Being scared is fun. I’ve always thought so.
Some of my favourite gaming experiences have been terrifying. What’s the most scared you’ve ever been playing a video game?
I have a couple of contenders.
— Mr X blasting through a brick wall in Resident Evil 2. Jesus Christ. It’s a wall. It’s video game geometry. This shit isn’t supposed to happen!
— The enemy in Dead Space that was immune to bullets and just chased you down a goddamn hallway. I swear to god, that guy took years off my life.
— Alien: Isolation. All of it.
— P.T. ALL. OF. IT.
Now you go!
Comments
73 responses to “Tell Us Dammit: Scariest Gaming Experiences”
Seconded for Alien Isolation. Especially the nest, bloody face huggers came out of nowhere.
OoT. Sun’s Song. ReDeads.
Then Hyrule Town Market after the timeleap. Ugh. UGH.
Not so much scary, but more creepy – Song of Storms and that guy constantly playing it in the windmill. Fuck that.
I do like the song, but still…
I remember Eternal Darkness scaring me at the time, but in general I don’t find myself “scared” by video games. With one exception.
I was 14 when ‘Diablo’ came out, and I got it fairly early in to its release. I’d just moved to Australia, so it would have been something to do while waiting for the school year to start. I remember with clarity turning a corner to find The Butcher, and like most people I was terrified and ran away. I played for a number of hours, eventually going to sleep.
It may not have been the same day, might have been later in the week, it’s been years so I don’t remember the exact timing. All I know is that, at some point, I had a nightmare where Diablo and The Butcher were tearing my heart out and flaying me alive. I woke up screaming in a cold sweat.
Good times.
It was that growly voice that used to get me. “Fresh Meat”.
Oh yes. 20 years later and it’s still creepy.
I can remember very carefully exploring the level, hoping to clear most of it before running into the butcher, then opening the wrong door and going NOPE NOPE RUN AWAY.
He is literally the hardest villain to accidentally run into… he has a room full of people on spikes!
I clearly remember seeing that room, and just being like ‘nope!’ and carrying on. Curiosity got the better of me after I cleared the third level (Butcher was always on L2), so I went back. Opened the door. ‘AAAAAHHHH, FRESH MEAT!’. I actually screamed like a little girl, as this huge demon ran over and hacked my squishy sorcerer limb from limb.
This was back before reliable internet connections, doubly so because I was living in Indonesia at the time. So I tried again, he killed me again. Third time I tried running away, he was right behind me, and I happened to close the door and pray… and he didn’t follow me through! Cool, he’s gone away, right? I open the door… and get promptly hacked to death. That’s when I realized about the whole inability to open doors thing, after that he was far less scary… but that initial 30 mins or so of him chasing me through the dungeons and repeated chopping me to bits was pretty brutal.
+1 for Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.
I don’t get scared at games, or movies as a rule. I know it’s not real so it doesn’t actually scare me (no, jump scares don’t count). Eternal Darkness is the one exception to that rule. That game messes with your head.
Exactly. I’m too detached to get “properly” scared because I know I’m watching a movie or playing a game or whatnot, but Eternal Darkness just took it that step further. Half the time I didn’t know what was part of the game. Lights off, sound up; great way to experience that one.
In slightly more recent experiences, I’d have to go with ZombiU. For me, that game did tension perfectly. Little-to-no cheap shots in the way of jump scares or whatever, most of the time it was down to my own sense of dread about what may or may not come. And most of the time, what I expected to happen never eventuated and the worry was all for nothing. But so many times I’d just have to pause the game, put the controller down and just go do something else for a while. Such a great game.
I really would like to check out Alien Isolation though, especially for the VR aspect (even if it isn’t the best implementation – people still seem to quite enjoy it).
ZombiU was good, it was especially harrowing in survival mode. It’s one of the few games which understands that slow zombies can still be incredibly threatening.
But for terror I put it just behind another underrated launch title, condemned.
Maybe it’s because it was the first fancy hd horror game I’d played. Maybe it was because I’d just hooked up surround sound. It had the same harsh, visceral combat of ZombiU, but wrapped it around the work of a very weird psychopath.
Actually, it was probably the mannequins.
F.E.A.R. There was an unassuming office cubicle and I was puttering around collecting ammo after a gun fight and the scary girl ran out of the cubicle at me on all fours. Was not expecting it and it scared the crap out of me. Had to take a one minute break.
