I like traditional horror. The games with monsters, helpless protagonists and dark rooms or forests. However, there's something I've been struggling with when making them myself. How do you keep the game going without adding cutscenes and dialogue?

Video games are an interactive medium and most of them - especially horror - have many long sections with puzzles or not that somehow retain engagement. These sections have little story and seemingly just tension, suspense and exploration to keep them going. However, when making a game, I just can't seem to achieve this kind of procedural content and fall flat when trying to come up with a new area or puzzle, instead having to opt for a non-interactive section instead. This in turn gives the game about two minutes of content for every week of development. Do you guys have any tips for this? Thanks

I couldn't say about games, but in static fiction it's just as hard to keep going from awesome beat to awesome beat for any length of time. For one thing you'd soon be exhausted, and so would the audience. I was telling a friend just the other day: for a story to have legs, it must be able to settle in for the long haul. And that means being made mostly of scenes that carry it forward quietly, without too much spectacle. Then the brief tense moments will have that much more weight.

The Portal games are a good example of how to do this I think. Puzzles, enemies etc. are made up of just a few elements. But they're constantly mixed up to create new, more difficult challenges.