 Welcome to Scared Yet, our horror roundtable discussion of horror in games. I realized that horror in the media might have been a better broader topic, so let's go and just change it. Because I wanted us to discuss what we enjoy, why we enjoy it, maybe how we came to it. Because I don't really understand why I like it. Because it seems like the thing that, as a child, I would have been steered away from. Because my parents remember horror people once. It's fun being scared. Yeah, we'll get into that for sure. You sound like you've got a lot of ideas. I don't have a few thoughts about horror games. Let's go down and if we would all introduce ourselves. So I'm Rim, I'm a podcaster and I realized this is my 39th Pax panel. I realized that a little while ago. So I do a podcast on games and I do lectures on game theory and I do consulting for game design for a lot of different companies. I'm also the executive producer of Dayton Ito which makes visual novels and that sort of thing. You do that? Yeah, I do that. Yeah, my friend Conrad Coyle. Interesting. I'm a lot of PS, I'm an editor at IGN in San Francisco. And I also have a silly YouTube channel where I sometimes play scary games. I'm on a Twitch channel where I play scary games every Friday. Through a cycle morning where you run. That's your name, huh? My name's Dallas. Thank you. My name is Dave Allen and I'm a designer for familiar tape. And I play scary games on YouTube occasionally. And I'm Chris Draub and I'm a cartoonist primarily. But I also play games on a podcast called 20th Live Later. And I also am the author of Candle Cove, the Creed Pasta. And I was like, are you sure? We started and we're like, let's save it for the panel. Yeah. Because you said that when you were, like your parents applied you with horror material. So the first big boy book I ever read was The Hobbit. Like that was the first one. Me too. And the second one was Stephen King's Skeleton Crew. Oh, not me too. Which is Stephen King. Like you think today is a certain kind of genre. But his early short fiction was very existential and weird. Like there was one that terrified me as a kid. Just where the deer are. And it's literally a girl's walking to school and there's no people. There's only deer. Whoa. That's it. Yeah. That's creepy. I think she turned into a deer. She was deer. She went to deer school. Oh, deer. Yeah, the first book. The first book. You lobbed that one right over the plate. I know, I know. The first books that I, like they were just on my dad's shelves were those old Lovecraft paperbacks. And I read them, I just wrote like 10. But I read them, I thought of them in a way that like you might read like classic literature. Like there's C.S. Lewis on the shelf and Jack London on the shelf. And I just thought of them as, well, this is just more, you know, we probably read this in junior high and write reports about it. Like I didn't realize that this is actually weird fiction that is, at the time I don't know, less about. I did. And the teachers in my middle school actually called my parents to ask what was wrong with me. Did. Was there anything wrong with them? No. So what was the outcome? To be decided. I remember very clearly being terrified of VHS or a movie box art titles in particular. Like they rattled me so bad through my childhood. One was future kill because HR Peter did the design and it's a sort of cyber demon monster to sort of like with his spine fingers over his face. And I was like, okay. And the other one was the serpent in the rainbow, which has the tagline, don't bury me. I'm not dead. And it was like, you know, this white as a sheet complexion and like this crucifix like painted in blood on his forehead, leaning out of a casket being like, no. And it scared the bejesus until I watched it like five years ago. And I was like, this is garbage. It was a very affirming sort of experience was like, oh, what the hell was I afraid of? Well, that's something we get into later. Like kids and adults like experience things very differently. Beetlejuice to a kid is a horror movie. Yeah. I didn't realize it was a comedy until I was an adult. Like when I was 20 and I watched it again. I was terrified of one of the Batman movies. The one where Jim Carrey was the Joker. So when I watched that as a kid, I was so scared of Jim Carrey. And I watched myself in the bathroom and cried. And I couldn't watch it. And then I went back to watch it like maybe two years ago. And I was like, this is a terrible film. And it's also not scary at all. But I just couldn't, I just couldn't handle it. Oh man, didn't we see some of the men? Yeah, that's exactly what messed me up. Yeah. When like the third Miss Frisbee's house is sinking and there's all the mud and they're going to drown, it's like... I remember being afraid of troll tube. I thought it was Ernest Scared Stupid with the trolls, right? Yeah. Which is still pretty kind of stupid. It's the best Ernest P. Warrell movie, like Hands Down. That's the one where he kills the troll monster by kissing it. And then it blows up. They're literally milk. Milk is what they are. Or Mayak. Mia. Mia. What? You haven't seen that movie recently, have you? No, I remember it. It's in my brain. So this is our, this is our panel. How did this stuff influence what you found? Like the cool thing of enjoying a horror movie, enjoying a horror game, like they're very different because horror places you there. I feel like that makes it potentially more effective. But how have these things influenced what you sought out? Like what channels of horror types? You know what I mean? For me it's interesting because I had this sort of like classical tutelage of horror because my family was so deeply into like horror fiction. Like I read a lot of like contemporary horror fiction just on a day-to-day basis. And I found that because I studied it from that sort of perspective, I very rapidly went into a like existential horror or sort of not realistic like bloody violence gore horror. But like one of my favorite short stories, it's a horror story, recent one, about a man who walks out into the tidal flats to see some birds and he doesn't realize the tide's coming in behind him and that it's too late. And it's terrifying and there's no ghost, there's no, it's just a man coming to terms with the fact that he's going to die and there's nothing he can do about it while the birds are watching him. I want more video games like that. Because I mean, most of them are just sort of like a jack-in-the-box with a demon inside. It's like, boing, ah, oh no, well better get the rocket launcher. Get the super boy. Do you remember Doom 3? Yeah. And you had to do the flashlight versus the gun. The first round of mods that came out were like, duct tape. Why can you only hit it? I think it was a great idea on paper. But it just didn't work. It was like, this is stupid. The problem was, the real problem with that game was that the best horror in video games in my perspective are the disenfranchisement horror where you are disempowered as a character and there are forces of nature out to get you. That game was, you're Doom Guy, you're invincible and things are jumping at you but you're Doom Guy, you've got a shotgun. You'd be afraid if something had been one shot with a rail gun? It's like, oh, it's you. I thought once that had revealed its tricks very early on, there was a very much, I know, other doors shot and there's going to be something back there. You understood its rhythms and now they're all fears removed. Of course, then look at a game like Five Nights at Freddy's that has the