It hasn’t aged well and the sequels were balls but damn was F.E.A.R. spooky.
The scariest experience is not knowing when a buggy game will crash, especially when you do not have a save anywhere feature. Same goes for a 30 min boss fight and then you know that the game may crash just when you are about to land the final hit ….
A previous housemate banned me from playing Dead Space at night because my constant involuntary gasping and yelling was keeping him up.
I remember renting Resident Evil 3 in my early teens and my younger brother being so terrified that we had to return the game early because he couldn’t stand having it in the house.
Personally though, F.E.A.R., P.T., the regeneradores from RE4, some part in Until Dawn got me, as well.
Condemned 2 – the incident at the lodge. Criminally underrated game, as was the original.
Thoroughly enjoyed Condemned 2. Dying Light is its spiritual successor and after finishing it last weekend it is comfortably my favourite game I have played on ps4 so far.
I’ve had plenty of jump scares over the years but a game that really got me was Vampire the Masquerade – Bloodlines. The seaside mansion. I was almost too freaked to play through the level until I realised there was nothing there to injure me lol.
Totally agree with you. Loved that game
There’s also the killer surgeon’s place, where it get more and more creepy and bloody as you go down each floor…
The Killer Surgeon! I almost forgot about him. More and more blood the further you go down. It was chilling. And at the bottom was a severed arm you could use as a weapon?
Yep! Once you killed him, you got to keep the arm he was clubbing you with and use it as a weapon.
THIS – VTM: Bloodlines was way scarier than I ever expected.
You know that ‘trope’ in movies and shows where the POV of the protagonist or victim is used, while they’re evading the Big Bad, and the shadow of the latter is shown as RIGHT THERE?
Think 80s slasher type stuff.
That happened to me in a game, spontaneously. You could even say it was emerg-wait no I won’t say it.
DayZ (Arma2 mod variety, circa 2013):
I was in a field and trying to escape an infected, so I went in a house.
The table I hid under was in a long room and the doorway was off to the left (so it was obscured).
I saw the zombie’s shadow cast into the house onto the wall as it walked through the door.
I thought, yes okay game I’ll never ever see this happen again to me in a video game as long as I live so I’ll go along and be terrified.
And I was.
Most of F.E.A.R. That game was bonkers.
The beginning of Alien Isolation. Where you’re in the checkpoint/luggage area, the Torrens flies past looking for you and the blast shields cover the windows, cutting you off from the outside world. Hearing thumping and the alien off in the distance doesn’t help either, knowing what you’re about to head into.
So much dread.
Try it in VR… I nearly crapped my virtual trousers.
Virtual or Actual trousers?
No thanks. I like sleep too much
The tension and fear of waiting 45 minutes for Medieval Combat to load from cassette to my Atari 800, never knowing if it would crap out at the last minute, and I’d have to try the recording on the other side of the tape.
I find a lot of games to be tame when it comes to “scariness”. Sudden, loud audio makes me jump most of the time (in any situation) but it’s more just a physical response than a full emotional one. Any panic also tends to be more about the fear of losing or failing than true terror, although I guess fear of failing can be thought of as being scared? I think the most I’ve been freaked out playing a game though was when I was playing “The Path”. Glitchy, abnormal behaviour in games tends to freak me out so the endings for each character usually made me apprehensive.
System Shock 2 – When a hybrid sneaks up behind you saying “Your song is not ours!” and you turn to shoot them only to have your gun jam…
REmake. Alien Isolation. Silent hill 1,2,3,4. P.T Dead Space 1(other dead space games sucked)
Going into the closest store where I live that sells games (super rural NSW) and seeing Little Big Planet 1 on the shelf for $110
This was a year agoForest/Shadow Temple Wall/Floor Masters were good for a bit of anxiety back in the day
RE1 Hunter
Playing Alien vs Predator on the Jaguar late at night in the pitch black presentation room at the office. No-one in the building, just the hum of the air-conditioning and the 3 metre wide screen projected from the NEC 6PG CRT projector.
That game was so tense, a mate and I were perched side-by-side on stools creeping around as the marine, heard the hiss of the Alien, and a door opened at the far end of the room. We started running backwards, shooting, him screaming ‘Kill it, kill it KIIIILLL IIIIITT!’ leaning backwards as it got nearer and nearer, and we both screamed as the stools toppled and we fell to the floor.
