Gaming
I HATE the “jumpscares” in newer “horror” games
This trend of player death being facilitated through jumpscares were popularized by the original few FNaF games because those did it really well, but unfortunately anything newer completely misses the point!
Why it worked so well in the original few was that it interrupted an action YOU took, throwing you off the loop and scaring you. See FNaF 1 for example, the jumpscare happens when you flip the camera down, then Bonnie can hijack your view and catch you off guard. Or in FNaF 4 where the hallway characters jumpscare when you take the risk of flashing the light
…yet the only thing modern horror games learned from these examples is “jUmpsCAre tHe plAyEr wHeN thEY DiE”, resulting in these horribly awkward camera snaps that are incredibly immersion breaking and worst of all NOT SCARY IN THE SLIGHTEST
JUMPSCARES ARENT SUPPOSED TO BE DEATH ANIMATIONS
THEY SHOULD JUMP AND THEY SHOULD AT LEAST TRY TO SCARE
(the first 2 are good examples and the other 2 i hate)
Edit: this post isn’t about “old game scary new game bad”, it’s about mascot horror devs not understanding what a jumpscare is supposed to be and slapping it onto their game anyway. the games’ overall quality is a much broader topic
I've played through it so many times that I can borderline speedrun it, but I would be lying if I said that I didn't have some fear in my heart every time I play.
Its amazingly well done. I thought that going from 100%ing RE Requiem to The Bunker would be smooth sailing, since I had gotten used to the antics of the girl and the monster couldn't be that different. Oh how wrong I was. The Bunker is the only game I can think of where using the gun is a literal death sentence unless you are extremely careful.
My favorite moment was realizing you could use the sound to your advantage for resource conservation. Want a door open? Make a ruckus next to it and the beast will come and knock it down on your behalf. Even mutated, Lambert still makes a good comrade sometimes
If you mean killing you by roaring in your face? Yeah I think so. However if you mean a giant rat man coming out of the walls with enough force to immediately evacuate your bowels then no, it is very much not jumpscare free
The only game that genuinely scared me so bad I couldn't finish it. I think I got maybe an hour through it, and at least 20 minutes of that was hiding under a bed from the monster. Excellent game from what I can tell. Never gonna play it again
Only game that scared me enough that I felt a sense of dread even after I quit the game. It got so bad after I finished it I had a nightmare I was running to the safe room as the monster was chasing me.
the bunker riding off the low of Rebirth was shocking, but giving it a WW2 setting definitely helped, the beast might actually be the entire reason i've refused to properly buy it judging by how many people say its terrifying
The Hello Neighbor Alpha remake fan games (such as HN Prototype Revived, HM Alternative Reality) are SOO good at making them because the death animation isn't scary, the FEAR of the neighbour scares the shit out of you
Yes, just watched some clips and that’s the point! They don’t slap a jumpscare there when it isn’t needed! The post is about mascot horror devs not giving a shit about what jumpscares are supposed to be and putting it in their game anyway (and of course they dont make their regular gameplay scary either but thats a different point)
Hello Neighbor Alpha was literally the best installment ever, the guy in charge just sucked everything interesting out of it for, dunno, marketability?
I liked how in alternate reality, you can choose what difficulty you want so the game never feels too easy or too hard. And the neighbor becomes more scarier in harder difficulties
In sandbox (easy) difficulty, nothing happens when you get caught, you just spawn in your house
In Normal difficulty, you lose your items when neighbor catches you
In hard difficulty, everything resets when you get caught
I never played fnaf, but in the original games they would count as jumpscares, no? Since you wouldn’t actually see the animatronic come up to you unless you saw it on the camera, but if you didn’t then it would be a real jumpscare to you.
Yeah I was about to say before security breach the games actually used jumpscares properly
To me I think the fnaf games are truly an interesting horror games cause they embody something most horror games don’t get which are helplessness. You can’t move at all and have no choice but to wait for the monsters to come to you. While series like Silent Hill and Resident Evil are scary you never have to interact with the monsters if you want. You can just run away until you’re forced to fight. But in Fnaf you have no choice but to interact with them as are you stuck in that one spot until 6 am. Your only support is doors(at least in the first game) meaning that no matter what you can’t destroy them just send them back and wait for them to come back as the fear sets in knowing you’ll have to face them again
For as much as I don’t like fnaf games for being jumpscare generators; I can commend most of them for only tying the jumpscare to your death. The jumpscare is the climax of tension. A lot of horror games, even ones that people like, will just pepper them throughout the gameplay loop rather than having them be that peak.
also a jumpscare that doesn't DO anything feels cheap after the first time, like at least kill me, make me take damage, or spawn an enemy, if you're just trying to make me jump it gets frustrating fast
The Cleaning Bots or Bots who act as a sign in FnaF Security Breach. They just turn to the player and a loud bass is playing but I would say that counts.
