If horror games are more realistic than ever, why do they feel less effective?
There was a time when horror games could scare the hell out of you with a static camera and three sound effects. You didn’t need photorealistic lighting or ray-traced blood pools. You needed tension. Atmosphere. The kind of pacing that made you dread opening the next door. Not because of a jump scare, but because you didn’t want to deal with what might be behind it.
Now? Everything’s louder. Shinier. Wetter. And somehow, duller.
Modern horror games try to overwhelm you. Too many filters. Too much noise. Constant stingers and jump cuts like they’re trying to get their trailer on a streaming service. And it all blends together into a soup of mediocrity. You don’t feel scared. You feel like you’re in a queue for a ride that’s already broken down.
It’s not that horror games are bad now. Some of them look incredible. The problem is that they’re trying too hard to simulate horror instead of building it. They throw monsters at you like you’re in a shooting gallery, then wonder why it didn’t land. Because the fear doesn’t come from monsters. It comes from what they make you imagine. And most of these games don’t leave anything to imagination. They show you everything. Loudly.
We’ve lost subtlety. Old horror games were rough around the edges. You filled in the gaps. Silent Hill didn’t have to render everything in detail because your brain did the heavy lifting. Resident Evil gave you tank controls and awkward angles that made everything feel worse (in a good way). You were fighting the controls and the situation. Now you’re just fighting a game that really, really wants you to look at its lighting engine.
They also used to let you sit in the silence. Long, awkward, empty corridors. Rooms with nothing in them. That’s gone. Now it’s noise. A constant stream of whispers, footsteps, or someone breathing like they’re trying to outdo a yoga instructor. There’s no space to feel anything because the game never shuts up.
And it doesn’t help that we’ve all seen this before. Haunted asylums. Scary mannequins. Possessed children. Creepy hospitals. Games reuse the same ten tropes because they work on paper. But horror doesn’t work on paper. It works in your stomach. It works in your nerves. And if you’ve played even a handful of horror games in the last ten years, you’ve probably built up a tolerance. Or boredom. Same effect.
Then there’s the gameplay. Half of these games are walking simulators with spooky paint. The other half are just stealth sections in a corridor full of lockers. Oh no, the monster is back. Better crouch in the same cupboard you used last time. Real tension comes from feeling like you might lose something that matters. Most of these games give you nothing to lose. No stakes. No permanence. Just another loop until the checkpoint triggers.
Maybe the real issue is that we’ve changed. Not just older, but busier. Harder to impress. You can’t scare someone who’s already had to sit through a Zoom meeting about quarterly targets. You can’t unsettle someone who’s lived through the daily apocalypse of modern headlines. Horror needs to work harder now. And most of these games aren’t up to it.
The good ones still get through. Amnesia. Visage. The first Dead Space. Some of them understood how to mess with your expectations. How to turn quiet into something dangerous. How to make you feel vulnerable. But most horror games just throw sound and gore at the screen like that’s going to hit you in the spine. It doesn’t. It just makes you roll your eyes and turn the volume down.
Fear isn’t volume. It’s timing. And horror games used to understand that.
What’s the last horror game that actually got under your skin?