We laughed nervously as our on-screen avatar was disemboweled, and he nervously mumbled “Wanna play Tempest 2000 for a while instead?”
alien isolation, oculus rift dk2.
nothing scarier than hearing it come out of the ceiling and come hurling toward you as you try to hide in a locker. i even got that feeling in your legs you get as you start to panic; luckily i got inside but spent five minutes trying to look through those tiny slits, you have no idea how easy using a mouse to look around really is….
I have to say Outlast and P.T. got me pretty good from this gen of games… I am not sure if part of that was playing this gen with headphones primarily for the first time.
All of Fatal Frame II or wherever you may live in the world due to some weird naming localization; Project Zero II.
Funny story now but not as a kid, Doom shareware or specifically the two barons in Phobos Anomaly, scared the absolute crap out of me as a kid, i think i would have been about 7 at the time and playing with headphones on and the loud roar they made the doors opened.
I can look back now and laugh.
Only two games have really got to me – Amnesia: The Dark Descent and PT. At least I was able to finish PT… Amnesia’s gameplay mechanics countered each other so well – nowhere was safe. Hide in the dark and you’ll go insane, explore in the light and you’re visible to the monster. I love being creeped out, but I don’t particularly enjoy being scared – I absolutely devoured Outlast, F.E.A.R and Dead Space, but Amnesia: DD… screw that game.
DayZ.
I when I say that, I mean the original Arma 2 Mod and my first life was just after they had removed the makarov from new spawns.
That first life was one of the most intense and terrifying experiences of my life, the server was in twilight, I had no means of defending myself in a game I knew little to nothing about and when that first zombie came out of the darkness, screaming and flailing then hit me…. well it was very nearly a code brown.
In almost 20 years of gaming no other game has shook me to the core, made my blood pump and hands shake quite like that, it is a shame that standalone doesn’t capture those same emotions.
I actually found the ‘dark ones’ in metro 2033 really scary, more so than anything in outlast, PT, dead space etc. Just that they were completely unknown for so long in the game, and russian… ugh terrifying.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines – it had an entire level that was an homage to The Shining that scared me a damn sight more than the movie ever did. Come to think of it, the Tremere mansion was also pretty spooky, and the werewolf chase section was pretty tense too…
My first experience was Alien Vs Predator. I just couldn’t play the human campaign, every time I tried I got truly terrified and had to quit. I was just a young’n when that came out.
Other times was Condemned when the mannequins started to follow and Project Zero, the first time I played it scared the crap out of me! Nothing recently though.
Subnautica, piloting my mini sub out over a huge abyss, looking down into the darkness and seeing something looking back, followed by some horrific creature dragging my sub down close to its crush depth, the glass of the cabin slowing cracking and water leaking in.
Wow, this has actually made me want to pick up this game now!
P.T hands down. Me and housemate were playing through it taking turns….I happened to get the run where she jumps out at you to pin you down….I jumped, flung the controller and had the dog asleep on my lap. Shes hasn’t slept on my lap since.
Finding the playable character dead in the bath tub in Eternal Darkness. ‘Nuff said.
Bioshock 1’s room of fog and mannequins.
Alien: Isolation.
The panic of trying to start a generator while Taken close in on you in Alan Wake.
Sight jacking in Forbidden Siren and seeing yourself.
I’m sure I’ll think of more after hitting submit.
Oh geez, that game had some intense moments. So disappointing that they have cancelled the sequels.
Outlast was pretty damn creepy
The first time I came across Bloodsuckers in Stalker. At nighttime, raining couldn’t see anything and then suddenly attacked from all sides and guns that took way too many rounds to kill them or when you have to sneak past them in Call of Pripyat, I was worried they would wake right there and then.
The first Alone in the Dark. Although it has aged terribly, being blocky pixelated mess. but it was my first 3D game, my first horror game. Finding out I was locked in that creepy mansion and that first jump scare, oh. I can still see in my minds eye, my brother “jumped” when that monster crashed through that window.
Literally the scariest was playing World of Warcraft… in 2005 I think guild was waiting to start a raid and they were all talking about a notification emails they got from Blizzard. “You morons, reset your account passwords now.” I shouted. Took me about an hour to explain it was spam email and the link they ALL clicked was bogus and what to watch out for. First time they saw spam email about WoW and out of 45 people. 30 got the email and 20 of them gave out their details. We didnt get hacked… but cause I insisted everyone change their passwords or they dont Raid.
