What makes a good horror game?

A good horror game doesn't rely on shitty jump scares or creepy Gorey imagery, A good horror game should make you afraid to sleep alone for weeks,I have mentioned this alot to friends and others who ask me what I think about horror games these last few years and I tell them the same thing every time " they are crap, they are scary for the sake or scary, they dont try to do anything good they just have you run away from something be it a ghost a clown what ever and then BAM hes in front of you , oh no I got startled by a random unsolicited large picture and a loud noise boy am I scared "

No your not scared your startled there is a big difference, my best memory with a horror game was resident evil 4,        I still remember
exactly what was going on, mum had taken me and a few friends out to the shops because we wanted to rent a movie ( yes that long ago) and they had it sitting there to rent/buy you know the type of thing where you can pay for it now for the weekend and if you like it you can come back and pay for it in full, blockbuster was a weird company not sure how they stayed in bussi... oh wait ...

So we picked it up being the rebel 10 year olds we were thinking " oh come on it cant be that bad its a game" I have never been so wrong in my life and I wish I had of left it in the pile and walked away in the store.. that game gave all of us the chills, it might have been the fact we were 10, might have been the fact we were playing it in my shed out the back by ourselfs at like 11pm( that's late for a 10 year old ) but I put it down to the fact it was a genuinely scary game, it didn't just have you getting startled it made you actually frightened to turn the corner for fear you would encounter something so outragus that you may actually wet your self, be that a weird monster or the fact you were well unprepared for what was about to happen.

All this mixed with the beautiful score of the game and the art style made it one of the best if not the best horror game ever in my opinion, so it makes me overly angry when I see horror game after horror game being published that are just bad, they dont make you scared they just make you startled for a couple of minutes and then do it all over again, five nights at Freddie's is a great example of a jump scare just being there for the sake of it, if you play the first game knowing nothing about the lore its a great game the jump scares get pretty over done fairly quickly night 2 from memory is where I was no longer startled by them, but instead of changing anything about how the game scares you with the following FIVE games where they could use the lore and make the game genuinly scarey ,scott cawthon decided to keep it the same because instead of making a game that was actully a horror game, he made a game that would sell like hot cakes because bigger youtubers would over react their reactions and kids love that crap.

The best way I can describe if a horror game is good or not is like this, its the same way a film director that directs a horror film judges, " if the audience is still in the theater at the end you didn't scare them enough" some of the greatest horror directors of all time have said their favorite part about making sacry movies is watching people leave the theater half way through, no understandably a horror movie and a horror game are  a bit different but if you can sit down and pay a truly scare game all the way through in one weekend its not a good game.

I love being cared, I love the feeling of being creeped out which is weird because I hate the dark(not scared of it I just dont like not being able to see) and hate feeling uncomfortable but are for some reason drawn to being scared like its crack and I'm in need of a hot spoon, my mother told me a story once about reading a book that helps explain what I mean about a good scare, in her younger ears she  was a big big Steven king fan , in fact she still has all the books in a box in our shed, but the only book she has never been able to finish of his is " IT" and that she only got half way through it before she had to throw it in the freezer because it was too much.

Thats what a good horror game should do, it should get you in the mind set that you need to get it as far away from you as you can where it cant get to you again, I dont mean go and put you hard drive in the freezer but you should be that afraid of it that you bury it away in folder after folder so as that you cant get to it again, until you think your brave enough that you can play one more level and repeat the process over and over again until completion.

Lucas
www.twitter.com/thelarrylazz
www.youtube.com/larryplaysgames

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Awkward Dimensions Redux.. its not... all bad?

I dont like visual experience games, if I wanted to watch a story unfold, I watch a movie, if I wanted to make my own choices I'd play a RPG , if I wanted to follow a linear game if play a plat former. Their are very few people who can make a visual experience game and make them well, most notable is telltales, i absolutely love telltales games they are what should held as the pinnacle of how to tell a story in video game format. Awkward Dimensions Redux is not.

I'll start this off with this, I took an art class in high-school, did it for 4 years. I still dont understand artist and how their minds work, and that's okay I dont need to under stand everything in the world and I've come to terms with that, but when you take your art work and push it into video games and try to hard to make it more art than a game.. that's where i have a problem.

The games free I get that it probably isn't the best as its a second game the dev has published, but its okay for it to be bad its the second game they have published not everything is a 10/10 when it starts, but this isnt even a 5/10 hell i wouldn't even give this a 3/10.

WARNING SPOILERS.

So the game is about a guys dreams, cool concept I liked it that's why I got a copy of the game and for the first 6-7 levels its a really cool game where you go through and play through some cool dreams, and it does have some pretty cool mechanics to it, one level you are in an art museum and you must look through a painting to see whats really there. that's something I like.

What I dont like is when the artist in this case tries so hard to make it into an art piece with a meaning and subject to it that during my play-through, which can be found here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3UoE93-fmU) I actually got genuinely angry at the game and had to skip a couple of levels because I couldn't deal with the devs self pity wow is fucking me bull shit that took up an entire level that I couldn't even finish,all I have to say is that thank the lord there is a skip button.

My other major complaint about the game is the lack of direction. I'm all for not spoon feeding the player to the goals, but when a level has no end and no indication of if your doing the right thing or not and than randomly will end without telling you what you did to make it end? come on now...

Now an argument to this is " but its art and you're meant to intemperate it how ever you want " you want to know what i got from the game? what i got from it was this.

It started off great the concept was cool, the art style was nice and the game played good, easy to follow controls all that jazz, but when I got to the level about 3/4 of the way through when I'm in the middle of a clearing in the woods in the dark in a semi demolished factory and all I have as things to do are;
A) pick a shoe up and look at it
B)throw it around
C)look at a mill of some sort and only look at it or
D) listen to the dev go on and on about how crappy their life is and how no one liked his first game and how he doesn't think he is going anywhere in his life forgive me if I call you out on your bullshit, during the level the he goes on to talk about how he has no choice in what makes him happy or not and if you watch my video you can see my answer to what he says.

Self-help is fine I get that some people are a bit touch and go in life and need a pick me up sometimes, but the self pity" wow is me my life is so bad nothing makes me happy" " no one liked my last game even though I thought it was good" that doesn't fly with me if something isn't making you happy or you cant bare to keep doing it, nothing is stoping you from leaving it or doing something else that does make you happy.

This isn't the normal type of post we wanted to put up here, we like to stick to cool games and fun things like interviews, cool gaming news and other things we find cool, but I had to write this to let people know just how bad I thought it was, as I said I genuinely got angry at a video game, not the sort of anger like when you die on a last life kind of angry, but the kind of angry you get if someone were to say, kick your dog on the street and i dont want anyone else to have to feel the sort of anger I felt if they dont have to and if only one person who was looking at it and wanted to know if the should download it or not ( it is free after all and a good way to kill an hour or so of your life if you skip the bull shit) then they can check here ,see that it has some of this crap in it and not waste their time.


Lucas Cause
www.twitter.com/thelarrylazz
www.youtube.com/larryplaysgames


contact info:

Email us here at---spotlightgamesreview@gmail.com
follow us on twitter at www.twitter.com/Spotlight_gr
check out our youtube channel over at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7RoOKJBv1BU3yRQFV20ejw
^^^ we cant get a custom url just yet but we are working on it