I’ve written a lot recently about scary video games. Mainly Alien: Isolation, which I love, but also P.T. which might just be my favourite gaming experience of the year so far. It’s got me thinking about the times in video games when I’ve been most scared.
A couple spring to mind for me. The first is the moment when Mr X burst through the wall in Resident Evil 2. That was insane, because in a game like Resident Evil 2 you never in a million years expected that a massive terrifying dude would burst through the actual walls. That was like a breakthrough in more ways than one.
More recently, the first jump scare in P.T. was ridiculous. It was so earned. Earned to the point where I legitimately just screamed out loud when it happened.
There have been others. Resident Evil 4 was pretty brutal, particularly when I first got my head chopped off by the dude with the sack over his head. Brutal.
Those are some of the moments I’ve been most terrified in a video game, how about you?
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82 responses to “Tell Us Dammit: Most Scared You’ve Ever Been In A Video Game”
P.T. Without a doubt, I refuse to play Alien Isolation for the well being of my vital organs.
@markserrels, awaiting moderation???
Mm, I know there’s been a few, but one I particularly remember is in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, when you’re playing as the lady and are in a prison-asylum during a storm when the power goes out. You had to navigate out of there to a particular pattern of button presses, and like, hold your breath when inmates came by so they didn’t eat your face off. God, it was horrible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_Tower_(1996_video_game)
This game had me so scared that for YEARS i couldn’t go near any place that had a clock tower.
The game itself probably wasn’t that scary, the baddie, moved incredibly slow, and you knew he was coming at all time, but because you couldn’t fight back and your only options were run and hide while being trapped in a building with him.
It played on the lack of control, and the fear of being discovered soo well.
It also did the resident evil door thing, and at one point playing it in the dark with a couple mates in the room, one of them decided it would be a great idea to open the closet door just as the bad guy jumped out of one in game, i freaked out, threw the controller and ran down the street screaming like a girl…. i wish i was joking 🙁
Yep: http://magicalgametime.com/post/33315715225/inspired-by-clock-tower-for-the-snes-in-the
Clocktower 3 on ps2 made me shit my pants, although the original on ps1 was awesome as well.
I can’t bring myself to play Five Night’s at Freddy’s.
That game does my anxiety no favours….
AvP 2 on PC, home alone, headphones on with the lights off and a pseudo 3D pair of goggles I found at Harvey Norman on sale (they used these prisms to kill your peripheral vision and enlarge the image).
I stopped when I noticed that my heart was running at 150+
AVP1 Marine campaign. Oh gad.
I was about 7 years old, my brother bought Silent Hill 2 a few months prior and I stupidly thought I’d be able to brave it out. Got up to the scene where James comes across the blood on the road and you see in the distance that straitjacket creature walking into the fog. First ‘yeah-nah’ experience I had playing video games.
Also P.T, that news report on the radio really made me say ‘yeah-nah’ not playing this game anymore (eventually got around to playing it a few days later)
Oh man! You took the words out of my mouth! I was about 9 when I played it and it freaked me out massively
Ocarina of Time. Having to go through the ReDeads to get the Sun Song. Or that room with the two Gibdos. The Gibdo mask in Majora was a godsend.
RE4 when you first come across the Regenerators. Screw those guys.
Most recently, all throughout ZombiU. Most of them were when I was anticipating something bad happening and spending a whole lot of time putting off proceeding, only to finally go through with it and have nothing happen at all. Such great tension.
Oh and that stupid daycare centre. Ugh.
haha oh yeah the ReDeads freaked me out. looking back now….not so much.
I still hate their moans and groans. And those screams…
Wind Waker kinda ruined ReDeads though, they weren’t anywhere near as scary at all.
Pretty much any time there is an underwater or vetiginous section. I don’t really find jump scares and gore scary, it’s more the fear of losing progress or failure that keeps me on edge. I do remember the zombie missions in Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven had me on edge the entire time because of their nigh invulnerability and the fact they were everywhere.
