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It's a fair point. The iconography of horror movies is a goldmine for game developers, but that doesn't necessarily translate into frightening gameplay. The games I listed above were exclusively ones which made me feel scared (even if only intermittently), as opposed to fun games which were marketed as horror but which never induced feelings of fear or dread. F.E.A.R. is an entertaining shooter, but at no point while playing it did I feel scared, not even during the bits where it was aping The Ring. I haven't played Dead Space to completion, but don't remember finding it scary.
I know what you mean, but were the TV show and comic even horror? I was under the impression they were both more like post-apocalyptic dramas in a zombie setting.
My understanding is that Doom 3 is the major exception to this, although I haven't played it.
I've never seen the Walking Dead show, but I did finish the comic, and you're right there; it also wasn't a horror story so much as a post-apocalyptic adventure story with some horror elements. The zombie hordes were essentially dumb forces of nature that could be dealt with given enough preparedness and cooperation, and only the human villains could really inspire fear. Telltale's video game (and its sequels) preserved the tone well.
I beat Doom 3, and I guess it does include a few exceptions? There was some body-horror executed amazingly well, and then there were some jump scares that just fell flat. The game disappointed a lot of fans, because since it was really pushing the limits of graphics technology for its time, they had to figure out some way to avoid overtaxing everybody's GPUs, and they did so by limiting the number of enemies simultaneously in combat. Ironically that's probably what pushed them to try (half-successfully) to make it much better as a horror game, but many people didn't care because that style made it worse as a Doom game. I think Doom 2016 was so well-received because in hindsight it felt like that was what Doom was always supposed to be, and every prior game had just been choosing which aspects of the Platonic Ideal Doom to sacrifice to the limits of pre-2016 technology.
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