*Outlast* players walked into the Chengdu comic convention: this Yasal offline event felt like a gentle horror

The lighting isn’t exactly dim, but it still gives me a fine layer of goosebumps. The person in the phone screen, dressed in a full set of traditional-style robes, is smiling gently, yet I get the feeling I’ve walked onto the wrong set, like I’ve stumbled into that “too quiet opening scene” of a horror movie. The background is clearly the noisy crowd and light boards of a Chengdu comic convention, but once your gaze locks onto her, the ambient noise feels like someone secretly hit the mute button—only that oddly out‑of‑place silence in the frame remains.

Snapping back, this time the protagonist isn’t a game monster, but the famous Korean coser—Yasal. She recently came to China for offline events, and her Bilibili account also posted photos from her Chengdu trip. On-site she wore Chinese traditional-style clothing, officially described as “gentle and refined.” At first glance this seems to have nothing to do with the Silent Hill or Outlast I usually talk about, but the more I look at these photos, the more I feel a familiar psychological tug—that “the image is too clean, which makes you subconsciously tense up” feeling that horror games love to use.

What’s more unsettling is that this time it’s not just one retouched official photo tossed at you and that’s it; instead, you get a large number of random onlooker perspectives together with the official shots. On Bilibili you can see many fans posting photos from the scene, such as shots from users like @吾妻丷由乃, @仲夏_3, @年愁京夜未到乡, @不会射箭的巴顿, @巫夕瑞, and others. The angles are all different, yet they all “pin” the same person in the dead center of the stage, the display board, or the crowd. It’s like a multi-person collaborative “observer experiment,” where everyone’s line of sight is silently calibrated onto the same target.

Viewing these traditional-style photos from a horror game player’s perspective, what strikes me most is how the emotional rhythm is kept very low, like a slow-boiling frog kind of pressure, rather than cheap jump scares three times a second. The outfit is a typical Hanfu-style robe with soft colors; the makeup doesn’t go for anything exaggerated or grotesque. But the movements are almost all restrained: standing, lifting her gaze, small hand gestures—even the heart‑hand pose feels like a carefully calculated “safe action.” You can sense she could act cute at any moment, but she stops right at that “just enough” edge. This deliberate blank space is especially good at stirring imagination in psychological terms, and imagination is the most natural accelerant for fear.

Yet what really scares me isn’t these gentle poses, but the sense of distance between her and the audience, which gets magnified layer by layer in the photos. The fans below the stage, holding up their phones, are smiling happily, but between people there are the stage, security, lights, and the glass reflection of the screen—this “can see but can’t touch” state feels very much like watching a streamer play a horror game live. We think we’re just passing by an offline event for a coser, but in fact we’re participating in a meticulously choreographed “visual ritual.” She is responsible for maintaining a stable persona; we are responsible for providing the energy of our gaze. This one‑way closeness itself carries a faint, subtle eeriness.

If you’re also a horror game player, I’d actually recommend treating the photos from Yasal’s Chengdu event as a living case of “atmosphere design” to study, rather than just something to drool over. Unlike the blood and gore in Outlast, there are no screams here, no monsters—only a gentle character, constantly captured by different lenses, spread by algorithms, sealed into tags, and then appearing on your recommendation page. When you’re scrolling Bilibili late at night and suddenly see that traditional-style selfie of hers again, that faint, inexplicable chill in the background may well be the embryonic form of this era’s “new kind of horror.”