Is this game really a horror game?

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Just curious if anyone besides me doesn't find a lot of stuff in this game scary that is supposed to be. The shadow hands are pretty frightening but the crawling horror just looks like a tribble with eyes and the spiders are adorable when they do their threatening post like a cute fuzzy tarantula. :3

Plus, I feel bad for the shadow watcher. The one in the William Carter puzzles looked scary but the one that shows up around my campfire just looks lonely. I wonder if he just needs a friend.

Weird thing is that I scare much easier than most people and have a laundry list of irrational fears and need medical help to deal with anxiety yet this game is put in the horror genre and I guess I'm not really sure why - I find the darkness scary but I also find it scary on minecraft and that isn't a horror game. o_O

[ChezBorgar]

when the first time playing this, the sound of hounds made me sweat and pretty tense lol. even worse with deerclops. i think if you stretch it a bit you can say this is sorta horror with all the creepy sounds lol. its even more creepy when you are insane and its night. shadow creatures appear everywhere.

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Originally posted by ChronoAsdasd:

when the first time playing this, the sound of hounds made me sweat and pretty tense lol. even worse with deerclops. i think if you stretch it a bit you can say this is sorta horror with all the creepy sounds lol. its even more creepy when you are insane and its night. shadow creatures appear everywhere.

You could say that, I thought the hounds were pretty scary as well, but I've experienced feelings like that from games that aren't in the horror genre. Minecraft comes to mind considering you can go about your business and out of nowhere a generic horror sound will play that I've never figured out the meaning to. Supposedly it indicates an unexplored open space underground but that's never been proven. Not to mention skeletons in that game are really scary, and have you ever heard the sound an endermen makes when you stare at it?

Then again I don't play many horror games because of aforementioned lower threshold for excitement but I've watched someone play Amnesia and I can definitely see where that game is scary. It plays off the human psyche's natural fear of the unknown and uncertainty and further compounds our own apprehension about potential threats by making any real threat a seldom occurrence whereas with minecraft and don't starve, the hounds eventually reveal themselves and have a predictable pattern. Can't speak for deerclopse as I've only gotten to winter once in vanilla and died a day later.

Although, Lone Survivor is supposedly a horror game as well and it does a downright terrible job of being scary. It does an excellent job of being a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ but that isn't even the same thing. The weird supposedly zombie-like things you run into are scary maybe the first couple times you encounter them but pretty much everything in that game stops being frightening within 20 minutes and just starts being annoying which is...kind of how don't starve ends up being. Yeah the first shadow hand I ran into scared the hell out of me but after the 3rd time I couldn't help but see them like the floormaster on zelda whose description actually says it only grabs at things because it's lonely. (Wind waker's ffigure room.) After that...aside from wanting to toss it a smore it just became annoying.

Should mention aquaria is a pretty scary game as well - mostly because it's hard. It's not unfair, but trying to find a savepoint in a dungeon has terrified me more than once.

I guess it's also possible this could have been intended as a horror game though, like so many others that just don't do a very good job. I've seen my cousin play Dead Space which is officially named a horror game and didn't see how it was any more scary than fallout 3.

[Slimehunter]

I find it to be rather dark and creepy in some places but i wouldnt say i'ts a horror game. some parts did scare me like going insane, getting killed by something I couldn't see, and those shadow hands were unnerving as hell. (especially with the music box.) but I wasn't really that scared when playing. i think it was classified as horror because of the screecher.

[Retrolicious]

i tell ya the mod "the screecher" was pretty frightening to me. But what one considers scary depends on the age and experience i guess. Besides i get pretty nervous in normal DS when my avatar is on low life and gets hunted by spiders queens or such. So its maybe not scary after a while, but for me still pretty exciting. You know the fear of dying out of accident or stupidity ( dont take fights you cant wing )

[Navarre]

The whole world and backstory underlying the game is pretty spooky. Sure, running around with the beefalos is not scary. But when you stop and think about what's happening, it's pretty damn scary. Imagine if it was you in the game, stranded in a weird world where everything tries to kill you, and hearing the howls getting closer... Then you manage to finish the adventure mode and find out what's really going on, making it even worse.

It definitely has its place in horror games, even if playing it isn't horrifying per se. It's kinda like the Sleepy Hollow of games: no big monsters jumping off to rip your face with gore all over the place and cat scares galore, but pretty creepy all the same.

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Originally posted by Navarre:

The whole world and backstory underlying the game is pretty spooky. Sure, running around with the beefalos is not scary. But when you stop and think about what's happening, it's pretty damn scary. Imagine if it was you in the game, stranded in a weird world where everything tries to kill you, and hearing the howls getting closer... Then you manage to finish the adventure mode and find out what's really going on, making it even worse.

It definitely has its place in horror games, even if playing it isn't horrifying per se. It's kinda like the Sleepy Hollow of games: no big monsters jumping off to rip your face with gore all over the place and cat scares galore, but pretty creepy all the same.

