Incline Guillermo del Toro involved in the next Silent Hill game?

[Jasede]

It's not 2000-something anymore, I'll take well-crafted mainstream horror over badly produced shit any day. This >>> Amnesia.

But I don't disagree with you, and of course I think all of us would rather have a game in the vein of SH2. But let's see what it's gonna be like. Personally, I've a growing respect for Kojima. Used to make fun of the guy for the cutscene-fests that are MGS games but when you actually take some time to appreciate how, uh, well-made it all is, there's a certain beauty to it all. Definitely going to be interesting either way.

 

[sexbad?]

This doesn't have shit on Amnesia.

 

[Jasede]

I will explain to you in one encounter why Amnesia is garbage:

I was exploring the samey corridors, minding my own business when, shock horror, a monster started chasing me! I ran away as fast as I could and... ran into one of the scripted flashback narrations, forcing me to stand still and watch and listen. The monster ate me during that time.

And that is how you fuck up a horror game beyond the point of any merit.


Good horror games are far and few in-between, so I can understand why people would appreciate even something slightly less shit, but come on. Scratches. Silent Hill 2. Hell, even Fatal Frame overtake that pathetic indie offering by leaps and bounds.

 

[sexbad?]

I will explain to you in one encounter why Amnesia is garbage:

I was exploring the samey corridors, minding my own business when, shock horror, a monster started chasing me! I ran away as fast as I could and... ran into one of the scripted flashback narrations, forcing me to stand still and watch and listen. The monster ate me during that time.

And that is how you fuck up a horror game beyond the point of any merit.

That sounds like a bug. I played the game like four times over the past few years, and that never happened to me.

 

[Jasede]

Fine, that's fair enough, but it really, really ruined the game for me. You can probably imagine it from my perspective, too: everyone's praising the game, and it's not terrible - why, I even liked the water part - but it's still kind of small and linear and even boring to me. Then, when it seems to pick up a bit and makes me run away from stuff - it does that. You can probably imagine that I wasn't too keen on giving it another try after that. (And it wasn't a one-time bug either, it happened multiple times.)

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Amnesia isn't that good, it's a game basically created in ~9 months with Frictional almost going out of business in the process. So it is small, a bit linear (although it's mostly that the environments are small, they can often be traversed in whatever order you want), monsters are scripted and despawn after ditching them, and so on. It's still a game that betrays a good understanding of horror - it has great pacing and manages to create a consistent level of tension and perceived danger despite not actually having a lot of enemy encounters. Making light a resource that needs to be managed is a great idea, as is disencouraging the player from directly looking at monsters through the sanity mechanic.

Jasede, have you tried Penumbra, Frictional's previous game? Most people who played both seem to agree that Penumbra: Black Plague is their best game. Stylistically it's more reminiscent of Lovecraft and The Thing as opposed to Amnesia's gothic horror, and it plays a bit more like SH in that it has actual puzzles that don't just involve bringing item A to point B.

 

[A user named cat]

Amnesia was ruined by all the Youtube morons copy-pasting each other's vids doing exaggerated reactions while playing it like screaming vaginas. The game was okay for reasons Cowboy mentioned but certainly not deserving of all the "11/10 it's okay best horror game ever" bullshit from the Fallout 3 crowd everywhere who never even played Scratches, SH, Shadow of the Comet or anything else in the genre except Res Evil and Dead Space. Basically fuck Amnesia because of ignorant Amnesia fans. They made me hate it before I even got the chance to play it, and I've still never finished it to this day because of the taint.

 

[Siel]

Amnesia was ruined by all the Youtube morons copy-pasting each other's vids doing exaggerated reactions while playing it like screaming vaginas. The game was okay for reasons Cowboy mentioned but certainly not deserving of all the "11/10 it's okay best horror game ever" bullshit from the Fallout 3 crowd everywhere who never even played Scratches, SH, Shadow of the Comet or anything else in the genre except Res Evil and Dead Space. Basically fuck Amnesia because of ignorant Amnesia fans. They made me hate it before I even got the chance to play it, and I've still never finished it to this day because of the taint.

Makes me remember the recent IGN's top 10 horror games of all times. Most of the comments were "Why isn't outlast on that list?".

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Another point in favor of Frictional's horror games - they have little to no jumpscares. Every other game from this new FP horror genre I've tried was riddled with stupid jump scares - I think it was the worst in Outlast, but P.T. suffers from it as well, as do all the shitty Slender clones.

Incidentally, one of the people I'd trust with a new SH is Agustin Cordez, the guy who made Scratches. Now there's a game that understood subtlety and grasped the difficult art of building tension without putting monsters everywhere.

 

[Jasede]

The jumpscares in PT work well because they're built up with mounting atmosphere. They wouldn't work without the atmosphere and unlike the Slender games (which it mocks) there's a lot more substance here than scare after scare. There's maybe two to five actual jumpscares (depending on your definition) in that teaser, and due to its random nature you might not even see them.

And the Scratches guy is making that boring-looking Asylum game right now. Let's see how good that'll be. But no Cellar of Rats.

 

[dnf]

In terms of pure disturbing imagery, it looks great. But it seems to suffer from the same problem as some of the later Silent Hills - it's too extreme and not subtle enough. SH 1-3 were mostly desolate and ruined, a lot of the games involved exploring decrepit buildings that didn't even have a lot of enemies or dedicated "scare" moments. This is true even for the Otherworld parts.

