrible move for survival horror.
And people just got older and grew past their fears
Great video. The way I like to describe it is that the older games like Silent Hill are predicated on "terror" instead of just "horror". Shit that makes your skin crawl, and scared to turn your lights off instead of just disgusting you with sheer gore and action.
There's a section in Silent Hill 3 after the subway car section where you're just wandering through empty, pitch black maintenance tunnels with no monsters and no ambient music. And then all of a sudden you hear in the distance really unsettling noises and movement but nothing is actually there. Or the stairwell in the Historical Society of Silent Hill 2, where you desend the stairwell for so long you forget if you're actually going *up* the stairs or *down* them, all the while a fog horn is sounding off at irregular intervals making you all the more uncomfortable. And when you reach the bottom, and the horns are playing over themselves at incredibly different time signatures you open the door to... silence. *THAT* is terror.
It's not unlike the difference between Western and Eastern horror movies. Ju-On and The Grudge feel entirely differently, with Ju-On opting on not using a soundtrack and lingering WAY too long on unsettling frames all the while not really showing you anything, while The Grudge is mostly in your face "bleeeehhh" type scares.
100% agreed! I've been saying this for YEARS! Atmosphere is _everything_ when it comes to horror, and atmosphere comes from so much more than just making things look a certain way - they have to _feel_ a certain way, and that comes from a lot more than just graphics. As you pointed out, sound design must be complementary to the visuals in order for the visuals to work. You could take any of those Silent Hill scenes and suck all of the terror right out of them if you put, say, the Benny Hill theme or Doom Eternal soundtrack over them. Music is great at eliciting emotional responses, but can also be misused to elicit the entirely wrong response and the utter lack of music in those scenes leaves the player alone to simply experience their own raw, genuine emotional response to the situation.
Thank you for talking about Nightmare Creatures 2. That game goes heavily unnoticed just like ShadowMan.
Shadow man always looked like a soul reaver clone to me back then
shadowMan was crap no?
Silent Hill needs much more love, for the creativity they brought to the table. I like Resident Evil, don’t get me wrong, but Silent Hill deserves more love. I just feel like people don’t have patience these days, for brilliant ideas or for slow burners.
I think a lot of it is just that old horror games generally have harsher consequences for dying.
Supplies are scarce, there are no checkpoints, and you can't save-scum your way through the game.
Totally agree, this level of constant stress strongly adds to the horror for me too
Agreed, I chickened out of Dead Space 1 and RE1 Remake almost immediately b\c my ammo was so low and I had no idea how far I could get or would have to go to save. Returned to them both years later, but the strees & panic was real at the start.
Less horror and more survival it sounds like to me. Usually the save points is what resticts the save scumming since you have to run back to an area instead of saving every 3 minutes
Agree. A lot of games these days feel too refined, where there are no real consequences for dying. Checkpoints are good, but are overused in AAA games to the point of garbage.
It doesn't feel like a "horror" type of fear. More like tension when you haven't saved in a while on classic RE. Still, fear is fear, and it's genuine if dying means losing 60mins.
Another thing in the old days you entered a room, you had to check out every item in that room, but now whatever is interacitve is immediatelly higlighted, so you pick those 2 things up and the room is cleared, it loses all its mystery.
I was shit-grinning when you got to the part about horror games back then just not caring about your skill level. It was sink or swim. I played RE2 OG before RE1 OG and nearly stopped playing it altogether because I kept dying AT THE VERY START. Too many zombies. Not enough bullets. No way to indicate if my aiming was okay. Couldn't run fast enough. Tight camera shots. Cramped space. Zombies played dead and lunged as you run past them. Worst, TANK CONTROLS. But strangely enough, once I FINALLY got through that one specific area it was all smooth sailing for me LOL - I was hooked and finished the game not long after.
Good horror games back then were brutal but rewarded you once you died enough times and established the 'rules'. Even as I write this, decades later after my initial RE2 experience, I realize what a genius bold move Kamiya made in starting RE2 that way. He told gamers exactly what to expect if they didn't adhere to the 'survival' horror aspects of this world. Those who did the work and followed the 'rules' survived. Those who tried to blast their way through and ignored the rules ended up back in square one.
I think difficulty spikes and challenges is part of the horror experience. When Ripley took on the Alien in the first film, she faced an uphill challenge straight up until the end. You're not supposed to feel like the Punisher by the end of a story - you're supposed to feel ALIVE, having just survived a complicated and horrific ordeal. I think a lotta horror games today missed that memo because, in this quest to appeal to a more wider and inclusive audience, many of today's games have you feeling like an armored tank than a survivor at the end.
As much as I fucking love playing Dead Space Remake, your description at the end is spot on. Isaac is the real monster once he has an upgraded rig and CONTACT BEAM. It’s the classic, “I’m not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with me!”
However, I played on impossible mode without allowing myself to use any node upgrades, no prototype stasis module, only the plasma cutter with no upgrades as a weapon, and that really helped to up the ante.
