Rough news at the start of the episode. I appreciate everyone’s candor about the situation (especially Frank) as much as I appreciate how much this reinforces everyone’s desire to continue finding ways to help the community flourish.
So in the interest of not letting that be the only conversation,
Really glad dungeon crawlers were noted a few times over. I was thinking of all the times I’d gotten a total party wipe in Dungeon Encounters, because I wasn’t paying attention to which horrible two letter combination was blocking a hallway.
I played a bit of Deja Vu and Shadowgate not too long ago, and I’ll say if you really wanna scare some folk, toss in some weird, inscrutable pixel art of a skull. Toss a few pink pixels in there to really freak people out. Or make it blood red!
Long time listener first time finding the forum. Just want to say you guys have an awesome podcast and i always have it on my weekly shows to listen to.
I too appreciate the openness regarding the news. It’s very lame of anyone to not be nice to folks. I hate when people just can’t Be Cool. So thank y’all for standing on your values, and refusing to be treated that way.
But to get back to positivity, I’m just happy IC is doing well regardless. I really love the show with or without Tim, and cannot emphasize enough how much I appreciate the forums and community here.
Sorry to hear the two of you go through that. I’m relatively new to the forums and I have to say you’ve fostered a really cool and open community. It’s the one place online that I genuinely look forward to reading.
Also there are A LOT of videogame related podcasts and shows out there but Insert Credit stands out for me. You guys genuinely talk about things that interest you which is why I enjoy listening (even though I know nothing about the PC-98 and stuff)
Damn, that hits like a real kick in the teeth, so I can’t imagine how you all feel about it. The candor is appreciated, and hopefully those things said didn’t hit on difficult memories for any of you—or at least, didn’t hit them too squarely
Hopefully this can serve as a jumping off point for the show to turn into something brighter and better in the long term
I’ve never bought that Bloodborne is any scarier a game than the others just because of the aesthetic, but there is one moment in that game that is particularly discomforting.
In the final area...
there’s a gigantic brain chained up in a tower, and you can pull a lever to release it into a seemingly bottomless pit. Later, you take an elevator down into a void beneath the level. If you’re playing online there might be messages on the floor indicating where to go, but I never had PS+, meaning it was perfectly black. There is nothing to make you aware of how far you’re walking, or even in what direction, unless you turn around to look at the elevator you’re walking away from, and seeing it disappear in the distance is equally frightening. Eventually the ambient light radiating from your character, or your lantern, or your torch will illuminate the oozing brain lying on the floor, but only when you’re about six inches from its big(gest) eyeball glaring right at you.
The Abyss in the first Dark Souls is disturbing for a similar reason: no floor, no walls, no nothing except the Four Kings flying at you and oh my they’re quite a bit bigger up close than I thought
Really appreciate Frank’s candid statement at the start. As someone that’s had a very similar experience of a long-term, close friend spontaneously burn that friendship for similar reasons I completely sympathise with you all. It must really suck for you all to have to deal with that but I’m glad to hear that you’re taking the opportunity to move on positively.
Great episode overall though and merritt is a fantastic guest. The most scared I’ve been, though it’s more shocked, was experiencing that bathroom scene from Eternal Darkness. Though generally I am most scared when in a similar way to Frank explained of his time being wasted; going neck deep into a dungeon in say, an Etrian Odyssey game and being surrounded or trapped by one of the super strong FOE enemies on the map and forgetting to bring an escape rope. Those games are scary!
Frequent listener, infrequent forum poster. Thanks for being forthcoming and just straight up addressing what happened, hope you’re all doing okay. All I’ll say is that I started listening to Insert Credit in the period where Tim had quit the first time and loved the show then, and I’m excited to see where you go from here.
playing alone in the dark when i was 7, had nightmares about spiders in the bath tub. But most painfull was that my little brother laughed about the game while i was terrified about it!
the codec call on mgs2 when the ai goes crazy, the whole vibe was a lot!
For turn-based horror, we find something like what Frank described with Phantasy Star in board games. There is an entire mechanic / subgenre (?) of board games where bad things happen if enough time passes. Think of Pandemic, where each turn, the disease gets incrementally less manageable, and often players are riding a thin line between success and failure. Or there is Arkham Horror or Betrayal at House on the Hill, where mechanics tick toward an endgame, creating a sense of foreboding. The turn is an effective interactive element, as with every choice, one knows that, whatever the outcome of that choice, they have also brought the game one step closer to their possible doom.
The foundational example of this is (fear warning):
Sorry about what happened to y’all. Looking forward to an ocean of much more positive episode-openings from here on out!
If my futile attempts at revisiting the original Silent Hills and jumping into the Dead Space remake are any indication, I somehow find scary games even scarier now than I did as a child. I was always comically easily scared by them, but I at least had the constitution to play the original Dead Space to completion despite the constant jump scares.
But the -most- scared I’ve ever been because of a game is for sure Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. It was the first game I ever got to add to my collection after getting an NES with Mario 3 on it, and the music and concept immediately terrified my pre-school self. My dad would continue to play it after I went to bed, and no amount of hiding under the blanket made hearing the music shift from creepy day to horrifying night through the door any less chilling. I don’t think anyone else considers or ever considered Castlevania II a particularly scary game, but it sure primed me to have the intended reaction to any and all remotely creepy game going forward.
This one is it for me. As (I believe) Frank and others have mentioned before, I ended up beating MGS 2 overnight into the wee hours of early morning, so that really added to it as well. Very trippy, disorienting and eerie.
Man, what a bummer. Sad to hear things went down the way they did. That’s definitely not cool and I hope you’re doing okay.
I’m not a fan of tribalism and I enjoy all of the panelist’s work so I hope things work out in the long run between you all. I will say however, that I’ve grown very fond of the IC podcast and forums. They’ve become a part of my life I regularly look forward to and one of the few places of the internet that make me happy to engage with it.
I’m glad the episode turned out to be a good vibe anyway. merritt k is a fun guest!
I’m a big baby when it comes to horror stuff and so I can’t really quote any particular horror game moments because I don’t play most of them. However Outer Wilds is a game that continuously made me feel a sense of dread and gave me some good scares. There’s just something very immersive about how the physics and universe are simulated which leads to a lot of emergent spookiness. Like the quantum shards and moon moving around and sometimes showing up directly behind you. Also the black hole in the middle of Brittle Hollow which gave me a strong sense of vertigo and fear. That definitely cooled off after a while once I realized you can get back pretty quickly from the white hole station but a bit of that primal fear of such a weird physical phenomenon always remained. And then theres more intended scares like the angler fish in dark bramble which definitely jumpscared me real good.
I once swam over the edge of a reef and stared into the deep, cold abyss of the pacific ocean and ever since you can very reliably scare me with murky and/or deep waters so basically Giant’s Deep was thalassophobia central for me.
