I thought this was going to be a lot more scary. Once you get used to the nightmare it becomes more obnoxious than scary. Its just running around mazes looking for keys. The enemies pose zero challenge and theres zero jumpscares. I know a lot of pussies hate jump-scares but you honestly need the threat of being jump scared to keep the tension high. Once you realize the game has no teeth it becomes a tedious cake walk
>>12102646the atmosphere is what makes the game scary.jump scares aren't actually scary.
wow cool yeah
>>12102649atmosphere alone isn't scary when the game has zero teeth. You need jump scares and dangerous enemies to keep you on your toes and in a scared state. The nightmare world just becomes obnoxious as fuck constantly having to look at your map to see what fucking room you havent checked yet in the pitch blackness where everything looks the fucking same
I used to play this at night with the lights off. I was on edge the whole time
>>12102646> I know a lot of pussies hate jump-scaresJump-scare aren't scary, they're obnoxious
>>12102664Wow cool yeah!
Name 3 scary games
>>12102673You idiots keep thinking I mean jump scares like friday nights at fucking freddies. I just mean there needs to a lot more Stings. The RE series has tons of them, especially REmake where the zombies will burst through doors or crimson heads will wake up etc. SH has literally nothing happening except a few moments where some faggot ghost bangs on a wall after picking up a key, that's literally fucking it.
>>12102683Afraid of Monsters DC (SH Clone but with actually scary enemies and moments), REmake, Fatal Frame.
>>12102690>REmakepost discarded
>>12102646Turn the radio off, that's what I did on my first playthrough
>>12102690Hee hee haw haw holy shit.... lol........ afraid of monsters is scary if youre like 15 you cornball.
>>12102664Play TEW
>>12102646I thought sonic was going to be a lot more fun. Once you get used to the speed it becomes more obnoxious than fun. It's just holding right and pressing the jump button sometimes. The enemies pose zero challenge and the game is just a random combination of jump and hold right.
>>12102683SH3 is pretty scary
>>12102695>>12102706I play in a dark room with really good headphones and REmake and AoF got me good a 100 times over SH. SH I just got bored, and the industrial noise music just gives you a migraine instead of being scared. Everything about the game is tedious and completely takes away from whatever is supposed to be scary
>>12102664>my subjective opinion and taste is the truthMaybe add "I think" to the beginning of your sentences. It'll make you more honest
>>12102646>theres zero jumpscaresyou didn't play the game you poser
>>12102690>REdditmake>scary
>>12102815Why adding something that is obvious?
There are jumpscares in this game.You complained about exploration and puzzles being too hard, so your opinion about enemy difficulty is garbage. If they were more challenging, you'd complain about that too.
>>12102646KCE Tokyo is just incapable of good game design.
>>12102646> The enemies pose zero challenge and theres zero jumpscares. There are at least 3 that I recall this actually breaks the hipster SH fans that like to pretend that akktshually there is no jumpscare because it's deeeep horror
>>12102812>le dark room>le headphonesYou got scared by a half life mod created by a 12 year old and a resident evil game.lol......
>>12103109But it wasn't a .jpg flying at the screen. Not a real jumpscare
>>12103109The scream that plays in the last dungeon right before (I think) Alyssa's room made me jump in real life when I played it for the first time last year.
>>12102646Cool bait>>>/v/
>>12103109Did they forget that SH1 has a fucking pterodactyl through the window jumpscare?
>>12103197>>12103181Right, that makes at least 5 then
>>12102684>especially shitmake
>>12102684Yeah but Resident Evil doesn't have a soundtrack that makes you want to run the fuck away from something that isn't even there either. And I say that with no disrespect to the soundtracks of the RE games which are usually fantastic. But a lot of Silent Hill's horror comes from the audio and sound design. RE might have more jumpscares but it never has Akira Yamaoka hammering pipes to give you that dread feeling of "get me the fuck out of here". Two different approaches.