Very good point. Also, in the 90s, I personally didn't have many games. So if I got a difficult game for Christmas, I was basically forced to adapt lol
Same! I panicked at the start of RE2 and so that, along with the inverted controls had me dying more times than I'd like to admit.
Sometimes, there's more fear from non horror games than jumpscare games, i love dark souls for having horrific themes, hell those screaming crucified people in elden ring was very unsettling
I think that comes down to horror vs. terror, and precisely why jumpscares are “terror” and not horror.
Terror gives you a quick spook, but horror unsettles you, makes you think, and sits with you in the darkness.
Vintage Story captures survival and horror combines into one game due to this. It helps the game has a very slow, but tension filles pace. Limited graphics, beautiful music, and somewhat low voxel enemies.
Got the same vibe from Velen area in Witcher 3. The whole mood amd atmosphere is very unsettling and eery.
Old man here🖐🏾 one of if not my favorite horror game moments of all time.. lisa garland transformation scene.👏🏾👏🏾
Honorable mentions
-RE 1st dog window
-RE initial zombie cutscene
-D opening
- SH1 beginning alley
-SH1 bird window diner
-SH2 pyramid just standing there in the hall
During PS1 era, Resident Evil series scared the shit out of me despite the graphics are obsolete in today's standards. Especially the appearance of Nemesis was very scary because he could appear from nowhere.
It was the eeriness. Didnt rely on scare chords when something crossed a hallway. The limited tech and low poly helped considerably, sure. But the old games played up the isolation, and taking an everyman/woman and seeing how they would logically react. Thats where i think alot of the cheesiness and campy style came from. It was absurd, but oddly believable.
It's not scary when u play a loud sound after a jumpscare, it's just annoying.
We need more uncanny video games
Make me deeply uncomfortable and paranoid and don't let me get too used to the game
That's impossible because you aren't a kid anymore.
I think it's because most modern horror games tend to lean into a more action aspect, like Resident Evil 6 did, rather than focusing on the horror aspect like the first Silent Hill, to me Resident Evil 4 is a perfect example of horror and action, because I both had moments where I was scared, and moments where I was just having fun blasting the Ganados.
Resident evil going more action already happened with RE2, even more with RE3. Yes Nemesis was dangerous and scary but they even added a dodge button.
RE2 remake is actually more survival horror than the original because Mr.X is a threat you cant just remove by killing him like the original.
RE 4 had no balance of horror and action, horror was lasting for 5 minutes while action for 1 to 2 hours.
@@NisseDood Code veronica reduced the fun and action, so they was like "now you must really be careful with your ammunition" and then Re 4 happened and they were like " Hey, I got merchant who can always give you health and enemies that can give you ammo :D"
Old horror games are scarier because the controls suck
I agree with all the things said.
1 - Its was because of imagination completed the "bad graphics", since in the time look at this games was like looking at something that never existed before, 3D was pretty new, no one ever saw triangle breasts, and such stuff, and that is even a thing that they use strategically. the CGI, all openings and important scenes was rendered with better graphics because we can relate to those character in a more realistic manner. Then our imagination completed the 32 bit graphics along the way.
2 - The difficulty was in fact a big thing, if you lose, you lose everything or almost. No games were "fun" they were challenging and stressful.
3 - Originality was the thing. With such small teams and low budgets, every game was little world, with their design, control schemes, music, voices, vibes. Nowadays its all the same thing in diferent franchises, because more worths more than passion. Old games was more a thing of a small department stores, it was a trip of adventure in all kinds of sources, technological, artistic, idealistic...
I agree. Another thing (maybe item #4) is that many old horror games had a detective-ish quality to them. There was a main premise and you had to find your way through it by looking for clues, reading docs and surviving long enough to watch cutscenes, all wrapped in a crude yet fascinating set of rules.
Speaking about department stores
The Myst was a good movie. Even the text adventure was good
Yeah 3D was still new back then, so every game kinda reinvented the wheel. Like "look what we can do with this technology!" and you'd have a game that simulates looking down the scope of a rifle, or another game that simulates driving cars, or another rpg that simulates becoming part dragon and never having a remake after 25 years (but who's counting?)
So yeah all those studios were basically working in the dark without knowing what other developers were doing. So even if two companies made the same driving game, they would need to do it from scratch and independently reach a similar solution using different methods.
When you're creating something, like a game, and you hit a wall, you need to solve that, either by changing the formula or creating a work-around. After you've done that so many times, you have a creation that's unique.
But now there's an industry standard that solves the need for work-arounds. No more department stores, you get Walmart now
How does no one ever bring up the fact that we were kids when these games came out ???? I would be surprised if I was scared by any of those old games as an adult, I have gone back and replayed a lot of horror games that scared the crap out of me as a kid, but have absolutely no affect on me now.
The Sound design in that Silent Hill Cutscene was perfect.
