Why Do Horror Games Stop Being Scary?

I am a piece of volcanic rock, and this game gave me nightmares

1:05 Fun Fact: The backrooms isnt really a recent concept and its quite different from what it used to be. The original concept of the backrooms was just the rooms, with no monsters, and no variations, just endless rooms, which is more scary if you ask me.

>that callisto protocol section Oh no no no no

I am a 10 foot wide piece of volcanic rock. I played this game and was absolutely shaken to my core. The horror is incredibly intense and when Chris Redfield punched the boulder I rolled back in my seat and quivered with fear. This is absolutely the scariest game I’ve ever played to this day, I see Chris in my Night terrors

The fact that Heisenberg calls Chris "that boulder punching asshole" and thus canonizing it is still hilarious to me.

I'd say the same shit about stealth series. Stealth and Horror franchises have a nasty habit of turning into a action series

Hearing Callisto Protocol at the end really made me sad after watching this entire video

Not a coincidence that a lot of small indie developers are capable of making great horror games. In Horror, often less is more.

'Why Do Horror Games Stop Being Scary?' One word: Familiarity. Humans fear the unknown, but once they get used to it it stops being unknown and thus stops being scary.

I think Subnautica still stays scary because of how they accidentally used the fear of the unknown, and how the game makes you underpowered to the leviathans, heck, even the smaller predators make you feel quite underpowered too.

Chris punching a boulder will be cemented in gaming history forever.

What makes something scary for me is awkwardness. Like a character acting weird and unsettling, staring at you in the eye and making extreme eye contact, saying something completely off topic that's creepy. Walking into a room and stuff in it is slightly off. Seeing a room of gore but In the center of the room it's completely clean. That to me is scary because you don't know why and your fearing something is off and something could happen. It causes you to hightdend your senses because your alerted by said awkwardness.

Something I find incredibly scary is inhuman movements coming from very humanoid enemies/monsters

Horror creators tend to forget that subtlety can be terrifying. Making things just a little bit off is so unsettling. That glimpse from the corner of your eye that you're not quite sure what you saw, or someone's movements being a touch unnatural, or walking through a room a second time and things have changed enough to be noticeable but just a little so you're second guessing what you saw. These are the things that can have a longer impact even after the person is done playing. You're still double checking what might be casting that shadow in the corner of your room.

This reminds of something I heard from, of all people, Shishiro Botan of Hololive: she once said that she isn’t scared of horror games because she knows that they were made with the intention to scare. On the other hand, something like a surprise Creeper in Minecraft does genuinely scare her because it is something she was not expecting.

The forest at first was super scary but a few hours into the game you kinda realize you can just take out the cannibals pretty easily, which kills the scare tbh

The dead space 2 intro got me because of the situation everyone else is in. You can visibly see other insane people standing there rapidly looking left or right or curled up into a ball in a corner while a monster stalks ever closer. They don't know what's going on, and they won't live long enough to EVER know what's going on.

My favourite part is when Leon tries to verbally convince the president to stop being a zombie

As it turns out when you're being constantly assaulted with things chasing after you and trying to scare you it becomes more of an annoyance than something to be scared of. That's why I love soma, there's just as many quiet moments of exploration where there's a fear that something could be waiting aswell as moments that something is there but not constantly hounding you.

I've noticed that the indie horror games are way scarier than the big famous company's horror games because they are very passionate about creating the horror games. great video btw!! I loved it!