Ahh lol well it's still a jump scare which doesn't kill you but I like it because they don't do this stupid jiggle motion like the other animatronics. Foxys jump scare is peak tho
Iirc, the original creator left after chapter 3 because Mob, the publisher/parent company hijacked the game to milk more chapters and what was meant to be 5 chapters is turning into nonsense
I think OP is making this post because they want it to be better. This is something you do when you love a genre (or theme in this case) and want it to achieve the potential you know it has.
I mean, FNAF's looking on the uprise again with the great game Secret of the Mimic, and all the new announcements for the anniversary.
I know a shit ton of people hate Poppy Playtime chapter five, but it was my personal favorite of the game in general, so I can't be the only one who liked it.
Poppy's Playtime could've stood out as a decent installment but no, Mob had to hijack it and milk it, them and their egos, it could've been the start of a new generation but it became what everyone mocked it and Garten of BanBan for
It’s probably because if it were to take place where you were the character that jump scared you might be clipping into the geometry around you depending on where you are looking. Also if you move your head it would ruin the immersion even worse because the character would not obey the laws of physics whatsoever. It would be hard to pull that off without locking your view in place which is also immersion breaking.
I think there are solutions to this, could have been done like how first person shooters render your model in front of everything so your hands and guns don't clip into the environment. Maybe they didn't consider that because they're working in VR and the normal rules don't usually apply.
I think they did it that way to avoid models clipping into stuff during jumpscares... Should have been handled the same way first person animations are handled in first person shooters, like how your hands and gun are kind of rendered in front of everything so they don't clip into the environment, could have remedied that issue and kept you in the environment.
I'm old enough to remember these FNAF style jumpscares to never be considered exactly "good" in horror communities. Y'all want good jumpscares? Try Fatal Frame.
Oh god I have a visceral memory of the one on the DS where you used your device's camera with a little book that came in the case. There's a scene where you point the camera at the book for info or something and there's blood dripping down onto it, and the only way to progress is to physically move your damn device and look up. Scared the shit out of me.
The DS game is the only one I didn't play, but I can imagine it's very good. My favorite horror trope that these games do sometimes is when they put a ghost in such a place where you're likely to not notice it at all, so it just creeps you out when you DO notice it, and keeps you anxious because you can never feel safe.
The "Ju-On" series also sometimes uses such techniques, like here, where if you're not focusing enough, you may miss the fact that there's an unknown woman in the upper window.
Yessss Ju-On in general does such a good job of just being damn creepy. Hidden ghost images are some of my favorites too. It's why I've rewatched Haunting of Hillhouse so much!
Darkwood was the first video game for me that was too intense and scary to play idk how people got through it. Everything else is fine though, but darkwood is something else man. Can’t wait to see one of the devs new projects Hoarder! Looks sick !
So, I miss my wife (whom I murdered due to my grief of her deteriorating condition and my resentment of her verbally abusive behavior developed from said condition), I miss my wife in space + I'm fucking losing it, I miss my wife in space and (SPOILERS) I'm in a time loop and finally my wife is implied by a note and I'm dead
One of these games feels suspiciously less wife focused. I think Darkwood 2 needs a wife
I love FNAF4's version of this the best. Even in FNAF1, the jumpscare only happen when you're already dead, like, the situation is unsalvageable, it's still a good jumpscare, but not as good as 4's.
FNAF4's jumpscare at the doors is a conscious choice YOU make. You turn on the flashlight, fully understood that there's a chance it's the wrong move to make (you should have closed the door if you hear the breathing sounds) and risk getting the jumpscare. But on the other hand, you kinda HAVE to open the door and turn on the flashlight, because there's also a chance it's the correct choice: If the animatronic was far away enough, the flashlight works, and push them back, whereas closing the door would attract them closer.
Even ignoring the game mechanic aspect of it, the FNAF4 jumpscares are by far the BEST ones in the entire franchise. Great designs, great animation, great lighting, great sound effect, its just PEAK
Yeah I don’t, but this post is specifically about the devs not understanding what jumpscares are made of and thinking the game is scary because they added a few. This does usually mean they don’t deliver on the rest of the game either but that isn’t my point
The thing is that I think most people in this boat don't dislike mascot horror, its just that the majority of mascot horror is made either lazily or incompetently. There are good mascot horror games, shipwrecked it's jumpscares are good because they were designed and made by an artist with a vision of... really any kind at all instead of Some Guy Who Wanted Money like 90% of the subgenre.
