Quote from dux4 hours ago, dux said: If you are given weapons that can kill what's trying to kill you then the game ceases to be genuinely scary.
Mmh what about having a weapon that can do that, but can break/wear out, or simply you have very scarce ammo, so you can kill someone in front but you might not be able to kill the next, and they could be more dangerous. Might be that the enemies are hard to hit and they counter you very hard if you miss. Or using a weapon means that more dangerous enemies will come round…
I dunno, I think we’d need to agree first what it means to be scared (in a videogame environment), in the sense we’ll never be so immersed that we’ll be genuinely scared like when your life is actually at stake.
In the general sense (from the dictionary) that fear is a sense of (deep) anxiety… I think there are many games that already achieve that.
and I think we forget that big part of the emotional response we get for stuff like this really has nothing to do with the (game) design, rather intangibles like art (lighting, characters) and most importantly (IMO) the sound effects. There are two-three games that I remember give me an actual chill along my spine: FEAR (the last escape scene), I think Alan Wake at some point, and… Untold Stories, which is a text adventure(!). The latter was really a perfectly timed combination of suspence and triggering sounds at the right time.