Hints to do a *really* scary adventure game...

[MoodyBlues]

Creed Malay:  That's a wonderful idea!  Actually, that's the kind of game Laura Bow I should have been.  Poor Laura just wandered around, trying to activate that stupid clock and find dead bodies.  It certainly didn't help that all the victims were largely two-dimensional; who cares if Fifi (:) the French maid and Jeeves (:) the Butler get stabbed to death?  They're no more interesting alive than dead.

Horror is best when the stakes are high, and nothing is more important than saving someone you can care about.

Pelican:  You're right; a player character must be in danger of death in most horror games.  And it's not enough to allow the player to replay from the point before death; no, he/she has to restore, old-skool.  That way, the player is less tempted to do stupid things that they would never attempt in real life.

Anyhow, that's my 2$. 

[Stalker]

Pelican:Ã,  You're right; a player character must be in danger of death in most horror games.Ã,  And it's not enough to allow the player to replay from the point before death; no, he/she has to restore, old-skool.Ã,  That way, the player is less tempted to do stupid things that they would never attempt in real life.

Anyhow, that's my 2$.Ã, 

That actually depends. If the danger is sort of visible or clued in (even if it's only implied... for example, when you decide to enter a dark cave, it's common sense to save your game first), or you have a chance to avoid it (by running away when a monster approaches, or seeing / hearing it from the distance before you encounter it) - okay. In fact, I actually enjoyed trying to find all the possible ways to die in Zak McKracken and Maniac Mansion, for example, and especially in the SQ games, since you usually got a funny quip.

But if it's random deathtrap #56 that activates because you... I dunno, decided to open a door, there should be a sort of automatic reset to "before" the moment of death.

Take the Nancy Drew game Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake as example.

Vague spoiler, nothing story-wise:

Spoiler

You see a note tacked to a wall. When you go closer to read it, Nancy says something like "It says: DANGER! Floorboards are roooo..." and falls to her death.

[close]

I considered it pretty funny when it happened, but that scene would have pissed me off quite a bit if the Nancy Drew games didn't have the "Second Chance" option which allows you to continue after you do something lethal. 

[MoodyBlues]

Right.  Random deathtraps are almost always a no-no in a serious game.  In games like Space Quest they're not so bad, though, since they can be sources of humor.

[Scienceman123]

In the 5 and 7 days games, the dreams of deaths and the walking corpses are truly scary. Crank up the horror, baby!

[Daniël Brooks]

Yes, the dreams were VERY scary! They had my eyes go like this:  :o

In 'Enclosure' I thought the tention was enormous since you never got a really good look at the "IT" until the final scenes.

And the scene at the end in the restroom got me jumping off my seat!

[Ozwalled]

F**k. I just realized that I'd typed up this big, insightful post, butÃ,  I was a moron and it no longer exists.

ANYway, what I'd wanted to say in a much more eloquent fashion was that I played "Friday the 13th" on the Commodore 64 when I was a kid. In it, as a GUI for you to see there was a picture of your face that would get more and more frightened-looking when scary stuff would happen.

What I was trying to say was that if adventure games are to be scary, it helps if you remind the player that the player character is scared, and do it visually. This might mean a cheap but effective "face GUI" like I talked about, or it could be through much more intensive animation work, like the charcater's actual facial expression and/or posture changing, but that can be an awful lot of work.

Blah. I swear it was awesome before I killed it.... And I once caught a fish THIS big.....

Dammit.

[FruitTree]

wow I completely forgot that friday the 13th game, I used to play it as a kid but hadn't thought of it for years untill you mentioned it!
wow I feel so rejuvenated!
I remember being real scared as a kid everytime Jason walked in.
man I'd give anything to play that game again.

as for making a scary game, there's no telling who will find what scary, so my advise would be, try to scare yourself!

[Babar]

The "5 and 7 games" might have had the 1st few dream sequences scary, but when same idea kept getting repeated, I got to expect it. I suppose a horror game shouldn't keep repeating the same "tricks", but I didn't mind them so much in the "5 and 7 games" (haha...that just might become an expression) because I took them as a part of the games. They had to have dream sequences where the guy died.