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Aug. 22nd, 2011 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupI'm playing Condemned, a game the clerk warned me I'd need to play with the lights on so I didn't piss myself in fear, but thus far (20% in) seems to mostly just be startling and poorly lit. And when I say poorly lit, I mean poorly lit- there's some collection side quest(dead birds, seriously), and even when they give me a detector and I was walking right over one, I couldn't see it, because the bloody flashlight beam was too narrow. This made it easier to be startling, because I couldn't flashlight sweep faster than the antagonists (crazed homeless people, seriously) could reach me. Finally I had the bright idea to mess with the tv contrast and brightness, and now the game is much more playable.
The interesting thing is that rendering the world viewable also made it scarier. Previously, I was forced to adopt an attitude of "well, the crazed homeless people are going to hit me, and I'm going to flail around with my length of pipe, and either I survive or I don't." It was be fatalistic or ragequit. Now that I have a chance of seeing them coming, preparing, and fighting with some sort of strategy, it's scarier, because there's time for a sense of dread to build. I feel like there's a lesson for survival horror games here.
The interesting thing is that rendering the world viewable also made it scarier. Previously, I was forced to adopt an attitude of "well, the crazed homeless people are going to hit me, and I'm going to flail around with my length of pipe, and either I survive or I don't." It was be fatalistic or ragequit. Now that I have a chance of seeing them coming, preparing, and fighting with some sort of strategy, it's scarier, because there's time for a sense of dread to build. I feel like there's a lesson for survival horror games here.
