Much the same principle that separates real stand-up comics from despairing, clutching attention-seekers applies to the difference between good and bad survival horror games. You can have all the right lines, but if you don't lead the crowd and pick your moments you'll be deafened by silence. Case in point: Xbox Live Arcade release Amy, a cavalcade of poorly paced homages to older peers, contriving to deliver a vaguely foreboding atmosphere which never ignites into terror.
Roll on Condemned 3. Can't believe they've left that hanging so long.
The inclusion of Dead Space in the list seems rather arbitrary , instead of truly having an argument behind it .
And please you're doing a general segment about horror games yet pretty much forget some titles and instead include fps games ? Remember fatal frame on wii ? Siren on psn ?
I'm going to to have to say that I've never played a "scary" game. I've played the first 3 Resident Evil games (and C:V) as well as the 2 Dead Space games. But they aren't scary. They have suspense and they can make you jump every now and then, but that's not horror. That's tension/suspense.
Horror needs that "OMG that is so awful" feeling, a constant dread and foreboding. Compare a true horror classic, The Exorcist, to something like Resident Evil/Dead Space. The Exorcist doesn't even have any big "jump" scares, but it is a pretty damn scary movie. It has a constant feeling of dread, it horrifies you at every given opportunity and the film is just dark and nasty. Even by today's standards it mops the floor with the supposed "horror" we are given by Hollywood.
That kind of horror is difficult to achieve in a game, because you have to make the situation very human. What makes something like Th Exorcist so horrifying is the defiling and perversion of the most innocent of us into a ghoulish, hate-filled creature with supernatural origins. There's a feeling of forces you can't quite comprehend just f***ing with people just because they hate everything. It's the human element that makes it scary, but games have a hard time making us believe their characters are real.
Before we can have genuine horror, we need genuine characters that we can relate to. Then we need to do horrifying things to them or put them in horrifying situations. Then we can be scared ;)
Games are never scary because when a thing pops out at you, you expect it and you can defend yourself. But games like Amnesia: The Dark Decent are scary because there is no way to defend your self.
Resident Evil 4