I don't know if you've noticed, but indie horror is kinda trending right now. (actually, the trend is ending now, so this is more of a retrospective.) Go onto the itch.io home page, and see at least one, if not several, games with the "horror" tag. Games that center around Entities and Anomalies, games about zombies or vampires or zombie vampires, games with blood oceans and allegories for societal anxieties. It's really "in" right now.
But I've noticed a trend in these horror games. A lot of indie horror games aren't scary, and I want to talk about why.
To be clear, I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who is often scared shitless by even simple horror. Modern, mostly indie, horror games, are not actually scary. They have the concrete and the red stains and the guns and the demons, but they don't invoke fear in the audience. In fact, it seems like they don't even try sometimes. Mostly it seems like horror games these days go for some combination three conflicting objectives.
I think every modern indie horror is some mix of:
Let's make a graph out of this, so I can map some games.
Okay, so, this diagram sorta shows what I'm talking about. Horror games exist on three axes, and for a while, everything stood around the Horror peak. But as these games became more popular, game devs made more of them, and began to prioritize different things.
Take FNaF for example. I think we can forget the original Five Nights at Freddy's was, primarily, scary. There were maybe 3 snippets of lore, and all the mystery was up for interpretation. There was also a "hard mode," but the normal campaign was like, fine.
Then, over time, the series really leans into the story, FNaF 4 literally has minigames in between nights with unskippable story elements. In my mind, this is no clearer than in Security Breach, a game I really struggle to call actually scary at almost any point. It's just a lot of exploring and going to point A and point B and hearing Friendly Freddy talk about the History of the Pizzaplex. How is this horror, again?
Meanwhile, a different subset of gamers got really into the "hard mode" of the original, and the series started to cater to them too. This is literally the whole reason Ultimate Custom Night exists, it's an ultimate challenge mode. They put some lore in there too, and it isn't, like, not scary at all. But it is pretty solidly a challenge, and that's the appeal. No one bought UCN to be scared.
Let's get another example.
Iron Lung is... okay, if you haven't played it, and you haven't seen it, please play it. You'll be glad you did, and it'll make it easier to see where I'm coming from. It's great. One of the best indie horrors out there.
...
Okay you're back?
Okay.
Iron Lung is a game built on its mood. It's all about what it would be like, to be in this fucked up scenario. Tiny metal capsule, no senses, bottom of a blood ocean, something outside, no air, no control. The things in the ocean are unlike anything we know of, and they're alive. It makes the player uncomfortable and scared for an hour, releases the tension, and then bam: IRON LUNG. It's compact, it's a story with no bubbles. Someone forced you down here and it's not safe and you're helpless. It doesn't even matter who sent you exactly, or why, or what you found.
Then the dev updated the game, adding a fully functional computer to your sub that explains exactly who sent you down here, why they did it, and an appoximate guess of what you'll find. Interacting with the computer pauses the outside game, and brings up a terminal where you can input commands to search for walls of text. It's not remotely claustrophobic or restricting. In fact, its mere presense in the sub clashes with the narrative that you're on a suicide mission: why is this here, exactly? Not just in-world, what does this add to Iron Lung? Answers to questions that were better when they were left unanswered? When people talk about this update, they always talk about how it fleshes out the world more. They never say it made them more scared.
The terminal gives you a bubble of freedom, in a game about having none of it. It gives you answers, in a game about the unexplained. It goes against everything else in the game.
And for me, this makes the game worse. I know some people like their fleshed out worlds and theory crafting and Entities and Anomalies. But to me, horror is about horror. It's about what makes us uncomfortable, what puts us on edge. It's a window into ourselves that other media only shows in it's villains. Analyzing a horror game can give us unique perspectives on child murder, or government control, or the unknown. It can help us better understand ourselves and our fears. And a little skill check can help solidify a game as a game, and lore can help contextuallize what a game is about... but a lot of games take it too far.