I bet you just Love Tomb raider games hahaha. Seriously though I get what you mean. Dealing with the horror of knowing you failed by your own hands sucks.
I play scary games a lot, Outlast, Amnesia, you name it I’ve played it (except for Alien Isolation, that is my next game). But the scariest thing in any game I’ve ever played is the elevator mission in Half Life 2. I don’t know if it’s because I was young when I played it, or if I was just too emotionally invested, but shit those grenade-combine-zombies destroyed me.
When every I encountered one if the people with the big black head crabs that swallowed up half their body – man alive they made my skin crawl
Also halfway thru the water hazard level there’s a zombie in a concrete pipe that literally jumps at you – that scared me half to death!
Has to be Resi 3 when Nemesis kept popping up.
Dude was like the juggernaut of Zombies, then the tentacles started
Oh, and a few bits towards the end of the original F.E.A.R
When I was a boy there was a level on the Rugrats PSX game where you’d becchased by a giant screaming Reptar dinosaur. The lights are all out and the music is tense as all hell.
Mix this with being a cowardly little boy and the foggy draw distance of thecplaystation and you got horror there.
YES! There is a level in that game where it’s nighttime and you have to catch the ghosts with your torch, fucking scary for a 10 year old.
No no, I remember this, and it totally was creepy!
Alien vs Predator, the original version of the Atari Jaguar.
We were in the office after hours, playing in a giant empty presentation room, with a 3m wide screen and an NEC CRT Projector.
The office was spooky enough after hours, and the only sound was the hum of the air conditioners.
We sat in the middle of the room, in pitch blackness and cranked the sound up. We were stealthing around as the marine, cautiously opening doors “g-zzhhhk”, and listening to the echoic beep of the motion detector. The tension kept building as we walked through empty, partially destroyed room. The beeps started getting louder and closer together, when without warning an Alien started sprinting towards us. We panicked, running backwards firing like crazy screaming “Kill it, Kill IT, KILL IT!” to the sound of the pulse rifle counting down the remaining rounds.
We both were leaning back so far we fell off the stools we were sitting on.
We looked at each other and quietly turned the rear lights of the room on.
It was frigging intense. I loved that game.
Everything in the first Silent Hill just scares me to the extreme, but the hospital with the knife weilding nurses, thats the worst.
I picked up The Evil Within today, can’t wait (but im at work, staring at the case)
Hell yeah. The hospital and the courtyard in the school with the creepy music or the little ghost babies. I really should play that game again.
I always remember right near the end before the final boss there’s an empty room, nothing to do in there at all, but you can hear glass smashing in the distance from that room. I found that really creepy (well, on top of the rest of that creepy game lol).
Also Max Payne where you run along the blood trail when high on V and you hear your baby crying and your wife… Maaaaaaxxxxxx…. MAAAAAXXXXXXXXXXXX…
Yeh, that Max Payne bit is messed up
Hexen, 20 years ago. a friend and I dropped a tab each, waited for it to kick in and played Hexen for the very first time, co-op. Scared us shit-less. I saw swamp monsters in my peripheral vision for days.
hahahahahahaha! just a casual tab 😛
I’m a bit of a pussy, Half Life had me scared a few times when I was younger, Doom 3 was pretty bad too I couldn’t play it for more than 30min at a time. Got about halfway in Dead Space but gave up cos I was constantly anxious, most recently P.T. Demo I would maybe play for 5-10min at a time, never finished it, I’m not sure what it is with games maybe because I’m in control but movies don’t really scare me.
System Shock 2. Devoted to listening to the audio logs, I was well and truly soaked in the feeling of terror and despair from the crew, all while being hunted by groaning monstrosities I didn’t have the ammunition to handle.
Oh shit, I totally forgot Dark Souls. With tonnes of souls in a difficult area I had never explored and wasn’t prepared for, with potential invasions and everything unknown… And those god damn giant skeleton dogs. NOPE-NOPE-NOPE.
Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and SWEATING as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?
With Dark Souls the feeling I would describe isn’t fear so much as dread – I remember going through Blight town with my 10yo and he described it as the must tense game ever – and he was only watching!!
*groans* “Your flesh betrays you…”
I’m a massive wuss, I couldn’t get the courage to even walk down the first corridor in P.T…
But at the same time I loved and finished Resident Evil 4 on the PS2, i think it’s just first person horror that gets me, why I’m willing to give The Evil Within a shot atm.
Probably Amnesia: TDD. Just the mechanics in general – only real hiding place was the dark, and that slowly drove you insane; the conflict between wanting to keep an eye on the monster while not wanting to look at him cos it’ll draw his attention… That combined with the setting just got to me, and I quit sometime shortly after the invisible dude in the flooded hallways. While there have been games that made me give up in frustration, Amnesia is the only game that scared me enough to stop playing halfway through.
World of Warcraft raiding with the diffulty set to TPG connection. Those tense moments where you know the interrupt is coming and you know your connection will pick that exact moment to to spike. Spooky stuff.
“DID YOU BASTARDS KILL THE BOSS WHILE I WAS DC’D?!”
I was such a pro I didn’t even need to be connected to tank heroics. Well, pro skills and I had a healer who was familiar enough with my stupidity to know when to fish me out of the fire and where to drop me.
“He’s wandering off again… life grip him into place”. =P
ANY GAME that flicks the lights off (completely off) and expects you to keep moving. Bioshock did this. I think Dead Space did it, too, from memory. It’s a little cheap, kind of obvious, and totally scripted, but it absolutely freaks me out.
Especially when playing in a dark room on the projector. You are literally plunged into total darkness.
For some reason I freak out in scary video games. Im not good at them at all. Hence why I love sniper rifles in any game, I can take creeps out at a distance haha.
Meanwhile, does anyone else find that picture up the top scary as hell??
I have some very fond memories playing ‘The Suffering’ with my brother next to me since I was too frightened to play alone.
Since then, the only games to give me that sense of fear and vulnerability were the Project Zero games and P.T.
I tried to like Outlast but couldn’t get into it.
Among the Sleep. After you pull the sheets back in your mum’s bedroom then have to go back in to the lounge room. Turned the friggin game off, turned on the lights and watched some 30 Rock haha.
Original SILENT HILL in the school.
A cat jumps out of a locker to a sudden BAH noise, then a second later a creatures jumps out of another locker!
The false positive from the cat gave me a moment of “oh thank god”, which made the actual monster bit… HOLY CRAP.
A little bit of pee came out.
Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. I was stalking the sasquatch, sitting in my living room in broad daylight, and nothing had moved other than me for a while; I knew something must be close to happening. All of a sudden, that creepy procedurally generated music kicked in, you know how the music subtly changes when certain events occur (or about to)? The eerie twang of those amazing old west strings rattled through my speakers and up my spine – the suspense was getting to me. Then suddenly I heard it – a muffled hiss, mixed with the croak of a dinosaur, it came totally out of nowhere. What the hell was that? I spun around, both in the game and in real life, but nothing was to be found. Weird, I thought, and I continued to stalk the elusive sasquatch. Then I heard it again not a minute later. Where the hell was this hiss coming from? There wasn’t a soul in sight. A sense of dread set in, I hate pop-up scares in games – I could sense one was coming, it’s the sudden burst of noise that gets me. I turn down my speakers so that I won’t flip out when it finally happens. The next time I hear the hiss however, it happens at exactly the same volume as before. What the actual fuck? I was very confused. I turn the speakers completely off, search around the living room and settle in 5 minutes later convinced that I’m hearing things. I continue my quest, still on silent mode just in case. As soon as my nerves finally settle down, of course the noise happens again, this time accompanied with a dull scrapping sound. Thoroughly freaked out, I stand up and sprint out of the room, and the chair slams against the wall. A massive cacophony of noise erupts from inside the wall, and that’s how I found out we have possums that sleep inside our roofspace each day. As it turns out, they have a particular penchant for the tight spaces of the walls, and continue to freak the shit out of me with that horrible gargling noise they make when they feel threatened. Possums in New Zealand are not friendly, by the way. They will terrorize the shit out of you if they feel intimidated.
