The horrific Phantasmagoria 2 became available on GoodOldGames.com this week. I haven't played it since I was young (and it's not appropriate for young people, bless my parents) -- but I remember that it scared me worse than nearly any other video game ever to date. I could not even finish it for a good couple years because I was too scared to try things and die over and over. It took me a few years before I was brave enough to print out a walkthrough for the very last section and beat the game.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if I tried it again today, it would be terribly disappointing, possibly even hilariously terrible. But paradoxically -- kid you not -- I'm still too frightened to revisit it.
What game scared you worse than any other in your memory? Do you feel stupid about it now, or does it still scare you?
77 comments:
If you're really curious about Phantasmagoria 2, there's a pretty hilarious Let's Play of it at www.spoonyexperiment.com. That'll cure any lingering sense of scariness.
I couldn't finish Eternal Darkness because I tried playing it when I lived alone. At first I laughed off the scares ("oh look, blood dripping from the walls, how subtle, ha ha"). Then I walked into the bathroom, next to the tub..."Yeah, time to turn this game off."
I still haven't finished Fatal Frame 2, and probably never will. Maybe if my girlfriend is willing to hold me through the entire game I could get through it.
Quinn: The bugs on the screen madness effect in Eternal Darkness freaked me right out, too.
If I'm being truthful, Resident Evil was the first, and maybe last game to scare the heck out of me. That dog in that narrow hallway. But does anyone remember D? I can still remember images that stuck with me, though I don't remember all that much about the game.
I never played 'scary games' when I was a kid but there were certainly instances that I could never cope with. The drowning music of Sonic 2 will forever be linked in my mind with the terrified panic of imminent death.
And those damned decoy mailboxes and boogiemen in Toejam & Earl. I would literally start crying when I saw the mailbox from a distance, realizing that I had to cross its path.
I tend to avoid scary games, so it has to be We Don't Go to Ravenholm.
My God that freaked me out a lot.
Oh man, I couldn't have finished Fatal Frame 2 either if I hadn't been living with a dude at the time who would do the scary parts for me.
...yeah yeah, go ahead and laugh.
First it was Silent Hill. My roommate had a burn of it back in 1999 that never got played and being an idiot, I decided to dedicate an entire day to playing it through. I started bright and early in the morning and finished well after dark. I don't think I slept for a week. There was just no resolution with that game.
Also, Fatal Frame kept me scared due to the odd mix of non-corporeal enemies that never stop coming, and the frustrating controls.
I've always been easily scared, but for some reason I put myself through Phantasmagoria and the beginning of Phantasmagoria 2 (and then my parents stumbled upon what I was playing ...)
Then I found Sanitarium. It's more of a psychological thriller (and even then it gets less scary about halfway through), but at 13, it scared the heck out of me regardless.
From when I was young the 7th Guest was just out, some of the cut-scenes were disturbing, I clearly remember a toy choking a baby to death.
Lately I think the Penumbra series is the one that has made me more tense, you feel compleltely defenceless
When I was about 5 or so we had just bought a new TV that was substantially larger than our previous one. While playing Scooby Doo mystery a werewolf jumps out in a part of the game that I had already beaten. But because it was so much larger than before I was so scared that I could never finish the game. To date it is the only game I have never completed.
Silent Hill 2 probably got its claws into me more deeply than anything else I've ever played. I particularly remember one jump moment with Pyramid Head that nearly stopped my heart.
Also, Half-Life was scarier than most people seem to remember. A headcrab leaping directly at your face in an immersive first-person game evokes a pretty primal reaction. The headcrab zombies in HL2 - particularly the insane fleshless ones that ran screaming towards you - were pretty dang scary.
I honestly want to say that Resident Evil was one of the first game that significantly freaked me out when I initially played it (I was nine at the time I believe so that's probably a big reason), but it didn't last long. Whatever atmosphere touches us first is what sticks sometimes. It was specifically the 'death screens' that did it (you know, when all the zombies just jump on you and start munching). After learning how to deal with that tension, I ended up becoming a hard scare in general. I was exposed to a lot of stuff I shouldn't have been when I was little, heh (why Jenn Frank talking about Haunted House & Mountain King just popped into my head, I don’t know).
One of the reasons Fatal Frame holds a dear place in my gaming heart is because it made me jump in my teens. Ju-On stuff typically makes me laugh, but when I first played that, it actually kept me unnerved consistently. Silent Hill I mostly play for deep psychological dread, I've never been 'Boo!' frightened by it.
Take apart a lot of this crap and you'll end up with a lot of nostalgia and silly mechanics that don't hold up now. However, there are still some remnants that strem from the genuine variation in how games deal with horror (I think it was you who wrote about how such things have kind of been significantly altered between the East & West, as well as big budgets). One of the big reasons I’m not really on the Heavy Rain kick right now is because playing the demo reminded me all too much of how Resident Evil USED to be (which infuriates me for multiple reasons).