same thing. There's a very specific rhythm to it. But then every night it breaks one of its own rules. So you go through that, you know, the classic horror cycle of, and there's dread, anticipation, climax, and then safety. And you kind of up and down and up and down and up and down to climax. So in Doom it was, like, the cycle was very, very specific to the whole game and it never deviated. But Five Nights at Freddy's, every night you feel like you're safe because you've got the game and then, oh, that one works differently. Foxy works differently. Freddy works differently. So the game keeps, like, going into the save room and hitting you. Yeah. I think my favorite, or one of my favorite games will stop is Silent Hill PT. I'm super passionate about PT. Oh, yes. And I think, even talking about it now, it still is like one of those Jack in the Box kind of things where you're just in a house and then there's this thing that just jumps out occasionally and even if it's in the same place, every time I play it through, I still scream. But it's, because you don't have any power in that circumstance, I don't think she ever stops being scary until you get to the last possible, which is just, uh, bullshit. Can you have, like, stand in a mirror and, like, whisper a name at the right time and it never works? No, actually I finished it without a microphone. Wow. Yeah. I guess I was just being stupid and whispering you a mic. Yes, I don't like the idea of not needing to finish it with a microphone where my house is like, Emily, Jesse, talk to me like son. Quarter video games with bullshit endings. There's so many of them. We can, yeah, let's get in there because... I love it. Who played Outlast? You finished outlast? Yes. That game I think is really, really great and I loved it until the ending because... Now the machine's son. It's how that game ends and it's like... What? Is that... It hurt me talking shit about it. Well, Phantasmagoria, there's an old game. Phantasmagoria was in the era of multimedia games where this game came on seven CDs and it was basically just a terrible, like, adventure game with actors, like B-movie actors, made by the same people who made Dragon Quest or not Dragon Quest, King's Quest. Yeah. But the end was, oh, there's actually a demon and it, like, comes out of the ground and there's this big fight scene where you fight the demon. And then the end and then it plays a really bad movie soundtrack as you walk away from the credits and it was just... I can't stand when they sort of, like, flip it at the end. It's like suddenly big combat because it kind of, in some ways, just robs all the anticipations of, like, Orin, like, oh, I don't know what this thing is. It's after me. Oh, it's a monster and I have to deplete its speed points and then it'll go away. Yeah. So to get back to Chris's original question, the part that I like the most is the stuff where I don't understand what it's all doing. Yeah. So it's like, if I don't understand whatever the thing is, as soon as you show me the bad guy, I can make fun of the bad guy so the bad guy's not so scary anymore. Right. So I'm like, what are you, a dumb face? It makes me feel super brave. But in Until Dawn, there's, like, the first, like, half of that game, and I don't spoil anything, but what you think is the bad guy is, like, flipped on its head and then you're introduced to this different bad guy. And figuring that out is really fun. I think that's a really good example of something that kind of flips on its end because you have no idea what's going on for a long chunk of that game in a way that makes you kind of have to evolve with that in terms of gameplay and decisions that you make. So I think that's really well thought out of it. Did any of you play Oxen 3? Yes. I love that one really good. Which was about it for the rest of the panel? Yes. Yes. There's, like, I'm trying to thread this, like, I mean, I'm moderating capacity, but I haven't. But Oxen 3, though. No, we have to talk about Oxen 3. So it's an indie game, but it's like an adventure game. It's really pretty. And the art is very, like, it's beautiful. It's very simple to assume. It's very cartoony. The music is sort of like, like 80s, I don't want to say horror sense, but it's very sense-heavy. It's very, it's really, really good. And it's all dialogue-driven. So there's a lot of emphasis on characters, right? But to go back to something that you said, Alex, about VHS artifacts, which is a device in Oxen 3. Yeah, that's true. I haven't finished the game, but I've gone a little further than halfway through. Have you done the headland thing? Yes. That scared the shit out of me. There's so many parts. And like you described, I don't know what I'm up against. Yeah. I still have no idea what the threat is. Yeah. What its shape is, what it wants. And I'm so afraid of it. Yeah. In a really impressive way, even after the end of Oxen 3, you're still asking those kinds of questions. Yeah. So it gives you closure, but you can only finish it. That's still like, what is that? Well, like the game makes you do things. That you're like, oh, this is a thing that is helping. But wait, am I actually making it worse instead? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it totally tricks you in a really cool way as well. Yeah, yeah. It's great. I don't know if I'm classifying that as horror. I think it is. It's scary. But it's Twilight Zone if that's a horror. Yeah. I've played so many horror games that I've started to discern flavors out of them. So there's games that are terrifying, which is the Demon and the Jack in the Box thing. Like a big slavery monster stomps after you. That's terrifying. You're scared. A game like Oxen 3 is more spooky. It's like the atmosphere of the unknown. You're like kind of off balance. And there's other games like Rule of Rose, which is really disturbing. It's just like the people are the scary part of that game. Just like... Man, is the real monster. Did anyone play Everybody's Gone to the Rapture? I did, yes. But whatever reason, I found that really creepy. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is just a game where you walk or run, which I found out very late through playing it. Unfortunately, you walk around this completely empty town and you come across these things that let you sort of replay scenes, but everyone's gone and kind of trying to figure out where they went. But for whatever reason, being in a town that has absolutely no unit is really eerie, even though there's no parent threat and there's never any indication that anything's going to hurt you. It's just super creepy. Yeah, it was always tense and I don't really know why. So I saw a bunch of people online. Gone Home is just not a horror game, but people who didn't read a lot about Gone Home and played it blind, as soon as they're walking around by themselves in a house for a while, a lot of them thought it was a horror game and were really unnerved and afraid and it took a while for them to realize that nothing was going to jump out and get them, except feelings. I don't know what I was afraid of. I think someone should do a mod for that game that adds one random jump scare. Not a mod of virus. Playlist is great and it's pretty trash in the end. The thing that I've read about that I was going to bring up, too, is that people who traditionally don't play games, played Gone Home the way it's exploring or reading about these people, but people who were familiar with games, like the fact that it's an empty house on a lead, it's the cadence of a horror game. That's the difference in