Bro, Regeneradors are scary as hell in the OG RE4. Especially when we didn’t know they were coming.
Something seemingly unkillable, moving erratically and unnervingly, breathing strangely and clearly intending to do something quite uncomfortable to you.
Then the Iron Maiden which can just one-shot you if you aren’t careful.
Not scary my ass.
I never got scared when i was a kid but Re4 remake regenerators are making me freaky
Fixed camera angles may have been born out of technical limitations, but they are a legit form of art, too. They can invoke so much atmosphere and put the emphasis of a scene exactly where the developers want it to be. Using fixed camera angles, one can play with perspective to a degree one never could with first person or shoulder camera.
What kills me is when people say that switching Resident Evil to an over the shoulder camera made the series "better". No, it just made it different to what came before.
What killed me in Resident Evil 6 was switching the camera during action sequences where the controls were sometimes inverted or area3D triggers were sometimes disabled for no reason.
Exactly! Thank you!
I wish we could get a fixed camera Resident Evil game with today's technology, RE1 Remake will always be my favorite @@jovenc4508
And then you turn the corner and get grabbed by a zombie because the camera hasn't switched yet and you can't see shit. I enjoyed RE1 and 2 back then, but only because it was a novelty. I've never touched another game with that crap again. It only adds artificial sense of vulnerability.
@@skaruts
Literally anything a horror video game does to make things scary is "artificial vulnerability" even if you have full 360 visibility.
I think the reason old horror games are so good is their limitations the fixed camera angles allow you to hear an enemy but not know where they are, the door animations in resident evil make you wait a few seconds in suspense for what feels like the perfect amount of time before you know if there will be a new enemy behind it, the tank controls also make you feel less in control especially when you first pick up the game, and the manual saves can bring all of this together if you haven't saved in awhile you're not super familar with the controls yet and your waiting those dreadful few seconds opening a new door not knowing what's behind it.
Regarding the graphics part, i think what your theory meant is the uncanny valley theory, it's like it's trying to be real and human but you can tell it's not, which gives the uneasy feeling.
Tank controls is what really scared me in those games
And that's because Silent Hill 2 remake will not be able to do the same as the original, since the enemies and animations are "stiff", "weird", unnatural, and I love that. Seeing Pyramid Head in a remake would feel like watching a cosplayer dressed as Pyramid Head... The original one scares me even at this time of day. Silent Hill 1, 2, 3, and maybe 4, are really great in horror because it's "weird" and "bizarre" at purpose.
You think that because you have your nostalgia glasses on. Take them off.
@@medranodiego8641 You didn't understand my point at all.
@@medranodiego8641 I didn't play Silent Hill 2 until a few years ago and yes it's a very scary game so I doubt it's this guy's nostalgia
Not only that. Silent Hill 1 and 2 are so good because they were made by people who know OCCULT concepts, and these things impact us on a very deep level. They don't do this kind of game anymore.
The worse graphics makes us use our imagination more too.
yeah this comment.
True
Makes the appearance so much creepier
@@a.r.375 yes
Not to mention they are scarier because we didn't have to deal with people spoiling the games and what to expect because there wasn't a lot of media to post or expose games and spoil them
i still got scared of the re4 remake lol :)
True. Nowadays, before the game is even released publicly, there's 100 let's players on youtube with complete 100% walk throughs and every ending discovered. Usually with spoilery thumbnails and titles
What is wrong with losing all customers when the next-best dolt thinks such allows monetizing a video-stream??? Human Rights for fans and players are not part of modern programmers. Only supremacy by unresolved teenage Xual issues is.
Honestly it's a weird combination between "Nostalgia bias", older games having much more love than modern, and modern games wanting to sell you a game instead of offering you a more than good experience.
Alien Isolation is definetly one big horror game and is modern
I think it's 99% nostalgia + playing them as an impressionable kid. I refuse to believe that that ""horror"" beat em up could be scarier than alien isolation or re4make to someone playing them today for the first time today.
Alan Wake 2 is too scary for me. I can play just about any old PS1 title and usually feel fine.
It's bias
The OG resident evil games didn't actually make you feel scared, actually, who's scared of slow zombies? Nemesis can be scary, but he's an exemption rather than a norm.
Silent hill is disturbing, but you can't actually fear as much as with alien isolation for example.
The survival horror genre had to evolve from what it was, because it was rather bad, the controls were bad, the camera is dog shit, and the only reason those games got a pass on that was because of the date they were made
Sorry to break it for you but games have always been products. They needed to sell back then as much as they need now so saying that back then games were made just to give you an """""experience""""" is beyond stupid. Games were scarier to you back then because you were a kid that was even afraid of its own shadow, that's all.
It's just people being young. Of course a 13 year old will be way more scared on his first horror game than that same person at the age of 19 after having played dozens.@@gabrielscoccola5960
Played the OG resident evil on Saturn. That dog window scene was unforgettable
It worked so well because you weren't expecting it at the time, and after getting chased by clearly visible zombies and being greeted by what seems like a moment's respite from terror in an empty looking hallway, you've relaxed your guard just a smidge.
