A few months ago I had a discussion on Twitter with Thomas Grip, the brains behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the Penumbra series, and now SOMA, about overused elements in horror games. Turns out there are a whole lot of trite, cliché, and downright dated design elements that show up again and again in horror games, and once we started talking about them they just came flooding out. What started as a joke (“Not every mansion needs an underground lab”) quickly turned into a mega-thread, to the point that some of my followers asked me to stop talking about this and write a blog post.

So here is that blog post. Thomas and I have racked our brains to produce the following USEFUL TIPS FOR HORROR GAME DESIGNERS.

A few people have commented since we posted this today that there are a lot of complaints about Resident Evil in here. That’s true! But we worked to ensure that each tip addressed a trope that can be found in multiple game series. None are exclusive to Resident Evil, and most are employed by five or six different games. Read the feature here..