~sLs~
I've got to go with the original Thief. What really did it for me was the combination of stealth game play, enemy design, and good sound effects.
The creepiest guys for me were the Undead Hammerites. Unless you had special equipment, they were nigh impossible to bring down when they were chasing you and they moved very fast when they chased you. It was possible to down one of you snuck up on it successfully which was a tense process in its own right. Finally they had this horrible laugh when they spotted you.
The most scared I've ever been by a game was the original Doom on PC. I was probably 14 or so when it came out. I drove 30 miles one way to buy a new sound card so I could play it.
Once I got it running (dang IRQ conflicts), I remember this sense of impending...well...DOOM coming over me. I waited for the parents to go to bed, threw on some headphones, and played until 3 or 4am.
Once I got to the 3rd or 4th level, and the pink demons that run around on their back legs started to appear with that foreboding crunching sound of theirs, I was both hooked and freaked out. And when the invisible ones started attacking me....it was almost too much!
Now it seems so silly. Pixelated little demons, satanic imagery, and gibs galore were pretty new to me at the time. Now they seem so normal and non-scary.
I made it through Resident Evil (REmake, 4, and 5), Fatal Frame II, Rule of Rose, Eternal Darkness... no problem, any of them.
But the night I stayed up late to finish Dead Space, I had a near panic attack and couldn't fall asleep. I eventually took a sleep aid and managed to get a fitful three hours rest before popping awake again. I should have played when the sun was out!
You beat me to it: Doom. This is why I maintain that regenerating health bars are the worst thing to happen to the single player shooter genre. The suspense of being wounded, low on ammo, and hearing the sound of a trap door opening somewhere, or the grunt of an agitated demon and you don't know where the hell he is, that stuff was gold. Returning the game parameters to status quo (lots of ammo, full health) between (and amidst!) each encounter makes all this impossible. Stupid Halo and its success and the wave of Halo-imitation taking place.
P.S. It also reduces the incentive to explore. In Doom, I wanted to find every secret because I wanted to end each level at 200/200. I don't like the fact that in modern games I have no reason to interact with environment that aren't directly related to my forward progress.
But, anyway, on a different note: The first Silent Hill, when we first got to the school (my friend and I), that was like, "Hey, I've got an idea! Let's turn on all the lights in the house!"
Also, I recall the garden in RE4 being like a not-so-much-scary but really suspenseful segment: knowing the dogs were out there and knowing they were coming was good fun. I think that game had an ideal balance between fear and gameplay.
The haunted hotel in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.
Maybe I'm a pansy, but the first half of that level (with objects flying at you from the walls and ethereal sights/sounds following you through the rooms) drove me to shut the game down for the night; I had to play during daylight to succeed, and to this day I'll always console cheat my way past that area.
Funny enough, my first and most memorable scary moment in a video game came from creepy monster sounds in the original Doom. Granted, I was about 7 years old at the time, but the first time I heard a monster 'sneaking' up on me, I nearly leapt out of my seat.
Oh god, that bathtub in Eternal Darkness is the only time I've actually screamed because of a video game. The thing that most scares me in modern games is definitely the black headcrabs in HL2. Just the noise they make is enough to set my skin crawling, and I always flinch when they finally jump at me.
Ah! I agree with Dead Space. That game was exhausting to play because I was so tense for every moment I was playing. Plus item management was tricky, I was always trying to save stuff but I was constantly on the verge of running out.
Eternal Darkness definitely gets a spot for all the mind games and some pop-outs I'll never forget.
The Silent Hill series probably holds the top place for me though. Each game scared me equally, but in its own way.
F.E.A.R. was scary for me on the first play through, especially in the dark, by yourself, with headphones.
I think if remade properly though, the original SNES Clock Tower would hold the top spot for me. Being cast as a nearly defenseless young girl combined with the random events led to some horrifyingly tense moments. Lock yourself in the bathroom and hope to god the scissor man doesn't break in! The music was excellent as well. Only the dated technology stops it from surpassing Silent Hill for me, but it's still on par.
I guess I’d have to make a difference between “dread” and “fear” – might be that I felt “dread” in games that wouldn’t hesitate to kill me; in newer days, “Persona 4”’s inta-kill cubes come to mind, in the older days I think of “Wizardy 8”, and even “Castle of The Winds” (damn rouge-likes, being so terribly unpredictable with their monster spawning…)
“Fear” might be more complex, having more to do with atmosphere – for example, I never got passed the monkeys in “System Shock 2”, because they so thoroughly freaked me out… ah, the Dark Engine - Thief would make for some more traumatic childhood-memories as well. In the newer days, I’d choose “The Path”, in which you actually can’t die at all, a fact that didn’t keep me from feeling very, very scared about all of the time (and even more so in grandmother’s house).