>>12102646I didn't even realize it was a horror game. My friends and I thought it was some playskool license game when we played it. People actually got scared by this shit? lmfao
>>12102646>it becomes more obnoxious than scary.First survival horror game?
>>12102646you don't need jumpscares for something to be scary. being put into contact with an effectively unnerving entity is going to be scary even when there is no sting or violent shock.
>>12102649I'd say it is the audio most of all that creates an air of tension and dread as well as melancholy
>>12103969>dilapidated, rotting town, covered in a layer of grey fog>not dreadful or melancholy
>>12102646>Its just running around mazes looking for keys.Sounds like my kind of game
>>12102646>I know a lot of pussies hate jump-scares but you honestly need the threat of being jump scared to keep the tension highJump-scares are the antithesis of psychological horror. I understand your RE examples in >>12102684, but that series is going for a different kind of horror.
>>12102646Okay but play this game at 10 years old in 1999 in a dark room on a crt. You'd shit yourself
>>12102731...
>>12102646>>12102664I don't want you to be right, but you're probably right. Playing it through for the first time now, and the atmosphere is great, but I'm just ending up using a walkthrough to tell me where to find shit because it's so tedious I have a hard time immersing myself in that atmosphere.>>12102649>>12102673They can be scary if done correctly, but they're almost never done correctly.I'm having fun, but not as much fund as I'd like to have or feel like I should be having.
>>12104091Silent Hill literally has a cat jump out of a locker, quite possibly the #1 most overused jump scare in history. Even Resident Evil didn't stoop that low.
>>12106541Silent Hill having one lame jumpscare doesnt mean it needs more jumpscares.
I love this scary game lol
>>12106541RE does have a rat jumping out of a locker though.
>>12106541The cat jumping out of the locker in the first world wasn't scary, and it wasn't supposed to be. When you come across the same scene in the nightmare world, that was what was meant to scare you, and it was one of the only scenes so far I've found the least bit spooky.
Silent Hill has way more jumpscares than Resident Evil ever did, but fanboys aren't ready for that discussion.
>>12102646You either didn't actually play it or you used a guide.I'm refusing to believe that you played the game blind and the enemies posed you zero challenge. The melee combat has a learning curve before you stop taking easily avoidable damage, and if don't know where the extra ammo and healing items are around town, you have to conserve the hell out of your resources, so you can't just shoot every enemy in each area.All of this applies to RE1-3 as well. If you don't actively try to never use your best weapons, you will run out of ammo. And the enemies create tension because of this because you have to use weak weapons or avoid them because you can't just use the shotgun on everything.In this way the genre is similar to dungeon crawlers, where you are constantly on edge that your next encounter could spend too many resources, thus preventing you from making it to the next area/out of the dungeon.
>>12102646The unsettling atmosphere is where it's at, though only a few parts really hit hard. The darkness does become obnoxious as you can see so little.>zero jumpscaresOnly incompetent morons use jumpscares.
>>12102646Are you playing without sound? It has tons of audio jumpscares.>>12106541RE has the exact equivalent with body falling out of the wardrobe.
>>12102646You know horror genre is more than just getting jumpscared like a little bitch right? Like do you even appreciate when a game immerses you in it's setting with great atmosphere and sound design, slowly building up and maintaining the intensity and gradually unfolding its horrors.It's easy to bitch about a horror games end game cause the fear of the unknown is highly diminished by then simply cause you've got accustomed to it and seen most of what the game has to offer. Literally all horror games (and movies) lose steam on their last chapter.
>>12102903Because then you don't come across as a smug obnoxious know it all with your head up your arse
>>12106507>but I'm just ending up using a walkthrough to tell me where to find shit because it's so tedious You're either incredibly low IQ, lazy, or spoiled by modern games and will have the same problem with any retro game.I just played through SH1 and didn't have to look anything up. Literally just spend a few minutes thinking.