I've seen other games that do this though, and they aren't really horror games. You could ask the same question about minecraft - who built the forts, what's with the nether and the end, why do endermen come out at night and steal my watermelons, etc. That isn't even accounting for what some mods add... (Hello Mystcraft, you dirty ♥♥♥♥♥.)

I guess it could have really just been that mod. I mean, it was an official mod, so maybe someone tagged the game with it because of that.

[Aro VII]

I don't find it particularly frightening except for when you have no way to add fuel to your fire with it half a second to going out with still a full segment of night to go and a sliver of health left with no touchstone found. I would say the game is horrifying under certain conditions, but other than that is just meant to make you insane before your character.

[deltaTom]

This game is more about it being tense whitch in turn can frighten you especialy the horror DLC and the screecher mod.

Cosidering this is a roguelike if you are nearly starving or nearly dead it gets very tense and frightening.

Personaly I don't find it very scary either. The only thing that makes me get worried are them ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 's!

[Navarre]

Originally posted by Kaze:

I've seen other games that do this though, and they aren't really horror games. You could ask the same question about minecraft - who built the forts, what's with the nether and the end, why do endermen come out at night and steal my watermelons, etc. That isn't even accounting for what some mods add... (Hello Mystcraft, you dirty ♥♥♥♥♥.)

I guess it could have really just been that mod. I mean, it was an official mod, so maybe someone tagged the game with it because of that.

The difference being, here you don't have to ask, everything is right there if you know where to look, and it's straight out of a Lovecraft book.

We're talking about a magician finding a cursed book that gives him power at the price of going slowly insane before the shadow masters suck him and his assistant in another world, trap him in a chair alone with godlike power on this world, and change his assistant in a spooky monster prowling in the dark to kill everything it encounters. Then he lures an unsuspecting scientist into this world by granting him forbidden knowledge, and strands him in there to be hunted and gruesomely killed by the monsters he invented while prisoner of the chair. That's unless the scientist manages to go through a portal, survive 5 different worlds, each one harder than the previous, in which case he gets trapped in the chair in place of the magician, who is now the one stranded in the world. (don't read if you haven't finished the adventure mode and want to find out by yourself.)

Pretty gruesome stuff, all things considered.

Then, it depends on what your definition of an horror game is. If it absolutely needs to make you jump out of your chair or soil your pants with realistic graphics, or if you have to blow zombie's face all over the place then it's not an horror game for you I guess. But for all intents and purpose, it's a game where monsters hunt you in a spooky world Lovecraft wouldn't have renied (except he wouldn't have given you any means to fight... or survive).

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Originally posted by Navarre:

Originally posted by Kaze:

I've seen other games that do this though, and they aren't really horror games. You could ask the same question about minecraft - who built the forts, what's with the nether and the end, why do endermen come out at night and steal my watermelons, etc. That isn't even accounting for what some mods add... (Hello Mystcraft, you dirty ♥♥♥♥♥.)

I guess it could have really just been that mod. I mean, it was an official mod, so maybe someone tagged the game with it because of that.

The difference being, here you don't have to ask, everything is right there if you know where to look, and it's straight out of a Lovecraft book.

We're talking about a magician finding a cursed book that gives him power at the price of going slowly insane before the shadow masters suck him and his assistant in another world, trap him in a chair alone with godlike power on this world, and change his assistant in a spooky monster prowling in the dark to kill everything it encounters. Then he lures an unsuspecting scientist into this world by granting him forbidden knowledge, and strands him in there to be hunted and gruesomely killed by the monsters he invented while prisoner of the chair. That's unless the scientist manages to go through a portal, survive 5 different worlds, each one harder than the previous, in which case he gets trapped in the chair in place of the magician, who is now the one stranded in the world. (don't read if you haven't finished the adventure mode and want to find out by yourself.)

Pretty gruesome stuff, all things considered.

Then, it depends on what your definition of an horror game is. If it absolutely needs to make you jump out of your chair or soil your pants with realistic graphics, or if you have to blow zombie's face all over the place then it's not an horror game for you I guess. But for all intents and purpose, it's a game where monsters hunt you in a spooky world Lovecraft wouldn't have renied (except he wouldn't have given you any means to fight... or survive).

I already know about everything in the spoilers. I'm not ashamed to look up a lot of info on the wiki.

I've seen things geared for kids that could be considered more disturbing than this. That's why I found the tag confusing.

Also I think you might have me confused with someone who likes shock tactics in game design. :V

[Navarre]

It was a general observation, nothing personal.

I could go on, but I don't think we'll achieve anything. Let's agree to disagree.

(And stuff for kids is crazy anyway. I mean, Grimm tales? That's pure horror right there.)

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Originally posted by Navarre:

It was a general observation, nothing personal.

I could go on, but I don't think we'll achieve anything. Let's agree to disagree.

(And stuff for kids is crazy anyway. I mean, Grimm tales? That's pure horror right there.)

I...can agree with that. Seems that stuff for kids only gets more disturbing when you're an adult and understand the context. >_>