Have any actually decent surreal/occult horror games actually come out of the last 5 years' endless deluge of shitty Slender clones?
>>342505772
You just posted the best one friend.
>>342506016
That's pretty fuckin sad then because CoF was comically bad.
>horror game
>the plot twist is that it was all a dream and/or you're actually insane
pirated!
>>342505772
I really liked Underhell: Chapter 1.
It's not exactly SH-like or anything, but instead mixes FEAR, Penumbra, hell even some MGS. And it does it well.
>>342506232
no it wasn't.
My only minor disappointment was the fact that it wasn't quite as stressful and spooky as AoM:DC, but that mod was the literal NOPE-coaster of all times.
>>342507841
I find it really hard to take a game where you play as an emo kid with cutting scars that has dialog that is hilarious both in delivery and content seriously. Between the dancing Freddy Krueger twitcher zombies, enemies that attack you by having their head explode, goofy twitching head room and the book-faced slenderman that I imagine the Swedish goth teenagers developing the game thought was really original and unnerving I spent more of the game laughing at how dumb everything felt than being frightened or creeped out.
>>342509312
Sucks that it took so little for you to discard everything else the game has done. It had pretty decent ideas and while the voice acting was sometimes indeed silly, they put a lot of effort.
As far as amateur productions go, CoF was one of the best I've ever played. I'd even rate it 7/10 using the 'AAA games' scale which is a lot, given the difference in budget.
>>342510017
What incredible stuff did the game do? Aside from some really weak and derivative Silent Hillish monster and environment designs and a really obvious "It was a psychological battle in your head lol" storyline.
>>342510626
I assume 'derivative Silent Hillish monster' is retard-speak for "psychologically inspired enemies". Or did you think that, since SH did it before, it somehow doesn't count?
I liked how the game was structured, for one, more so than many professionally made games. Early apartment levels suffered a bit from obtrusive level design but it got better later on. The forest was genuinely frightening, especially the part where the door knob is just laid down in front of you. There last two chapters were great, especially once the sun starts rising and you hear birds chipping. You felt Simon was finally getting close to home, more so than the other breather moments.
Inventory juggling was also okay, excluding the rather frustrating search for the two fuses. Having to decide what kind of weapons I'll use out of their not-so-modest variety was also welcomed. I also appreciated the callbacks to RE series.
>>342511876
I mean directly lifting things Silent Hill did for their designs without understanding what made them work; twitchy, rusty, barb-wired deformed creatures fused to or accompanied by hospital equipment are super fucking tryhard and derivative at this point since it's pretty much the same sort of thing every horror obsessed fantard influenced by Silent Hill ends up designing.
>>342512742
Seems like it's highly subjective as I felt most enemies were correctly tied to their environments. Some of them like the plastic-bag kid made me feel nauseating.
>>342513325
A lot of those bits where you're fed exposition like the child rapist/murderer photo room came off as tasteless and shoehorned attempts at being disturbing as well, made me feel embarrassed by proxy for the writers.
>>342514115
I just looked past that since it's not even relevant to the main plot. That might be a design error but I was aiming for the conclusion of Simon's story from the get go. Seeing the deserted city actually did wonders for my wondering whether or not this is completely inside Simon's mind or is it at least partially tethered in reality.
>>342514115
>>342512742
different anon here, but I'm not sure if you're looking a bit too deep into all this, or just being super biased towards the game for being blatantly a tribute to RE and SH games, just like AoM:DC already was.
Now, I'm a huge, old SH fan myself, and I simply adored both of these HL mods. While the dev commentary made it clear that some elements weren't made like that for any other reason than "it looks cool / creepy", I actually did start theorizing about many design choices with my buddy while I replayed CoF last winter. If anything, it confirms the thing about art I heard earlier: the creator may not have wanted to make a statement or mean something with his work, but that doesn't mean that people could not find meanings from it, and thus make the said product more than sum of its parts.
I definitely never felt "embarrassed" while playing AoM and CoF. On the contrary, I find them to be some of the most atmospheric and disturbing horror games since the original SH games and Penumbra ep1 & 2.
>>342509312
He's about as lame as Heather Mason, but nobody complains about her because double standards.
>>342509312
>emo kid with cutting scars
You're playing as a man who had lost his legs in a hit and run car accident. The hooded guy you're controlling is his projection of himself as he's writing his book. Discarding mental anguish of someone who is reduced to a potato that has to rely on someone else to take care of him because he has been struck with paralysis from the waist down in the years of his youth as "emo" is the height of idiocy. He's cutting to relieve extreme mental stress, not for the sake of attention. In fact if you know she about Simon's character you'd know that attention is the last thing he's looking for.