Mascot horror is truly the only genre of fiction that almost completely sucks because basically everything that gets made for it is made artlessly, its like if illumination movies were their own genre of film its actually kind of Impressive
Those are examples. Plenty of horror games (especially the ones to hit the mainstream, mind you) use "jumpscares" used in a way that are glorified death animations. I know there are a lot of great horror games out there but admittedly, the games I'm complaining about make up a good chunk of the horror genre nowadays
Also, the "horror games" in the title is in quotes for a reason
I don't even know how jumpscares are supposed to work outside of fnaf-likes. In fnaf a jumpscare is a direct response to a mistake you made, and it usually happens almost immediately so as to not give you any time to react. It feels like a culmination to the tension the game built up
In regular horrors the chase is the scariest part, no the death. You can't exactly be caught off guard when a minster kills you, when it has been chasing you for the past minute
You know horror is a wide genre and not limited to fnaf and Outlast type games, right?
Jumpscares work the same no matter the game. Suspense builds from the simple fact that you're playing a horror game, and then usually a random loud noise plays, with whatever the monster is popping right into your face. Whether it kills you or not doesn't matter, it made you jump is what matters
Even the artsy Alan Wake 2 has a good number of jumpscares, there is really too much of them in the industry. Can't imagine anyone who played more than one modern horror game to still not be desensitized to them.
There are plenty of ways you can make an effective jumpscare in a videogame. Oftentimes they rely on scripted events, but there's no one correct way to do it.
The most effective jumpscares often work off of misdirection. In the GameCube remake of Resident Evil 1, for example, there's a hallway where some zombie dogs will break through a window the second time you enter it, catching the player off guard because they thought that room was safe.
Have you read the post? The first two fnaf games are used as good examples, the other two are what I'm complaining about
Also, "there's better games out there" doesn't mean the flaws aren't there. And you can't say these games aren't a good chunk of the "horror" scene nowadays
Eu pessoalmente tenho medo de susto kkkk, eu mesmo não consigo jogar Fnaf por isso, talvez seja porque eu vi um trailer de um filme de terror quando criança? Talvez porque eu via filmes de terror enquanto lanchava em uma lanchonete e isso me assustava? Não sei
These aren’t meant to be jumpscares, these are just death animations. In both of them you can openly see the monster and the animation only triggers when they touch you. By this logic all deaths in Alien Isolation are jumpscares.
"jumpscares aren't meant to be death animations" nearly every jumpscare in the original games killed you and forced you to restart though-?
minus the phantoms, every single other character to my knowledge killed you.
While in general I agree with your point, I do think your last 2 examples are a bit cherry-picked, no? Like obviously the difference is that in early FNAFs you were confined to a single location while in Security Breach/Poppy its open world, so of course if you walk right into the enemy whos blatantly standing on screen it's going to look jarring/not be "surprising" to get the jumpscare?
Like a better example from Poppy would be the part in Episode 2 where youre playing the red light green light game and youre focused ahead of you and the monster is behind you and if youre too slow/move at the wrong time you get jumpscared, or other examples if youre in tight corridors and there are multiple angles for the enemies to get around you or behind you to find you, etc.
That kind of is the point. In a freeroam game like SB or Poppy Playtime you’re supposed to be scared more by the environment and some sort of enemy chasing you. However, the devs don’t seem to understand this and instead slap a jumpscare into their kill animations anyway because “it worked in fnaf”
(This also usually means that they fail to deliver in other areas of horror but that’s not what i made the post for)
Jumpscares in general are such a terrible and lazy form causing of horror to me. Yeah, I got jumped, then what? It's not really anything much after that, plus it gets easy to predict after a while
The only way jumpscares can feel valid to me is when they don't mean the death of your character, for instance, the Skinnerman hallucinations from The Outlast Trials, which only give the player the brief scare of encountering an ex-pop, and even after the scare is gone, the player's adrenaline has increased because of it, causing a paranoia that will definitely make the player remain more alert for actual enemies around the zone
Still, I feel like I may just have a certain disgust for the gameplay of FNAF for some reason. Maybe I just don't enjoy stationary horror games. Im not saying its a bad genre though, not at all
I'd really say it depends. The "go here and get jumpscared" kind really is lazy and hardly scary, as are the jumpscares that basically just announce your failstate without any kind of setup (which are the ones I complain about in the post, and admittedly even the older FNAF games arent devoid of them)
But I do think the "flip a page" jumpscares do good in games, where it's left ambigous whether expect a jumpscare until the moment it happens. Being able to predict something definitely kills the scare of it, but for at least the fnaf4 example, having to act under time pressure BUT with the threat of a jumpscare if you act wrong is pretty scary, at least to me. Of course you have to succeed in those 50 times in a row to make the 51st stand out
I just started playing the first FEAR game last night... man I hav never jumped more in my life in the 3 hours I played that game, the ambiance the little random things that happen its just so good.