The most intense feelings come from games that combine the two, though – and somehow, the game that left the darkest impressions in me is, rather surprisingly, “Lands of Lore 2” (rather surprisingly because it’s full of camp humour and overall schlock). But it was pretty damn unpredictable a lot of times (not to say: erratic), and hard as well - nowhere more so than in some kind of sunken citadel. The point being that I just had found some sort of uber-weapon that just couldn't help me surviving any enemy-encounter whatsoever. This, combined with the distant sound of some windchimes (if memory serves), the natural creepiness of an abandoned place and the fact that it might have been one of my first serious 1st person game-experiences all added up to a pretty damn terrifying experience. (Ironically, I found out later that it was actually the new-found weapon that drained my life by using it, so after I knew this, the game got significantly less difficult and scary.)
The original Doom - the lighting was such a new, scary thing. System Shock 2 after that - the very tense resource management survival horror really got to me.
Let's see... Doom 3 was also super scary until you became the predator with the acquisition of the Soul Cube (or whatever it was called).
Yesterday I was playing Mount & Blade and I lost my horse for the first time, and in the thick a big fight, as well. That was really, really scary, to be on foot and at the mercy of all the still mounted enemies.
Thief 3's Shalebridge Cradle by Jordan Thomas. It spends ten, fifteen minutes ramping up the tension largely by being devoid of life. But the lights gently fade in and out, like the building itself is breathing, and distant echoes of times long past gently make themselves known. Then, as you edging step by creaking step up to the top tower THERE COMES A TREMENDOUS THUNDEROUS CRASHING as if something terrible and bloody is occuring in the attic above. On first hearing this, I turned tail and fled all the way back to the bottom-most point of the basement before daring to pause...
And the level culminated in a desperate, breathless creeping up to the staff tower. By the end I was being chased by half a dozen faceless shadowy staff-members and, abandoning all stealth, sense or even reason and with mere inches between myself and my persurers I threw myself from the top-most window - my only escape from the Cradle was my apparent suicide.
When I was around 6, I vividly remember having nightmares that always had the original Legend of Zelda dungeon theme playing in them. Something about their claustrophobia really creeped me out as a kid (in the over world, if you're being overrun, you can run in just about any direction off-screen; but in dungeons the path was often blocked).
A little older, the GameCube remake of RE and RE Zero really scared the hell out of me in places--that will remain the single, scariest game series I would ever play (though RE4 and 5 severely toned it down). I know a lot of people have issues with the games' clunky controls and over-the-top plots, but they still hit a nerve even now. I recently downloaded and started playing RE2 on my PS3, and despite its aging pixels, it's still gotten a couple of jumps out of me :-)
Someone mentioned the "We Don't Go to Ravenholm" chapter of Half-Life 2, and I have to agree. Maybe it's just because I wasn't expecting it in that game, but there were a few places in the series that had some good frights like that one.
Lastly, I would have to add Demon's Souls. While it's not scary in the traditional sense, knowing how easily you can die at any moment to have even a small monster jump out at you from the darkness is very unnerving :-)
Errr, not to mention also, playing Doom on mushrooms and realizing we're in hell and the walls are made out of dead skin and holy shit are those babies crying in the background?
Leigh, feel free to delete this if you want to keep things hallucinogen-free here. I won't be insulted.
Of course, The Cradle! I was so overwhelmed by long-term nostalgia that I completely forgot it. Lots have been written about the genius of its design, and, I’ll second that by admitting that it’s another level scary enough that I never even finished it. (I never even got passed the first moments, when there actually isn’t anything around to kill you…)
When I was four I just couldn't bring myself to play Maniac Mansion for long stretches. Whenever I was caught in the kitchen and then sent to the dungeon I'd run and turn off my NES. Of course, I did beat the game since then. But that mansion is still a bit frightening.
Okay, so I'm 15 years old. It's a teacher's workday, so I have a day off from school - and my parent's house to myself, something of a rare occurrence. I also had some, uh, marijuana on my person. I wasn't exactly a staid veteran at that kind of thing; the first time I'd succumbed to temptation and ingested the "demon weed" was the night before.
I'd just fired up "Thief: The Dark Project," when my very good friend came over unexpectedly. We decided to finish off the drugs, eat about a sleeve of Oreo cookies, and go our separate ways. Afterwards, still reeling with inexperience and heavy-lidded wonder, I returned to the game. It was a fairly early mission, wherein Garrett has to sneak into a heavily guarded cathedral by way of the Old Quarter, a spooky place of daemons and hammer wielding fanatics.
