Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 often get snubbed for allegedly replacing Horror with Stress, and while I can understand that argument, I don’t think those games are entirely without merit. True, triggering one’s fight-or-flight instinct with jumpscares & ambushes is regarded as cheaper than any attempt to instill…

I don’t know if it would displace any of the entries on this list, but Diablo 1 is definitely a memorable horror game for me. The modern Diablo 3 & Torchlight games all follow the example of Diablo 2, which was all about the constant gratification of mowing down monsters and getting new loot. But Diablo 1 was supposed…

I also found Doom to be really scary when I was young. Hearing the growls of wandering monsters always made for a more anxious experience while I navigated the mazes. I remember seeing my first pinky demon through a window: it woke up and ran out of sight, and I just froze. I had never seen that monster before, or…

I can’t handle horror movies. Oh, I’ve seen plenty, but I spend a not-insignificant amount of the runtime NOT watching the film. Once the soundtrack gets quiet and the camera angles get close and claustrophobic, once the movie starts telegraphing that a jolt is coming up, I spend most of my time looking down, waiting…

While the results in this study of the subjects sitting still and calmly listening to this music would of course result in mentally surfing its sound into a kind of peaceful transcendent zen state, you have a valid point of how this was invented in the first place to get the live crowd MOVING in a way nothing really…

Here, have some adorable Lego stop-motion death metal.

Not quite the same genre, but that reminds me of discussing Meshuggah with others who’ve heard of them and want to try to get into something so deliberately impenetrable: “Keep in mind that the vocalist acts as another percussion instrument, helping to keep time and lead the listener through this maze.”

I am reminded of watching a streamer play through that initial Leon campaign in RE6, and the jokes that were made about Helena’s stubborn insistence on not telling him anything until they get to where they’re going. I always imagined it going like:

That’s a good point about what a release of tension a Game Over screen is, and how fragile the suspension of disbelief can be in a horror game. It’s like they need to ride this fine line of making the player afraid of a negative outcome without ever actually experiencing that outcome. Many older games did this through…

Don’t worry, you’re not coming on too strong. If I ever do take a second look at Undertale, it’ll be far in the future. Right now, I would only do so to slowly and painfully kill everything, which would take a long time, and I have to assume it would get incredibly difficult to accomplish and unpleasant to sit…

I agree with how well-done that moment is where Batman is on death’s door, where he’s hallucinating and collapses, when Kevin Conrad nails the anguished delivery of Batman trying to reassure Oracle, “I’ll... MAKE it...”

Picking the new wish that showed up on the list at the festival just introduces a new character, and a new route. It didn’t change the game (except for a pretty good gag at the end of that route). It looks like I’ll have to play through it once or twice more, because it seems like I’m pretty close to the climax of the…

I adored Earthbound when I played it. I thought it was one of the most charming games I’d ever played. The very first puzzle in Undertale is actually an Earthbound reference.

In recent weeks, I’ve been trying to catch up on what seem to be highly-regarded art games from the past few years.

Commander is something I’m usually ambivalent about. On the one hand, “find fifty individual cards that combo with your chosen creature” is always a fun project to work on. On the other hand, actually playing games with those decks can be unsatisfying.

I am also among the few who found the diligence that dungeon requires to be a feature and not a bug. If memory serves, there were only two complaints I had about navigating the Water Temple, and both of them are solvable using the tools the designers give you, as long as you’re willing to use those tools. The first is…

I guess my favorite Prelude would be IX’s version, partly because of the choice of harp & flute as instruments (which sound way less like synthesizers than previous iterations), and partly because of the choice to withhold it until after the very end of the game, playing over the final “The End” screen. I always found…

I think there certainly is an art to making random encounters: a way to avoid making the process feel like a joyless slog. The original Final Fantasy, for example, had its random encounters serve as one piece of a larger resource management game, as you tried to stretch your MP and items to last through a long dungeon…

I’ve been playing a lot of Terraria lately. I was convinced to try it by a friend of mine as a way for us to hang out over Discord, and it’s been a lot of fun. His insistence that the most fun way to play it is on Hardcore mode has been mostly true, based on my experiences, but it does introduce a bit of tedious…

There were still genre-advancing gems like Neurosis - Through Silver In Blood (1996) and Gorguts - Obscura (1998) being released in that era, and plenty of bands kept putting out good work after the initial Death Metal boom subsided (like Morbid Angel & Cryptopsy), but I didn’t find out about any of these until many…