Try this: Imscared

edited in General
gamejolt.com/games/imscared-a-pixelated-nightmare/download/10058/

This is an indie horror game with pretty simple graphics and ideas. Nothing special actually happens, but I think it's a good bare bones look at horror triggers, maybe? I know there have been several recent attempts on the frumz. Should be a learning experience, you really ought to give it a try. I'm sorry in advance.

Comments

  • Oh great. Another game I have to shit myself to in the name of research. Thanks @nandrew !
    Thanked by 1Nandrew
  • edited
    Just played this now. With the lights off and before bed time. Will I ever learn

    Meh, spoiler tags seem to not be working. Spoilers up ahead!










    Breaking the fourth wall stuff was really cool.But at the same time very easy to miss - I nearly missed it myself. Having old school point and click head hurty puzzles while trying to avoid foreboding presence was just too awful. Actually would have much preferred it without that. Would have rather concentrated on the game changing messing with your head, and keeping the puzzle element contained to the moments when you're outside of the game.

    Thinking of the forth wall stuff - pretty convinced that taking a web cam shot of people just as the big scare happens would be a great way to get some great viral material. Privacy might be a bit of a thorny one to navigate, but hopefully so long as you make it clear you're not uploading their picture it might be okay enough to get away with it. could still give them the option of uploading it themselves to youtube etc...
  • Beware, there be spoilers ahead.












    So I played this, twice. And I'm not sure I get it. The game keeped me on edge the whole time, but I didn't feel scared at any point. So I guess I would call it a suspense game rather than horror. While playing I actually began to feel quite depressed, it felt to me like this White Face character was an extremly tormented child that commited suicide. I love the experience it gave me, but I think it threw me because I was expecting Slender type horror. If anyone had the same experience, please tell me otherwise I need to go back and play it again to find out what I missed.

    The other stuff I want to mention is the way the game uses sound. The footsteps in the game was almost hypnotic to me. It felt like I could trust my footsteps, if that makes any sense. All the other things were screwy and changing the whole time, except the sound of my footsteps. It's cool because this meant that I wanted to keep moving. It made me actually run and walk around to get that feeling of comfort, but while walking I was seeing new(and eerie) things which made me feel anxious again, which made me want to walk some more to hear the comforting sound of my footsteps. I don't know if it was planned this way, but it seemed like a really cool idea to me.

    I also think that the pixelated graphics of the game adds to the eerieness of the game. As soon as the game starts you don't identify it with the real world. You identify the shapes of the bed and closet because they are recognizable, but you also realize that this is not the real world. The real world has better resolution :P. The implication of this was that because I did not identify this as the real world, I assumed anything could happen. Which meant that I thought EVERYTHING was happening. All the monsters my creativity could conjure up was hiding in the darkness.

    But the breaking of the 4th wall is what made this one of my favourite games in a long time. I think when you ask people why they like horror/suspense movies the answer is usually that they like to be scared or something. But I actually think that it's the lingering effect afterwards that draws people in. The turning of the light switch and running and jumping on to your bed. The fact that you get scared by your own shadow/refelction hours after you watched the film. And this game could potentially have the same effect. I would have liked if the game could have done something that made you think it has ended but actually just continued running in the background and at certain times made sounds or something that made the nightmare bleed into reality for the player. Or maybe "randomly" opening the image files while you are busy with something else. I'm not sure how practical this is, but it would really mess with people's heads.
  • I got well and thoroughly horrified, I'm quite terrible with scare games.

    I think the undersell was a bit cheesy, cos I actually did enjoy some of the clever ideas explored. I wish that could be investigated a little more deeply, but I suppose there's always practical concerns.
  • @Nandrew, I'm a notoriously bad audience for scare games. Slender, even though it is well execeuted, was not enjoyable to me at all.

    This game however doesn't do the same thing, it's more horrorish. I mean that there isn't really somewhere in the game where they use a cheap scare tactic like a boggart bouncing out of a closet. It's a lot more subtle and they try to creep you out more. Which I like.

    What do you mean by the undersell? And what practical concerns?
  • I didn't pounce and immediately mention that I was like sooooo scared and stuff. Nothing much. :P

    The practical concerns are something that @TheFuntastic touches on: the more you try to do to mess with the player's "out of game" experience, the more you're running up against security, privacy or technical limitations.
  • @Nandrew, So what do you think about a game that doesn't let you decide whether you're currently playing. :P I don't know if anyone else have seen the film "The Game". I hope I rembember the name correctly as well as the plot, but basically the protagonist pays a lot of money to play a real life game, but pretty soon he can't distinguish real life from the game and he gets real paranoid and stuff. (I know I mentioned this earlier)

    I'm just entertaining myself with some random thoughts now, but it would be so awesome if you could mess with players like that. Creating sounds after they have played the game making them think that whatever was in the game has escaped onto their computer and is now really haunting THEM, as opposed the haunting the PLAYER. It would be a very interesting experiment. Messing with their mouse cursor to spell out words or other random like letting notepad type messages to them. I have absolutely no idea how you would go about doing something like that...but I think it would be pretty awesome. Or rather, that is a type of horror game that would actually scare me. :)
  • See, that's the thing: the most awesome meta horror game would essentially be a *computer virus*, and as unbelievably cool as that is on paper, we can all see off the bat how problematic that is. :P Curses for missed opportunities!
  • Meta horror game, thats a great name :D. And yeah, it's been mentioned but all the practical implications is just too much.

    But I think that is why I'm such a bad audience for horror/scare type games. I scare easily in real life. When you wait around corners and give me a fright I'm likely to break your nose and run away crying(literally). It's because I'm not in control of the situation, but when it comes to games I'm always in control. I can always just turn of the game, I can always turn up the room lighting, or even the game/monitor brightness. And that is why it's not scary to me. It's also the reason why I don't think games are the best medium for horror tropes.

    When watching movies(in cinemas at least) the lighting and sound conditions are entirely controlled by people other than the people watching the movies, removing control. The movie goers also can't stop the movie at their leisure, and they also can't get distracted by real life stuff lying around because the screen is larger than life and bascially the only thing to focus on.

    But that is true for horror/scary stuff. I think something that games can do exceedingly well is creepy/eerie. The player projects himself into the game world and tries to relate all the things they see to things they know. If it doesn't make sense, it creeps them out and they get a feeling of supsense or become anxious. You can then use this anxious feeling to fuel their imaginations to scare the crap out of themselves.

    And this is probably going off on a tangent now, but it's still interesting to discuss because it has so much to do with psychology.
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