Silent Hill 2, walking into a huge dark room in a derelict prison hearing weird sounds of some creature running around you. Never played that game at 2am in the dark ever again.
I think I’ve told this story here before, but… relevant.
Scariest moment was probably the first Resident Evil game. My friend was the first of the group to get a Playstation for this birthday, and the game he got with it was Resident Evil (we were like… 10. 5/7 parenting!)
Anyway, so a group of us are there, it’s night-time, we fire it up. All good – little creeped out by the intro. We literally made it 5 minutes into the game, nothing too exciting, then this happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe6srxp1-9I
We all promptly lost our shit, turned off the PS, and then proceeded to lie to each other about how not-scared we were. Good times.
The garden maze in Castlevania 64 (I think it was that game anyway). When you’re 12 and there’s a big guy with a chainsaw chasing you down in a maze, you freak the fuck out.
Also, the chainsaw guys in RE4. I don’t care if the windows are on the second or third storey of a building, I’m jumping out of it if there’s a chainsaw guy inside with me.
Call of Cthulhu: DCOTE. Waking up in the hotel and being chased by the locals, aghhh it gives me the willlys just thinking about it
The original Resident Evil on psx. I was 14. By today’s standards not scary but this was my introduction to the series and I was immersed and totally in love. I played it all night with the lights off and the feeling of isolation coupled with the lack of supplies and need for item management was truly thrilling.
There was an old point and click game called Darkseed. It was based on the art of HR giger. Played it on an Apple 2ci.
Very oppressive and bizarre atmosphere to that game.
Probably the original Dead Space. I played it in the dark, and inside my tiny apartment where my surround sound made it sound like there were creatures crawling inside the walls. In the end I had to turn the lights back on.
My scariest game experience ever… by far (I live by myself)
Missus just went home, fired up far cry and decided to clock some coop hours with my mate.
Couple hours in I hear the door to my study open and just think its the wind, felt a hand on my shoulder and I freaked out hard. I tried to spin around and jump up but got close lined by my head phones taking half my desk with me as I tumbled to the floor.
As I looked up, still dazed and confused I see my Ex standing in the door way just staring at me.
Turns out she broke into my apartment because I hadnt been answering her calls since we parted ways and she was ‘concerned’.
Meanwhile the whole ordeal was broad cast live on team speak to all my mates who just assumed I got blair witched
R.E 1 was bad for me. It’s literally my first horror game and I was 6 y.o. (this was overseas where age rating means nothing)
And also, P.T. … When I was home alone for a month… *shivers*
The original STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Sneaking through pitch black concrete tunnels, hearing sounds of unnatural life in the distance somewhere and the occasional reflection of torchlight in eyes at the far end of the corridor. Turning a corner and coming face to face with a Controller in the darkness.
Agreed actually,this game oozed atmosphere and even tho u could save scum the enemies were all threatening.
One of my favourite games around that time. It was genuinely creepy in such an intense way, and as you say it was rich with atmosphere.
Yeh alien isolation for me. I mean it takes a lot to get me a) scared ( some movies are disturbing, but never scary I’d say) or even b) shocked ( or startled where you jump up from a spring loaded scare etc.)
But there was something about isolation that freaked me the hell out. Lights off, late at night, crawling through vents, and then -THEN- a fucking xenomorph comes scrambling towards me, the limbs flailing about while the mouth is shaping into that terrible grin…my god now that shit got to me like nothing else had in years.
Ha,maybe it was knowing that I’d have to replay portions of the already deliberately paced game, but I think it was the randomness of the alien tbh. I know that the alien wasn’t truly random but it felt like it to me for sure.
Left 4 Dead. You’re creeping around a dark alley then you hear it, the blood curdling scream (Awesome Mike Patton vocals) of the Infected. They have found you! The music picked up & you knew that you were in trouble… 3 choices: Run, Gun or Die. Most of the time it was die.
Alien Vs Predator and RE2 were the only ones I really remember. First time playing RE2 when new (also new to Resident Evil in general), in that corridor in the Police station and all the hands burst through the boarded up windows got me a ripper.
