(I disagree even more with Brendan’s intercalated suggestion that “horror” games should have “scripted encounters”, which seems completely off the mark.) To quote Lovecraft, who may have been a horrible and messed up person, but did know how to write horror, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”. Sure, there’s a lot of horror that does (especially survival horror), but, for example, “cosmic horror” is really about the sense of horror you get from realising that you are a tiny insignificant entity surrounded by unknowably vast forces and beings that might destroy you (or worse) without even noticing or trying to. Hmm, reading the RPS interview, I’m not sure I agree with their implicit statement that “horror” involves malevolence necessarily.
I think they misjudged how quickly the fear ramps up once the many elements stack together, especially in the early parts of the game around the Aurora.
The developers even refer to it more as “terror” rather than horror, and didn’t intend for it to be quite so scary. I believe this comes from it not trying to be a horror game. Something about being in and endless void scares me on a fundamental level! I’ve gotten a similar feeling from other games, like when I fell into the black hole in the center of Brittle Hollow without my ship in Outer Wilds, or jumping off the shelf in Subnautica, but KH was the first that I can remember! When the cutscene revealed the stage I remember my stomach flipping and the blood rushing to my head.
CW endless voids I guess! Basically, you’re floating in an endless expanse of blackness with only a strange structure in the middle to really anchor you visually. To add to the list of kids games that were accidentally scary, the final boss of Kingdom Hearts really got me as a kid! Well, not specifically Ansem (Xemnas? Ansem’s nobody? Honestly, I have no idea!), but the arena you fought him in. When I wrote up this weekly, I didn’t expect that there would be so many stories about stuff from games we played as children being unintentionally terrifying! It makes sense, because adults have no idea how kids are going to react to basically anything.
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