>>12111031I dunno. I didn't need a walkthrough for most of RE1 and RE2. It's not that I couldn't do it; it's just that the atmosphere is so samey throughout the entire game so far that I don't really want to spend 10 times as long as I could running around in circles in hallways looking for keys. The puzzles are often gay and stupid, but this goes for most Jap horror games of the era (nobody in the real world fucking has twenty different keys for a house with different emblems on the tip of all of them).I think it's ab objectively great game and the atmosphere is good, but it's very much a one-note song. Maybe I am spoiled by modern games in the sense that I don't have 10-30 games to choose from and feel like I need to squeeze infinite enjoyment from all of them; I've got a backlog in the thousands. It's a time thing. I want to get to the other Silent Hill games, too.As a kid, I could play the first level of Super Mario 64 for as many hours as I'd put into a modern game just running around and fucking around with things. It's the 90s gaming experience, and I miss the ability to do that. But it's not the 90s. I have hundreds of movies and tens of thousands of books on my hard drive. I have a thousand plus games on Steam. And I'd care more about "authentically" playing SH1 if it offered the slightest bit of variety when too much of the game consists of running around in circles backtracking for things I missed.
>>12111476>The puzzles are often gay and stupidSH1 literally has one of the best puzzles in video games with the piano riddle. It's genuinely a 10/10 puzzle on-par with games like MYST. SH puzzles in general are fairly out-there and require obscure thinking. >that I don't really want to spend 10 times as long as I could running around in circles in hallways looking for keys... (nobody in the real world fucking has twenty different keys for a house with different emblems on the tip of all of them).Are you sure you're not referring to Resident Evil? Because your entire post feels a lot more relevant to the Resident Evil series than it does SH.I love RE, but it's definitely more known as the "key game" while SH is more known as a "riddle game".
>>12111476What's the point of playing something just to get it done with as soon as possible? If you're not gonna take your time to enjoy what you're playing, then you're better off playing something else. The fact you don't care about neither the atmosphere nor the puzzles in a fucking Silent Hill game but feel the need to not only finish it but also play the others in the series is absurd.
>>12102664>atmosphere alone isn't scary when the game has zero teethNothing in a video game can make you feel "scared" as an adult. The best you're gonna get is an unnerving feeling or taken by surprise by a loud noise - Silent Hill excels at the former. >You need jump scares and dangerous enemies to keep you on your toes and in a scared state.You don't need jump scares and Silent Hills enemies on Hard are more than dangerous enough to keep you on your toes. >The nightmare world just becomes obnoxious as fuck constantly having to look at your map to see what fucking room you havent checked yet Sounds like a short term memory problem to me. The School/Hospital/Nowhere are really not that big. If you can't keep track of ~10 rooms, you should stop smoking week.>in the pitch blackness where everything looks the fucking sameTurn your flashlight on?
>>12111503The puzzles in SH1 are definitely better than the puzzles of early RE in both quality and lack of feeling completely out of place in the context of the game and breaking immersion, but I was referring more to the latter. But there's still some of the latter. Who the fuck uses a Plate of Pig and a Plate of Frog to unlock doors? Couldn't Japs design their puzzles to feel more natural?>Are you sure you're not referring to Resident Evil?Yes, because Resident Evil, even the first one after the first half of the game, had a variety of different locations that all felt different. I'm 2/3rds of the way through SH1 and there have been essentially two different kinds of rooms and one kind of open area so far.>I love RE, but it's definitely more known as the "key game" while SH is more known as a "riddle game".Well, I'm not using the walkthrough for the riddles nearly so much as for the keys. I don't like have to constantly reload because I didn't know that the non-essential room with the nurse in it that I wasted seven bullets and a health state on was only guarding one health potion, and I don't like doing circles in the same hallway over and over again because all hallways all look exactly the same and I can't remember where's what.>>12111547Well, because I am enjoying the atmosphere. Just not the tedium. I also feel like I need to play it before the later games in the series, which probably have more variety in them.>you don't care about neither the atmosphereI never said that, faggot. I've said over and over again that the atmosphere is great. That's the ONLY reason I'm toughing it out. But it's a Scooby-Doo repeating background.
