I was talking about P.T. with a friend recently. Here’s what I told him. I said that I believed P.T. was one of the scariest things ever made. Not just video games. Things.
Like it’s up there with the scariest books, movies, TV shows, whatever.
Is it the scariest video game ever made? I’d argue that it might be. I also suspect it created a high barometer of quality that Silent Hills probably wouldn’t have been able to maintain.
But that’s another story for another day. What I want to talk about is this: what do you think is the scariest video game ever made?
Comments
85 responses to “Tell Us Dammit: Scariest Video Games Ever”
Hmmm, System Shock 2 probably for me. Also was very happy when I finished Alien Isolation.
Part of me wants to agree with you on SS2. It had its moments, but not in the traditional horror/scare sense. For me, the only game I recall actually having to turn off due to being too freaked out to play more, was the original Alone in the Dark. Which, by todays standards seems pretty tame, but back then.. whoa!
Yeah I was going to mention Alone in the Dark. Terrified me as a kid, though now days it’s now texture polygon art is kinda funny.
SS2 and funnily, early Minecraft (before armour/ refilling health) are both great examples of “less scripted” horror.
Both games have spawning enemies that tend to wander in an unpredictable manner. They also both have very audible enemies that force you to listen for danger as much you do to look for it. It means that you almost always have to be on your toes even in a room that you’ve cleared.
From the sound of things Alien is the another game that follows a similar mould.
I find games where the enemies wander far scarier than the “jump scare” format of RE, Dead Space ect…. In those games I tend to do a lap of each room to trigger all the jump scares and then relax a bit.
lol! I had no trouble playing the original AITD because the graphics were too disconnected from realism. Nowadays, I can’t even watch my son play some of the new ones!
I agree, Alien Isolation, in VR was bloody terrifying.
I find me old mate the Alien has been around so long he no longer scares me. He’s as familiar as Spider-Man or Mickey Mouse.
SS2 was the first game came to mind for me, too. Running low on scarce resources, every engagement running at a loss, hearing enemies LONG before you could see them or know exactly where they were… Plus those damn recordings.
I remember hiding in the corner for five minutes once just listening to ambient shuffling. So creepy.
pathways into darkness.
scared the hell out of 7-year-old me.
more recently. amnesia : the dark decent.
Ecco the Dolphin
Probably a Bad Company 2 tournament I played in. Our team knocked out of first round of the finals to that years 2nd place. I remember waiting to respawn.
Project Zero (Fatal Frame) on original xbox… Used to scare the shit out of me.
Yep…. plus one for that. I think the best horror games really do audio incredibly well and the creators know exactly what notes to hit to make your skin crawl.
For me it’s the original STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Traditional scares don’t really do much for me and jump scares are just a cheap manipulative trick. STALKER had a really creepy atmosphere at all times, and amazing ambient sounds. Creeping through abandoned concrete bunkers and turning the corner to find a Controller at the other end of the corridor, that was scary.
I recall that one time you first encounter a blood sucker in a dark bunker… “WTF Are those glowing lights bobbing up and down?”
Any time the lighting was dark in that game, whether it was night or inside a building. STALKER had a terrifyingly oppressive atmosphere at the best of times, but when it got dark, it got real dark.
Actually for me its H1Z1 and when the zombies group up (talking ALOT) they will chase you forever and that has scared me a bit. I play on the dropbear server and was at the pleasant valley police station found some guns and some guy shot me now the gun sound was that loud it scared the crap outta me lol.
In recent years Alien Isolation and P.T. have really spooked me. I was so relieved to finish Isolation because I was so on edge pretty much the entire time playing it.
Amnesia is really scary too.
I remember being really freaked the eff out by yahtzee croshaw’s chzo mythos games. Gave me a couple of nightmares
Depends on the age as well. As a 10 y.o. kid, RE1 on PS1 was mind- and soul-numbingly scary… fast forward 10 years or so, not so much. Brings back nostalgia though, that was my first ever horror game.
Now, i’d say P.T. is the scariest, followed by DreadOut (that Indonesian horror game, did they ever release the second episode???)
RE1 for me. Those windows smashing as the dog came in which was a perfect jump scare for the time.
Also the fixed camera angles made life hell as you could hear the untreated PDS (Partially Deceased Syndrome) sufferers in the room staggering toward you.
