Tag: horror game design
Research Log
Why Folklore Still Matters: Hauntology, Residue, and Deep Worldbuilding in Games
The quietest hauntings are often the most frightening. Think about those familiar, domestic moments: the sudden, inexplicable cold spot in a warm room, the drawer that always sticks, or the faint scent of a perfume or tobacco no one currently wears. These aren’t grand ghost stories or epic mythological cycles. They’re the small, persistent…
Research Log
The Art and Power of Horror Game Design
Horror game design, I shouldn’t need to tell you, is a craft that takes our everyday reality and transforms it into a landscape of fear. The essence of a great supernatural horror game, I repeat again, isn’t only about jump scares or monsters; it’s about the uncanny, the familiar made unfamiliar, and the echoes of…
Research Log
Handmade Horror Game Aesthetics: 7 Powerful Ways Imperfection Elevates Indie Horror
Discover how handmade horror game aesthetics embrace wabi-sabi to evoke eerie atmospheres and emotional storytelling in indie games. Handmade Horror Game Aesthetics While AAA video games often strive for photorealism, there is a notable aesthetic within some indie horror games that seems to embrace the imperfect, the tactile, and the uncanny. This aesthetic divergence may…
Research Log
Drawn Into Dread: Technical Drawing Techniques That Sharpen Horror Game Level Design
Monsters are great right. I mean, I love a good monster as much as the next guy but even the most terrifying monster can’t match the subtle dread of a hallway drawn slightly too long, or a room that feels just *off*. Over and over again in this blog, I come back to the question,…
Research Log
Horror Game Design Through Silence and Emptiness: When the Walls Do Nothing
Have you ever experienced a hallway that seems to stretch for too long, a silence that seems to last for one second more than it should? the magically haunting thing about these moments in Horror Game Design is that they don’t scream… they wait. And in the waiting, something inside us begins to unravel, it…
Research Log
Designing Fear Without Ghosts: How Hauntology and Potentiality Shape Supernatural Horror
I’ve long been interested in the potential of designing fear without ghosts. We all know that the most terrifying ghosts are not the ones we see, they are the ones that might be there, somewhere, in the darkness. In this blog, we have spoken, many time about t fear not being in the jump scare;…