I agree here, Resi games aren't as scary as they used to be for a reason. Silent Hill games for me aren't the scariest, but my favourite s/horror series, the main reason the games are scary is because they're messed up games, the rusty walls, demented monsters, It's really grotesque, and that's something we aren't used to in our everyday lives, so basically
Zombies aren't scary, Pyramid Head is.

Also I that Silent Hill RPG game is a fucking terrible idea I'm going to buy the game solely
to throw it into the fiery pits of death 

I was actually going to compliment Silent Hill for having creative monster design (in my opinion), but my post was long enough as it is.

Of course, after you spend several years reading jokes and parodies on the subject of Pyramid Head, he loses some of his dignity. Horror games are cursed to become less potent with time.

Paul's right. there is a mentality in a lot of people that leaves them unable to stay away from things that makes them feel angry or set-upon. they don't like feeling those things at all, but they're compelled to go and try to deal with it and piss everyone off, and especially themselves, and it's not really their fault.

but it's something one has to learn to live with to stay on internet forums, where everyone's opinion is wrong. try this exercise I do every time I feel like getting involved in a terrible argument. repeat this to yourself:

you are arguing on the internet. you're not just wasting your life, you're removing good things from your life. close the forum right now and go play a song, draw a picture, or run for five minutes. whoever you were planning on correcting, admonishing, needling, or just commenting at, they're irrelevant to you and they can live in their own little hell of living lives that aren't yours. I mean, after all, they're the ones spending minutes of their limited time on earth posting - not you.

works every time!

The Music forum is thankfully chill and free of shitfits. It's very low-activity, which probably contributes.

Of course this isn't practical for most games, but: an enemy that is forshadowed to be invincible, looks invincible, and is invincible. No tricks. It looks at you, goes after you, and humiliates you. It makes a mockery of your weapons. It reminds you, no, the fact that you're the player doesn't mean shit, you are immersed in my world of origin and you are nothing to me. Were you proud of that shiny new gun you got? It's useless.

All you can do is run.

It's the same feeling Mario inspires in goombas, or any player in an RPG feels when they go back to the first town and refight the first enemies. When you go up against something you have no chance against, they are the sentient, living beings, and you are the pitiful creature of code.

You have two frames of a walk cycle to move with. Run.

You do know exactly what zombies could do, which is why they're not really creative or scary things. They're going to lurch at you and bite you. Maybe they'll lurch quickly. Maybe they won't bite you - maybe they'll claw at you or something. How to kill them? Shoot them. In the head, if you're picky. Maybe you don't have a gun! Maybe you have a knife. The way zombies have been overused has actually ruined them in other games where they might be more scary - when I see a zombie, I think "that's just a stupid-ass zombie, I am looking at a tarted-up refugee from Plants Versus". If I see a vampire, I'm going to think "this game has one more thing in common with Twilight".

Compare, say, the Toriningen in Yume Nikki. They're virtually harmless - all they will do is teleport you to a place where you're stuck, and you'll need to backtrack to wherever you were before they got you. But when you start the game, you don't know that. You don't know what the hell a bird-lady with googly eyes is even called, and you were pretty sure that nothing in this game really hurts you or even - holy shit, is she running at me? And you can't do a thing. They will catch you and you cannot stop them, even if you can stop everything else.

You get paranoid to go near them, paranoid to possibly have one show up somewhere, paranoid about the calmed-down, friendly versions who won't harm you - they taint everything you see. Sure, they won't eat your brain. But that's a small comfort. Maybe they will if you do the wrong thing. What's more worrisome - power, or potential power?

To my mind, the bird people are way worse than zombies, even though the fear fades away eventually. All horror in games fades soon after you understand it fully - even Amnesia, which is a damn scary game to just about everyone who plays it, isn't scary if you run through it several times and understand it in advance. To me, at least, that shows that game horror should be really based on obscured and incomprehensible things. (And not just startling things. Jump scares are lame.) Well-adjusted humans will stop being scared of games after they've played them enough; the unknown terror fades away and is replaced by the knowledge that you're looking at models or sprites and you know exactly how they will act and respond to anything. ("This is the Water Monster's room. The Water Monster is going to be here." Suddenly, it's lost the element of surprise, you know what it looks like, you know what it's going to do.)

If it was a zombie vampire, of course I'd shit my pants.

postmortem: ha ha ha how embarrassing

i'm not an art guy so maybe im just being ignorant but the games mentioned here all look pretty similar to me

I think it's the very fact that the silhouette demands attention that makes people unable to see the differences between different games with different art styles under the same banner. If you're not used to some genre or style, everything that is within that style will seem similar. It's similar to how people who don't listen to (apropos of Sigvatr) death metal think that every death metal song sounds the same. If you're unused to it, you can't see subtle differences.