SH1 and 3 is shock full of monsters barring some moments of calm. SH2 is inferior to both games and it is unjustly elevated to god tier status.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

In terms of pure disturbing imagery, it looks great. But it seems to suffer from the same problem as some of the later Silent Hills - it's too extreme and not subtle enough. SH 1-3 were mostly desolate and ruined, a lot of the games involved exploring decrepit buildings that didn't even have a lot of enemies or dedicated "scare" moments. This is true even for the Otherworld parts.

SH1 and 3 is shock full of monsters barring some moments of calm. SH2 is inferior to both games and it is unjustly elevated to god tier status.

No they aren't. I don't remember SH3 that well, but 1 and 2 only have tons of monsters on the streets, and those are more of an environmental hazard rather than a scare, and you can run past all of them. None of the games rely on the presence of monsters to be scary.

 

[dnf]

In terms of pure disturbing imagery, it looks great. But it seems to suffer from the same problem as some of the later Silent Hills - it's too extreme and not subtle enough. SH 1-3 were mostly desolate and ruined, a lot of the games involved exploring decrepit buildings that didn't even have a lot of enemies or dedicated "scare" moments. This is true even for the Otherworld parts.

SH1 and 3 is shock full of monsters barring some moments of calm. SH2 is inferior to both games and it is unjustly elevated to god tier status.

No they aren't. I don't remember SH3 that well, but 1 and 2 only have tons of monsters on the streets, and those are more of an environmental hazard rather than a scare, and you can run past all of them. None of the games rely on the presence of monsters to be scary.

They are mostly the same and SH3 barely have streets to walk.

 

[agentorange]

These trailers, and that demo thing, could have been for any big budget, Slender-like nonsense game, there is next to nothing about them that invokes the surreal atmosphere of Silent Hill 1 - 4. Of course in traditional Kojima fashion this stuff will probably have fuckall to do with the actual game, but Kojima is not someone I trust to be subtle (and double that for Del Toro).

The fondness I have for the Silent Hill games really has nothing to do with how much they physically scared me (compared to the original Resident Evil games Silent Hill didn't affect me in that way at all), but with the lasting impression of the dream like ambiance they were able to create, and more importantly maintain throughout the entire game - the effects of which are far more powerful than any brief scare that only achieves a brief reaction. They are the only games (apart from maybe Pathologic) that achieves the sort of ever present dread and mystery as is present in say a film by David Lynch.

 

[Cromwell]

In terms of pure disturbing imagery, it looks great. But it seems to suffer from the same problem as some of the later Silent Hills - it's too extreme and not subtle enough. SH 1-3 were mostly desolate and ruined, a lot of the games involved exploring decrepit buildings that didn't even have a lot of enemies or dedicated "scare" moments. This is true even for the Otherworld parts.

SH1 and 3 is shock full of monsters barring some moments of calm. SH2 is inferior to both games and it is unjustly elevated to god tier status.

No they aren't. I don't remember SH3 that well, but 1 and 2 only have tons of monsters on the streets, and those are more of an environmental hazard rather than a scare, and you can run past all of them. None of the games rely on the presence of monsters to be scary.

As far as I remember you could deactivate the monsters/fights in sh2 which I did. May be a matter of taste but I found the atmosphere even better then, the only thing that remains as a monster then was the pyramid head. Without the monsters the town became really dreadful.

 

[dnf]

In terms of pure disturbing imagery, it looks great. But it seems to suffer from the same problem as some of the later Silent Hills - it's too extreme and not subtle enough. SH 1-3 were mostly desolate and ruined, a lot of the games involved exploring decrepit buildings that didn't even have a lot of enemies or dedicated "scare" moments. This is true even for the Otherworld parts.

SH1 and 3 is shock full of monsters barring some moments of calm. SH2 is inferior to both games and it is unjustly elevated to god tier status.

No they aren't. I don't remember SH3 that well, but 1 and 2 only have tons of monsters on the streets, and those are more of an environmental hazard rather than a scare, and you can run past all of them. None of the games rely on the presence of monsters to be scary.

As far as I remember you could deactivate the monsters/fights in sh2 which I did. May be a matter of taste but I found the atmosphere even better then, the only thing that remains as a monster then was the pyramid head. Without the monsters the town became really dreadful.

I think it's the only SH that does that, and since it is the only silent hill that people seems to give attention it becomes canon for the entire series more or less. Harder difficulty mode gives even more enemies tough.

 

[Jick Magger]

I probably would've enjoyed Amnesia alot more if it weren't for the fact that the perpetual teeth grinding sound effect that came if you so much as stood in a dark room for too long left me with a near-constant headache.

 

[Jick Magger]

No they aren't. I don't remember SH3 that well, but 1 and 2 only have tons of monsters on the streets, and those are more of an environmental hazard rather than a scare, and you can run past all of them. None of the games rely on the presence of monsters to be scary.

I played it fairly recently, and I don't quite agree or disagree. In SH3, while the streets are probably the calmest out of the three original games (owing to the fact that you don't really walk around them as much as the other games), the number of enemies and their overall aggressiveness are both much greater than the prior games inside the buildings. Hell, two of the basic enemies you encounter constantly in the game have a knockdown attack as one of their most basic moves, while in the earlier games only the end-game big bastards are really capable of it. This is probably the first since SH1 which actually actively encouraged that you run away from enemies through how utterly brutal the enemies are. Even in SH2 I found it easier to just beat most enemies into submission with the wooden board/steel pipe than to run past them.

 

[Whisky]

This isn't Silent Hill. It's not right.

They just don't understand.

 

[A user named cat]

Repost but it belongs in a SH thread. Here's some Silent Hill-ness that actually looks good.



Non-annoying LPer

 

[Mynon]

http://www.pcgamer.com/akira-yamaok...l-revived-is-open-to-team-silent-reformation/
Where there is smoke...

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Where there is vapor...