That is exactly the point in the game I threw away the game controller, turn off the PS1 and run away saying nope…nopenopenopenope…
Literally ANY game that requires me to be underwater
So, interested in playing SOMA?
The Suffering creeped me right the hell out. Something about prisons/hospitals/asylums mixed with abandonment makes me super uneasy.
The first one was incredible. Blew me away when I played it way back when. Really full on.
My claim to fame is I created a handwriting font that they used in The Suffering: Ties that bind.
Wax Works. 10 floppy disks of horror. The game was pretty scary too for its time (1992).
As a kid 7th Guest freaked me out. The intro anyway.
As an adult, I’d say Among the Sleep. The demo for that was the only game or movie I’ve turned off because nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.
Condemned (2?). Those goddamned mannequins. Anyone who’s played it will know what I mean.
Condemned: Criminal Origins. That whole game is creepy as hell, I think I was more creeped out when you first enter the mall and that mannequin moves his head to look at you….
I just remember a room off a long hallway that you walk into, and has mannequins in it. You think nothing of it, move into the room to check a cupboard or something and turn your back on the mannequins. Except when you turn around, they’ve all moved closer and are surrounding you. Each time you break line of sight and look back, they’ve moved again. They never did anything beyond that that I could tell, but holy Jesus I got out of that room and legged it so damn fast.
The original FEAR was pretty creepy for me when I first played it, cant remember how old I was but I had to turn it off a few times and only played it when there were other people in the house. I’m not sure how much it would freak me out now though (desensitized and all that). Before that I remember having a mate over on school holidays to play resident evil (I was really young) and we both freaked out when my sisters cat started scratching at the glass door to come inside (to our very young selves it totally sounded like zombies trying to get inside), we still laugh about it to this day.
But recently Amnesia and PT probably gave me the best scares.
fear scared the crap out of me at times too. Really enjoyed that game.
FEAR had some creepy moments. Its up there for one of my Favourites that I replay every year or 2. I think they mixed the Atmosphere with jump scares well. Still remember the one point your walking around and nothing really is happening. Theres a ladder you go down and just as you turn around she was standing behind you. ERRHH
Yeah, might have to go back and replay it I think. It was a long while ago (seems like it anyway). cant really remember the game that well but I remember the atmosphere felt really dense and the jump scares were well done.
I think I know what I’m doing tonight !!
thanks for the nostalgic nudge mate
In the 90s, Alien vs Predator on the Jaguar, we played it after hours in the office in the Presentation room on a 3metre wide screen and sat so close it took up all our vision. The building was abandoned except for us. The damn tension in that game with no music, just the hum of the air conditioning… We were creeping around a level, and then heard something. We very, v-e-r-y carefully edged around the corner, motion detector echoing across the darkened room, then an effing life size alien just starts careening towards us. We panicked, running backwards shooting wildly and managed to get through a door and hide for a while, breathing heavily.
We both looked at each other and said, “let’s turn the lights on”.
Kojima and Del Toro could’ve really brought Silent Hill back to life, but hey, a better business model would be to make crappy mobile gambling games…WUT???
I can’t play scary games lol but i did give Slender about 5 minutes and that was enough.
Also just remembered HalfLife2 Ravenholm got me good back when it first came out.
Clive Barkers – Undying. All of it, but especially the brother who was chained on meat hooks.
In terms of moments, for some reason Vampire Masquerade the Ocean house hotel really unnerved me.
Oh and Silent Hill 2 where you just hide in that closet with Pyramid Head doing his thing.
Practically anything on Oculus Rift.
Believe it or not, in the old days, Colonels Bequest spooked the hell out of me, and it wasn’t even a horror game.
That scene in SH 2 is exactly what I was saying below, what is Pyramid Head doing? Is he raping that mannequin, is he killing it? Or maybe they’re just wrestling or mucking about, who knows what monsters get up to when noones looking.
The ambiguity is far more scary than a straight up jump scare.
Exactly… you don’t need a narrative for that scene. Your mind completes the terror for you.
The haunted hotel terrified me. Usually I like to slowly wander around, exploring and making sure I don’t miss anything. In that area I flew through faster than I thought possible, all I could think about was “get me the hell out of here”. I’ve been wanting to re-play the game for a while now but I think I’ll actually have to get my partner to play through that section for me. I don’t think I can take a second round :(.