>>342515093
knew shit about*
>>342505772
I really liked how they handled the jump scares in Cry of Fear. They start the game off with a really brutal one, and it puts you in a paranoid state for the rest of the game. They don't actually use them too much after that, but that paranoia from the opening jump scare is enough to give the remainder of the game a huge amount of tension.
The forest part is an exception though. The developers decided to go HAM there and just jump scare the fuck out of everybody constantly.
>>342514725
I really wanted to like it going into it since RE and SH are both pretty great horror games each in their own different ways but everything about it felt pretty hamfisted from the get-go. Same with AoM.
>>342515093
I've completed the game, I don't need you explaining the storyline to me. It still comes off as an attempt at being edgy or transgressive by approaching a touchy subject that the writers absolutely do not have the talent to do any justice to. "Ooooo this stuff is happening and it's a metaphor oooOOOooOOoo" isn't good writing by any stretch of the imagination when it concludes without saying anything meaningful besides "Hey, our main character is a mentally anguished cripple by the way lol psychological head battle". Afraid of Monsters did pretty much the exact same thing with the subject of drug addiction.
>>342516120
And it's a problem how? How is it "edgy" or "transgressive", do you just enjoy tossing buzzword sand seeing if they stick? Can you even explain what is it that you mean with these terms? And I think the writers did the subject justice, especially if you get the cripple Simon bossfight. And why would the game say anything "meaningful", it's a story that has been told, that's the extent of it. It doesn't need to have a lesson of morality or a message embedded within. This is not even criticism, you've just barfed out a wordsoup in an attempt to seem smart when all of your issues with this game can be best summed up as "I don't like it because reasons".
>I don't need you explaining the storyline to me.
>>342516621
Everything between the beginning and the end is a load of pointless, random wank trying at being disturbing with a few select metaphors and references to Simon's story and current physical and mental condition that can be summed up in a sentence and is basically spoonfed to you in the opening scene; yeah, he was hit by a car. Oh, he's a cripple now? What a shocker, I couldn't have guessed that from the opening scene where a midget car runs into someone.
I can't really say anything else about it that you won't just dismiss with a "Nuh uh, that's subjective!" like the awkward creature designs influenced loosely by the MC's mental state. For example: I'm not all that difficult to scare and I still wasn't scared by it at any point.
>>342518121
Because it is subjective and being the unimaginative cunt that you are, you're trying to pretend that it's not. For you it was pointless and awkward and for me it was looking at mental anguish made visual and pain made into sound (Upper scream). Besides, why wouldn't monsters produced by the mind of a man that is stuck in a wheelchair not be awkward? It tried at being disturbing and succeeded in my case and didn't in yours, apparently. And while you claimed that you didn't need to have the story explained to you, it seems that you've failed to get what it was all about. It's less about "oh my he's a cripple" and more about "what being a cripple has done to his perception of things and himself". Which you casually dismissed, hell, I don't think you even mentioned it. You can dislike the level design, some monsters that were unneeded like the sawrunner, the occasionally poorly paced jumpscares that were absolutely needless, like the starting one, although the contrast between that and then finding that head suspended helpless later too was a good move in my opinion, those things are legitimate criticism. What you're saying is not. You simply don't have what it takes to appreciate this kind of a game and that is all. It's alright not to like things, but don't act like the game is shit because it doesn't push your specific buttons. It was a disturbing journey I enjoyed quite a lot with a soundtrack that is Yamaoka worthy and makes for a fairly decent standalone listen.
>>342518121
>I'm not all that difficult to scare and I still wasn't scared by it at any point.
so you are difficult to scare, or rather, lack emotion of immersion.
Dunno if I'm just more immersed, and less analytical when playing my games, but the way the game was designed did keep me guessing all the way to the end. And definitely spooked as fuck most of the time, especially during times when seemingly nothing really was happening.
The chainsaw corridor, the entire forest section, and the mental hospital were some pure nightmare fuel
>>342519812
>It's less about "oh my he's a cripple" and more about "what being a cripple has done to his perception of things and himself"
If we're assuming that the whole thing is in his head then that kind of goes without saying, doesn't it? And -PSYCHOLOGICAL HEAD BATTLE- is sort of a trite subject in the horror genre, particularly when they're so heavy-handed in delivering that whole idea through metaphors. I feel like they think they were leaving it ambiguous while still dropping hints but it was really fucking obvious. Bringing up sound, the occasional peaking, awkward filters and other miscellaneous production issues with the audio kept pulling me out of any sense of immersion I might have had by constantly reminding me how fake everything is. I'm honestly envious of anyone who can ignore or not notice stuff like that.