My headphones pressed tightly to my ears, face inches from the CRT, I began. I never played Thief better in my life. The whole of my consciousness was enveloped in this fantasia, and I couldn't have moved though the game with greater stealth had I worn Perseus's helmet.
Yet I was not flawless -- one Hammerite finds another unconscious while going about his lamplighting duties. I hide, not very well, as the Hammerite begins searching for me, slowly and toughly. I dare not move. I hear him coming, but he doesn't see me yet. I'm inches from the screen. He's looking right at me -- inches from my face -- but he's not seeing me, so dark is the alley. But he's not turning around. I hold my breath.
Then my Mom touches me on the shoulder.
I freak out like never before. Full body spasm so intense, it moves Garrett from his hiding spot into certain death.
She'd gotten home early and made me a ham sandwich, which was very thoughtful of her. I was quite plainly high - the aluminum can we'd used, in our infinite wisdom, to smoke out of was lying by my feet - but she said nothing and I contently ate my ham sandwich after shutting down the game.
Those late 90's stealth games are unique artifacts -- they're scary, yes, but they're also impossible to play and enjoy today - drugs or not.
To this day I have an irrational fear of the dark maze in Doom's E1M2.
More recently there's the Penumbra trilogy and Scratches. The atmosphere can get really tense and oppressive in those games.
I find the more action oriented horror games a lot less scary (if at all), either because I can punch evil in the face (Resident Evil, Doom 3) or because at some point I figure out that the monsters are retarded (Silent Hill).
I haven't played a lot of the standard "scary" games, so I really don't have many experiences to share. There was one level in the original DOOM, though, that creeped me out. I was playing on Ultra-Violence difficulty, and there were hardly any monsters in the level; it was way too easy, and I kept waiting for the game to spring something horrible on me to make up for it. As it turns out, though, it was just an easy level with far fewer monsters than the ones before it.
I also had a tendency to get creeped out by the static "The End" screens that appear after beating some games. I can't explain it at all, but there was something about that white "The End" text on a black background that got to me.
The Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows unnerved the hell out of me. Upon replaying it hasn't aged that well, but being stalked through a Victorian mental hospital by nigh invulnerable zombies while a little girl gives you directions was one of the more nerve wracking gaming experiences I've had.
I don't play a lot of scary games, but the one that scared me the most was an arcade game called Sinistar. I was 5 (+/-) at the time and I used to go into my corner arcade and play pole position and the original Star Wars arcade game. Then one day, they got this dark shooter that I'd never heard of. And it talked! In a sort of snarling, mocking voice, no less. Games weren't supposed to talk! I couldn't even be in the arcade when anyone was playing it. Hell, I couldn't bring myself to play it on the arcade comp that I bought for my ps2 a while back.
Since then, the egg boss from Little King's Story has probably come the closest to scaring me, although it's a vastly different kind of fear.
I was never at all scared by the Resident Evil games, so when I got Fatal Frame 2, I thought "Alright, let's turn off the lights, close the shades, put on the headphones, and give this game a chance to at least scare me a little." I got halfway through Fatal Frame 2, and had to stop; it was just too intense. I felt like a complete wuss, until I ran into another male friend on the street, and asked what he was playing. "I started Fatal Frame 2," he answered, "But I had to stop---it was freaking me out!"
I finally went back to finish it with the lights on, and was glad I did---the end is pretty fantastic (even if the worst of the bad endings is heart-clenchingly terrifying).
Having been held underwater until losing conciousness as a child, I'd have to say that Tomb Raider was the scariest game I have ever played.
I didn't even bother to turn it off. I just ran away.
The whole "Metal Gear" experience always frightens me, but not in the same visceral way that horror games scare. No, that instills in me a deep sense of socially traumatizing paranoia, or at the very least taps into a pre-existing condition of mine. Can there be a more neurotic experience than hiding from an entire army in the midst of Orwellian conspiracy theories?
As a designer myself, I know one genre I'd like to inject some much needed fear and anxiety into-- dating games.
Curiously enough, given the attention you've given its sequel recently, it's Bioshock.
See, I'm only 19 now and I'd always avoided horror games. The only reason I played Bioshock was to see what all the fuss was about, because really, the core concept seemed ki9nda dumb at the time. Obviously, I don't think it sounds so dumb these days, having done a helluva lot of research on objectivism and the philosophies of Bioshock, but still, back then the notion of a city under the sea with a bunch of crazies seemed ridiculous.
I had no idea what I was letting myself in for and the setting struck me really hard. The tone was really something I wasn't used to and I think amongst everything the one aspect of the game that really shook me up was the voice acting. Seriously, I was convinced that the people doing the voices for the splicers were actually crazy.
