How do you make a scary horror game? Examples welcome

Verisimilitude

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Who hired Kojima to direct RE8?

Major Tom?

Power is adaption

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>Heavy emphasis and focus on sound design
>No music whatsoever
>Just ambient noise and sound
>Dark places are actually dark requiring a flashlight that only illuminates up to a certain point

Sounds good

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Don't kill the astronaut !!!

There are plenty of scary games out there. Why don't you play them first?

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>Enemies need to be a threat

There should always be a bit of dread whenever a player finds an enemy. Whether that's through difficulty in fighting enemies or scarcity of ammo/weaponry combat should always be worrying. Too many horror games lose this half way through.

>player should always be varying levels of vulnerable

Doom 3 manages this well. You're never certain when you enter a new room if you're under threat or not. Even after you deal with enemies theres always a chance that theres a delay on the last one spawning in. Whereas something like Dead Space you know you're fine until you turn into a corridor with vents down the side and then you know you're in combat mode.

>atmosphere and context are everything

Ambient noise, set dressing, and the story all add up to make a game scary. The player should feel helpless and isolated. Noise should be a major part of gameplay. Killer7 manages this well as the player is constantly listening for laughter and what direction the foot steps are coming from as well as the pace of the foot steps. Hearing the fast pitter patter and manic breathing of a smile sprinting for you is a very tense few seconds.

>commit to limited visibility
To add to the above - if you design sound and environment clues well then you can make visibility poor without it detracting from gameplay. Again, Doom 3 does this well by committing to dark areas being dark and making you vulnerable to be able to see. At the same time enemy sounds are able to be used to locate them and things like the imp fireball helps you see them. Alien isolation achieves this well.

He’s the sentinel.

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If i were to make my dream horror game it would be this.

>Setting:
late 1800's/early 1900's eastern european countryside.
>Atmosphere: drab colors and effecive use of lightsources to color the enviornment. The setting of the sun paints the world in dark oranges, the night is almost black and white. Architecture is run down and worn, plants withered or old.
>Plot
You play as a Harker character, except that the whole purpose of the game is to escape the vampire following the intro sequence where you realize that the vampire has marked you.
You wake up in the middle of the night as he closes in on you in your room and after a brief escape from his castle you are on your own.
>Enemy:
A nosferatu, basically count Orloc as that fucker is one of the creepiest takes on a vampire. He isn't some physical specimen, but a carrier of disease and famine, master of illusion and shadow.
What this would mean in a gameplay setting is that he would not chase you down a hallway, but stalk you from the shadows. Your sanity draining as colors vanish from the world around you, sounds blend and shadows trick you. If he gets you, a myriad of animations would depict your demise, but they have to be quick and brutal
>Gameplay
As i would envision it, the game would be a semi-rougelike. Now calm down, what I mean is that you essentially play runs trying to complete the game in one go.
How this would work is that the game is a series of hub-worlds. After your initial escape you would be safe in the nearby village at dawn, but you know that you are being hunted and that you must escape and get as far away as possible.
In each hub-world, such as the starting village you would be free to explore with the sole purpose of getting away before night sets. You can gather information by talking to locals, read books etc. Information would be stuff like lore on the vampire, weaknesses or tactics.
For instance, a book on vampires, or a local woman might inform you that the presense of a

RIP stroke-user

They expose your sex life to the public lmfao

Never really played a game that scared me without relying on jumpscares. And jumpscares aren't real scares, smacking me on the head from behind achieves the same result as a jumpscare, that's mostly surprise rather than fear.

The fear of exploring the unknown is the most terrifying you can ask for. Bottle that up in a game and you got yourself a winner.

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reminds me of that one episode of twilight zone where someone seems to get invaded by small aliens which in the end turns out to be human astronauts

Nosferatu is signalled by increased presence of rats, disease or the lack of birds.
This is important because your objective each day is the escape to the next village/town and by doing so throw off your pursuing vampire.
You do this by stuff like booking a carriage, taking a train or riding a horse. (this would function as a loading screen to the next hub)
Here lies the trick. You would have to throw the vampire off, like buying a train ticket but secretly arrange transport by carriage.
The vampire would send thralls (which can be identified) who collects information and tracks you. This is why you must throw him off. Failure to do so would again be signalled by aforementioned signs.
Once you and the vampire are in the same town, failure to procure transport (such as lack of money or missing deadlines) means you must survive the night with the vampire hunting you down in town.
Likewise, failure to cover your tracks could mean a showdown in the middle of a forest path as your carriage is stopped, or he gets on your overnight train.
You would successfully escape if you got to a major port without him on your trail and got onboard a boat going overseas.

You would not be able to fight a nosferatu, at best you could ward him off provided you had to knowledge and ability to do so. A crafting system would cover that.
There would be no saves, or at least limited saves. tracking down the means of saving your game could provide tension as it would distract from your primary objective.

Tyke distracted me mid posting.

Make it a VR game.

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Resident Evil 1~4 gameplay
Silent Hill-tier story
Haunting Grounds atmosphere
don't try to make it a shooter halfway just to appeal to COD kids

Just one thing, and I think it applies to horror movies as well. Make it believable. As soon as the immersion is broken it's all over.