Nobody knew what rooms was safe or not back then, so not seeing or hearing any threats in a new room allowed your brain to get a slightly false sense of security right before it betrays you and hammers home the subtle message to "always be on guard"
@@cocodojo Also old games let you take some time to process what you just witness. An your imagination is just running at full speed. For example playing the OG 3 Silent Hill games, every time you see a weird monster. Your minds processing you don't wanna see what the next monster you might run into next. An every room you enter has a weird and disturbing thing that can happen. The fear of the unknown is more terrifying then one that is known, you kind of know what to expect.
Like say Alien: Isolation the one you should fear the most is obviously the Alien but you kinda know what to expect from the get go. But dealing with monsters that don't give away their presence and makes you guess what you in for if you run into them thats scary.
@@silentecho92able You've pretty much hit the nail on the head right there. Back then, we didn't have the nonstop insane over the top action set pieces of the current "modern" games so you had plenty of down time to process and give a moment to try to think what your next steps should be going into the next room or area.
Also, not knowing ahead of time what's going to happen plays immensely towards the uncertainty factor. Fear of the unknown as well as building the proper atmosphere and setting plays a huge factor in those games.
The Silent Hill nurse's scene made me cry as an 12 y/o. Not because I was scared.. I sure was, but it was more so how surreal that moment was for the characters and story. The buildup wth the music that was chosen too.. all just.. chefs kiss.
I still find the Half Life 2 Zombies one of the scariest enemies in gaming despite the dated graphics, it's something about their screams and the fact that they're still alive and conscious
Uncanny valley. Real enough to be recognizable, but something seems unnatural and off that it makes you uneasy
those random third person pov were scary af
monsters weren't pi~atas, they didn't drop ammo
resources and saves were limited
you had to think before you made a move
If you guys want to play a fun modern horror game with old feels, give "Fear and Hunger" a chance.
Can confirm F&H some scary shit despite not looking like that
That first resident evil zombie head turn remains the scariest video game moment to me
In Resident Evil's case for the camera angles, it was absolutely a result of limitations as well. All the areas are literally sets of photos with collision and sprites laid over top of them. It's why all the legendary door transitions are set in the void, so it could pull the next sets of photos, collision maps, and sprites for the next area from the disc. However, the benefit of this was making a massive length story, that looked good for the time, and have it all fit on one disc. It was an ingenious solution, and managed to simultaneously create the light tension that you don't know what you're getting yourself into with each transition of the camera.
Also the garbage controls added to the stress
One thing that I liked and miss from old horror games was the fact that you had limited manual saves or reach a certain point to save your progress if you had luck and that factor added an extra fear and tension since you don't wanted to die and lose all your progress and you don't know what's going to happen (if you played the first time).
Nowdays thanks to the checkpoint system that tons of horror games have, they actually made the games a glorified trial-and-error and removes that fear a lot and instead it gives you frustration if you die a lot in a certain place or in the entire game.
you hit the nail on the head when you described the motion and look as something recognizable as real but not quite so realistic. what you touched on is the uncanny valley, which is this strange place between something looking realistic and not. it's the same reason that porcelain dolls are creepy...they're human enough to recognize as human but somethings just a bit off.
Older videogames took their to portray the decay of life (like zombies) better. What I mean is that modern videogames make zombies like super powered paranormal entitities and the player character never flinchess or is himself an absurd parody of a human.
And older horror videogames had more effort put in colours and sounds then in animation and story because of hardware limitations.
I am in full agreement with ya. I may not be a full, purebreed horror gamer, but I've been into the retro gamer lifestyle for a LONG time. Sometimes having less is considered good, in my opinion. As a tradition for Halloween, I play Lament of Innocence. The game is from 2003, on the PS2. I enjoy the game a LOT, but when it comes to graphics and story, it's a bit strange. Sure, they do look odd, but my mind does the rest in filling certain blanks. It tends to go overboard in certain environments, and I get pretty freaked out. Certain environments and bosses look more grotesque, and it works quite well.
Dopamine consumption is the short answer to the question.
All those who played the old horror games are 32 years old or older.
Back then, in the 1990s, the only source material for horror was movies and TV shows, and when I started playing video games for the first time, I played Atari and Sega. For our generation, it was like a Neil Armstrong moment when video games went from 2D to 3D in just a few years.