It was a terrifying ride, but ultimately it left me open to a whole new genre of games. I still won't play Resident Evil because I straight up don't like the mechanics of it, but the Condemned's amd Silent Hill's of the world have been scaring me ever since.
Silent Hill 2. I was going through a rough patch at the time, and playing that game didn't do much to improve my state of mind. It just wormed its way into my mind, and wouldn't let go.
Wouldn't say it scared me, exactly, as much as caused me to curl up into a ball under my comforter. Still, I love playing that game every once in a while now.
... Ravenholm.
I took me SIX MONTHS to finish Ravenholm. That's how long I let the game sit before beating it. Once I got the guts to finish Ravenholm, the rest of the game was cake-- delicious cake.
See, at first I did about half the level, then dropped it and went to play various RTSes, because that's what I was into as a kid. I had no stomach for any of those low-light survival-horror bits in HL2.
I was able to play RE 3 a couple of times, but I couldn't finnish the second round of RE 2 since I kind of got tired of being scared all the time...
And then...
I started playing Silent Hill on broad light and...
It was horrible!!!! I was scared all the time, AL THE TIME!!!!
I just hated how the character would run like he had a leg missing and everything suddenly got from bad to WORSE!!!! IT GOT WORSEE!??!?!?!
Arghhh.... °__°
Right now I'm trying to find some valor to play SH 3...
Wish me luck °__°
I have two "moments."
1. Resident Evil 4:
The Verdugo - the boss you have to fight down in the sewers of the castle - a boss that can decapitate you instantly, is already one of the toughest in Resident Evil 4 on normal mode. On professional he is so difficult to kill that some have resorted to dying enough times for the game's dynamic difficulty to make him weak enough to kill. Basically, if you don't have a rocket launcher on you, just run away. I had to learn that the hard way.
I couldn't buy a rocket launcher so I thought I could get by upgrading the power on the magnum as high as I could. After using all the liquid nitrogen available in the room in which the Verdugo appeared, all my magnum ammo and a couple hundred SMG rounds didn't do shit. The next plan was to run like hell down the sewer to where the elevator was and hope I found enough ammo along the way to kill him. Didn't happen.
Reaching the elevator room which housed a couple more nitrogen tanks, all I had left was my pistol in the hope that maybe I'd drained most of his health by now. After both tanks were gone and my pistol was empty, he was still there, and the elevator hadn't arrived yet (you have to wait four minutes for it). So it was me with no ammo period, stuck in a small room with only a table separating me from probably the most dangerous boss in Resident Evil 4.
The only thing I could think of now was to take out my knife all like "let's do this man!" As he walked towards me, I thought to myself that this is one of those moments in movies where the monster has the guy cornered and the guy runs forward screaming before being eviscerated. Right then, the elevator opens up behind me.
2. Silent Hill 2:
There is a room in Silent Hill 2 This room is nothing but a room, but damnit I still don't wanna ever go in there again.
This room in the bottom of the underground prison is gigantic and bitch black - I can't see but five feet in front of James Sunderland. No matter where I go there is a subtle beating sound - there has GOT to be something in there.
Not being able to take it anymore, I run all over the room just waiting for whatever's in there to jump out and kill me. All I ever find is a hanging platform in the center of the room. From the time I start hearing that sound till the moment I exit, no matter what I do, nothing happens. Ever.
There are enemies all over the prison and that room is completely safe. Nothing will ever hurt me while I'm in there, but I still don't want to have anything to do with that room ever again.
Fatal Frame. Absolutely terrifying.
Out of 42 comments and no one drops the name Clock Tower. What a shame! Clock Tower 1(2 in japan) is still quite possibly one of the scariest games of all-time. It took the concept of a slasher and made it virtual in a sense where instead of just screaming at the protagonist to go through the fucking door, you were in control of making them go through that said door, all the while the sound of sheers snapping draws closer and the chase music only seems to get louder. Clock Tower had been the first time I was scared to play a videogame but compelled to keep playing it. It had happened very few select times after with titles such as Silent Hill 2 and the last Fatal Frame game. Its a rare feeling but one that I relish like a vivid nightmare.
I am a survival horror enthusiast, so to see stuff like Resident Evil and Silent Hill be talked about isn't new but always interesting to see. I believe games need to start messing with peoples comfort zones a lot more. It has been touched upon (e.g. eternal darkness) not as much as I think it should be. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories warned against its psychological profiling though it never managed to really screw around with the gamers head(though I loved SM). I'm awaiting the day we get a game that leads on that it wasn't the player who was playing the game, but the other way around. One can hope.
