To create a scarier horror game...

Aye, never really meant it to mean that tension=horror, but I believe you cannot have horror without tension. A tense situation, a Mexican standoff for example, does not mean it's a horror. But walking down a dark corridor, with the light flickering on and off, with a little girl singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star somewhere just out of sight, that could be pretty scary done right. Simply walking through the corridor isn't enough, there needs to be tension (again not disagreeing, just clarifying).

In an OHR game, adding that level of tension and horror would be tricky IMHO (or at least I have no idea whatsoever how I'd go about it). It would take some exemplar story telling skills to pull it off perfectly I suppose. But hey, what do I know? I haven't even finished a single game to date, hehehe.

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In my opinion, gameplay creates tension and atmosphere/storyline creates horror. I don't think you can do a good horror game without either.

Honestly, though, I find it very difficult to find any game mechanics that are legitimately scary. Tension is the closest thing I can come to. The scariness factor usually comes from the things surrounding the mechanics such as atmosphere and plot.

If you look at horror movies, I think that the separation between tension and horror is there as well. For instance, the movie The Thing creates a lot of tension in the plot mechanics (not knowing who is the monster, knowing that there IS a monster but not where it is, etc.) but the horror comes from the visuals and the high level plot (a monster that can pretend to be a human, is infectious and possibly not contained).

So yeah, not equating tension with scariness exactly, but I do think it's a key element.

I disagree! Resident Evil 1 was terrifyingly stiff to control and gave you this sudden shock when you realised that you are too slow to get away from some enemies. It reminds me of those recurring nightmares where you run as hard as you can but just cannot escape.

@the thread
I believe that great horror isn't achieved by what we do see but what we don't see. Using fairly grim lighting, with objects going missing/subtle changes in the environment mixed with ambient sounds, e.g. distant doors slamming shut, or whispers in the dark. With the OHR it would make more sense to aim for creating a tense, thick and horrifying atmosphere using ambience and suggestion over less subtle jump-scary stuff (the kind of thing that can outright give you a heart attack).

I HATE those nightmares!
Everything except for me is normal. I run like i'm underwater; Theres too much resistance holding me back, and I never go fast enough.

Ahh, nice example. I'd be interested to see more examples like this.

I suppose when I think about it, the "level-down" mechanic in Bloodlust was legitimately scary, mostly because I still don't have any idea how it worked, just that I was getting weaker. That's more than just tension.

The controls and limited saves in the old RE games didn't make them scary to me, they made them frustrating and unfun. The Silent Hill games have better controls, unlimited saving, and are more legitimately scary. Unless you have a Quick Save system, limited saving in games became a humongous pain for me once I wasn't a kid anymore and didn't have time to play a game for hours straight at a time. I hate save points in JRPGs, too.

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Having nonstandard or obscure controls can add to the atmosphere.
Sometimes it just falls flat on its face in failure, as was the case with the stiff jumping mechanics in the early Castlevania games (though this might have nothing to do with the horror atmosphere), but I can think of at least one instance where it succeeded.
In the indie game Au Sable, you're eventually given the standard mouse-and-keyboard run-and-gun controls, with the exception of a crosshair. This makes it difficult to aim, which makes careful planning and sniping tedious and ineffective, forcing the player to take risks and combat monsters face-to-face. This is of course more difficult if the monster in question is terrifying, either because of its appearance or its ability to kill in one hit. I thought the experience was pretty scary, myself.

On the thought of saves, I think Au Sable autosaves in the background, a feature of modern games I have come to love. I could be wrong about Au Sable's usage of it, but whatever the case was, it was a game where I never had to worry about saving and could focus all my attention on the game itself no matter how often I died. It was completely immersive. The only thing limited save points have ever caused me is headaches.

The first Aliens movie. You don't see the alien except for brief glimpses in the dark, but watching that as a kid, boy did that creep me the crap out.

Or the nightmare king from Nemo in Slumberland. You do get a good look at him, but a lot of the time he's in the dark and you can mostly just hear his voice. Not very scary, but that terrified me as a little boy.

Or the Black Rabbit of Inlé from the Watership Down movie. Or the poltergeist from Poltergeist. Or dozens of other examples I can't seem to think up off the top of my head.

Crap, I do believe I traumatized myself by watching all sorts of crazy stuff as a child...

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

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I disagree.

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From the brief sessions I've spent playing Au Sable and All of our Friends are Dead, I'd say that Amon26 is one of the best indie horror game designers around. From what I've seen about him, most of it comes from personal experience, as he's prone to night terrors and tends to make games as a way of alleviating the terror. He essentially takes his nightmares and turns them into games, except he gives the main character a shotgun.

Very effective!

Hah! Now that's effective therapy, hehehe. With bigger and badder weapons the worse your nightmare's get.

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

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