Why I Don't Play Scary Games

Resident Evil, Dead Island, Dead Space etc. The survival horror genre of games is really big right now. Maybe bigger than it's ever been before. I don't play any of them. I might watch a let's play on youtube or somewhere else, but that's it. When I tell people I don't play scary games most people assume I'm just scared. There's actually a few reasons I don't play scary games but fear isn't one of them.

The first reason is I don't scare easily. That's for a few reasons. I'm my father's son and nothing is scarier than him sitting in the dark smoking a cigarette. That man is dark and it looks like just a glowing red dot, but I'm getting off topic. My parents also raised my older cousins for a while. They enjoyed scaring me. Eventually I got used to it and stopped being fearful of everything.

Even if I don't scare easy, there should be enough effort put into the games to scare me but there just isn't. The scares in most games is just jump scares now. They throw a random enemy right in front of the camera and expect you to jump and say "Oh, that was scary." But, when that stopped being enough they just made them yell at you. If you mute the game, you're just not scared anymore. It's that simple.

You want to know another reason I don't play them? I'm tired of zombies and infected and everything else they're called. Lately it seems like everything is just a different skin on the zombies with some new names. The zombie thing is played out. I can't take another zombie game no matter how you wrap the zombies in a new skin it's still a zombie. I admire Last of Us because they tried to do something new with the clickers. But a lot of the other infected were just standard zombie variations.

Before Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare was the last scary game with a story behind it. It's rare that any of these games has an actual good story besides "Zombies, let's survive." That was the story for Last of Us too but they wanted to find a cure at least. They also took the time to create characters that were unique. We all remember how hyped up Dead Island was. We also remember how bad the story was. How nobody can remember what the story really was. It was bad.

Cheap scares, standard enemies, bad stories and a whole heap of other issues. I don't play horror games because they're bad. They aren't scary. They aren't difficult and they're rarely memorable. They're just bad games and I don't like bad games. I'd rather not waste my time playing them.

You can hear Darrell on the CP Time and Powerbomb Jutsu podcasts. He's also playing Pokemon Liquid Crystal on YouTube
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