matt wrote:Cryostasis and Cursed Mountain sound cool, but I get frustrated easily and I suck at games, so I'm not sure if I could see past the flaws. Maybe I'll give it a chance if I finish my current queues of games although it's pretty long. hahaha
Actually Cursed Mountain isn't very difficult. First of all, your ranged weapons have unlimited ammo, if you hit a ghost with a melee or a ranged attack it stuns them and makes them stagger backwards so it's fairly easy to create breathing room for yourself and run away, if your health drops below about 1/3, it'll slowly regenerate back up to 1/3 health, if you weaken an enemy enough you can kill them with a simple QTE that heals you, and on top of that they rain healing items on you like blessed mana from the heavens. Incense sticks are the healing item in the game and I finished with like 30 of them in my inventory. I don't know if it's because of bad design, because they were trying to make a "casual" survival horror game for the Wii, or both, but like I said, it's not a terribly difficult game, which for me is a knock against it, but you might like it.
I've been thinking about it quite a bit, and I think my ideal horror game would be something like System Shock 2 or the Metro series, because they appeal to my OCD. I'm a hoarder and a double-checker, and they both have different ammo types and resources to collect, and different things I can fuss over, Metro especially.
With System Shock 2, with the rather unforgiving weapon degradation system, I started out with points in repair and no points in maintenance, so I couldn't improve a weapon's quality, but if it broke, I could repair it back up to a low quality level, for free, so for the first half or so of the game, I went around with 2 pistols and 2 shotguns in my inventory, and I would use one until it broke, and then pull out the spare one. This, of course, involved making sure that I knew the quality level on each one at all times and made sure that they were all loaded, made easier by the fact that you can reload weapons when the clip is full, so I made it a habit to switch between all of them and reload each one every now and then (too often), and overall it worked and made me feel like a pragmatic badass. I don't know, maybe it made me feel like my neurotic and obsessive tendencies would be useful in a survival situation, if you want to get all psycho-analyzing about it.
The Metro series, on the other hand, gave me things I needed to worry about and ways to check each one, which was personally very satisfying. So I made a habit of, every couple minutes, making sure all my weapons were reloaded, charging my battery back up, checking my air, checking my compass, and if I had any pneumatic weapons, make sure they were pumped up all the way. In Metro: Last Light, they took away the check watch button, which made checking your air a little less satisfying, since they changed the display from an analogue watch to a big, easily read nixie tube display, and they made it so it's visible at all times with all weapons, buuuuut, they added the mechanic of your gasmask visor getting dirty and gave you the ability to wipe it off, so they gave me one more thing to fuss about and I forgave them.
So, when I think about things like this I think about how particular, but easily sated my tastes are, and I can't help comparing these mechanics that I like to those baby toys where there's some spinny plastic things over here, a thing that makes a rattly noise over here, some plastic shapes that dangle over there to bat at, and a thing that turns over and there's a mirror on the other side. So, I kind of feel like I'm a big baby and the game devs are just making fancier and only slightly more complex baby toys for me to play with. But, anyway, yes. From a game mechanic standpoint, my dream horror game would consist of several things to fuss over.