So yeah, my most scared moment in gaming wasn’t a completely vanilla experience, it was assisted by the amazing life mod, but man if it didn’t get my heart racing. It was that perfect blend between creepy music, and stalking hidden prey that brought it to life.
Scratches! Had two moments that made me scream and push away my keyboard, only two times I’ve ever done that too
Silent Hill 1 – I had to stop playing this when I found the first body in the town right at the start. I couldn’t take it at my then tender age of 17 🙂
AVP 1 – Playing as a marine was way too intense for me at the stage of my life when this came out.
Since those early days, nothing has gotten me to the point where I didn’t want to play anymore 🙂
Years ago I downloaded the demo of Clive Baker’s Undying.
The alien/supernatural level wasn’t scary but that mansion sure as hell was!
Fantastic graphics and atmosphere and to top it off your character didn’t have modern day weapons to kill the monsters.
Finished the demo but there was no way I was gonna get the full game!
Definitely PT… that game just made me nope out of existence
Alien Isolation didn’t even phase me
The original Dead Space, playing that thing in the dark with surround sound turned up I was hearing things crawling through the walls and had to turn the lights back on.
That nursery in ZombiU was pretty terrifying too.
I haven’t screamed at a jump-scare ever since F.E.A.R came out, when you would turn around to step down a ladder and BAM! there was Alma. P.T is definately the scariest “game” i have played in years. Not to the point where you quit and not want to play again, but actually want to continue because you feel you want to know more. The scares are well earned.
I know the exact Alma moment, and it got me too. Such a good game. I spent the rest of the game on edge anticipating a repeat of that moment – and although there were other ones like it, that first one was definitely the worst.
Dark Messiah in the spider tunnel things. Got so freaky and not jump scares but just realistic and creepy and eeeekkk
A bear attack in the middle of the night in Red Dead. It was probably 2 AM when I was playing it and I nearly threw the controller when it happened. That and Blood on the PC freaked me out when I was a kid.
This part of P.T was spoiled for me because people keep posting this goddamn screenshot!
System shock two… when you discover that Polito is not who she appears… her form is dead…
The sound as SHODAN reveals herself still sends shivers up my spine.
I remember being so scared of the big black beast from the start of Another World that I asked mum to return the game.
edit: the Mannequin scene from Condemned 2 deserves a solid mention too.
First time was playing Doom. In the dark, with STEREO SPEAKERS (yes, I know, right?). Bloody imp was making that bloody imp noise somewhere. Horrible. WHERE ARE YOU!!! Argh.
The other time I remember well was Far Cry. The first time you meet the pink monkey/gorillas in the level with the high walkways. I’d been creeping about generally shitting myself for a while, turned round and there was one RIGHT THERE. Actually jumped out of my chair.
2 for me, most I’ve been genuinely scared by a game was Metal Gear Solid when Psycho Mantis reads your memory card and if you have any other konami games tells you about it, “I see you liiiike Azure Dreams”…I was like what the actual effing eff..and the second was how anxious I would get in the original Sonic the Hedgehog in the level where you go underwater and have to survive on air bubbles that rise up to the surface, the music would get faster and faster as your amount of breath left got less and less and if you didn’t make it Sonic would drown and you’d get the sound effect from Family Feud when someone is wrong “buh bowwwww”…
Outlast, until I turned the volume down.
Started that. NOPE.
Saw screenshots. NOPE.
Was that you last night? 🙂 Awesome run. Fun.
