Peril: Experimental Survival Horror Roguelike

[Codex_SQ]

  Scariest roguelike I've ever played is Aliens RL.

Tried it just now.  Scare factor: 4/10, Fun factor: 8/10.      Although it pissed me off how weak your secondary weapon is.   

[guest509]

Was the sound up?!

Did you have Alien on in the background? With the lights off? Did your two cats decide to wait for the moment when the Alien unfolds itself in the life pod to go running across your feet?

:-)

I think my point was it makes good use of sound to set a mood.

[requerent]

Highly restrictive field of view. Dark, very low light.
Make the player significantly weaker than enemies.
Leave visual hints that a certain type of enemy is on the map (blood marks, scratches, etc).

Make it so enemies pick up your scent or see you before you can see it- you can then give audio cues that way. Maybe a blind creature smells you, howls to inform its pack. Maybe you have to run to an underground pond to hide your scent, or something thereabouts. There are ways to ensure that it's always possible for the player to not-die if he makes the right decision.

Perhaps the player is fine facing one enemy at a time, but multiple enemies should be very difficult, and the production of sound should draw more enemies.

Make the environment non-focused on the player- ie. Dragons eat hell-hounds. You should regularly run into the bloody mess that the dragon made of that hell-hound.

Just some thoughts.

[Omnomnom]

For the roguelike I am making I added small spider-like alien creatures and scientists. I spawned into a room with some scientists and then left them and went around shooting spiders all over the map. When I returned back to where I had started I suspected I would find dead scientists, what I didn't expect to find was the dead scientist bodies swarming with over a dozen spiders. It was an accident of the spider AI which didn't switch back to random walking once the target was dead. So after killing the scientists they kept walking over them and ended up buzzing around the dead bodies as if they were feeding. I tried with scientists getting infected by being bitten and 200 turns later (approx) spiders burst out them. That's all gore kind of horror though.

I added a weak scare jump kind of horror by putting crevices into random walls on the map. Single tiled spaces that are pitch black. You can't see what's in one until you try to move into it. If it's empty you move in (and can use it to hide). But if something is already in the hole it is instantly revealed - if I add a sharp "scary" sound at this point it'll probably reinforce the jump scare. It's not much of a jump scare but it does hopefully make the player apprehensive about looking in the holes. The thing in the holes are crawly things like giant snakes,giant millipedes,spiders, etc. I think filling a very low % of holes with nasties works best as it makes the discoveries rarer and more effective when they do happen.

I also considered the idea already mentioned above to have monsters suddenly move in real time, but not as a surprise the player doesn't expect. I was thinking more like the "quick hide!" sequences that get triggered in Amnesia and the Penumbra games where activating a certain item or entering a certain area. I was thinking that the player accidentally making a loud sound could trigger it (like in left4dead) by attracting attention. It doesn't have to happen often, maybe only once per level. This would then leave the bulk of the game to be standard turn-based roguelike.

The way I was thinking it could work is that when a chase is activated the game initially pauses to either play some suspenseful music or flash something up on the screen to indicate what's about to happen. Then the game world starts forcefully advancing at something like 1 tile per second, or however fast the player moves. Some monster or monsters are released that are coming towards the player's position so the player has to run or hide. Then after some time the monster has passed and the game goes back to regular turns.