I’m after game recommendations.
My situation, I used to enjoy gaming but stopped maybe twenty years ago when my PS2 died and I moved abroad. Until last year when I got a steam deck and I’ve been catching up on the good stuff I’ve missed. Played bioshock (great!) and soma (decent), I’m playing prey (think I’m nearly finished, just got to the military operators) and resident evil 7 (just got away from that nasty bint Margheritte).
Most of y wishlist had come from stuff I’ve read on here, so I thought I’d ask - what next?
Back in the day I really enjoyed silent hill (can’t remember which one, would have been early 2000s, the one with the school and hospital). I’m enjoying resident evil 7 - haven’t played any of the others - and I like the atmosphere but most of the scares seem to be jump scares.
Jump scares can be good but I kinda feel like they’re a cheap scare. I’m looking for something more fundamentally upsetting.
No idea why, I can’t watch horror films, I get too frightened! But this seems to be a game genre I enjoy. Any suggestions?
Thanks! So I’m thinking to play amnesia next but you’ve just added to my wishlist.
I’ve been recommended alien isolation but never alien v predator. You think it’s worth a look then? Sounds like you get just what I meant about jump scares, I’ll check it out.
Yeah I’ve been playing prey and enjoying it. I’m really crap at games that need coordination tho, playing it on easy mode and feeling cautiously confident rather than bullet proof.
I’ve just looked up a plague tale, thanks for the suggestion, looks just what I’m after.
I struggle with retro aesthetic. I grew up with 8 bit graphics and got no desire to return to those days now that computers so much better! But I’m not closed to anything.
And yeah I entirely agree with you about horror. I don’t want something that just scares me, I wanna be appalled.
Thanks!
I tend to get shouted down when I say it but:
Alien Isolation is just Amnesia/Penumbra but worse. It is VERY clear the devs had also played Penumbra and loved the idea of hiding in a closet and frantically trying to work the lock before you get got. And once you have played one, you have played them all. And I personally prefer the Amnesia approach since A:I falls apart REAL fast once you figure out that you are mostly just balancing the rubber band of the AI and it will either get you or not depending upon where you were standing when it triggered “go scare the player”. If you REALLY like the Alien franchise but never saw anything after 3, it is awesome. If you are part of the crowd that needed to be told a few hundred times that Romulus has an argument for being the best in the entire franchise? Carry on.
And if you genuinely want the kind of horror that makes you more afraid of what you see in the news than what might be under the bed? Definitely give the “PS1 Horror” game genre a go. Those are some of the best examples of true indie games these days and they are, by and large, made people with something to say. They are very much not 8-bit and are really not even 32-bit either (the vast majority are just lower res PS3 games).
I forget which group this is, but the Haunted PS1 Demo Discs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_PS1) are mostly a bunch of game jams built around the theming. Some are jump scares. Some are deeply unsettling. And some are the kind of things where you have a ten page long list of content warnings. Most tend to be 2-20 minute affairs and some actually become “full games” or are by studios who have “full games” in similar veins.