>>12111590>But it's a Scooby-Doo repeating background.Yeah, but it's a REALLY good background. So good in fact that most horror games are still copying it almost 30 years later.
>>12111556Some games can actually still be pretty scary if you're willing to immerse yourself (of course nothing will be if you're not willing to do that). Not all of these are retro, but:>Amnesia: TDDThe water scene, if nothing else. Apparently the newest game is also good; haven't played yet (Rebirth was not scary).>RE VIIStressful and anxiety-inducing all the way through.>RE VIIINot scary except for one scene. You know the one.>VisageA mixed bag, but incredibly bleak throughout and insanely scary through a good portion of it. Also, even the puzzlefag elitists are going to need a walkthrough for most of it.>Night at the Gates of Hell/Puppet Combo in generalDefinitely have their moments. >Fatal FrameScary.>Chilla's Art in generalAlso have their moments.>Alien: IsolationThe feeling of being stalked by an unstoppable monster is the closest I've ever had to being legitimately scared by a game in a long time.>OutlastThis for the same reason.>Don't Be AfraidCheesy, but can be disturbing.>MadisonJust started this, but it seems good.Also, since you mentioned movies, one of the scariest films I've ever seen (and I've seen hundreds of horror movies) is Lights Out. And it's PG-13. YMMV, but that movie was great.>>12111597>Yeah, but it's a REALLY good background. I would agree. Any other game this monotone would've gotten dropped to the infinite limbo of my "on hold" game playlist by now.
>>12111590>I don't like have to constantly reload because I didn't know that the non-essential room with the nurse in it that I wasted seven bullets and a health state on was only guarding one health potionThen don't reload and roll with the punches instead. Again, you don't enjoy the game. You're forcing yourself to beat it as soon as possible so you can play some other games you probably won't enjoy neither.
>>12102646Horror in general is mostly silly fun.
>>12111652I'm enjoying it, but I wasn't until I got the walkthrough. Or at least I'd enjoy it until I missed some essential item and condemned myself to wandering infinite repeating hallways looking for it and had to take a break for a few days.Stop pretending like half the kids playing games like this in 1997 didn't have Mom drop $25 on an official licensed guide from the video game aisle in Walmart. This is not a new thing.
>>12111658https://www.silenthillmemories.net/publications/guides/silent_hill_1_totally_unauthorized_strategy_guide.pdf$11.99 USA, but that's almost exactly $25 in 2025 money, yeah.
>>12111658>I'd enjoy it until I missed some essential item and condemned myself to wandering infinite repeating hallways looking for itSo you enjoyed the game until you had to actually play the game, so you took steps to avoid playing it as much as possible, because you enjoy it so much.
>>12111672I enjoyed every part of the game so far the first time I played it. Not so much the third, fourth, or fifth time. What really got me was the nightmare school hallway. I couldn't remember where ANYTHING at fucking all was, and there was one door I needed to find that I spent an hour or two every day for multiple says trying to find.Finally give up. Type "SH1 walkthrough" into Google. Up pops Silent Hill memories dot net, and suddenly I know which door I need, and I can find it because I'm given a way to find it in relation to all the other doors that look exactly the same and there's no map.Haven't looked back since. I'm enjoying myself much more now.
>>12111690You do you, man. I'm just saying, you're trying to play a game centered around exploration and puzzle-solving when you don't like exploring it or solving its puzzles. Also there is a map, and it marks every door you've gone through and which ones you can unlock with a key, so I don't know what you're talking about.