Yeh i still remember clearly going up the staircase and seeing a little toy car slowly rolling out of one of those rooms.
Then in the basement, that woman runs past you along an adjacent corridor with her face in terror. Yep… i was done.
The original Resident Evil on PS1. I never owned it – a friend got it for his birthday, and we played it at his party.
We got up to the first zombie. You approach it from behind as it’s chowing down on a corpse, there’s a cutscene where it turns to look at you. We all screamed like little girls, and that was the end of that.
Silent Hill 1,2& 3
I don’t find monsters particularly scary, but when you start hinting at things & my brain fills in the gaps. That shot scares me.
I also get my scare in from reality questioning stuff, so the way the other world in the first SH seems to have a pattern & then they throw it out the window.
Then other people don’t see what you see? That’s scary as shit, maybe I’d been walking about shooting innocents or something.
Also, the pulsating, oozing flesh walls.
At the time Resident Evil did it for me, although that was coupled with the incredibly shithouse controls that makes every undead encounter 100 times more tense than it should have been. FEAR’s probably the closest I’ve come to being scared since, but the scare moments were tamed by long periods of shooting in between so it wasn’t too bad
I’m actually really good at the resi style tank controls. It’s just something you learn.
Maybe not the scariest game ever made but nearly having a real life heart attack playing Doom 3 puts it up right there for me. Still causes me to hit alt-f4 early on in many a horror game I have attempted to play since *rocks back and forth shivering at the memories*
P.T. has got to be up there – it’s everything I look for in a horror property, regardless of medium.
For me, just about anything made by Frictional Games. That includes the Penumbra series, and the Amnesia series.
Penumbra: Overture wasn’t too bad because you had a weapon and with a bit of skill, could kill enemies. Black Plague, along with Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs were scarier because you had no weapons, so you had to hide.
TDD was also scary, as it was a psychological kind of terror. If you stayed in the darkness for too long, you’d “lose your mind” and start seeing things. You would peek through a door into a dead-end room and see something coming at you, but when you looked again, there was nothing there.
Black Plague was probably the scariest for me, as those creatures talked and would shout at you while you were fleeing.
Slender the arrival. P.t. condemned 1 + 2. Silent hill 2. Dungeon nightmares. Resi 1 + 2. Amnesia. Dead space had its moments.
Clock Tower on PS1.
No way to fight back, no direct control of the character and that gimp legged Muther F%$&er with the Giant scissors was EVERYWHERE!!!
Resident Evil 1 got to me shortly before RE2, which then destroyed my resilience to burning cities and zombies.
Dark Messiah, that god damn spider section had me sweaty palmed and jittery
P.T easily imo. I’m a big horror fan and not one to fall for jump scares or get actually scared by things but P.T had me unnerved at times.
Any part of OoT that had ReDeads. Especially the part where you retrieve the Sun Song. Also, Gibdos.
Oh and the zombie part of Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
Dunno about flat-out scary, but ZombiU did tension really well. Had to take a lot of breaks playing through that.
Dead Space 3 co op was pretty amazing – Had some womans voice in my head but not my mates so when we were chatting we were talking about completely different things and it freaked me right out
For me it it has to be Stalker and playing as a marine in AvP(1999) and AvP2. They manged to still make you feel a sense of dread and death even when your fully geared (except when your using ALICE in AvP2)
Dino Crisis, Doom 3.
Dino Crisis is RE with fucking DINOSAURS.
Casually walking into a nice dining room, BOOM T-Rex head through the window. Nope.
Doom 3 caused a younger-me to sprint through many corridors aimlessly, freaking out.
I remember playing the original Diablo late at night, delving much deeper than I was prepared to handle, seeing everything hellish for the first time, and the cat brushed past my legs, nearly causing me to leap out of the damn chair.
I had a similar thing happen as I left Ravenholm in HL2 and you jump down the abandoned mine shaft that has a heap of those black poison headcrabs.. Dog brushed past my leg and I actually kneed the keyboard shelf so hard it came off its rails
Quake
Sanitarium
Diablo
Resident Evil 2
Silent Hill
Aliens vs Predator
FEAR
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Dead Space – 1 mostly as I knew what to expect in 2 and 3
Amnesia: The Dark Descent – especially the part where the invisible water creature chases you through a number of inwards opening doors, that was so intense it literally made my body hurt.