Call of Cthulu made a pretty big impression on me when I played it. It's the only game I've ever played where I felt truly helpless.
Being cornered by fishmen and in a dank cave, realizing your last bullet didn't put down your pursuer puts in perspective how helpless you really are.
I'm a sucker for cheap scares, really. I have particularly fond memories of Aliens versus Predator (1, i.e. super duper classic edition they're now selling on steam). It really managed to reproduce the feel of the Alien movies, especially when stuck in a dark corridor with only a flare for light and your motion sensor going ballistic. I did play as an alien and a predator too, but I still feel the marine campaign was the only proper way to play this game.
What scares me in a game, hands down, is atmosphere. I like to put myself in a character's mindset, so a horror game that fully commits to using its environment as an expression of dread will eventually seep into my bones and seize up on my lungs.
Two great examples come from Resident Evil 4: when you reach the swampy area, dense with fog. As villagers slowly walked towards me with their torches, illuminated only by flashes of lighting. And defending that small house from the Las Plagas in pitch black. Neither of these were leap out and scare you moments, but they sure were memorable.
Bioshock's environments worked wonders on the psyche, too.
I guess the REmake scared me a bit. I jump more than I would like to think at monster-closet/"BOO!"-type scares, even when I se them coming. Which is what makes it annoying.
I think the biggest fear I have is being co-opted, taken over, infiltrated on a personal level and used and applied to an evil purpose.
I remember one of the scariest film moments from my youth was watching John Carpenter's 'The Thing,' and marveling how the characters who turned out to be the alien seemed almost to have no idea themselves that they had been 'corrupted.'
Had a similar spook on seeing Donald Sutherland's point-and-scream at the conclusion of the 1979 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Leigh it's good to hear from a grown child whose parents let them play awful scary things and turned out alright. It is, in fact, one of the subjects of my latest podcast with my kids, at http://www.happygamefamily.com
One of my son's friends recalss seeing his parents play the first Phantasmagoria. What a coincidence!
Games that have underwater sections scare me, well not the games, just those sections. I can't even play past the Tutorial level of Tomb Raider Underworld because at the beginning of the First Level you start out on a boat, in the middle of the ocean... I will not jump in the water! Heck I remember a couple Mario 64 levels that freaked me out... :(
When Psycho Mantis broke the 4th wall in Metal Gear and addressed me (the gamer) directly, I was a bit freaked by that.
Also, Doom always scared me, but when you added in the element of hearing babies crying in the background in Doom 64, it just got creepier X10.
Oh, speaking of Metal Gear, JT, the "Colonel" starting to berate you and glitch (and also break the fourth wall) during the climax of Metal Gear 2 was not exactly scary, but creepy as hell.
System Shock 2 still terrifies me. I think the audio logs were a fantastic touch--they really flesh out the narrative in a more cerebral way than cut scenes or queued events. I wish there had been more in Bioshock. I still love Sander Cohen's "I Want to Take the Ears Off, But I Can't."
Yeah, like a lot of people Fatal Frame 2 is probably the closest front runner.
Though I think I could handle Fatal Frame 2 alone, at my own pace. What makes it scary - like what makes a lot of horror movies scary - is experiencing it with a few close friends in a dark room and constantly speculating worst-case scenarios.
Plus the ubiquitous, "OH FF- Did you see that?!" "What?? What?" "What are you talking about?!"
I'm pretty hardy when it comes to horror though. Whenever my friends and I have a horror game night, I'm always the one with the controller... Everyone else either doesn't want to even touch the controller, or does fine until they're being attacked and panics with the tank controls.
(There was one awesome jump-scare in Fatal Frame 2, though, that had ALL of us literally screaming. Freaked out the neighbors I'm sure!)
What scares me ... search trypophobia ^_^ completely unrelated to video games.
http://weekly-gaming.blogspot.com/
OK, I'll jump into this, since I'll mention a game that barely got a passing mention, a game that wasn't scary unless you were a 6 year old, and a game that probably nobody else ever played.
As a lad, the scariest thing for me was the Popeye arcade game. I knew that walking under Bluto required care, because he could punch down and take you out. However, one day at Chuck E. Cheese I learned that, in one motion, he can jump down a level AND punch the level under that. I jumped a foot away from the machine when he KO'd me that way, crashing into my father standing behind me.
Moving ahead to the age of 12 or 13, I was playing a Friday the 13th game on my C64. It wasn't the NES game that more are familiar with, the idea of this game was you were one of 10 Crystal Lake teenagers. Jason was one of the other 10, but you wouldn't know which one until either he attacked you, or you saw him kill one of the others. The bottom of the screen showed the 10 characters. When Jason killed one of the others, whether you witnessed it or not, the screen froze solid and there was a HORRIBLE, shrieking white noise sound which I guess was supposed to be a scream. And if that wasn't bad enough, occasionally the graphics would disappear to be replaced by some leering skulls, or the image of a head with a machete sticking out of it and blood streaming down the face. This was in 1988, on an 8 bit computer system, and was the second scariest game I have ever played.
