Horror

Horror games fandom nowadays is full of nostalgiagays who claim the genre is dead but wet their pants after a rumor of a new Silent Hill is getting developed, ignoring all those games that came after the disintegration of team silent, which varied from trash to ok games
Main complain about these games is the "lack of scary elements" You are an adult, you can't get the same sense of fear anymore, ignoring that, and if you really want to give every player at least some dose of fear, your best bet is on enemy variety
Everyone has fear of something, it might be spiders, or snakes/worms, or other humans, they can come as a giant, or a swarm of small things, maybe they actively try to chase you, maybe they only attack you if you stop looking at them, or look into a mirror, enemies that mimic objects, or instakill you, its up to your imagination as a designer
If anything i learned from The Evil Withni and Prey 2017 is that invisible enemies scare the shit out of me personally

Another solution would be tension, tension is objective and there is a lot of things that can cause it. For example
Race against the clock: Building going down when you are inside it, another character in danger, a bomb that needs to be defused, blah blah blah
Ammo management: There is nothing worse that getting into a boss fight without ammo, it forces you to use the environment, or thinking ifs worth it to use a rare object
Choices: Good endings are not always allowed, making he player choice between two objects is not the thing that i talk about, but making them choose from two characters is something that Telltale used a lot on their games, and i loved it in Wolfenstein:TNO holding the face of the player and making them observe the consequence of their actions is one shocking but effective way to inmerse the player into the story

>HUD
>walking simulator
>puzzle than could either be solved by a 3yo or are so badly written tha you have to bruteforce them
>turn the whole damn screen red when low hp
>late game weapons will annihilate any monster
>all you can do is run and hide, the game is just a giant stealth section
>obvious asset flip
>the great hall of nothingness
>le ebin twist at the end
>the game has actually 5 minutes of gameplay diluted by pointless repetitive tasks that add nothing to game but getting to the 2h mark so you can't refund it
just stop doing these ffs

Phasmophobia has the potential to be a really good horror game with pvp

Hear me out, I honestly think that implementing a human element to the ghosts would be a great way to increase replayability as this would definitely make each experience unique.
Here's the premise;
>Desolation mode is exactly Phasmophobia but in reverse, 4 players will spawn in a random spot within the Haunted location. Phasmophobia's whole premise is to get in and investigate, this time its to survive and get out.
- The windows and doors are shut, and players are equipped with only a flashlight/Light source, their goal is to find items scattered and hidden within the location, and upon successfully gathering all of them, they can perform a ritual at a specific place within the location (where the ghost presumably died). In doing so they win the game.
>useful items are also scattered in the location, like crucifixes and salts, providing temporary relief
>A ticking clock is provided with the sanity meter, the longer they stay within the haunted location, and the longer a ghost stays beside them, the faster their sanity goes, losing their sanity would mean the end for them. Being in a group slows the decline, but also hinders their progress.