For me it's probably your vulnerability (and honestly I expect this answer to be one of the more common ones), and that to me is what makes Amnesia work so well compared to other horror games. Slap a weapon in your hands and you completely remove that all important element. That's why Black Plague worked so much better as a horror game than Overture did.
The ambience, by far. The first like 3 hours of the game I was afraid of every shadow and every strange sound, because I never knew when or if something would pop out, and the music was making me feel so tense.
^Amnesia does that so well.
Everyone I know that's played, myself included, is freaking out pretty much from the start, all the build up prior to ever encountering anything, few games can have you freaking out even when NOTHING can happen to you.
The darkness. The sounds. (Altho some of the insanity sounds could have been toned down.) Sitting in the darkness staring at dripping walls and not knowing where safety is....
I fear and hate being helpless in real life, therefore, being utterly helpless before a terrifying enemy, is well...terrifying
I'm with duskofdead here. The ambience, the sound effects, the music, the overall spooky atmoshere. All of it combined to have me sweating buckets through the whole game.
The potential danger...sometimes before it's even reared its face in your direction. Half of it or more is the suspense, the danger lying dormant rather than danger manifested.
(04-27-2011, 04:45 AM)gandalf91 Wrote: [ -> ]The potential danger...sometimes before it's even reared its face in your direction. Half of it or more is the suspense, the danger lying dormant rather than danger manifested.
Yup, in a way it's scarier to hear the "grunt danger" music start playing than to actually see where he is, because you immediately double back to hide somewhere and have no idea if you're going to end up running right into a monster's sight.
I don't even need to see the servants to be terrified when I get the clues that they are around.
The audio. I would often wonder if what I heard was a real threat or insanity in my first few hours of gameplay.
The suspense. Peeking around corners, walking down corridors, freakin' opening doors... I wasn't super cautious all the time, but when I got cocky and careless, I soon regretted it.
And, being helpless. Not in the way Hunter of Shadows mentioned (although that's scary too), but being lost in an area made me feel incredibly helpless. The prison was the worst... I didn't know where I was going, where I've been, there's monsters everywhere... aaaugh.
Frictional is brilliant.
The safety and danger of well-lit areas.