I’ve been developing a horror experience on and off since 2014 and have decided to really focus on it this year. I’ve also noticed that a lot of horror experiences have been popping up lately so I thought it may be a good time to tackle my own that’s been on the backburner for a while.
One of the main problems I see with most new horror experiences is that they’re “key finding simulators” at the heart of it all. Finding and collecting objects isn’t a new core loop to horror games and is in fact very common but it does give some meaning and objective beyond just walking around a linear environment waiting for jumpscares to happen.
From the perspective of a developer or a player, I’m interested in knowing what kinds of mechanics have been approached besides finding keys in mazes that you’ve found have worked well. I don’t feel like it’d be adequate to root the entire gameplay in just reading text and “jumpscare/key hunting”.
I do think a good narrative carries a horror game a long way and that’s my main focus but I’m not sure how to make the gameplay mechanics interesting enough that it doesn’t seem like a slog to get through. Key hunting isn’t exactly the most fun thing to do but it could be spiced up.
I did play around with a gameplay mechanic using a game mode that had some loose roots with the core gameplay loop of Slender games – the user was given 2 minutes to search across 8 locations for 2 “real” objects while the other 6 were traps that spawned a monster to chase after the player. Even to me, playing through it wasn’t interesting and it feels inappropriate to debut something to a wider audience that not even I myself enjoy.
Thanks in advance!