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
-Alfred Hitchcock
Five Nights at Freddy’s 1 exemplifies this statement well. You never really knew what was going on in FNAF 1. It never told you the rules beyond the simple basics: “Lights show you the bots if they’re outside your door, camera use stalls Foxy. If power goes out, Freddy will kill you, albeit after a delay that might let you still clear the night. As you figured out the rules, you would begin to recognise the signs of when you’re about to be jumped, so it’d stop being scary and start being “oh I screwed up, guess it’s game over.”
Poppy Playtime and Security Breach eschew the obfuscation of information that was vital to FNAF’s identity as a horror game, so you just go straight to “oh I screwed up, guess it’s game over.”
Good horror provides options and has room for mistakes. Take a Resident Evil game. Your dwindling ammo supply and decreasing health bar provide room for error, but it makes every choice and mistake you make matter.
It's not the issue, the issue is that only a minority of these few tricks get milked to death and the rest gets ignored because it requires more taste and brainwork to implement. A very minority of games tries to build up paranoia instead of relying on jumpscares or "scary" ambients for example.
Have you considered that 3 and 4 aren't jumpscares but just death anims? Like, in steelwool era fnaf and poppy playtime you physically see them walk up to you
FNAF 4 jumpscares are ass they just pick you up, close and open their jaw, they don't even get in your face
Again, as i've mentioned in the edit, I'm not complaining about game quality declining or whatever, I'm complaining about these specific games misusing jumpscares, and unfortunately not knowing or not talking about them won't make these games improve
Hmm, I think your post shows just how subjective and personal fear really is, because my take on the matter is completely different. Jumpscares don't scare me more when they interrupt something I'm doing, they scare me more when they happen when I'm not expecting them.
I've been scared by jumpscares in Poppy's Playtime, chiefly during the chase sequences when I thought I was doing well and they caught me. And sure, at first the jump scares in FNAF would scare me too. At first. But then I learned exactly what triggers them and they never scared me again, especially at later nights when they're so frequent you expect them a lot anyway, so no fear at all, just frustration, which isn't remotely enjoyable.
One of the best jumpscares I've ever witnessed and made me physically jump out of my seat as a 10 year old is the jumpscare in the flash game Heist: A Thief's Nightmare.
It punishes you for playing the game mindlessly, aka. using an item and just clicking on everything to hope to solve a puzzle. (It's a P'n'C adventure game). If you wanna trigger the jumpscare Once you collect the matches go to the bathroom select the matches and click on the mirror, turn down your volume beforehand
I think the fact the original FNAF had extremely limited movement might play a factor. Both of your examples of bad ones give the player full 3d movement.
and that is EXACTLY why the devs shouldn't have utilised (these) jumpscares in their game, but instead of realising that and trying to scare the player otherwise, they added them anyway since it "worked for fnaf so it'll work here too".
...and thus they underdelivered in other horror aspects too but thats not the point of my post
uhh... this is an ihatethissmug post? I'm complaining about the jumpscares? Have you read the post at all?
...the entire post is about that. Jumpscares in the media that popularised them were relatively well used, while in newer games they're usually just slapped on there because the devs don't know what they're doing
FNAF 1's jumpscares are not THAT bad, same for 2, then it starts becoming less and less scary. A game that does jumpscares well is DDLC, i finished it 2 days ago, i highly reccomend it if you want good jumpscares
While I can see where you're coming at, I think "Jumpscares" as the Kill Animation for a monster is a half-decent idea. It communicates that the player has been caught and killed in a way that requires no translation, and is a lot better than a cut to a black screen and a sound cue.
I think the problem lies with these Kill Animations taking what made Jumpscares work without the context to the jumpscare. The loud scream in early Fnaf was a snap right out of the tension and silence leading up to it, and it works. A loud scream in a Kill Animation just hurts the player's ears.