I remember the first time i heard of survival horror as a kid. My dad had rented Resident Evil for the PS1 and I honestly thought he was watching a movie with bad actors. When i saw what it was he was playing, i was immediately drawn in and saw how frustrated my dad was with the tank controls and trying to fight that first zombie with a knife. Good times. 😄
All valid points and maybe this is a cop-out answer and it could just be me getting older, but i also genuinely think people are harder to scare than they used to be. After being bombarded with so much horror media and constant exposure to real horrific shit just being a google search away, people just don't scare like they used to.
its a fact
I think the things that horrify me as an adult is not the monster, but often the themes. A monster that moves in an unsettling way is startling, but seeing a protagonist slowly wear themselves away with each act, falling apart not just physically but ideologically as the story continues until the thing that comes out the other end is unrecognisable, that makes me unsettled long after the horror game ends. A monster isn't enough, but most horror games generally bring only the monster, not a story that will make me hurt long after the game departs.
i believe the biggest plus for the older games is that the clunky controls and no hand holding put you at a disadvantage so when certain events would happen and you felt like you were not on the winning side all the new games the controls are easy to use and makes you feel more powerful , going back to re1 that first time you kill a crimson head and he comes back to life and is faster was terrifing and trying to turn around with the tank controls added desperation
I liked old games because they rely on creep factor and not the bull**** jumpscares.
dark souls game can feel unsetelling . I am curently playin one and i am in blight town. its fucking hell
The first time walking slowly through The Depths. The only sound is your footsteps echoing in the cramped passageways. You turn a corner and see two basilisks with their big eyes crawling towards you from the darkness. They leap forwards and cover you in a cloud of poison. Boom you're cursed.
Dark Sousl also benefits from the uncanny valley effect. You're frequently meeting people whose suits of armour look grotesque and impractical. The demons look like they've been malformed and evolved to be worse than they could otherwise be. Everything looks diseased or injured. Human opponents are 16 foot tall for no reason.
*Bloodborne*
They made dark souls enigmatic by giving you zero answers
@@memenazi7078 FR
silent hill 1 3d models and cg cut scene is only worked by 1 legend, Takayoshi Sato himself.
Sato described the experience as "hell", working 15 hour days 7 days per week
Sato was the sole member of Team Silent to work on the 3D cut-scenes in the first Silent Hill game, taking him nearly 2,000 hours to complete, and during much of this time period the schedule would be so demanding that he would sleep under his office desk.
Its the graphics for me , older games have this raw , dirty looking like visuals to me , nowadays games look too clean also it applies not just horror games
Resident Evil 1, 2, 3 were very filthy
"I never felt as scared as back when I was playing on my Playstation 1"
I mean.. you were a kid, or generally young & inexperienced with the horror genre. It's not weird to be scared by the first few horror games you see and become less & less scared the older you get, the more horror you play. I personally didn't get to PS1 and PS2 horror games until recently, and they were more funny than anything resembling scary.
Tank controls and crazy camera angles are what perfectly sell so many of Silent Hill's best scenes. The first alley you venture down is the perfect example, the camera swings around unnervingly and follows you from odd angles as you venture deeper and it gets darker and the things you encounter get increasingly disturbing. It plays like a scene from a movie and the player is in control for almost the entire scene because the tank controls are relative to the player, not the camera. The camera in the first 3 Silent Hill games IS the character of the town itself, constantly hiding in the shadows and watching you from all angles. The game simply wouldn't be as scary with a modern camera and camera-relative controls.
I miss those gut churning moments when you need to run but can’t. You turn around only to remember you have no where to go to get space and that you only a few seconds to defend. Dead Space 1 +2 and Left 4 Dead.
old games characters also creep us out because sometimes they move like skinwalkers trying to mimic human behavior yet you can clearly see that something is off thus creating the uncanny valley
Scary is subjective, I've never found old horror games scary like you have.
In fact the only horror game I actually been terrified of was Darkwood (2017)
This is coming from someone who is still obsessed with Silent Hill since he was a kid btw.
i think everyone just grew up, being younger and playing older horror games frighten us more compared to newer games where the player is much older
to me, it's definitely just the fact that now it's harder to scare us ppl who grew up playing loads of these "old" horror games in question.
I hate how frequently this conversation is minimalized by people who just want the most black and white interpretation. The truth is, horror games weren't the problem.
The industry was.
RE4 came out and not only popularized a new genre of Action Horror, but showed how promising third person gunplay could be. The focus AKA the goalpost shifted away from things like "Atmosphere", "Cinematic Cameras", "Inherently Eerie Situations" and "Compelling Stories", things that MAKE you care about dying in game and fear monsters. What did it shift towards? It shifted towards money and profit. Not that games haven't always been a product, but after Halo 2 the mainstream went from looking at videogames as this "dumb little kids trend that will die out" to "wow, these dumb little games can make a LOT of money". Remember RE4? Well that was also one of the most popular and successful RE titles ever that got countless remasters and ports and as long as you follow the money you can see why.
And once again, if we just stick with the RE franchise, we can continue to see what the modern problem is with games like RE7 and RE8. It's NOT that games aren't still capable of doing these things, let me make that clear. The PROBLEM is that corporate suits don't WANT them to. We can see that in RE7, a game Capcom considers a middling success. Why? Well it's not because of the pace breaking second half like what you might think, it's because when they sold it to Japanese audiences, they found out most people didn't even get past the first house section because the game was THAT scary to them. Think they didn't do anything with that information? Wrong. They came right out and stated they made RE8 more casual and less scary ON PURPOSE because of that, which is why the only legitimately scary segment is the baby section.
