Gothic Horror Computer Games

[Brandi]

Seeing as we've already mentioned Thief II, there is a character in that game (Karras) who is a priest and who looks just like Yagno Petrovna.

He's quite the odious SOB too-- would make a good darklord (I still have some idea of doing a massive rewrite of Nosos with Karras as darklord-- it would have less of the just stinking piles of refuse but would still have the same disdain for Nature, and possibly involve the Woodsie Lord somehow. It's never quite jelled, though. )

[Jack of Tears]

Well, you've got the chemistry of Karrass dispising nature and the Woodsie Lord dispising manmade creations ...

What if the Woodsie Lord had once made a deal with Karrass who convinced it he could make men better, more controllable, and the deal went terribly wrong?

Or Karrass was once a servant of the WL who grew to dispise the anti-human propoganda of the god and decided to replace the forest with a world of man ... only to find that men were too faulty and so went on to try and improve upon it through his new religion of technology?

[HuManBing]

Fallout 3 is not particularly Gothic, but it does have a location that is clearly a nod to Lovecraft's more gothic works - the Dunwich Building, based on The Dunwich Horror. The building is a wrecked office, and the inhabitants are... unsettling. The lower levels have a very alienesque structure that invokes the otherworldly horrors of Lovecraft, but the fight to get there will have you alert and paranoid, lashing out at something terrifying in the darkness.

[Jack of Tears]

The journals you find there also have a Lovecraftian feel to them - I had a fun time exploring the area, though I wish there had been more to it.

[Ail]

Anyone remember The 7th Guest?

I do. Nice premise, a bit disappointing in the end. In particular the part of the maze. I still remember the words "Feeling lonely" echoing in my mind everytime I reached a dead-end. Not fun.

And the puzzle of the cans: "shy gypsy slyly spryly tryst by my crypt".
I hated it, really. I know it was made to look difficult, with that abundance of 'y's, but there were so many words in there I didn't know that it was really frustrating. Still, I learned about 'tryst' and 'spry'

[Ail]

Speaking of oldies, I think Quest for Glory IV actually was the first game to give me the good feel for some gothic themes, although the game feels a little light-hearted to be horror...

That said, something I picked on the net a few years ago (freeware) was Fiend, and that DID scare me a bit. It was supposed to be Lovecraftian in theme and I never finished it, but even if it is 2d bird's eye view, I find it has good horror in it.

Guess it should be this one: http://www.tucows.com/preview/238084

[Pale]

Sanitarium was a fairly creepy undertaking - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitarium_(videogame)

[HuManBing]

I have that game but am still working out how to get it running on my computer.

I played a few levels of it on an old computer and it was pretty good. A little rough-around-the-edges, but good.

[HuManBing]

The entire Thief series is well worth a look ... I've been meaning to run a game based on the setting for some time.

My classmate did that, although not in Ravenloft. (He used a homemade RPG system.) The plot was very similar in tone, but he'd taken a few artistic liberties with it so that the entire game revolved around the discovery (and eventual disposal) of the Hand of Vecna.

I do remember he had scripted the plot brilliantly so that the true power of the hand was not fully revealed until a key point - where the city's Prince, the heroes, and their rival archeologists were all together at a tense confrontation at the masqued ball.

The rest of the game was spent teaming up with the rivals to try to kill the possessed Prince, who was now running around blasting magic and collapsing part of the city.