that cycle between dread and expectation or anticipation. Dread is, I'm unnerved because music and sound cues and whatever, but expectation is in one of those adventure survival horror games where you turn the corner and you see a long hallway with lockers and one of the lockers is closed. Bring a damn hallway and dead space in life. It has all the horror game setups with none of the payoffs, which just makes you more and more and more nervous. It's like, where's the other shoe going to drop in? I can't deal with this. I mean, anticipation I think is really a horror mechanic in any kind of horror. Especially when you then use it to, like in Resident Evil, while that's really not a horror game, it just has a lot of genre horror trappings, there's a few times where you walk past a window and nothing happens. You expect dogs to jump through, but nothing happens. And then stuff happens and like 10 minutes later, you walk past the same window and then it happens. Yeah. Do you feel like, speaking of, do you feel like jump scares are cheap or effective? Both. Because I, well here's the thing, I don't have a very good startle response like, and so it does not work on me. Did you play Five Nights at Freddy's like even that one? No, no, I didn't play that one yet. So it does, I have this like hour long video essay I did a while ago on Five Nights at Freddy's and like the mechanics of the game and why it scares people the way it does. But the gist of it is that the game, like it's a very technical game, like open the door, close the door, account the stuff. So it forces you to pay attention real hard. So you keep like leaning in closer and closer to the monitor. So it's almost like the clown's like backing you closer and then he gets you. So the more you concentrate, the more invested you are, the blinders keep coming in and then the game jump scares you. Well, the thing about Five Nights at Freddy's is there's one jump scare, you know it's coming and you just have to try and avoid it, which is unbelievably stressful and why I can't play those games. I played the first one, I was like, this is great, I love it, I'm glad it exists, I never want to play these ever again as long as I live. But that is why the jump scare is, I think that's a good one because a lot of games like Resident Evil's a jump scare happens to, oh my God, jump scare in the middle of the game to remind you it's a horror game. Five Nights at Freddy's it ends the game. It's almost the reward, it's like being in the haunted house. You kind of want the jump scare because it releases the tension. It's the only way out of the game other than feeding it. So it's more like the game's blinders put someone who wouldn't normally be scared in a haunted house in the situation where your body forgets that you're an adult who knows that these things aren't real and then it jump scares you. Maybe now I have to play it and see if it will ping me there. It's worth playing. Yeah. Just don't read about it, like don't try to be good at it, like people who do like live stream like run throughs, like time attacks and it's not. Don't find any pro strats for fighting Freddy's. Why would you want to do that for a game like LG? Oh, forever. You know I think the effectiveness of, I don't know, successive jump scares varies depending on the game. So until then I'm totally going to use this. In a way that you have them all the time in similar circumstances and I'm just like, again? But I mean they work on me every time. I had fun, like I'm filming that on YouTube and picking their thumbnails and playing through it with my mum. I would pick thumbnails in every episode where our faces were like, and it was just every time it was so easy to find because they always weren't, but I was just getting tired. I was like constantly expecting them to be there and they weren't very good. It would just be like something fell over and I'd be like, one point there's like, they're in an abandoned house and this raccoon comes out of the cupboard. What was it eating? How did it get in there? The house has been empty for a really long time. Why is there a room in there? And it leaves and no one ever mentions it ever again. Like that's just, this is a complete waste of time. Like it scared me but it didn't add anything to the game. It just scared me and I felt like that was really cheap. But if it's in like, I think Five Nights of Freddy's is the perfect example of how to use them right. Yeah, I think the idea is to use them as sparingly. Yeah. And Five Nights of Freddy's uses it extremely sparingly because there's one in the whole game. Yeah. It's a different one sometimes, but you know it's just use it every once in a while and keep people waiting and then like, ah, no. Well it's also very cleverly. Like you talked about how when you know the mechanics you figure them out, like you play a game you make a mental model of the game like a heuristic in your head. When you figure out the model it's hard to be afraid of it anymore. Yeah. Five Nights of Freddy's, it's a very simple set of heuristics that make the game work, but it doesn't tell you that. So you don't really know how the game actually works. The game doesn't tell you, I won't really spoil this stuff, but like there's things you can do that avoid jump scares. Only because you don't understand how it's really working. If you do it wrong, they're in the room with you already and it's too late. Like at one point you go to click on the button to close the door and it doesn't work anymore and you don't know why. You're like, keep clicking on the button. Like wait, why isn't the button working? And you're kind of weird and out about it. And then you have to keep playing the game and then you're already dead at that point. It's going to get you. It's just a matter of when. And the when is triggered by an action you do or it's random so you can't figure it out. Well, that's just mean. Yeah. Well, throwing a player off balance is really effective for keeping the model in mind. It's a form of disempowerment. It's like you can't effectively wield your skill to avoid these things happening to you. Although that's a tough line to try because you're going to end up disfrustrating the player. You also have to make them think that they could figure it out or that they have figured it out and then remind them that they haven't. Which again, total opposite of Silent Hill PT. You get to the end and it's like, by the way, walk 10 paces. Yeah. What? Now this is by walk 10 paces. A baby loss. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Speed it. It's the little achievement that pops up. I think Five Nights at Freddy's uses jump scares as a punishment for dying. Silent Hill PT kind of does the same except for the few moments when she's in a window or she's in a hallway. I think that is a pretty big use. If it's your punishment for doing something wrong is being scared, I think that's cool. Well, it's sinister though because you start conditioning you. It's like training your body. Think about that. Five Nights at Freddy's. When I was playing it a lot to do that video, I had to figure out all the mechanics, like really mess with it. And I was playing all four of the games. And it got to the point to where I knew it was coming and I was paralyzed. I would start to react before it happened because my brain was trained that the action I just did when I pulled the mouse down is going to make a jump scare appear. There's nothing I can do to stop it. One time when I was playing on the phone where I expected to jump scare so I just looked to follow the screen. It's going to come up. There it is. And then there was one time where I actually didn't react. So I was looking kind of at the floor and I could still see it in my peripherals and I was like, yeah! I didn't do anything to me. There was a moment in Five Nights where there was a timer on one of the jump scares where you hear footsteps and then it gets you. But okay, like one in ten times the footsteps will happen and then the jump scare won't happen for like 30 more seconds. So I have a video of myself literally being like, did the game crack? And then it got. I was looking down like I'm not going to get jump scared and it like tricked me into looking back up and got me. I had that same experience playing with layers of fear which is, it's like this idiot out of nowhere. You're wandering around basically a nightmare of like this painter and there is some weird creepy stuff going on and there's a nightmare sequence where like the room is spinning and there's all these like things and you're like, ah! It goes on and on and on. And then it's over and you're like, okay, there's the release. And you go up in the door and there's a baby head the size of like God. Oh yeah. And the replay I am talking about like I get to this part and then I start answering the question in the chat. It's like this game doesn't use jump scares off and door swings open and I scream so loud like the mic blows out and like I whip my headphones off. Did you place Silent Hill 4 which was the malign? Like a lot of people do like this. It was. I like that game. The room. The room, yeah. I like that game but it has so many problems. What is it? Is it horror? Is it genre horror? Is it just survival horror? You know, all those subgenres like what kind of horror is that game? It's like, I heard that one of the problems with that game was that it was a different game that they were like, let's make it Silent Hill now. It was, yeah. And I don't have enough. I don't have enough. It is my microphone. I'm sorry. It's been solved. Now I know when I can use it against the audience. I don't, I didn't have enough pledged enough fealty to what Silent Hill is to have been disappointed by it. So like I didn't play like all the first three and I'm like, what the hell's four? I played two, which I loved. And then four I really liked because of how it inverted like your apartment that you're trapped in is the safe space. And you can, it's really obvious you can save and see, but you gotta venture out into Silent Hill and it's a shitty time out there. But then your, but then your apartment starts getting haunted and now you hate going back there because you don't have a weapon in your apartment. It's so, like I, I got to the part where the fridge starts yelling and I was like, no, please. Please, no. No, not that. There's an old Atari game that does something about Night Stalker. It's also like an arcade game or whatever and in television, but it's a game like where you start and shoot stuff and there's scary monsters that are coming. You have to fight them. Scary game is a kid because you start in this really safe place. You can always run back in there if you're invincible. But after you get a few levels in, it starts decaying and then it's gone. And I turned the game off. I was like, five. Oh man. I'm gonna turn that off. Did you guys play Eternal Darkness? I liked it. It's a horror genre game but it's not really a horror game. It wasn't scary except as a story and the insanity things were fun. They weren't scary so much. It's really interesting in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, I think they were scary but that's fair. I feel like I approach horror games where I'm like, like my reaction to something as scary idea is like, oh, not like, oh, I'm chilled. I have to leave now. But like, I had read, because I liked it a lot and I loved the Sanity Effects stuff there. And I had read a fact about it that's listed them there where they tried to be definitive about it. And one of them which I never encountered and might have even been invented was that one of the main characters like you'd be going down a hallway and just randomly one of the main characters in the extreme foreground like Superbos on top of the game their head would rise up and they'd go, and they'd wink at you and then go back down and I was so terrified that that would happen because I'm questioning, it's not like, it would have been one thing if a face came up and yelled at me and I would think it would have angered me. I'm like, that's cheap. But now I'm questioning what that behavior is. Like why did it wink at me? Yeah. I only played a little bit of Eternal Darkness but the impression I got from its reputation is that it attacks the player along sort of a meta axis where it's just like, it's trying to, you know, spook you directly. It's like, oh, why is it deleting my save files? Oh my God, when that happens. Are you going crazy or is my character going crazy? Or like they try to simulate the mute or like the volume of it and they take your sound away and stuff like that. There were very interesting effects and I like that it's the type of horror where it's not like, you know, some of them where like you walk in and you blow up and you're dead. But some of them are like, your character just just getting very small and then you just just very big tears where you're questioning why is this happening? Well, that's a genre of horror. Now there's a lot of, like Japanese horror uses this a lot and there's a show it's free on like a crunchy roll. You can just watch it called Yummy Shibae. It's just all short horror fiction like five minute episodes but the gist of all of them is you're an adult and something's a little bit weird like that happens and you're rationalizing to yourself that there's no way that could have actually happened and that is why it gets you. Like it keeps getting increasingly dire and the characters are reacting the way we all would. Like you open a copier and you see a face and it's screaming at you and then it's gone. You're not going to say, well, I guess there's ghosts and push that out the window and call the police. You're going to say, that was my imagination and turn your back on it. Or maybe back out of the room because you're a little cautious. I know that actually reminds me of it. It's not a video of you but it's a movie. I think it's called The Troublesome Man or The Bothersome Man. It's real scary and in a really subtle way because like this guy shows up in this town and everything's perfect. Like they give him a job and an apartment and all this stuff. He's like, talking about his business and this is really nice. And then just very gradually he starts to realize that things are messed up and it starts with little things well actually big things like he glances out his window and there's a dude who's like jumped off a balcony and is like gored on these like railing spikes and there's some dude who's sort of like cleaning it up like he doesn't care. It's a living. He starts to realize that he can't feel things normally and nobody else can. Like he meets this guy in a bar who's just like in the next stall and he's like there's something wrong with the liquor here. I drink a drink and drink and he'll feel anything. Like I don't get drunk. I don't feel anything. And it's just like he keeps going he keeps going. It's really good. I love that kind of stuff. Which video games do that more often actually? I do. Silent Hill does a lot. Yeah. That's one of the few franchises that I can pinpoint. It's like it progressively gets creepier and pretty much