I've heard of Demon of Laplace--apparently some people see it as a spiritual followup to Sweet Home, which I liked despite it being a rather typical ghost story.

To be honest I used to think video games weren't a good fit for storytelling... but a couple of things convinced me they could be, and made me think the problem was creative stigmas similar to what haunts the comic book industry--basically, "because it hasn't been done, then it can't be." But when you find an author who says "screw that" you get brilliance. The Metal Gear series could've continued to be brilliant if Japan wasn't a conformist culture and Kojima wasn't bound by corporate interests (screw critics, Metal Gear Solid 2 was brilliance on a disc).

Then there's games like Ib and the Crooked Man, a pair of indie RPG-Maker games (which aren't RPGs despite what they were made with) that show how effective games can be at telling stories and the latter really does do some thinking outside the box, managing a sort of subdued idealism which points out the potential drawbacks of trying too hard and never letting go of your ideals. It's not quite the antithesis to every kids anime ever made, its more like a counterpoint.

I haven't heard of Elder Sister-like One, but I did hear of this anime/manga which reinterprets Lovecraft peeps like Nyarlathotep as.... high school girls. I think it's called like Nyarko-san or something, and to be honest it sounds adorable.

See, in a case like that... well, one of my favorite anime is Ranma 1/2, which is character drama, but in that case you know what you're getting into when you sign up for it, and the Ranma cast is entertaining and likable, the kind of people you could imagine having a few sips of whatever beverage with while they tell you about whatever antics (probably involving mind-control mushrooms or secret societies based around cursed pools or really serious games of kick the can) they got up to recently.

It also helps that in that case the character drama is the most interesting thing going on--its not like the series spends three episodes talking about the Jersey Devil and then suddenly drops episodes about an arranged marriage on you.

Basically, I won't complain about character drama if its what I signed up for. I don't play a light gun game then say there's too much shooting.

As for explanations, the big thing I demand is that the explanation doesn't cheapen the experience--which I feel springing "oh you were bringing this on yourself the whole time" almost always does. I think I've seen precisely two games where that reveal worked out... largely because of a themological significance it had (both games involved coping with depression). The game I ragged on in the OP, the one that goes on about aliens and betrayals before revealing you're just a guy at a hospital after a car wreck... that was just B.S. (Also seriously, what hospital keeps freaking horror movies for the patients to watch?)

Though "Maybe it was real, maybe it wasn't", now that you mention it, bugs me as well, but for a different reason: It feels like a cheap cop-out. I kind of feel like the concept of "up to personal interpretation" has become soured--for awhile it was seen as artistic, but it didn't take long for creators to weaponize this and be considered geniuses, essentially just for being lazy. Especially since that take also has the dubious "benefit" of, if a critic ever sees a plot hole, the author can claim it was an intentional clue. I just hate things that give bad writers easy outs like that.

That said, I do agree there should be variety in horror, with tons of different takes... that's kind of the problem tho: there aren't. I keep seeing the same ideas trotted out again and again, to the point that a genre that should be awe-inspiring and mind-blowing, is now just kind of tedious and predictable. I mention Lovecraft because his stories show places that could be gone to, and I look at those and say "Wait, this could easily be done as a video game... so why hasn't it?" It can't be technical limitations, since many could quite easily be done as RPG Maker or even Text Adventure type games. I mentioned a story of his where one scene has a normal sail boat go over water that is kinda ramping up before falling over into an abyss, and the boat uses this "ramp" to take off flying into outer space... You could easily do something similar with sprite graphics.

It's not just adaptations that bother me... I used to be big into creepypastas like Slender Man and The Rake. The problem with such crowdsourced properties though is that the crowd is... not very creative. I mean, anyone who has ever been involved with fanfiction has seen fanon basically suck the imagination out of whatever work they rally around (how many fanfics reduce a canon character to a one-note joke or a meme?) and the same thing happened to poor old Slendy. In terms of video games, the guy almost immediately became associated with games where you had to find eight pieces of paper before he killed you.... Slenderman games with an actual plot are much rarer. In terms of the wider Slender/Rake mythos, well... both characters are basically just generic slasher monsters now, basically just Jason Vorhees with a new body. When what made them good originally was that you didn't know what they were about and their mere existence raised tons of questions. Slender Man also developed his own version of the "Lovecraft beasties have a magical aura that makes people go insane around them" thing where making you paranoid is just a power Slender Man has (rather than the much more naturalistic explanation that maybe these people are getting paranoid because some tall blank-faced creature keeps showing up in all their home movies).

It reminds me of when George Lucas established in Star Wars: A New Hope that "the force is a strong against the weak-minded" but then by the time of episode one the reason it doesn't work on that wasp guy is because he has some racial immunity to the Jedi mind trick.... it's always a sign of a poor creator when something that could be explained with a natural force like willpower is instead BSed away with a kryptonite.

I actually did a post on Reddit discussing Slenderman and how he could be made not-garbage. There's some thematic overlap with the OP of our current topic, and I think a lot of my ideas work for games as well. Although I notice that there I say explanations are a welcome thing.... although in that case, it was because the default fanon assumptions were the worst, most lazy assumptions you could come up with. "He chases anyone who knows about him?" Come on! Even him being a living manifestation of your guilt over missing a Game Theory livestream would be better than "he's after you because you read a book about him once."

Ultimately, explanations are a funny thing.... they basically have to exist, but they are WAY too easy to screw up. It's no wonder people like Scott Cawthon go the obtuse route where they make finding out the story a puzzle in itself. They're essentially banking on the dopamine rush you get from putting the puzzle together will distract you from realizing that once you do, its really just a bog-standard ghost story.... up until part four where it suddenly becomes a war between a father and a son with the former core element (killer animatronics) being relegated to just showing up because they're a part of the series, even though they no longer have a core plot reason to be a thing.

I'm just rambling now, so I thinkest I will taketh a nap.