Top dog, by far however, was mentioned above by one other poster. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. The Santa Monica haunted house. It was a breathlessly paced scare fest, with the frights coming from everywhere, with literally dozens of different ways to make you jump. I literally felt my heart rate increase, I was a sweaty mess, and several times I had to stop just to breathe, contemplating pausing it and coming back to it later. I toughed it out, figuring there was no reason to ruin my experience. So glad I did. I don't think I'll ever be scared by any game, movie, book, anything ever again as much as I was by that. I wish more people had played this to know what I was talking about.
Most recent was Ravenholm (I didn't play Half-Life 2 until a couple of years ago). There's one section where you come out into a largish street with lots of alleyways and the zombies just keep coming. I could not figure out how to get out of that street, and so I played it maybe twenty times in a row; each time my lungs would constrict a bit more as the sense of inevitably shedding ammunition and armour until I only had a crowbar and a pair of pants (metaphorically) against a never-ending tide of zombies that were coming from every direction felt more and more futile.
The Dread Lords in Galactic Civilizations 2 are also frightening: you know they're out there, and you know how badly underpowered your ships are compared to theirs, you just hope you don't run into them...
In Rescue on Fractilus, when you land to pick up downed friendly pilots, sometimes you will encounter an alien infiltrator instead. He will run up looking (almost) exactly the same as a real pilot, and if you don't notice, a huge alien will jump up at your windshield and try to smash into your ship. (If you leave the airlock open for him, he will just come in and kill you directly.) It scared the heck out every time, even after I knew that one might be coming.
Doom 3, for me there's absolutely no doubt. I nearly suffered heart attacks playing that game. I did manage to finish it, but I don't think I'd try it again and I gave up on Resurrection of Evil without even finishing one level.
It was the unexpected whispers in the dark that did it for me, as well as the set piece near the start where you find one victim who has been ritualistically killed somehow (my mind blanked out all the details, merecifully). Oh and those disturbing, mobile, yet necrotic textures on the walls... Oh, and the horribly real looking textures on the corpses... "they look so still but they ain't quite dead" as Stephen King put it in the Tommyknockers.
I used to play that in my attic bedroom in a rented house and there were times when I couldn't got downstairs to the ground floor bathroom I was so shook up. Embarrasasing really, since I love horror movies like the Shining and Don't Look Now. I think the first person perspective makes things a little different...
I think it was the thought of being stuck in that base on Mars with nowhere to relax and take things easy, the constant restless movement of things all around. Nowhere to sleep. No safe place, just knowing that there is an evil there that hates life, has violently killed everyone else there and the investigative team that you're a part of, and is now hunting you, the last survivor.
Clive Barker's Undying, especially the first two acts.
They don't make stuff like this anymore..
Doom 3 was pretty scary as well, especially that part with the female voice that said,"They took my baby". The first time I played that, I ran backwards down the corridor while shooting randomly.
Resident Evil 2 on the PS1 (never played the 1st one at the time and didn't know what a zombie was :P) scared me so bad when I was younger. Just the demo gave me nightmares XD
Wow, some very like minded folks over here. For me it was likely:
1. The Condemned - Criminal Origin- I entered this old, apparently abandoned department store and started seeing strange things out of the corner of my eyes. Next thing I know I swore I saw a mannequin move, but when I looked again, nothing. Condemned 2 also had some great scares.
2. The Suffering - This game, from the entertaining beginning, to the end, kept me captivated and with a nice strong feeling of dread.
3. Somebody already mentioned it, but Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines had 2 really strong set pieces. The first was the previously mentioned Haunted House that really kept me jumping. The second was the encounter with the Werewolf which was a really wicked chase for me.
Fatal Frame 2 scared the bejeezus out of me, and not from a dogs-jumping-through-windows standpoint of Resident Evil, or a look-at-all-the-fucked-up-imagery style of Silent Hill, but by creating a legitimate atmosphere of fear. I couldn't play the game in the dark, let alone complete it. It remains the scariest game I've ever played.
Resident Evil on the PS1. I played that game when I was 12 or so, and I had nightmares almost every night. I would tell myself every night that I would not play that game again, yet courage woke up with me on weekend mornings and I'd go back to it, only to repeat the process of being scared come nighttime. The zombies were the scariest to me, especially the first time I saw one with its decaying, pale head turning towards me in that memorable cutscene close-up.
