What makes a videogame scary and how to make a successful horror title?

Although horror games are a specific genre, they are still very popular.

And probably will be in the future.

But making a really good horror game is not as easy as it might seem at first glance. It's not enough to just flood the game with screamers and creepy enemy models.

That approach is more likely to be annoying.

Read on to find out how to make a truly scary game.

The most important aspects of a successful horror game

Tension, stress, and suspense are the three pillars of any good horror game.

You need to build the tension slowly to an extreme, and then release the tension in several stages.

The player has to be involved in the game, because that's the only way he can experience stress and fear.

And involving them can be done in many different ways. The most proven way is to target the fear points and spice it up with a good story.

Fear can be many things. First, it is generated by the unknown, the expectation of some unpredictable change. This is perhaps the strongest kind of fear, which accompanies a person everywhere and all the time.

There is no point in not playing with it, because it is extremely effective.

If go a little deeper, you can try to scare the player with the fear of failure. This will be more difficult, but if your game is really atmospheric (and this is very much influenced by the quality of music and sound effects, which you can download from our site, by the way, completely free), the player will not want his quest to end in failure. If we talk about examples, you can create very strong opponents and make the protagonist extremely weak, and the checkpoint to cast very, very far away.

As a result, the player will be afraid to take a step, because the loss of progression in this case will be very, very scary.

Finally, the two fears described above can be combined with a third type. The most primitive, but one that will work perfectly in conjunction with the others.

Images of blood, violence, and dead people are the most direct way to display fear. It will affect more people because the aversion to such content is ingrained in people on a genetic level.

We hope that we have given you an idea or two on how to make a really scary game. Finally, we would like to clarify that you can use any engine to do this, but for indie horror games Unity is probably the preferred option.

There is a lot of content on our hub that will definitely help you create a really scary game. These include 2D assets and 3D models of all kinds of monsters, ghouls, ghosts, zombies, ghosts and vampires. All of them are made by professionals and are free of malware. Moreover, you will be able to download them completely free of charge and without registration.

We have also prepared a section dedicated to guides. There you will find a lot of guides, for example, how to implement all these downloaded models in the game so that they look organic.

And we also have tips on how to use this or that 2D and 3D program.

And of course we have content for Unity, otherwise we wouldn't recommend you to make a project on Unity!