Incredible Fear

[davidn]

Is it just me, or is this scene from Incredible Games like something out of a nightmare? I'm serious - it might be clearly meant to be fun there and the pursuer has a more pink, blobby visage than most extradimensional serial killers, but particularly when he appears the second time... when I think about it, there's something quite genuinely frightening about the idea of this horrific creature who isn't bound by any physical considerations and can appear at any time, even seventy floors up after getting away from him. It's like Jason Voorhees with googly eyes.

And his appearance isn't exactly nightmare retardant if you grew up with this ghastly apparition - indeed, the murderous grin and harsh distorted electronic voice might make it all the worse. The thing that most people say they were scared of from this programme was the Dark Knight (shown here just missing a golden opportunity to vaporize Keith Chegwin), but I know which is the clear winner.

I seem to have been developing a large surplus of nostalgia for a lot of different things recently (some of which you might think as better left in the past), so I'll post about those over the next while, unless I forget to.

Comments

[davidn]

Now that you mention it, I'm very surprised that nobody else seems to have drawn comparisons between Insane Cancer and Mister Blobby.

There are a number of things about 90s Britain that I have difficulty explaining, but this is definitely a big one.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

...

...

...I have no words. The thought of that thing chasing after me screaming a distorted "Blobby blobby blobby!!!" as it flails at me with its arms is going to haunt the edges of my nightmares for the rest of my life. I hope you're happy now.

If ever I learn programming properly, I'm going to make my own indie horror game, and that will be my John DeFoe. Don't get in any lifts any time soon...

D.F.

[davidn]

Well, I can only apologize :) It was one of the very few things that I personally thought would make Silent Hill more comical rather than more horrific, when I got the image in my head! The distorted slightly Dalek-like voice that can only repeat one word at various levels of pitch and intensity really doesn't help with the... uncanny non-human fearsomeness. Indeed, part of why I found the scene in my post so... not right was because of the idea of being stuck in a lift trying to get away from a Welder-like enemy that could appear wherever he wanted at any time.

Incidentally I've been wanting to make some sort of horror adventure as well as a revenge of sorts... though that isn't really a genre that I'm familiar with making. They seem to have huge viral appeal in getting other people to play them to see if they have the same effect as they did on you, or just to get some sympathy about them.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

If you do make a horror game, I'd be all up for that. :P I suppose the first thing would be to decide what sort of 'source' produces the horrific things in the game. Off the top of my head, I can think of:

- a blatantly supernatural force, like Silent Hill or the Chzo mythos. Variant subgenres include demons and the undead
- amoral science, like Resident Evil was initially (although it seems to have drifted away into nonsense as it's become more action-orientated)
- simple human cruelty (some slasher movies, also q.v. anything vs the Nazis, although they're used so frequently as bad guys, the horror element is often lost)
- alien (not necessarily invaders from space, but anything the human mind can't understand - q.v. a lot of Yume Nikki, for example). Crossovers possible with the supernatural (Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos) and science (AM from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream)
- psychological (depends on the person involved, but stuff like being trapped, falling, darkness, spiders, water and threat of drowning, body horror and so on)
- plants get organised No! Bad M. Night Shyamalan! Get out of here!

From there, you can work out some basic stuff like setting and plot, and techniques to draw players into it.

(In case you can't tell, I have a distinct taste for creepy games; my friend John got me into them a while back, and I've got a small library of them. Or at least, did have; the move to Linux has meant a lot of them fell by the wayside, and Wine doesn't seem to support a lot of indie stuff, sadly.)

D.F.

[davidn]

Let's see. How to say this so that other people won't understand it. One of the most terrible scenarios for me is to have something deadly presented as a game - two separate people who I've talked about other projects of mine with have mentioned the Saw films, and when it's possible to see something as a really twisted and harmful variation on something you enjoy, that's a... horrible thing to think about. At the same time, a lot of my own game-making comes from a love of making up... traps, or things to challenge people in a devious way. Everything is inter-related...

Harlan Ellison's short story also really got to me - perhaps not so much for the actual scenario as the way that it was written, taking such delight in the gruesomeness of his detail... but that's not a good thought, the idea of a godlike entity that can do anything, keeping his victims alive and hasn't run out of ideas over one hundred years. I should say there are very obvious ways of telling which works of fiction have influenced me the most :)