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I would agree. A game that has a horde of horror motifs that isn't scary is still horror. Maybe not very good horror, but still horror.

If you define horror as "having a mutilated corpse", then the overwhelming majority of games are horror games.

An alien zombie outbreak in an enclosed space from which escape is limited and religious nut jobs who want unify everyone with said alien zombie outbreak with some shadow corporation backing them up is pretty much the definition of a horror story line (EDIT: You could even say the story is a complete rip off of the works of John Carpenter, fusing his trilogy into one thing with a space twist). Just because the game isn't scary doesn't make that go away.

Leviathan isn't a particularly scary movie, nor are the Resident Evil games (save RE1 but that was really only scary cause the controls were gak). They're still squarely in the horror genre, just like the majority of slasher films, which also happen to generally not be scary at all. Heck, Cabin in the Woods wasn't frightening in the slightest, but it's still a horror film. If we're going to start excluding things from their genre just because they weren't very good at something we're gonna have to reclassify pretty much everything that wasn't grade A material (I mean, how are we going to start classifying Scary Movie under this 'it's not horror if it's not scary' system of categorization, or any other horror comedy for that matter) .

 LordofHats wrote:
An alien zombie outbreak in an enclosed space from which escape is limited and religious nut jobs who want unify everyone with said alien zombie outbreak with some shadow corporation backing them up is pretty much the definition of a horror story line (EDIT: You could even say the story is a complete rip off of the works of John Carpenter, fusing his trilogy into one thing with a space twist). Just because the game isn't scary doesn't make that go away.

Leviathan isn't a particularly scary movie, nor are the Resident Evil games (save RE1 but that was really only scary cause the controls were gak). They're still squarely in the horror genre, just like the majority of slasher films, which also happen to generally not be scary at all. Heck, Cabin in the Woods wasn't frightening in the slightest, but it's still a horror film. If we're going to start excluding things from their genre just because they weren't very good at something we're gonna have to reclassify pretty much everything that wasn't grade A material (I mean, how are we going to start classifying Scary Movie under this 'it's not horror if it's not scary' system of categorization, or any other horror comedy for that matter) .

Exactly. It's like watching an old cheesy horror movie and claiming it's a comedy because it was made so poorly. No matter how funny you think it is, it is not a comedy.

I would like to point out that it took me forever to beat Dead Space 2 because I couldn't play it for longer than 30 minutes at a time before I had to find a save point, turn it off, and go do something else...

I jumped at everything in that game...

I hate horror games, but I love horror films, what does it is the interactivity in the game

 Alfndrate wrote:
I would like to point out that it took me forever to beat Dead Space 2 because I couldn't play it for longer than 30 minutes at a time before I had to find a save point, turn it off, and go do something else...

I jumped at everything in that game...

I hate horror games, but I love horror films, what does it is the interactivity in the game

I didn't have that problem with 2 so much, but my first playthrough of 1 ended because I found it really stressful to play and didn't pick it up for a while.

I'm happy to acknowledge this means I'm willing to be frightened of what's essentially a hallway of a thousand monster closets, but I did find it... horrifying.

 Melissia wrote:
Eh, I can see what you're getting at, but it's still not as good as Penumbra or Amnesia when it comes to honest-to-Emperor horror.

Havnt played them.

I dont atually like horror games. The only reason I played FEAR, Resident Evils, Dead Space 1 is because I found the settings were appealing. (Also the reason why i HATE Dead Space is because it turns out the setting I thought the game was had nothing to do with the actual setting and I hated the actual setting)

 Galdos wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
Eh, I can see what you're getting at, but it's still not as good as Penumbra or Amnesia when it comes to honest-to-Emperor horror.

Havnt played them.

I dont atually like horror games. The only reason I played FEAR, Resident Evils, Dead Space 1 is because I found the settings were appealing. (Also the reason why i HATE Dead Space is because it turns out the setting I thought the game was had nothing to do with the actual setting and I hated the actual setting)

Penumbra is... well, I dunno how to describe its setting without giving spoilers. You play as a scholar searching for his father in modern times, who stumbles in to an old WWII bunker in a winter wasteland and get trapped inside while investigating what the hell is going on here. That's about as much as I'd say without spoilers.

Meanwhile Amnesia has more of a medieval style setting, you're in a massive castle most of the time IIRC.

The Penumbra sounds kind of cool actually

 LordofHats wrote:
An alien zombie outbreak in an enclosed space from which escape is limited and religious nut jobs who want unify everyone with said alien zombie outbreak with some shadow corporation backing them up is pretty much the definition of a horror story line (EDIT: You could even say the story is a complete rip off of the works of John Carpenter, fusing his trilogy into one thing with a space twist). Just because the game isn't scary doesn't make that go away.

Leviathan isn't a particularly scary movie, nor are the Resident Evil games (save RE1 but that was really only scary cause the controls were gak). They're still squarely in the horror genre, just like the majority of slasher films, which also happen to generally not be scary at all. Heck, Cabin in the Woods wasn't frightening in the slightest, but it's still a horror film. If we're going to start excluding things from their genre just because they weren't very good at something we're gonna have to reclassify pretty much everything that wasn't grade A material (I mean, how are we going to start classifying Scary Movie under this 'it's not horror if it's not scary' system of categorization, or any other horror comedy for that matter) .

To be fair Cabin in the Woods was an intentional deconstruction of horror tropes...

Oh, blast.

A shame. Dead Space was one of the creepiest game series we've had for a while.

Still, I reckon it's a good thing that it didn't just keep on going forever, like a few franchises I could mention.