When you keep that in mind and pay attention to indie horror games like Crow Country, Signalis, Amnesia the Bunker and SEE how good they are at evoking oldschool fear and tension while Triple-A games fail at every step with titles like Callisto Protocol, Alan Wake 2, Alone in the Dark Remake, etc, you see a consistent issue where the games lean HARD away from horror into incredibly predictable and formulaic Hollywood-adjacent storytelling.
Modern Triple-A gaming is an extension of Hollywood.
That's the problem. The only people that can seemingly escape this are Capcom, but even they stumble a lot with games like RE3 Remake and RE8. Making a "horror" experience isn't the objective. Making money is. And they will sacrifice whatever meat they have to in order to maximize profits.
... And before anyone says it, this isn't a black pill.
Just play Indie Games. Independent studios are killing it right now and for far cheaper.
It’s the ambiguity that makes old horror games more unsettling.
I think another aspect is how movement compliments the experience similar to having a nightmare where your movements are stiff as this abnormal creature moves with no problem.
Yet new games try to make you move super human like, if not, more inhuman than the zombies you're killing. Especially when you add parry, movement like RE6 where you dynamic dodge, better camera controls, 8 way movement, better lighting, etc. At that point, it's not a nightmare, it's a fantasy.
The real reason is age, experience/exposure, technical limitations, and psychology. If something isn't explicitly detailed or defined, our minds fill in the gaps and usually use our worst fears to do so. True horror is in what's left unsaid and unknown.
The main exception of new horror games not being scary, in my opinion, is Lethal Company. Yes, you're often around the company of your friends and that really puts the horror in the backseat for a while, but the brilliance of it, is when you get so used to hearing the voices of your friends, that when you no longer do, it's truly one of the most unsettling and terrifying experiences I've ever felt in a game, new or old. The tension is immaculate, and that's what's so brilliant about it.
It was scarier because punishment for losing was way more harsh back then
I think what you're referring to with things looking sorta realistic yet "off" is the "uncanny valley":
"As the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it becomes almost human, at which point the response quickly becomes strong revulsion."
I want to add an option to the design perspective. I believe that the reason for older designs being scarier than todays high res designs is that developers grasped the archetype of a specific scary thing. It deeply referred to primeval anxieties that existed in our genes for millenials. Whereas the modern designs trigger the dopamine system - like everything else in nowadays media. It makes you 'think' wow that looks scary, but you feel nothing, let alone something deep.
W comment
I do agree with all your points, but imo the key element here is the clunky gameplay. New game try and succeed in replicating Silent Hill's fog and uncanny animations, but no studio would dare making a clunky gameplay. The way I see it, a key distinction between action and horror is control. Horror thrives in taking your control over the situation away, taking your power away. If you go out in the wild and find yourself face-to-face with a wolf, you'd be scared shitless - but not so much if you have a gun. A gun gives you power, and power gives you control over the situation. Having no control means the other can more easily decide your destiny for you - there's nothing you can do, and that's terrifying.
Nowadays studios want to show off their skills, their technology, their animations. Gameplay needs to feel smooth, responsive, snappy. That gives you more control over you character. If you're supposed to have a gun, that scales even higher, because now you can use this fluid gameplay to defend yourself, and not just run. If you can defend yourself, you have control over the situation. You can use your skill to thrive - your destiny is defined by your own capabilities, and not by the power of the threat in front of you.
Old games are the opposite of that. Turning around is so slow it's painful - you don't have much control over your movement. There is barely any aiming system, sometimes you just need to pray you are looking at the right direction - you don't have much control over how you will defend yourself. Ammo is scarce, you can't just go around shooting everybody all the time - you don't have much control over when you can defend yourself. The camera is bad, and in some cases they are even fixed at a single direction - you don't have much control over your field of view, you can't peek from the safety of a corner.
All of that make these old games play and feel more like you have iron ball chained to your feet. If something drops on you, you can't turn around and run quickly. You can't shoot it 'til it's dead before it reaches you. You have to drag your body away from the thing, and that itself is pretty hard. Your reaction speed runs faster than your body, and oh boy isn't that dreadful when a monster is right behind you, you want to run but you can't move fast enough.
For this reason, I think the most successful horror games aren't the ones with more gore, but the ones that take control away from you. P.T. gets you stuck into long and narrow corridors which limit your range of movement, your field of view, and the monster can only come from behind you, where you have the least control over. Outlast doesn't give you a gun, so you have no control over your self-defense - and worse yet, you are constantly forced to see the world through the camera, which limits a lot your field of view. I still remember playing Exmortis and being scared shitless - it was just a point-and-click flash game, but for the very reason you have no control over your character, it was terrifying. Once you go into a room or click on something that will trigger an event, done, you can't do anything until the event is over - or if you die because you did something you shouldn't. On the other hand, while F.E.A.R. was pretty scary, it felt much better knowing that I could transform whatever came at me into swiss cheese.
