Horror Game Advertising Sucks

If there's one thing that's pissed me off for quite a while now it's the way horror games are advertised to the public.  They have zero subtlety and everything is made far too obvious from the trailers. 

Let's take a look at an old piece of promotional material for the original Silent Hill

and let's compare this to

See the difference?  Silent Hill has a pretty decent trailer with it posing a question and then showing you a few scenes from the game to give you an idea of it's cast an atmosphere.  The majority of the games content is left a mystery and the little bits of horror that they do show you.

Silent Hills on the other hand has a pretty bad trailer that's all about the special effects and wowing you with next gen graphics rather than making anything remotely scary.  Apart from the fact that it's all pre-rendered, which pisses me off on it's own, the whole thing is more like carnival horror house rather than cutting edge psychological horror game.  No real build up or any mystery, just a big twitchy spazbeast chasing the character down and then some weird shit with a door and a dark stairway.  Don't even bother mentioning the man throwing up centipedes or whatever because that shit was laughably dumb.

Going from that trailer into Silent Hill is like going on a horror adventure filled with mystery while the Hills trailer is like a big advert for Kojima's Spook House.  However, a bad pre-rendered trailer, while annoying isn't the end of the world and it won't sour my opinion of a game before I even get a chance to play it.  It's those stupid fucking reaction videos that do that for me.

This kind of promo material is the fucking worst.  It's like someone saying "HEY GUYS! HERE'S HOW YOUR SUPPOSED TO FEEL WHILE PLAYING OUR SUPER SCARY GAME!".  These kinds of videos falsely put forward the idea of a game being scary, so that when other people play it they already have that idea in their heads.  The game isn't scary, they've been fooled into thinking it's scary beforehand by idiots screaming in front of a camera.  Outlast is actually a really good example because it's one of the least frightening "horror" games I've ever played yet there are people who think it is scary because they've had that idea forced into their head by stupid bits of promotional material like this.

Horror games are supposed to be about mystery and atmosphere and I think whoever the people are in charge of making trailers and promo material for horror games really need to get a clue and learn how to make a good trailer again.