Friday, 16 February 2024

The Worst Kind of Horror

 

I am a big fan off the horror genre as you might be able to guess from the fact that I always do giant 31 game challenges of various horror games every October.  It's not just one of my favorite genres for video games but it's also the first genre I go to for books and movies too.  I'm just can't get enough of all that spooky bullshit.

Horror is a pretty broad term as within "Horror" there's all sorts of different types of horror.  Slasher, supernatural, body horror, psychological, sci-fi and found footage are just a few examples of all the different sub-genres within the giant umbrella that is "horror".  But there is one sub-genre within this niche that has consistently just the absolute worst content known to man and that's Mascot Horror.  If you see a game within this sub genre then I suggest you ignore it and not waste your money (or time, if its free to play) because the only thing you are in for with the majority of games within this genre is a bad experience with maybe a couple of jump scares peppered in between.

I feel like the big jumping off point for Mascot Horror was Five Nights and Freddies, the game that really put the genre on the map.  Now I don't actually hate FNaF all that much, it's not mind-blowing or anything and its tension is quickly ruined by its eagerness to kill you with a jump scare but its a neat little idea for a game.  However the majority of its sequels and all the copycats it spawned are probably some of the worst things to happen to the horror genre in its entire history. 

Poppy's Playtime, Garten of Banban, Baldi's Basics, Amanda the Adventurer, countless examples of just low effort trash shat onto various online platforms for idiots to waste their money on.  Desperately hoping that the game, like FNaF, will be picked up by enough children that think it's being really clever to develop a following and in turn, make a boatload of cash.  Really though, juxtaposing childrens entertainment with horror elements is just a really lame way of generating fear and it's the kind of thing that only a person under the age of maybe 12 might think is effective.  Movies do this too where horror films like to take a childrens song and have it play slowly over some scene of violence and I have never once in my life met a person who thinks that that kind of thing is effective in any way.

The two worst offenders I can think of within the genre are Bendy and the Ink Machine and CASE: Animatronics.  Both games are janky, poorly made pieces of actual shit that fail both as horror properties and as games.  CASE is far worse being a buggy, low effort mess clearly trying to muscle in on some of that FNaF money but Bendy is just as offensive to the senses as that has somehow manage to build itself a little bit of a following.

You aren't being clever by taking something that's "for children" and making it spooky or worse, covering it in gore for shock value.  Take your Unreal Engine horror game template and fuck off, stop wasting time and money by putting this shit to market.  Go and work on something actually interesting instead.

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