all of them. Kentucky Group Zero had a little bit of that. Like it got creepier as you went further in. Like little trappings of horror and like little like you're wondering what the... Does the thief games kind of did as well? The original thief games were so creepy. Fatal of the frame. Oh Fatal of the frame. Oh man. You want to talk about the opposite of a jump scare. Fatal of the frame is a game where there's ghosts. I feel like they still call them jump scares. Well they do jump scares. Like you know in the most recent one or maybe the one before that where there's like a broom and there's a dressmaker's doll and when you raise your reticle its head just pivots. Yeah. And it's just subtle enough that you're like did I see that or am I going nuts? Yeah it was this one by the most recent thief game which was you know okay you're in an asylum and you walk into like this lunch room kind of thing and there's all of these mannequins on a stage who are probably from certain ways and you look and then you see them there but then if you turn around they're all posed differently and then you walk out. That's it. That's what happens. Nothing in that room attacks you. The mannequins just move and I was like I'm out. They move. It's one of the things it's like is almost overused but I still really love it. Just anytime I see mannequins I'm like I'm about to have a just like that. I think I have a I'm going to stuff trying to get up from the exposed wire. I think that's going to be really intelligent. You played um what was the most recent Batman? Arkham Knight. Was it? Yeah it was Arkham Knight. Did you notice those effects there? Like there are billboards that when you look at them when you glance at them like instead it's the Joker's face it's the wire. That's cool. But it's not like it's like an ad for a car and like a smiling guy in there and then it's not like now it's the Joker's head. It's like now the man in it is the Joker. That's really that's clever. And then when I first saw one I you know I just looked away and went back and I did it a couple of times to see if it would trigger and it did. That's very good. I would not have noticed otherwise. It's such a subtle touch. That game wasn't fantastic but the whole because that's more about that's like a literary trope of his obsession with the Joker and like the feedback loop Yeah. Yeah. Lit crit coming in here. Actually of all things I saw a lot of cosplayers undertale you know super popular recent game it has there's parts of the game that do that like I'm not not spoiling anything about the game but there's a very sinister story in the game like it is a dark serious really sad guy I cried like a lot I couldn't tell you it's only like 6 hours longer. Yeah. Imagine I haven't beat it either but I'm like I need to go back to this when I have enough spoons to tackle that task It's just unfortunately doesn't look good it really doesn't look like an inviting game everyone says to play it but based on the way it looks something I don't really have interest in it Everyone I know they're like oh it's just some JRPG right I don't want to grind for 40 hours Yeah. But it does So it's the sinister like there's a sinister thing and you see like a little flower appear somewhere and you're like was that a glitch and you think it's just like this 8-bit glitch that's happening and then you start to realize what's going on and then the game's really creepy and then at the end of the game I'm not going to spoil anything no worry there's a horror scene where it gets really creepy and it does a lot of those horror tropes in an 8-bit like really simple 16-bit looking simple game you're in a bathroom and you know there's a thing you need to get like the curtains are closed and there's like a thing you can't see what it is but it's moving back and forth real slowly making this like noise and if you as you walk closer to it your character moves slower and slower and it starts moving faster and faster like what boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop and you have to you have to go up there if you want to get the key I mean you can always lie down and stop breathing yeah that's an option you could just start living and see the way from it where there's a lie down and crying until you pass out it's like boop goodnight now play Undertale you want that existential literary like there's a horror story that happened in this game that game is really good it's for the for the panel myself included so like one of the things is this revisiting of these types of like VHS artifacts 8-bit stuff that looks like 8-bit and then these the glitches are used in a certain way right do you think that these things will remain frightening or are they are these developers they're just playing with things that we remember from our childhood like there will come a time when you know somebody playing would be like why are there lines on this like why is it like Undertale like why is it so blocky I don't play this you know I don't know it's weird to try and predict how these sort of what are essentially artifacts at this point are going to go further like you know the icon for a foam your foam and it's like a Bakelite receiver and that's just the icon for a foam but it's like nobody uses Bakelite receivers anymore or clockwise like what's a clockwise name it's a save symbol like I saw it was like a tweeter something somebody was pulling up a floppy disk the capture was like while someone printed out the save button of course that or am I I think there's some things that were remain scary but a good example is like the first Doom when I played that I was really scared I don't think that's scary now I feel like playing that now it's I don't know kid it doesn't have any effect on me really at all it's just like shoot stuff yay but I think that that has I think that's probably because of the graphics more than anything and then if Undertale's creepy it's creepy in a tone way which I think is something that will last for a very long time story telling is the scary part but the artifacts I think might hang around too because that all it comes out of creepypasta which that's a young man's game the creepypasta world like that's younger than me and the fact that creepypasta 8-bit stuff is popular among people who were born long after Final Fantasy 6 and 7 came out I feel like those artifacts are going to continue to be brought forward into the future I wonder if it's just like the old dusty tone forbidden knowledge only transplanted to a more contemporary setting it's just like the VHS said that you watch it and then you die a week later it's the same kind of thing it's like this old format thing that has forbidden evil or something the sonic.exe file that you run and then sonic comes into your room and kills you this sort of what's happening yeah well that's what I mean is like will these things still be useful like static which we remember as a scary thing to look at there's no static anymore it's just a blue screen that says line you know in whatever way like they took it away from us just make you really sad we'll be missed we do have garbled screens because video cards are kind of yeah like video cards are super glitchy now just because you know we're pushing them so hard so you get like those weird visual artifacting like the textures are all wrong that's going to keep happening for another couple of decades maybe the next part in the commode we'll have an NPC that just like turns into spaghetti and like crab walks after you that's actually I want to see more stuff use that because like where you