>>12111708There's not a map for the nightmare section of the school, is there? I couldn't find one. I was under the impression that there weren't maps for any of the nightmare sections of the maps. I did just fine with the map for the normal part of the school.>centered around explorationIt's not "exploration" if I've already explored every room and hallway available to me including the one the door was in that I actually needed to go through but forgot to check on and have to spend hours searching for it. That's "tedium". If I had found a map for the nightmare school, I wouldn't be using a guide to get through everything else, though, yeah.>game centered around exploration and puzzle-solvingAlthough, to be fair, exploration is cool and I fucking hate puzzle-solving, but no, it's a game centered around horror. I'm only here for the horror; I'm not one of the pretentious /vr/ faggots who somehow thinks Myst is good just for being a boring, tedious puzzlefest with nothing else going for it. If Silent Hill were the exact same game with the exact same map and puzzles but was set on a series of tropical islands with a completely different theme and atmosphere, I wouldn't play it and I would mock anyone who does. I'm only here for the atmosphere, and that much is great.
>>12111728>There's not a map for the nightmare section of the school, is there? I couldn't find oneWhat are you talking about? I'm pretty sure it's the same as the normal map, it just wipes all your notes once you switch over to the other school.
>>12111786I'm talking about the fact that it says "I don't have the map for this place" when you try to pull up the map in the nightmare school along with the fact that the map is also largely different. It has mostly the same rooms, but the layout is different thanks to the gates blocking various paths. If it was the same map, then I don't know, but it seemed like there wasn't one because the game wouldn't let me use it and all of the maps of the normal school online (which I looked up and tried to use) were for the normal version of the school and not 100% applicable to the nightmare version except for one Reddit post that did have maps of both in tiny unreadable thumbnail format.>Use Google after writing thatIf the school map was the same as the nightmare school map, then I must have tried opening it exclusively in areas where there is no map for (I know this is the case for floor 4 of the hospital). But I dunno. If what you're saying is true, then I didn't need the walkthrough after all and probably wouldn't have gone for it in the first place, and I'm going to enjoy the game a LOT more from here on out. Oh, well.
OP Here. By any means I dont think the game was BAD. I thought the atmosphere was amazing, and I couldn't believe how good the graphics were for a ps1 game. The sheer detail alone in the school area is absolutely the best I have ever seen for a ps1 game. It was really ahead of its time in the art department.I just thought the game wasn't scary, except the game didn't have ANYTHING going for it gameplay wise to make up for the lack of scary. I was enjoying the atmosphere but the game itself was beyond boring. If the atmosphere and graphics wasnt so good people would think this was a really shitty game.
>>12111812>>12111828>condemned myself to wandering infinite repeating hallways > I couldn't remember where ANYTHING at fucking all was>one door I needed to find that I spent an hour or two every day for multiple says trying to find.>I was under the impression that there weren't maps for any of the nightmare sections of the maps>have to spend hours searching for it. >I'm not one of the pretentious /vr/ faggots who somehow thinks Myst is good >the game didn't have ANYTHING going for it gameplay wise
>>12111590Silent Hill sells itself hard on that opening alley sequence but it rapidly goes downhill afterwards.
>>12111828>By any means I dont think the game was BAD>the game didn't have ANYTHING going for it gameplay wise>the game itself was beyond boringLol.
>>12111908The last one>the game didn't have ANYTHINGwas not me, I'm not OP, but... do I agree? Maybe. I think the gameplay (as far as combat as exploration goes) was mediocre, but not bottom-tier. But I don't expect everything to be perfect; I can still like it if the atmosphere's that good.And yeah, it did take me multiple days to not be able to find a single door on my own. I was not systematically searching, just running through doors and trying to remember where I was and never could. I did just have a head injury recently also, and my short-term memory's all fucked up. I can remember most things, but when every goddamn hallway looks like every other goddamn hallway, I don't know what to do and just kept running through doors randomly and never finding the right one.
>>12111908I always thought of Silent Hill as a horror-genre noob trap, but apparently it's a massive filter, kek.
