The strongest memory the series left in my mind probably is the eerie feeling I was confronted with when watching the Twin Peaks/Bodysnatchers episode (with a vegan spin)!

You sound just like that guy played by Bradley Whitford in Cabin In The Woods.

I think that's key to the feeling of hostility and vulnerability in the game, much more than all the elements that would nowadays be labelled "survival": I once argued in a paper that while most games do operate under an 'ego-logical' paradigm, in which the player character is always front and center, and the whole…

I actually like Stephen King's distinction of three kinds of terror:

It's interesting that you write this under an article talking about Amnesia, since in my understanding, that game actually did try to make the horror part of the systems. Things like the fact that you are — mechanically, not narratively — discouraged to actually look at the creatures, least you go insane. You could…

Also, whether you like it or not, Five Nights At Freddy's and its many, many iterations would probably have to be included — I figure that for a lot of kids in the last years, that game was the very introduction to horror games. It takes some clues from Amensia's playbook, if I understood that correctly, too, what…

I saw Beautiful New Bay Area Project about two years ago, a short movie in which Kurosowa basically said: Screw it, I'm going full Capcom.

I saw this one at a festival in summer. I did have some problems with the script — as in a lot of horror movies in general and Kurosowa's in particular, I firmly preferred the first part of the movie where things were a lot more ambiguous —, but it's as strong on atmosphere as you might hope for from a Kurosowa movie.

Shinji Aoyama, director of the marvelous Eureka, also worked under Kurosawa early in his career. That guy is influential, and rightly so.

Yeah, it is kind of nice, isn't it?

80 Days is spectacularly good in my opinion. It really points to a bright future for interactive fiction. (I've actually lately gotten a tablet, so I will be playing Sorcery! as well, and, needless to say, Inkle does wonders for the format there again.)

It's one of the rare games that I enjoyed playing cooperatively with my partner. We both were majorly pissed off when the sequel went the Free2Play way.

That seems to become common wisdom! I know a German podcast that praised 7/10 games already a few years back, and Rockpapershotgun recently had a list In Celebration Of Perfectly Average Action Games.

Sunless Sea got its Zubmariner expansion this week, and as a backer, it was free for me. I dabbled in it earlier this week and realized that while I was ok with the deliberately slow and circular structure of the game (which is thematic, not only mechanic), I won't get far in the expansion when I do not change things.…

I do agree that those things can lend to over-analysis, but I'd like to point out two things:

There are a lot of games that do this, but because Colossus'
themes resonate so hard with these ideas, and that it has such ambitions
in its storytelling, it probably captures people's attention in a way
something like God of War might not.

I had the same fears, since I didn't get a PS2 until maybe 3 years ago, way after the game had already achieved mythical status. Needless to say, I was pretty much blown away nevertheless when I played it.

That was a thing that bothered me, too. If memory serves, it was the reason why I turned off the notifications on PS3 in general.

what might be the worst story in a series that’s never had narrative as a primary concern

As I have written above, I have only seen the move for the first time a few years ago. I was completely unaware of the critical discourse surrounding it, but I was feeling exactly the same way: Newt felt to me like a somewhat clusmily shoe-horned in character that was only introduced to make something literal and…