see like it's like yeah I'm so hungry you guys you know like those like Skyrim and Fallout 3 glitches where one character's like see you later and then he just starts to spiral into the sky but it's never been like used as a device yeah I mentioned a game like that that was engineered like it looked like a normal game but then the game itself just starts to fall apart and maybe the NPCs like are vaguely aware of it like we are dying yeah that would be great OX is pretty kind of does a good job of that where you walk into like a certain area and then you keep walking and then it'll just loop you back to the stop and then you'll do it again and you'll be like it's meant to be happening the first few times it's happened so like I don't understand why people would bring me back and it's like effective because you don't realize what's happening it's similar to like that man out in the silent which I didn't particularly find scary had cool moments with the first time you encounter the Scarecrow it's like that man starts coughing you can't use detective mode you walk up to Commissioner Gordon who's on the floor I think it's Commissioner Gordon and he's like dead or something and then you try and walk into this room and it takes you back into the same room and you're like oh my god and there's like another part where it makes it look like the game's broken I think it's something to do with poison ivy and the screen just kind of like greens out or something and it uses things that you would identify as like oh the game's not working why could I use detective mode right now this doesn't make sense or why is the screen green I do like geometry based scares which Layers of Fear uses to great effect and then you turn around and the door's gone and you're like oh that's bad there was an excellent scare which is one of my favorites from a weird game it was like a Half-Life 2 mod called Underhell and it was like fear but a mod and there was one part that I really loved where you're in a sort of a nightmare and sequence-ish and there's this long dark corridor and you walk to the end and it's a dead end so you walk back and it's also a dead end and then you walk back again and you gradually become aware that the corridor is getting shorter until you're in a cubicle and then darkness and then the thing happens and then it says thank you for playing Underhell until I'm locked there's a very there's a very similar mod if you all probably own Half-Life 1 but it's called Elevator's Source and it's just you and a bunch of friends you have to play a multiplayer you're just in an elevator you get into it and it goes down it stops at places and it's funny at first like oh it's Jurassic Park and there's dinosaurs out there but then at one point a character gets on the elevator with you and just stands there and then you just stand there at first and the game goes on for a little bit and then at one point the lights go out and then it comes back on and there's just a skeleton laying on the floor it was funny like 10 seconds after it happened but it was frightening when it immediately happened because it was that horror trope where you look at something like the door and you look away and you look back and it's different and our brains are keyed to say something's up when that happens actually then you did a good job of that too that same level the only one that's creepy and probably the only good level in the entire game is the asylum and it's a part of the end of that level where you're trying to get out of it and if you walk forward you'll end up having a park walked and when you turn around these things that were like far away before are facing you so it's like it forces you to turn around a lot and every single time you do it's kind of like The Weeping Angels from Doctor Group you know that every single time they'll be standing right there and after that I also did that with the part where you're as a joker and you're shooting a statue of Batman's like I tried really hard to to get out of that part you have to have Batman catch you and I tried so hard not to let that happen like half an hour but you get out of the room sit down but anything that tricks you into looking behind I think it's that sense of dread that makes that really effective and also more effective than just a random jumpscare because you're anticipating it if you know that something is going to be behind you or if you know that I mean that's why Slenderman is so scary it's like you could be anywhere at any time where he's behind you right now and then the fact that you're in a critical building where you're like he's going to be around all these coins and the fact that you're the one you have to turn around to look at it to make it happen when you do the action that causes that scary your brain decides that it was your fault that is part of human psychology that's the advantage of video games over other forms of media is that you become the character that all this stuff is happening to so your experience is in some ways unique and you're just like and then a thing happened to me not this poor bastard I'm reading about so I thought that I hated horror games for a really long time and then I started reviewing games so I had to play a lot of them and for ones that were particularly scary I had a lot of jumpscares and I just sprinted everywhere so my theory was like well if I'm moving really fast then nothing can jump out of me so I was running through everything that I possibly could which actually worked because I think a lot of what makes things scary is you approaching it slowly because you're feeling cautious you try and take that away and it's not half as scary when you're playing Alien Isolation the start of that game was terrifying and the end of that game is complete trash but it was like I tried playing it with the music off at one point and that stopped it from being scary completely I mean it also meant that I would die because I couldn't anticipate when the end of the game but it wasn't scary even in the slightest without sound it was just nothing because you know we're talking about like horror game and then genre horror stuff like the accoutrement of horror those are a big part of horror those cause those feelings of dread like the light motif of Jason when he's coming in the woods and those kinds of things they close up an actual sad ah it came out really well I have practice you know what I've written now a performance of classic themes what I'm talking about with the sound how important do we think it is important I think because we're not at the level where VR is like 100% I was playing the kitchen the kitchen? No I feel like so VR is an entire other thing where like everything everything I'm talking about now I'm like I don't start all so none of this will fright me I feel like I don't know how I will be able to play any VR horror game even stuff that looks bad VR games do look fairly bad it's still scary because you can't separate yourself from it in any way the scariest VR game I played it was a demo I got a few packs ago it's a guillotine simulator and all it is is you're someone like people walk you up and put you down and you're looking around and then the guillotine happens I've done that and in the demo they guided me and they literally like oh I guess mine does it too they're grabbing by their arms so it's tactile because they know how the game goes and they put me on a chair like this and I feel that it's awful people could not take it before we leave the topic of sound design did anybody play Dark Echo? no I think that game would really