Anyway, you get the idea. I feel the lack of control is the key aspect of horror games, but I might be totally wrong since, actually, I'm not really into horror games so I haven't played a lot of them. I just tried distilling what makes them tick since that's part of my job. So I really hope I'm onto something here hahah
Haven't watched the video yet, so you might have mentioned it, but the title really got me thinking about The Suffering. That was my first horror game back in the day and I swear it was so damn good - could probably use a remake but there's almost no chance of that happening lol
Edit: Just finished the vid, and it was great. Threw you a sub :)
Appreciate you lots, friend! ♥
You perfectly nailed why I think the Silent Hill 2 remake is doomed to fail. Silent Hill games have these bizarre cutscenes where something's always off - the characters are talking to each other but not QUITE like real people do, it's all stilted and uncomfortable. I don't think you can properly replicate it with modern graphics, because just copying that same off-ness would look silly, but if they're made "properly" then suddenly the horror factor is gone.
I think "less is more" in general applies very strongly to horror. I replayed classic RE games recently and I think the original RE2 is scarier than its remake, and so is RE4. The silence, those iconic loud footsteps, the monsters not having this weird hyper-realistic rubbery feel to them.
PS1 always had the creepiest games, to me. Those eerie, early 3D graphics, and the generally sluggish controls (adding to a feeling of helplessness) have never been topped.
As far I can tell it boils down to things: 1. Limitation breeds creativity(like it was said before on another comment), limitation makes you strive for freedom an only trough limitation can you do that, you have to have fun in other to move forward with you idea. 2. Is sacred geometry, as we live in world or reality rule by phi and fibonachi sequences, geometry planes a very important role in what we define as beautiful if you notice the games of old, did not have a high poly count, yes but that made them use what they could and make things that resemble other things, this in fact adds to the fear factor, by simple design that render image on that X game, is not a figure you find out in nature, its outside of it even of the supernatural framework of esoteric knowledge and add into the lore and shape, the symbolism which is power by consciousness it takes life of it own, just like an egregore. Is just that fear is based upon the unknown and an unknown that follows its own design outside of the sacred geometry, its not life what you look at but rather something outside of it.
Id say japans censorship of gore. Example re4 was brutal because they didnt censor gore. Now one look at violent anime and youll see black blurs over everything. Also Over consumption of gore and horror media. Fear is like a drug and after you use it too much you need far more as you go along.
7:38 I kind of disagree here, on opposite I think this is exactly what is happening.
When we look at this monster at 6:14, it is so well defined that our imagination can take a step back. If we are chased by it we know exactly what is chasing us. We see this creature has menacing claws, looks imposing, we can make unconscious assumptions on its weight, its strength, the likely way it will attack us etc. In the end it looks scary but it's an identified kind of scary which, in a sense, diminish the threat.
On the other hand, When we look at a low poly monsters with janky movements, they are much less defined so we are not completely sure what we are dealing with. We have to extrapolate, fill in the gap , our imagination naturally goes overboard in the process and in the end we are still not sure, which end up making the monster looks a lot more menacing imho.. Because the monster keeps a large part of unknown. And the human brain fear the unknown.
I think this is the same reason why darkness is such a big component of horror. Darkness shroud otherwise well defined monsters in an aura of mystery, uncertainty and menace where our imagination is solicited and will unconsciously work overboard to increase the potential danger posed by that threat, just in case. Low poly monsters kind of recreate that same effect imho.
The design of the creatures got way too complex as time went on. The creatures of most modern horror games are just too noisy. Simpler shapes and distinct characteristics is the way to go. Good video btw. Subscribed.
Nothing can compare to the first time feeling. Therefore, these old games always have a place in our heart regardless of how many newer games we play
As someone who got to experience both the old and the new generation of horror games, I respectfully do not agree. Sure, older horror titles are absolutely timeless masterpieces when it comes to gameplay and creating atmosphere, but there are a lot of newer games that can make you "shit your pants" just as much if not even more. Just think about the Amnesia series, Dead Space 1 and 2, Resident Evil 7, RE2 Remake and even more action oriented titles such as RE8 and RE4 Remake have their scary moments (especially RE8, house Beneviento has been the most scared I've ever been in a game, both in the base game and the DLC), and when they don't, they succeed at creating a lot of tension.
In fact, I do think it is more a matter of gameplay loop and creating (sometimes) the same type of anxiety that older games had. "Remaking" the PS1 RE formula with RE7 and the actual remakes of the older games has proven to be succesful, and it's just an example of a succesful modern horror game.
