When we're specifically working on moments that are intended to be horrific or terrifying, um, there are lots of challenges with those things. Uh, on the third version of Dead Space, you know -- or fourth, if we include Dead Space: Extraction, um, people have seen the enemies. They know what they look like, so many people are desensitized to the -- to what once was really frightening. The first time you saw a Slasher in Dead Space, uh, it was like, "Wow, what is that?" You know, and so you immediately -- you know, your adrenaline pops up, and you have a reaction. You know, by the third time, you've seen those enemies. So, now how -- what do you do next, to kind of keep them excited, or, um, keep them on the edge of their seat? And I think that really, in itself, is an art, to try to keep people off their guard, so you're, you're looking at the pacing of when you lay out encounters, you know. You -- I like to think of it sometimes like music. So, perhaps in one part of the game, you're scaring people on a cadence of -- you know, on the twos and the fours in terms of music. That's when you're going to get them with the big punches, the big scare moments. But then you want to mix it up, and maybe now on the ones and threes, you want to pop out and scare them. But there's so much more to making a scary game. It's not just about things jumping out of closets at you. It's about tension. It's about the, the absence of action -- like, the, the points where nothing's happening, right? You walk into a room, and it's super noisy, and things are clanging around, and you're like, "Okay, something's going to happen in here," and then all the sound stops. And at that moment, you're like, "Uh-oh. Okay, now something's really going to happen in here." But you don't do anything, right? You don't need to do anything at that point, because you've already kind of changed the, the feeling and emotion of the player at that point. They're kind of ready for something, so let's say you don't do anything for the next few minutes, and they leave that room, and they continue through an, an area, and it's completely quiet. Um, and they get to a point, eventually, where they're like, "Oh, I guess nothing's going to happen in here." Then you want to scare them. Then you hit them with something when their guard's down. Like, figuring that timing out, and playing with that, um, is just something that you have to nuance, and, and noodle with, and play around with, and you have to observe people playing the game. Um, it -- there's no formula on how to actually create something that's scary.
