Jump scares and horror games have gone together since the earliest days of the genre, with games like Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark utilizing shocking moments to keep the player on edge. Having an enemy leap out at the player from an unseen area after a moment of quiet is a tried-and-true method of getting some quick scares out of an unexpecting player. While this trope was used lightly in the earlier days of horror games, there was a brief time where it seemed like every game had some kind of jump scare.

The early 2010s saw a bit of a resurgence for horror games, with titles like Five Nights at Freddy's reinventing the genre for the era of online content creators. While that meant that fans got truly creative horror games, it also meant that many of these games focused heavily on the kinds of horror that would get reactions. Things like shock horror, gore and jump scares ended up being overly used to a point that many started asking if jump scares even had a place in horror games.

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This oversaturation certainly lead to a drastic shift in the kinds of horror games developers made. While there are still plenty of titles around today that still use jump scares, many horror games have a renewed focus on things like atmospheric and psychological horror. Indie horror games have long since drifted to these kinds of horror games, though even big AAA developers have turned their focus to other kinds of horror. Resident Evil Village even explores several kinds of horror that aren't often tackled by video games.

Jump scares can certainly be done well when they're more than just a scary image and a loud noise. Those kinds of cheap jump scares are usually criticized for missing the point and only furthering the oversaturation of the trope. What makes a good jump scare is the build-up and anticipation creating anxiety in the player, which is something that the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise has understood for a long time.

FNAF has continued to grow in popularity since the original game was released in 2014, with each new game adding on to the basic formula of learning each animatronic's patterns in order to survive. While FNAF is often criticized as being the series that killed the jump scare, the series actually has a pretty solid understanding of how to use jump scares. The dark and foreboding atmosphere of the games helps to start a slow burn of anticipation that culminates in an animatronic jump scare.

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Atmosphere is important to making a jump scare work since it's important for the player to still anticipate something without being caught completely off guard. A jump scare needs to be both scary and startling, but it can't just be startling. Slender: The Eight Pages is another classic horror game that knew how to use jump scares since the actual jump scare was completely telegraphed by a slow build of noise and static.

Time may have been all it took for jump scares to find their place in modern horror games again, as the trope doesn't feel as saturated as it once did The occasional jump scare can work in horror games as long as it is used properly and sparingly. A problem the FNAF series ran into later in its life was fairly telling of the rest of the horror genre, which is that the jump scares began to feel less impactful due to how often they happened.

Even if jump scares need to be anticipated, too much predictability kills the impact that a jump scare has. Jump scares should be anticipated in a way that players can't predict specifically what's coming but they still feel the dread that something is going to happen. Dread and anxiety are the feelings that players should get from an upcoming jump scare, with those feelings being crucial when it comes to making a jump scare really work.

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While they may have felt overused in the past, jump scares certainly have their place in modern horror games as long as they are used sparingly. Certain games benefit far more from not having any jump scares and instead just letting the dread be the major source of horror. The modern horror titles that focus on the same kind of horror brought on by liminal spaces don't require jump scares to get their horror across.

Today's horror game fans, in general, tend to be far more receptive to jump scares in their games, especially since there seems to be a renewed focus on doing them well. While they may have been overused and done to death at one point, they're no longer a trend that every game is trying to use. In a way, jump scares becoming scarce again have reinvigorated the kind of terror they can inflict on horror fans.

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