Happy Spooktober everyone! As Cary said earlier, our original Halloween special is back, and this time we’re going back to what it’s all about: the scares! This week we’re talking about which genre scares us the most, and for me it’s the gaming equivalent of the suspense-thriller!

I can take grotesque designs and body horror (to a point), I can get used to jump-scares (though I hate them) and I can deal with cosmic horror (but it still keeps me up at night), but knowing that a scare is coming and having to wait for it just messes me up! There are a lot of games that cross into this, but I suppose I’ll only focus on two this time: P.T. and Alien: Isolation.

If you think about it, nearly the entirety of P.T. is spent building up suspense. At first you just wander through its infamous hallway, slowly figuring out that there’s something very wrong with the place. Then, about when that realization fully sinks in, you meet Lisa, the ghost haunting this house, and she seemingly kills you. But…its not over. You venture back out into the hallway, only it’s gotten darker, more corrupted and it echoes with the cries of an infant. It’s all kind of wrong, but you must keep moving lest you trigger Lisa again.

Of course, she’ll trigger herself for no discernable reason at times too, leaving you constantly wondering when shes’s going to pop up and get you again. All the while, this hallway you’re looping through continually descends further and further into esoteric nightmare territory, piling dream-like disorientation onto the unease and dread that you’re already doing your best to deal with. The worst part?

The tension this all generates is never really relieved. Lisa popping out and scaring you should be enough to dispel it for a time, but it doesn’t Everything about the place and the experience you’re stumbling through screams that something even worse is right around the corner, and there’s no way to know when it’ll finally be there to greet you! Only by reaching the very end and walking out the front door can you finally breathe a sigh of relief, but it’s not like the experience just leaves. It lingers on the mind for a long time after, making you kinda wish you hadn’t taken it on in the first place.

Then there’s Alien: Isolation, one that I admit I couldn’t finish. Something about being hunted just fried me like nothing else. Certainly I could avoid the xenomorph at times and even learned a couple of the tactics for throwing it off my trail long enough to get away. Still, there was no feeling “safe” in this game. The xenomorph isn’t the kind of braindead NPC enemy you typically see in most games. It stalks; it investigates, and it absolutely siezes upon any mistake you make. To give away your position when the xenomorph is around is to immediately get chased-down and jumped!

You can run into the thing anywhere too! Any size space from large open rooms to the stinking air vents and you can bet your bottom dollar that you’re gonna be seeing the alien sooner rather than later. Oh, and it’s absolutely going to spot just before you manage to make your getaway.

Heck, you can leave the thing in a room several rooms away, see no indication whatsoever that it’s followed you or is still near your position, and it’ll still magically be there to get you should you accidentally make some noise! True to the xenomorph’s reputation, this creature is relentless! And the constant tension that it generates wound up being too much for me. Maybe one day I’ll try to go bck and finish it, but that’s probably going to stay a ways off for a while yet.

In small doses, I actually like a bit of tension in my horror games. It’s what facilitates the scares and supports that essential dangerous and spooky atmosphere. Everyone has their limits though, and horror games that rely almost entirely on suspense are the sort that I do the worst in. Even with all that said though, I’ll probably wind up playing another one in the not too distant future.

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How about you? How do you deal with suspense horror? Is it the worst thing for you like it is for me? Is there another flavor of horror that hits you harder? Lets talk about it and stay tuned for the rest of Spooktober!

Image compiled by Hatmonster