Dead space 2 was the first on the series I played, hence did not know what to expect. Those babies man… They may not be the strongest enemy, but (maybe because I was a new dad then) having to kill mutated babies really rattled me… And their scream…
I was trawling through the comments for Dead Space. I was terrified during every single elevator ride in the first game and when the one inevitable scare finally happened I was still totally unprepared.
Elevator? What elevator?
(note: The writer is so traumatised by the whole experience that his brain completely shut out the experience from his memory)…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Un6Dl0q8DE – I think this one? It’s been a while since I played it so I can’t specifically remember.
I think the souls series has given me some pretty good jumps and scares. I mean alot specially when playing at night.
The most scared I was with Dark Souls was in the Depths at the bonfire where I’d just turned human so I could kindle the fire then suddenly the bonfire goes out.
I had No frigging idea what was happening and suddenly this red dude comes to kick my arse. The fight with the red dude didn’t scare me as much as the bonfire extinguishing – that was unexpected and creepy!
Hahaha yeah so many moments like that just freaked the hell outta me.
You are all probably going to laugh at me for this but here goes. The last level on the Doom shareware – Phobos Anomaly. I was 6 or seven at the time and snuck onto the computer and played the absolute shit out of doom but then i got to the room with the two barons of hell and it scared the absolute crap out of me, eventually i got over it.
Looking back it was freaking pathetic but back then that shit was scary.
Game that would be scariest for me now would probably be either SCP: Containment Breach or the FNaF games, the scariest part is knowing that a jumpscare is coming but you don’t know when.
Shadow Temple…
My girlfriend loves watching me play horror games.
First time I loaded up Outlast, we were playing through. Nice and creepy, just getting inside.
Saw a swinging body and heard talking then BAM! All the lights and power went off. We were just both like WTF it was some really good timing. Just as the jump scare is supposed to get you.
I remember the first skaarj in the original Unreal was awesome, had my heart pumping. All the lights shutting off and the music kicks in, that was brilliant. Video of the bit below.
Haha, so underwhelming to go back.
I played Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl early on while it was still (even more of) a buggy mess. There’s an underground sequence where you have to negotiate toxic waste and one or two lethal facesuckers. Thanks to a bug, the few floodlights in the area didn’t work and a flashlight was out too. I felt my way along walls, completely unable to see, my only clue as to where fatal horror lurked was the sound of monsters quietly breathing, punctuated by a usually final roar. QUITE. ALARMING.
I made the mistake of playing Wolfenstein 3D not long after it came out.
I was WAY too young to be doing that. Bad idea.
I must’ve been all of maybe 5-8 or something when I first played that. It was at a friend’s place, and there were three or four of us playing it together and full light of day. And even then it was still terrifying.
Shadow Man on the N64. Asylum Playrooms area. ’nuff said.
Yes yes yes, still gives me shivers. The whole game was pretty eerie.
Also, Max Payne. There was that Gothic church level (which was also my favorite level) and also those ‘dream’ segments where the hallway kept stretching. Freaked me out.
My earliest gaming freakout was from a game called Venture on the Intellivision. You have to clear out these rooms of enemies with a bow and arrow, if you take too long this alien thing would come out and chase you.
Last scary game I ‘played’ was Outlast. Didn’t play for long, I think I got to the part where you try and squeeze through a tight gap and this big guy grabs you and throws you to the ground. Ha, you can’t kill me if I hit the power button!
Oh man, how could I forget Eternal Darkness!
I remember being freaked out by the Shalebridge Cradle mission in Thief 3, took me by surprise and had brilliant atmosphere
Thank you! I was scouring these comments hoping someone would mention Shalebridge Cradle. That was a fantastic, atmospheric level.
Going up that circular staircase… seeing the inmates for the first time… heck, the whole damn level was just brilliant.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark corners of the earth
When you were running from those fishmen it really made your pulse race. Once again, incredibly well done creepy audio and lighting really makes the game shine.
So you liked playing Bioshock? (Recommend playing at night, with lights out)
F.E.A.R was the first horror game I played, and when I first played it it scared the shit out of me. Retrospectively, it wasn’t that scary, but it’s mix of shooter and horror elements made it a good introduction to the genre.