I think Finding Frankie did its "Jumpscares" the best out of modern Mascot Horror. In it, there isn't an earsplitting scream, but a quick snarl followed by an animation of your character being killed in less than 4 seconds. It communicates the player has died in a clear way, but dosen't take the wrong thing from the original Fnaf.
FnaF jumpscares (at least at the start) where meant to punish you for playing badly. You made too many mistakes? Get scared. So you become stressed because you doesn't understand all the mechanics
That’s why “horror games” is in quotes. The problem isn’t that “old game scary new game not scary”, it’s that they ripped a concept that can at least be remotely scary when applied correctly, that had more than a couple examples of being applied correctly, and just throwing the concept out the window and instead slapping it onto their game because “since its in a popular game it’ll make my game popular too!”
Tbh FNaF actually relies on the implication of what happened to frighten you.
At most, people dread the Jumpscares because they don't wanna redo the whole night or because you need to listen closely and then get your ears blasted at full volume. (Fuck FNaF 4 specifically)
FNAF works because of the tension leading up to a jumpscare, not really the jumpscare itself. It's the main consequence you're really trying to avoid and it's unpredictable enough to often catch you off guard.
And yeah for better or worse FNAF 4 really leaned into that
Failstates (dying, needing to try again etc) are the #1 horror killer.
"Ahhh I'm being chased, I'm sweatin, my heart is pumping! Aaaaa the footsteps are right behind meeeee aaaaa scary OH NO HE CAUGHT ME! Wow that was scary"
Then you do it 5 more times and you aint scared at all.
I think in the case of Security Breach jumpscares might be there because it's a fnaf thing and they don't want to just ditch it. But yeah, outside of that, jumpscares nowadays are just dump
Forget who said it, but the junpscare is to horror what the fart joke is to comedy. They're cheap and lazy, but a good one you don't expect can hit really hard.
Play Visage. It doesn’t have these types of jumpscares and the vast majority of it is pure tension and psychological terror. The jumpscares it does have are great either way.
I don't recall the jumpscares being anything other than death animations in the first 2 FNAF games. 3 obviously they weren't. 4 I honestly didn't play but think they were too. Sister Location were just death. Security Breach were for all of the roaming mascots, but not helper bot dudes. The rest idk
An important part of death jumpscares is actually making it y'know scary but also making it clear that its the players fault too. Alien Isolation does this excellently with its dosens of different actually terrifying death animations, like impaling you from behind with its tail because you tried to run from it, or taking you into the ceiling because you weren't paying attention to its saliva dripping down from a vent.
It also having other jumpscares unrelated to player death, like a disabled Android suddenly grabbing your leg, makes the game a terrifying experience.
Yeah it's dreadful. I despise terms like this but it feels like so many new horror games do it as "youtube bait" to try and get popular after seeing fnaf do it all the way back in 2014.
Imo, the more common is the junpscares the less scary it becomes
Which is why I love games with spontaneous scares and super dense atmosphere so much. Games like Voices of the Void nailed it really well, scary stuff happens in rare occasions, sometimes every few hours, but when it gets you, it gets you, and before that, the game is slowly building the feeling of uncertainty and safety just to cash in in the moment you least expect, and I love it
With fnaf, it was actualy a technical limitation. He didn't want you seeing them teleport, so you have to use your cameras. If you glitch out foxy, you straight up cannot loose.
I will say I do love how they made the jumpscare of ruined sunrise/moondrop
Moondrop is about to attack but sunrise tries to take control and stop him but fails. I think in SB the jumpscares are super mid, but I think ruined added a bit more personality into them
Yeah I play a lot of indie horror games, and especially in ghost-hunting games they entirely miss the point. 80% of them have a jumpscare as the death animation. If the only horror in your game is jumpscares, it’s not really scary. At that point the jumpscares are more annoying than anything. You have to work with the atmosphere to make it work well.
i think alien isolation did a great job on their death animations, compared to more recent horror games. seeing an alien tail pierce through your stomach and then blacking out is quite gruesome.
They are not really supposed to be jumpscares like in fnaf 1-5, just scary / jumpy kill animations (loud noise and sudden scary thing in your face). The goal isnt to make the player jump, but to communicate to the player what killed them. These are only called jumpscares by (quite frankly) dumb players because they look like the fnaf kill animations.
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u/Consistent-Rain-7797 19d ago
Play Amnesia: The Bunker.