[Thaluikhain]

Oh, yeah, there'll be spoilers.


Anyway, I'm not the only one to find them scary, though many were apparently too scared to finish them, or play them at night, which I could do.

I was just wondering why. I mean, the welder is, IMHO, terrifying...but he's just some crazy guy in a funny outfit with a mask and a machete. I mean, sure, there's the ghost stuff, and later on the Chzo waffle, but your still left with an otherwise very generic monster. Likewise Barry...so the dead captain is roaming about killing people. There's no particularly scary about that. Except on the lowest deck of the Metistopholes. The Tall Man...that's a more unusual creation, but nothing inherently frightening about it. Oh, BTW, which monster did people think was the most frightening?

Put another way, if I was to find myself in alternative universe, one without XDAS and tried to make games using the exact same ideas, they'd not be nearly as scary. What is the vital ingredient/s that I'm not seeing?

One thing I had noticed is that Yahtzee made walking round a totally deserted, monster free building a frightening experience the second time I'd played the game where I knew nothing was going to happen. That's ratehr impressive, IMHO. Though, some bits didn't work so well...there's always an element of "now what does the creator want me to do?" in these things, and it reduces the anxiety alot, the amount of blood and guts got silly after a while, and he'd overdone some techniques (was anyone surprised that the kid hiding its face in 6DAS would reveal something nasty when it turned round?), but still the most frightening games I've played.

[Chyld]

Building tension.

/thread

But seriously, to paraphrase and butcher the Big Y's own review on Left 4 Dead, if you can get the mood right with sound, and waiting, and not quite letting the player/viewer know what's going on, you can have a horror film/game about labrador puppies and it'll still be horrorous. You'll notice how the Saw films got progressivly less interesting as the numbers went up on the end? As you rightly said, by 6DAS, the cards were very much on the table, and while it was still a good game, there wasn't anything really new to be tense about.

[David-kyo]

horrorous

I love this word.

Anyway, when people say that they'd been having night terrors for weeks after playing these games, they might just be whoring for attention/trying to flatter Yahtzee/being hyperboles/etc. No need to take them seriously.

[Ghello]

Never anything worthy of nightmares, but the tension was done very well and I felt it through most of the series, but like the person up there mentioned it got less scary but a lot more interesting in 6DAS.

[Spann]

I played 5DAS through on my own in the dark at night, and it had me turning to check my door was still closed a couple of times. It is all about the tension. That, and the first time you play 5DAS at least, the fact that you don't know whether it's you, someone else, or what the fuck's going on. Soon as you know what the killer is, it loses some appeal - a bit like Creep.

[Thaluikhain]

if you can get the mood right

Well, yes, but that's like saying "if it's scayr then it will be scary", isn't it?

I mean, I can't think of anything much that I can put my finger on and say "Aha, that item there, it's to build tension", but tension was built up somewhere.

I played 5DAS through on my own in the dark at night, and it had me turning to check my door was still closed a couple of times. It is all about the tension. That, and the first time you play 5DAS at least, the fact that you don't know whether it's you, someone else, or what the fuck's going on. Soon as you know what the killer is, it loses some appeal - a bit like Creep.

Hmmm...well, after playing 5DAS, you sort of know what is going on in 7DAS, but that was very scary. Still, Indigo Prophecy Syndrome and all.

For me 6DAS didn't work so well because the last 2 games had very much changed what was going on. Suddenly it wasn't some isolated ghost, it was all due to some ALL-POWERFUL and ANCIENT thing of UTTER EVIL, which had been MANIPULATING THE COURSE OF EVENTS all along in order to blah blah blah. I stopped taking an interest in GW because they released at least one of those things every edition it seemed, relying more on all-caps and jumping up and down saying "I'm scary I am" than actual substance. Yahtzee doesn't cock it up like they did, but I liked the nice quiet horror story where the fate of you, not the world is at stake.

[HerbertTheHamster]

I thought the games were scary when leaving/entering rooms, especially in Trilby´s notes. (Duuuur). I also thought the random events were scary, like when Zombo-Barry kills Angela. 6DAS kinda removed the scaryness with not being able to die though.

PS: I know it´s not random, it just felt like it.

This post has been edited by HerbertTheHamster: 17 April 2009 - 07:04 PM