Saw Silent Hill Yesterday (Word About ‘Horror’)
June 8th, 2009 by JuusoPosted in Game Design
We rented the Silent Hill movie yesterday. I have tried the game (played the demo like 10 minutes), but found that the real horror comes from waiting for the horror. The movie was not really using this element, as did the game. In the movie (I’d rate it like 2½ out of 5 stars) there was fog and monsters and this japanese style horror plot, but it wasn’t really that scary.
Unlike the game (demo got 4 out of 5 stars from me): I played the game for some time, and pretty much every moment in the game I was waiting something bad to happen - some creepy creatures that would attack, or something bad things to happen. The game’s atmosphere just made me expect something bad to happen. Now, that was spooky. That was scary.
Something to think about when people consider doing horror games. You don’t need to spawn monsters to scare people: you need to show people that there’s a possibility that monsters will attack and eat you right around the next corner…
(A nice coincide was that when we drove to the rental place, song by Scooter was playing in radio. In that song he kept saying “the chase is better than the catch”…)
June 8th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
I played SH2 and 3 to the end and they were great. Think 2 may have been the best. Movie was quite faithful to it and pretty good, but not great.