Alien Vs Predator, parents had left me home alone for the evening, whole house was turned off except me and the computer. Can’t remember the exact moment, I just remember mashing Esc with my fist and uninstalling before I calmed down.
The original s.t.a.l.k.e.r. RPG gave me my biggest gaming scare. I confronted a bloodsucker inside the basement of an abandoned building. Killed it and moved on. Same building I ran into a mutant with psychic attack ability. Freaked me out but I killed it and moved on. Moved onto the stairs outside the building to leave and found it had turned dark and a thunderstorm was lashing the area. As I went to go down the stairs into the pitch black night a flash of lightning revealed another bloodsucker standing in the garden at the foot of the stairs, quietly lying in wait for me. As it ran at me I panicked and alt-f4’d…
I would say that my scariest experience would be the first time I played Dead Space. I accidentally deleted my save game halfway through the actual game and then had to subject myself to all the jump scares and creepy stuff again. All in all though it became one of my most loved games for it’s HP Lovecraft/Event Horizon/The Thing tones.
0.3 Hrs in Outlast
http://imgur.com/NSutPBM
not sure I’ll keep playing that game…. but I’m so curious to see what else is there, but the anticipation of scary things with only a camera as a “weapon” makes me go “Nope nope nope nope”
Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly for sure. Was lost at one point and came upon this room with a window I looked out of only to see another room across a yard and out of nowhere this ghost child pops out of bloody nowhere! I literally dropped my PS2 controller and froze! Such a good game!
Found the link! https://youtu.be/xOBeFlnZGt4
Multiple occasions here, but often games have scared me because they have not acted as intended. I’ll start with one case where I’m not sure if this counts because it was more or less the game contributing to a real life possible physical-danger scare than the game causing the scare.
One night I had purchased Condemned: Criminal Origins at a late-night EBGames sale (oh wait, they have those every day don’t they?) and began to play. The game did indeed scare me silly, but nothing made me jump so bad as the next moment – I was creeping about an alleyway before jumping through a basement window into an abandoned school, when I looked up the corridor ahead and what should I see, but a very large, agile spider dart across the screen.
I sat there thinking “Huh, that’s a really cool effect!”. It wasn’t a huntsman silhouette though, since I generally would’ve recognized them as real-life issue much much quicker (who puts a huntsman effect in an American game?). My mind suddenly made the connection – why was there a spider effect in this part of the game and not earlier? I jumped out of my seat and sprang back, flicked on the light to find a bizarre, enormous red spider I’d never seen before in my life living in Australia, roughly the same size as a large huntsman. I spent the next few hours sitting at the edge of my bed with a pipe wrench, waiting for it, before it stumbled out from behind my monitor and I ended up destroying my desk.
Some other times;
Playing the infamous leaked alpha of Half-Life 2 for curiosity/developer research a few years ago and wandering around old versions of Ravenholm for many hours, before looking out into an alleyway and seeing the G-Man staring back at me not 3 metres away. Then he did the most peculiar thing – he bolted away, and I panicked and hit F10 to quit. His movement was uncanny and unnatural, and it surprised me since he generally doesn’t act this way. I actually uploaded a video of this onto youtube which was huge for a while.
The Half-Life 2 alpha, as well as multiple other early alphas of games seem to share an aspect, the element of isolation – they generally make you feel as though you’re not quite in a complete, “secure” environment. There’s bugs, and god-knows-what hanging around that the devs had not yet discovered, or had been experimenting with, and that is what I found to be the most creepy of all. There were rules that would be broken by the games behaviour, so you’re effectively on your own.
In the same alpha, I remember wandering along the coastline before ducking into the water to see what the leeches looked like (In the oceans in the retail steam edition, when you swim out far enough, leeches come and eat you up alive). Instead, no leeches came, but rather a strange, deep sound I hadn’t ever heard before in the half-life universe like a growl. I stopped for a moment and began to swim back to shore. Ten seconds later, I wasn’t able to find the shore in the murky water and before I know it, one of those itchysaurs [sic?] swam at me out of the darkness and ate me up, much like the final-game teleport-gone-wrong sequence.
In general otherwise, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth had me jump a few times, again due in part to the game acting out-of-the-rules and things happening that shouldn’t such as NPCs escaping their designated zones, sound bugs (a blast of static underground), Afraid of Monsters: Directors Cut was scary as holy hell, and Amnesia had its moments too.