Which game did you find scarier?

[Adny]

Something that's been bothering me, guns/being able to fight back=/=not scary. Silent Hill 2 is considered one of the scariest games ever (the scariest to some) and it has weapons. Sometimes it can even make a game scarier, watching your ammo slowly go away and realizing you won't be able to fight back soon. It's all in the execution, but saying "this game is scarier than this game because you can't fight back" is stupid.

**I've never played Silent Hill 2; I tried, but aside from the strange camera/movement controls (which I thought made it unplayable) it continuously crashed, so I can't offer any input there.**

It's just my observation. Typically when games implement weapons (especially guns), they rely on things popping out at you and try to classify that as horror; that's fine for some people, but I find jumpscares more "fun" than scary, as in after a jumpscare, you laugh at yourself, but when you are genuinely scared, you want to turn off the game.

DCOTE couldn't even manage to keep any horror element after they implemented weapons. It had plenty of resources and made it so you never really felt "in danger" when enemies appeared; they were far too easy to kill and could rarely ever hit you as long as you weren't standing still for 5+ seonds.

A game that I think does a good job of balancing resources and using subtlety is Metro 2033. I started playing it a few days ago and I had to stop a few times, it got too overwhelming. It has a lot of "NOPE" moments, and really does well with ambient sounds. I found the enemies to be genuinely scary; they were difficult to kill and often forced the player to use up a lot of resources (i.e. the "Librarians").

tl;dr - weapons/fighting back is fine, but developers usually can't do it right. Players will always take the easiest way out of a situation with an enemy; if that means blowing its brains out after 1-2 shots and there is no real cost to the player, it's no longer scary in my eyes.