8 Tricks Horror Video Games Use To Terrify You

8. Limiting Your Vision

Being confronted by monsters on the big and small screen is never a pleasant experience, but it's often what we don't see that scares us the most. Whether it's Lovecraft's cosmic terrors or sounds of unseen horrors offscreen, the fear of the unknown and its ability to generate suspense often proves to be the most effective way of scaring us.

A key way developers replicate this is by severely limiting what players see onscreen at any given time. In the early days of Silent Hill and Resident Evil, this was accomplished with fixed-camera angles which made walking down a corridor a nerve-wracking experience as we were never sure what was lurking just out of shot.

In modern games, however, the fixed-camera has been substituted for the first-person perspective of Outlast, Amnesia, and Alien: Isolation. While players can control the camera here, only a fraction of the environment is ever framed - something made more frightening when a measly flashlight further restricts what's visible.

Even non-horror games like Subnautica can transform into nightmares when hundreds of meters of darkness is all that separates you from a hungry leviathan.

By keeping players in the dark (literally), horror video games can generate constant suspense.