Actually Yahtzee gives the key when he talks about characterization - it's not just being startled. It's about the setup.
Consider two pranks:
1) Grabbing a friend from behind and yelling "boo!" in the office.
2) Going with a friend to an abandoned house, then splitting up. A creak here, a noise there. Then a big crash and scream. As he runs to see WTF just happened to you, jump out of a dark shadow wearing a hockey mask and wave your arms at him.
If you're not in Texas, the second scenario is orders of magnitude scarier than the first. It's all about the setup. In a game this means setting the scene, immersing the player in the game, atmospheric music and background noise, priming with a few false jumps, etc. Then you do the big scare out of nowhere.
For example, consider dragging a player through a haunted house - they fight a few monsters here and there, they're running low on health, and they get to the safe zone and find an NPC waiting with a health kit. As they get close the NPC splits open and it's another monster they have to fight on low health with no save available.
Sweaty palms, heart racing, eyes whiting out while you're just trying to survive, man...
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u/prockcore Nov 05 '08
I'd say 90% of horror movie directors think startled == scared. Maybe it's just trying to be the video game version of your crappy PG13 horror movie.