emphasize how important sound design is because there's almost no graphics it's top down game and the only display you get is sort of like radians coming at it from noises you make that reflect off of surfaces oh that game and it shows you detect your surroundings and threats within them entirely by sound so you can clap and it sends out a huge pain that echo locates off everything your footsteps make similar noises and then you start encountering enemies that can hear you so you have to find your way by making noise but not so much noise that they find you and it's all like really good atmospheric things like you can see dripping water sort of manifests as these little blue radians coming out and you can sometimes see things like flies like little black ones it's really good and cheap I mean yeah I think the only reason alien isolation is scary is because of sound the sound causes dread but then like sound and whole PT I could talk about this game but the reason that you know that there's a threat there is because of sound so my response to that was never to be scared but to stand still so it's like the sound in that isn't particularly scary it's all warning so I feel like different games use it really really differently well like Five Nights at Freddy's I pulled all the tracks out for that video I did and had all the different soundtracks and things and I did some spectral analysis but you know the game is really simple it's one screen you can't ever move you're just sitting in a room the entire game so the soundscape like one of the tracks is this ambient sort of like background noise that the phase is moving around like this the whole time with really wide stereo separation it makes you feel like you're in this huge huge building but then there's a fan in the room with you and it's making noise and it is center channel right in front of you because it never changes at any point in the whole game so you have this sound there's like this constant safe sound that's very close to you and never moves and you have this like amorphous nothing out there that you can never see except through the cameras when the monsters move they kind of move like stereo sound or whatever but then when the power goes out like you mess up the fan going away is the most terrifying thing that happens in that game because that sound like you don't even notice it's there until it's not there anymore and then your brain makes out. Yeah. It says an argument that sounded like it's super critical like provided that you understand that it is because I can see a lesser developer and they're like yeah in that fan room and you know a small room I'll make a review or be a forwarder. See me as a developer I think it's way cheaper to do sound really well so you can buy a lot with not a lot of budget to make cool stuff happen in a game like if you wanted to make that whole building as a 3D walk around game that's like three more people on your team now. Yeah. Yeah. I think I remember this first part part in the first fire shop where I think you've fallen someone and all the lights just go out and I had to move like I know that I had to like look for whoever that was and I was like well it's pitch black and I'm not playing this anymore and I actually just walked away for quite some time I was like no no no it's like anything that takes away your orientation which I guess sound can do really well makes things terrifying it's super unsettling. So the challenge then for a game where like in Bioshock you're like well I have to keep going like I'm going to have to do this but in PT where it's like the cue lets you know that something is ahead and you stop but now you have to decide whether or not you want to see it and as the player you may be like that's getting too intense like rather than being forced to proceed you have to decide whether or not you want to continue and witness it but it's still continue or stop playing the game whether it be choosing not to continue is a choice in the game that has other consequences like a different route like a different ending or conclusion which that costs a lot of money to make usually for a good game it would be great though you know you think it's kind of the least resistance the game is like a Netflix ask like are you still there actually so it's putting up hint cues like walk in there see what's in there it's like it's like the baby needs help do you hate movies? in Far Cry 4 you can finish it in like 20 minutes by just hanging out in the room when you ask you to oh I did the right thing do you think that do you think that well I'll phrase it this way I think we're fortunate to live in a time this kind of came up at the beginning when we can explore a lot more experimental types of games whereas you mentioned what was one of the games because the one that's coming to mind is Undying, did you ever play Club Barker's Undying? I did, it ran really badly under emulation and it was cool I was like I've been in the 90s this was amazing I liked it a lot the reveal was so shitty at the end but like I had this other idea of what Undying was about and the scenes and all those stuff fitting my model and I was like this is amazing and then I got to the end and I was completely wrong and my idea was so much more scary but at the end you have to fight a big monster there's a lot of combat but here's the thing back then I feel like they were making games and like well there has to be combat nobody's going to play a game where you have to walk around but now we live one guess that is a game too, we can do that this leads me into something that I was really hoping to talk about which is like how much gameplay you want and what kind of gameplay you want to put in a game and I actually have the opinion that there's sometimes like too much and they're sort of obligated to that like you know our games are sort of expected to be video games first or second so you have lots of combat or lots of puzzles and shout out to the women's yeah Richard Garfield gave us a lexicon to solve that though the thing is that like those obligations sometimes they work other times they just generate frustration and frustration will kill horror atmosphere like that like if you get mad at the game you can't be scared of it did you say that you had played Soma because this came up I really really liked Soma and that was a game definitely more on the sort of like disturbing existential horrors and the spectrum yeah there are some monster stuff I really want to play it it's real good it makes you super uncomfortable yeah the ideas are great and you get very uncomfortable and it's stuff that like follows you out of what it means to be a person what's like an example of something that's particularly creepy in that game is it spoilers oh wow something about you just walking through a room there's just dead bodies everywhere and you have to inspect them well this is decapitated people it's fun oh yeah there's one later so how about this one there's a lot of unsettling philosophical concepts in the game but one of the characters that most afraid to go up against is the but it looks like it's a guy in a diving home it's like a nude man who's got this weird organic diving home and looking object on his head huh? he can teleport and he can teleport if you look at him otherwise he walks around and I like that if I stare at my shoes I'm fine if he sees you it's still like if you get too close it's a problem but the issue I have with that is that I did get frustrated and ultimately I thought that the act of taking away my ability to look at him was a good way