>>12112163I dunno. I was that anon, and I play mostly horror games (and real horror novels, and watch horror movies). If anything, I took a long time to get into Resident Evil and Silent Hill because I thought they were too mainstream.
>>12111828>people would think this was a really shitty game.no they wouldn't. people would judge it in the context of when it was released and on the psx it's a competent enough 3d action adventure game. you shoot stuff with auto aim, you run around boss attack patterns, occasionally you strafe, things work roughly as you'd expect them to. the interior level design is a bit quirky but it's not some abysmal thing people would be shocked by>ok I'm in a dungeon, I'll work my way through.the only thing I would call absolutely terrible is the final boss's istant kill lightning which does suck but that's a one off.
>>12111828>I just thought the game wasn't scarywhat do you expect? it's a hellish environment with creatures that attack you and some large boss monsters. like yeah, the only thing that's really going to be pants shittingly scary is going to be a stalker enemy following you, seems kind of pointless to dog everygame that doesn't feature that.
>>12111828>except the game didn't have ANYTHING going for it gameplay wisechasing enemies, the way those play out in silent hill is genuinely pretty unique, I honestly can't think of any other game where it's as well realized without relying on something like timed platforming or qte dodges. the sewer chase with the praying mantis beasts is a highlight
>>12111828People tend to experience horror differently, it becomes scarier when you allow yourself to experience the sequences as your own with no expectations instead of a narrative with a certain conclusion. Have you ever tried playing Haunted House on 2600 with the volume way up and intentionally trying to feel frightened while playing? It adds to the atmosphere.
>>12110789That's your problem if you can't accept other people's opinions.
>>12111812There's no place in the nightmare school where the map from regular school doesn't work. It simply carries over and the layout is identical with a different route. Only thing I can think of is you tried using the map with your flashlight off.Speaking of, you can't pick up items or unlock doors with your flashlight off either.
How many mother fucking silent hill threads are we gonna have?
>>12114917It's October. Silent Hill is the best retro horror game by a mile.
>>12113509Haunted House on 2600 is the only game predating Silent Hill that can actually unnerve me.
>>12114886It definitely wasn't with my flashlight off. That says something like "It's too dark to see the map" or something. I'm not going to restart the game and see. I'm not sure what I did wrong.I only have my flashlight off outside because it's easy enough to see and it seems to keep monsters from finding me.Only thing I can think of is that I didn't actually pick up the map in the first place at all and had false memories of using it in the regular version of the school. I already had the layout memorized from DBD (which looks more like the nightmare version of the school and takes bits and pieces from both, but has a more similar layout to the regular version).I guess that's most likely what happened.
>>12114934It's great. Especially on higher difficulties.
>>12116302Haunted House on 2600? I remember booting that up one time.
>>12111828>I just thought the game wasn't scaryGive example of something scary.
>>12112015i mean the gameplay was beyond boring. The only thing keeping me playing was just experiencing the amazing atmosphere, but that barely kept me going through the game. Also im not that retard that keeps complaining about the puzzles. I wish the puzzles were harder, the only real puzzle was the piano puzzle and that wasn't really even that hard. If the puzzles were good I think I would have a more fun time. Also just running around the pitch dark maze just looking for the one place or room you forgot about was hell. If the enemies were a lot more dangerous and random it would be a lot scarier. >>12118716Like I said, I think REmake and REmake 2 (not retro) are really fucking scary games. Because you are tense the whole time because a zombie can actually fuck you up and you have to save ribbons and you really dont want to die if you made it far without saving. I think game mechanics like enemies constantly chasing you or enemies that can jump scare you, and stuff like that are scarier than rusty corridors and banging pipes.STALKER is also scarier. Afraid of Monsters DC the enemies run really fast and jump right into your face. I also thought System Shock 2 was pretty scary just because you dont know when a monster is coming.