Yeah, dude. Shadow of Mordor tonight. Might see you over the weekend 🙂
My biggest jump-scare was in Half Life. I’d played it so many times before I knew exactly how many head crabs were in a particular vent. I mechanically killed them all and jumped in to proceed – and whether it was a bug, or a respawn issue, or whatever, I don’t know – but out of nowhere there was an extra one. The first I knew about it was when it’s horrible gaping jaws slammed up against the screen. I literally fell out of my chair.
Other notables? The collapsing library balcony in Resident Evil 2, the dog jumping into the interrogation room… many moments, actually.
I also thought Doom was pretty creepy back in the day.
This is gonna sound ridiculous nowadays, but the Aliens mod for Doom (or was it Doom 2). I was about 15 and it scared the pants off me. I want to play Isolation, but memories of that game still haunt me.
I picked up Lighthouse not long after it came out… I was about 10.
The Dark Being popped out, and I cried like a little girl.
Same for the original Resident Evil on the PS… group of us went to sleep at a friends house, and he got it for his birthday. We made it into the front door, saw that first zombie crouched over the dead guy… I still remember that cutscene where the zombie turns its head to face you…. we turned the PS off straight away.
The only time I’ve been scared of plying a video game is the origin; Doom game for PC. The sound gave me chills & made me look over my shoulder when out away from the PC. It was the sound effects that made me scared.
The first couple of hours of ‘Silent Hill: Shattered Memories’ were pretty terrifying, as was the “escape from Innsmouth” section of ‘Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth’.
The hallway scene from Silent Hill 2.. see pyramid head normally walks slowly after you so you kind of assume he can’t move any faster, until that damn hallway where he just starts SPRINTING after you.
Awful.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the SNES. I’m not even joking.
Silent Hill 1. I was much younger but the first bit when you go down the garages to then get swamped before you wake up in the cafe with the cop. I god I was scared.
PT I think is the only thing since then that I actually can’t play without being scared. I thought I grew out of it since then. I put SH2 on the pedestal of best game ever but PT, oh man.
Katamari forever. That spooky king guy creeps me out every time
Dark Souls – the darkness in the skeleton tomb and then all you see are two pinpoints of light shining and the mass of bones attacks. Makes me jump still in NG+
Manhunt – i played this game only late at night as my wife was freaked out by it. walking down a corridor and then get jumped by a freak with a smiley face mask on.
Minecraft. Mining on hard, down to one heart, low food, and plenty of valuables, knowing at any minute I can lose it all.
Also Metroid 2 is just so claustrophobic and terrifying D: So basically all of Metroid 2.
I jumped in outlast when i opened the door and that body fell down right near the start, I stopped playing after that, and its only 5 mins in.
also
vampire bloodlines, that haunted house is pretty scary sh*t and made me jump a few times, but got through it.
Couldn’t play any of the Silent Hill games. Or PT. Or Outlast. Or Amnesia.
Resident Evil was fine. It was super sci-fi/fantasy and you have BIG FUCKING GUNS.
Also, most underwater sections in games because of my phobia of deep water :-/
Without doubt P.T. It was just so perfectly crafted to mess with your mind.
Sorry to say but Doom 3 had me too. But that was back in the days (when it first dropped) when I had an awesome setup with surround sound, and more weed than I could smoke. Stupid crying babies….
My scariest moment in a while in a video game was during Assassins Creed: Brotherhood. I was playing at 3am (for some strange reason) and was walking through the modern day Monterigionni at night and using Eagle Vision, when all of a sudden the blood trails show up leading a trail around the whole town if you followed it in Eagle Vision… scared the hell out of me. they were never explained!
Ahhhhh, fresh meat!
When I bought Max Payne on Steam and it didn’t work, so I downloaded a community patch that gave me a shittogram of very loud adware and viruses.
Does this count?
Trilby’s Notes (indie game by Zero Punctuation “Yahtzee”). Free and well worth a look.
Was Condemned 1 or 2, i’d backtracked through this shopping center to find an item, confident that i’d gotten ridden of all the bad guys. I find the item and I turn around and there is this crazy naked guy attacking me waving his arms everywhere.