You know, I do think that for their time, almost ALL older horror game succeded (and still do) in creating the eeriness and fear of the unknown, other than that kind of "uncanny valley" that you mention. But as of today, there are a lot of titles that manage to do that too, in my opinion.
It has to be said that with modern titles there was a period where mainstream horror games really only focused on action (the RE5 and 6 period), but I think this has changed since RE7 came out, although even now, some developers do think a lot about the action side of a videogame (and that's ok in my opinion as long as pure survival horror titles continue to exist).
That said, I do think that something has changed in all these years: we grew up. In fact, I do remember not even being able to look at horror games when I was little, I was too scared. Growing up made me appreciate this genre of videogame a lot more, but I was still little and scared to death when I first got into it.
Hey friend!
I really appreciate that you took your time to write such an elaborate comment. And I do agree with you on a lot that you pointed out. There definitely are modern horror games that are very scary. I think at the end of the day, it always boils down to a personal taste or preference, too. To me, nothing is more uncanny than those weird and bizarre ps1-era monsters were, but I do agree with the statement about resident evil 8 and 7 specifically. It seems that horror games are on a good path and I'm excited to see what is next for the genre.
you always have some idiot on youtube coming up with a bad take "old good, new bad"....re2 remake, dead space remake, alien isolation even something like P.T for example things weren't scarier back in the day theings where just being done for the first time that's all....how are low polygons scary anymore that's just retttttarded
Back when I played SIlent Hill for the first time, there was a point in the game were I didn't want to keep advancing. It was when I made it to the morgue in the hospital. Heck, basically the whole hospital made me not want to continue playing, specially after I went down the first stairs and then tried to turn back to save, only to find that there was now a wall were the stair was.... good times
Resident Evil 3 Nemesis scared the life outta me my older brother got me in to gaming so i played any game i could. Too bad the Remake was a dumpster fire The Pursuer and choices is what made it great that an cutting 1/2 the game was probably not smart smh.
Back then we also did not have any kind of safety devices outside of running to our parents and turning our bedroom lights on aswell. Nowadays if something scares you, you can just distract yourself with TH-cam or FaceBook with the lights on and that fear will go away, you can also have TH-cam playing in the background to make you feel safe. There are many more safety devices nowadays.
Plus back then the bad quality audio and visuals kind of added to the horrific experience.
We also tend to focus on the graphics alot too which breaks the immersion if we're sitting there like "damn the details in that model is insane" but back then we focused more on the gameplay aspect than the actual graphics.
I think we’re more easily scared when we’re children. That plays a big part, I used to get scared of things that don’t hold up. But now that I’ve “seen everything” it’s not as easy to get scared
FEAR-AND-HUNGER Mr brave. Youll see.
An older game now but I recently played the evil within 1 which by 90s comparison has all the updated elements and found the game to be quite good horror on par with a RE1 PS1 experience. I think one aspect is also the saving with modern games which seem set up so you can’t fail. Playing RE1 on PS1 knowing you forgot to save and invested a lot of time wandering makes the penalty of an in game death worse than just rebooting from an automatic save point.
I don't know. We should also ask some yound people who play a modern horror game as their first horror. It might simply be that us old folk have been desensitized enough by now which is why new stuff isn't scary.
A big thing that made older RE games scary was the fixed camera angles. Not being able to rotate the camera and scan an entire area gave enemies more places to hide and kept you on edge with each new area.
To be fair I was never afraid of the regenerators. They're too slow and shortly after they're introduced you get the infrared scope
Remake regenerators are much scarier, their movement makes hitting the weak spots a lot harder, and it's a race to get them all before they can grab you.
@@gabrielscoccola5960 yeah the remake regenerators were an objective improvement. The stretch they do made things more tense
I feel like so many old horror games also had such unique artstyles. There's nothing wrong with video games now trying to strive for realism as much as possible, but I much prefer a horror game to have a unique artstyle rather than the most realistic graphics possible.
Because you where a kid when you played those old games. Now you're older. Have you wonder why newer games are not scary to you but kids playing them are terrified? The more you love something, the more you go for it and the more desensitized you become to it. I have never, ever felt the same kind of fear I felt while playing silenthill 2 (mi first horror game) so now I feel games are not scary anymore. My cousin is 10 years younger and he played the original slender games (those where not scary for me but he was terrified of them) turns out he doesn't like the newer games. It's not the world, it's you. That's getting old.
Yeah now that we played too many games we just essentially become desensitized to it. But there are many horror games out there that still retain the core horror elements and not just deteriorate into a fast-paced thriller action game. Psalm 5:9-13 is a prime example!
That first zombie in RE1 when I was a kid was one of the most memorably terrifying moments of my childhood.
It doesn’t matter what anyone here saids nothing is scarier than a regenerator coming running at you full speed
If that scared u then idk what wouldn't
When fighting Del Lago there is nothing more horrifying than a picturesque sunset, lol. 😂😂😂
It was scarier back then because it was a new experience.
no it's because they where better made