Frankly, if one tries see the games objectively, their differences are pretty apparent. They have roughly as much in common as the first three Mario games for the NES did. The superstyle is limiting, but not to such an extent that one couldn't make an interesting and unique aesthetic out of it.

only works for a small range of settings & themes,

This seems sort of silly; just going by games mentioned in this thread alone we've got a fantasy game, a horror game, a physics platformer in a pastoral setting, a rhythm game about tribal warfare, and an action-puzzler with an Asian sort of theme.

I forgot about Silhouette Bros. - it's a hack of SMB that turns each level dichromatic. Nor do games need to use only a few colors - Blade Warrior has beautifully-designed backgrounds that complement the gloomy, sharp-looking shadows of the foreground. Jumpman could also be considered to be entirely silhouetted in various shades, without even backgrounds - but try looking at Jumpman and telling me it's not creatively designed and unique-looking! Each one of the games mentioned so far looks distinctive and stylish. (I think stylish is usually the word people use to describe silhouettes in indie gaming)

1-bit games, like Hero or its sequel, could be considered to be on the fringe of silhouettes. Not only do they have to contend with the drastically limited palette, but they have a minute resolution as well. I'd say they look fantastic, and surely someone could make a different 1-bit game and not have it look anything like Hero!

Now, of course silhouette styles are harder to make distinguished than full-color styles, but indie gaming in general tends to frequently set graphical limitations for itself. It's no different from limiting yourself to a certain small palette or tiny resolution. Or, speaking of homogeny, think how many games use Oryx's fantasy tileset!

Saying that silhouettes aren't "versatile in the slightest" is just a case of not using your imagination enough!

Not sure where to post this so I guess I'll do it here (especially since there's some Mother talk going on). Would anyone be interested in a small dungeon crawler RPG with a Mother'esque battle system/style? I ask because Overkill and I are currently dicking around with the possibility of having Earthbound-styled backgrounds (trippy moving colours/shapes) working on GBC, beyond that, just using interesting dialogue for the battles.

I doubt we'd bother wasting our time though if people just end up saying "Do something original", "Stop stealing Mother stuff", "Go die faggots", so I wanted to get some random feedback from a couple people first. At the end of the day, I'm sure some people will say, "Make the game you want to make", so I should probably just go forward with this, but...

Replaying the The Underside demo made me realize just how much the world needs Mother-style whimsy. I say make the game for sure.

Oh if only we could have a Game of the Minute, I just want new games all the time

but you're on tigforum. logically invalidating your own opinions

devious

Procedurally generated, horror-themed twin stick shooter/open-world metroidvania, taking place in an enormous, rotting derelict of a city. General mood is sort of grim fantasy, similar to Dark Souls, with lots of religious imagery and Giger-style body horror. You wield a rapidly-firing mechanical crossbow instead of a gun, the typical armament for twin stick games.

Imagine wandering through an open-world labyrinth, besieged by demons and automatons alike, while flocks of dead peasants cascade out of open mausoleums towards you. Desperately holding back waves of eyes and hands while balancing on a sea of muscle tissue, rippling in the city's river, before a building collapses and reveals a regal set of jaws sitting atop a fungal mass. Marching around an open landfill, glancing around to see where the filth undulates before an immense worm leaps up and riddles the air with its leathery body. Hot damn.

Man, sorry for starting a new topic, but I couldn't post anywhere else because this has nothing to do with any existing thread. I couldn't post in the general chat thread because I had already posted there, and I'm not going to double post. Anyway:

Why the hell don't more people do stuff like Blade Warrior? It's a game made entirely of black silhouetted figures on beautiful Amiga backgrounds. I can think of two more: Limbo and Night Game, by Nifflas. Somebody should do something more, with a dark fantasy theme. Those skeletons look hauntingly spindly and great in those shadowy pixel-y forms.

Be actually innovative and make up creative situations and settings. Zombies aren't fucking scary, they're zombies. Some creepypasta meme? Psh. People are scared of the unknown. Things are most frightening when they're unfamiliar, when you can't put a known fictional face on.

i liked it because of the way it was terrible

Have you tried asking the controller?

kill yourself faggot

Black Dynamite
Shaft
phubans

people who care about serious issues, like math.

[Chordotomy - Bludgeoned Into Demise]

Chordotomy - Bludgeoned Into Demise

Chordotomy - Structures Of Inexistence

oh sigvatr, you card