to keep him mysterious like forbidding me from actually observing and Nizia did the same thing you can't look at the monsters you gotta look away from them but in Soma it's got to the point where the way I believe that he worked was that you know if he walks at a certain speed and then when he sees you he would jump like he'd lose like and I believe that he was at a running speed but it was still weird I'm only able to see him when he gets to this position or this position but I think he can just teleport to you and I had been in that same little closed space with him for like I don't know I had died like six, seven times and all the mystery was gone I'm like let me just get back in that's why Alien Isolation.bad is like at the start the alien was super mysterious you didn't know how it worked and then it was because of that game I feel like they played a really good Cisale game and then they dragged it out and made it super long but by doing that you automatically figured out how it worked and how it would get you and exactly how to manipulate that where it just like completely got rid of everything that was scary by making the alien walk on a track okay well I'll just wait for it to go around that corner and then I will fall and you're like that's not scary at all and then we go like any time you smash your head over a brick wall or get into a routine it gets boring or frustrating and then you're just like not scared and I was like he could kill us like okay we gotta do this part again I forgot about the other frustrating thing about that Soma enemy and I think they all have a sort of shared like don't really look at them that one in particular it's a great idea and it's a game that's definitely worth playing and I really do enjoy it but the other thing that it does is that if you're not allowed to look at it you are looking at the wall or the floor and the textures aren't super cool and I've literally got to the point where I was like I've been looking at this kind of chunky wall texture for 20 minutes and that was what is frustrating me You know what, might be really good I heard about this wall and I kind of wish I'd heard about it before I played it all it does is de-aggrose all the monsters they're still there they're still creepy and weird but they don't try to kill you and in some ways it sort of I think it's intended to change it where it's just like these are like weird creepy haunted things like you don't know what they want they have this sort of familiarity it's like they're looking at you they think they should be doing something but they want it and you're like the splashes in Byershock went into it way cooler if that were a thing like if they wanted to attack you but they didn't just follow you around they keep chasing you for someone to make a horror game where it's zombies but they're not trying to eat you they're just really sick and sad and upset and sort of coming after you but they're coming after you because they need something because they have this like faint memory of like this human connection but they don't remember it and they get like frustrated that gets under my skin a lot more than a lot more than the assault stuff not that I don't enjoy zombie games but like a friend in college said to me and he said so you go into a I don't know a building that used to be a restaurant but everybody like a chef died you see the ghost there it's the ghost of the chef he's standing over the old store where it was and he's still doing the same thing there's no food, there's nothing there he's just still doing the same thing what's scarier that he doesn't break from it or that he sees you and attacks you and I said I think just doing it over that is going to be what happens to me and where I draw that line is that if he if I'm in a house and there's a ghost and it looks at me and it disappears I don't have a clear line of action for what I need to do it's a ghost attacks me and I sell the house like I know what I have to do you know and I have to do it right away this is another fantasy of mine is like I want to play a ghost game where like it's mysterious and you're not sure what their intent is and it ends up like you help them move on eventually but like some are you know like trying to kind of trying to do that which one? yeah it was kind of like a movie where you hit buttons to make the game progress yeah absolutely the interaction sounds like you're a ghost you can't just interact with anything but it's like you helping like missing a limb sort of get out and they're all creepy they're just dead and they help you be in more faces that's almost that so maybe in a different game I'm super sick to death of like permanent aggro monsters it's just like I have one way to interact with you it's like I'd like them to behave more unpredictably in a way that you're like I'm not sure what this thing was well you all sort of address this everyone basically said something to the effect of sometimes these horror games get too caught up in being a game and that's where the whole Richard Garver like he uses the term ortho games to talk about like competitive that kind of game and for game designers we can talk about other kinds of games instead of using that super overloaded word game because that's why like gone home everyone said oh it's not a game and yes it's a game it is a game did you play it with a keyboard and a mouse? did you buy it on steam? because there's no HUD though so like Richard Garver is a game ortho game to refer to like those competitive games so I've seen more people using idio game to mean like a personal experience game like a game where you have chart a course through the game and like you have an experience as a result of it that's unique to you or in some way personal so then we can avoid the guy who says oh well that's not a game or it's like I just said it's just a movie it's not actually a game you're just hitting buttons to make the movie happen that's the only thing that really haunts me about those discussions like it's not a game it's like okay well what is it it's not a monkey and they never have an answer for what it is he's right it's not a monkey damn or they'll suggest something that's like a horrendous mouthful it's like it's an interactive art experience it's like no one's going to call it that you just don't know it happens you know well just tell me the ESA is not the ESA is not the video game whatever it's the like or entertainment software association this is all entertainment software that's cool or ESOP for short that's what the kids call it it's game control hey kids do you want some ESA yeah can you win a white child how old are you at the time I feel like 40 seconds left we're at time I guess we're out good bye thank you very much everybody for attending do we have enough time for everyone to say what their products are where we can find you so I have little cards here if you don't watch that video essay I talked about it's an hour of me like digging into the deep of Five Nights at Freddy's I got a QR code here and I have a panel tomorrow at one in the same room on writing game rules congratulations I feel like I'm an adult now other URLs anybody twitch.tv slash loading ready run I really hope I got that right I don't even really like I don't know what I'm saying you're branding I know one of those and Friday you can get some PST but let's know with me and some other poor shlug what is your thing give me your thing again talk to me I'm sorry I talked over the one thing you said what is that is that some kind of video game video game thank you everybody