It hasn’t been fun watching Konami unravel before our very eyes these last two weeks, but all the bad that’s enveloped Silent Hills did get me thinking about some other promising horror games that have burned me almost as badly in the past.
Games like the 2008 reboot of Alone in the Dark, which I was intensely looking forward to in the months leading up to its release. I had high hopes for the game, which I assumed would be the refreshing take on a franchise that’s served as the grandfather of survival horror. The footage I had examined so closely showed immeasurable promise, even if Atari did have an annoying tendency to lean to heavily on its realistic fire effects.
It had some good ideas, sure, but it also had the audacity to think anyone would enjoy spending hours running through a monster-infested Central Park searching for devil trees to set ablaze.
Clive Barker’s Jericho is another example of a game I didn’t expect to see fail so spectacularly. Granted, my expectations for it had been solely based on the name that was attached to it, as well as my love for Undying, but I’ve been excited for games I knew less about than that. In the end, Jericho succeeded where I thought it would — I’m mostly referring to the monsters here — and it failed in almost every other way.
Its biggest sin may have been how frustrating it was to play. Overpowered enemies, lazy level design and alarmingly poor AI sucked almost every drop of fun from that game, leaving us with something that was stylistically interesting and a chore to play.
This leads me to my question:
Other than Silent Hills, is there a horror game — or games — that burned you bad?