Eternal Darkness was also pretty scary. The bathtub scene made me drop my controller and walk away from the game for several weeks, before returning to it and beating it. As a side note, that's the best survival horror game I've played (RE4 is a better game, but a different one). Silicon Knights should leave Too Human on the side and focus on making a sequel for ED.
I can't seriously remember which games from my childhood really scared me.
I remember playing Silent Hill for the first time, like many of you folk have. Seriously weird! Good to see many other people giving Eternal Darkness a mention.
Somewhat surprised that Night Trap hasn't been given a mention!... :D
Oh, I forgot to say, X-Com night missions could be quite scary. The impact of fog of war was huge, so you never know whether there'd be a big bad around the corner, waiting until you ended your turn to shoot at you from a wheat field, or worse yet about to jump out and mind control one of your guys.
Laura Bow 2: The Dagger of Amon Ra gave me nightmares as a kid. It's a great game, and I knew it at the time, but it scared me.
I have not been seriously frightened since I first picked up a key in Super Mario 2 and the face on the wall shook itself free and came after me. I freaked out, threw the key in any direction, and waited for the face to stop. It took a long minute or two before I had the courage to pick it back up, and then I literally screamed and hollered as I ran to the locked door.
In retrospect, I guess the most frightening thing about it was that it broke my assumptions about the world and what could happen in it. Background is background, and scary things in the background should not be able to come after me. Also, those eyes. That pointed smile.
That, and I was 5 at the time.
Definitely Call of Cthulhu in Innsmouth, it's pretty much just a run away part of the game. (The FPS is mediocre at best.), but very easily the scariest part of any video game I've played to date.
I was scared most by Silent hill 2.
Not the creepy sights, though the rusty metal and meats was disturbing and disgusting.
Or the sounds, with every footfall I was worried about attracting monsters and every bump or creek I accidentally made had me jumping with 'Oh no! they found me!'
Or even the monsters, since I didn't know you could kick them so they kept getting up. Making each monster encounter uniquely scary since I only knew to run away.
It was the big story reveal... and how much I sympathized with James, even knowing that it was all really his fault. It made me question 'am I the monster?'. (absolutely not helped by SH3, where that one cultist said 'wait, you see them as monsters?')
My end was 'in water' and I found it fitting.
DOOM on SNES for me. I was far too young to be playing it, in retrospect. There was some sections of levels that were nearly pitch black with flashing lights and what not that I refused to enter for years and years, and it wasn't until I bought the playstation version which was far better lit that I dared some areas. Most notably, the maze area on the second level where you go to get the chainsaw. I could never enter there when I played as a child. Recently i played through all of DOOM on PC (finally!) and still felt goosebumps entering that room, even though I had memorised the placement of every zombie and imp in it.
I forget the name of it in Australai, bt the game that I think is called Fatal Frame elsewhere in the world freaked me out, if that is the one where you are a japanese school girl with a camera. It may be a different game, though. Either way, the game I am thinking about, on PS2, freaked the crap out of me and I could not play it for long periods of time.
Ravenholme is still up there on the scariest non=horror game sections I have ever played, and headcrabs in any airvent in any half-life is still more than capable of making me drop my mouse off the desk as I jump in fright.
Feeling fear while playing a video game usually takes the form of dread for me. And I dreaded walking into certain parts of the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows.
System Shock 2 would have to be the scariest game I've ever played in my life, followed by Silent Hill.
I feel that the first terrifying game you play is always going to be the scariest, because once you've finished it you build up a resistance to the horrifying elements. All other horror games I've played, after these two titles, have been a little scary but not all that much.
Perhaps a game like Heavy Rain will scare me, but I'll have to play it and see.
I've never been "scared" by a video game, but I was once startled.
I was running around Silent Hill 2, trying to figure out what to do next. I had killed everything there was to kill and had not seen an enemy of any kind for about 20 minutes.
All of thus sudden, a Lying Figure jumped out at me from under a van. I yelled, jumped, my heart started racing, and somehow, the controller went flying out of my hands. That was the only time I was "scared" or startled during a video game.
I'm right there with you Chesh. I still haven't finished Fatal Frame II either - that game just scares the ever-lovin' crap out of me.
I think it somehow manages to plug into my (infirm, but still very real) belief in some measure of spirituality.
Zombies don't scare me - monsters don't scare me - I don't believe in them. But some part of me seems to believe in the afterlife, or some sort of immortal spirit - so it's harder for me to maintain my general pop-culture cynicism with Fatal Frame.
One day I'll go back to it.
Maybe.
For me, recent Metro 2033 has--surprisingly--creeped me out! At the risk of mildly spoiling something for some of youe--the game has ghosts!
Last night I was slowly working my way through a old, creaky, abandoned building. The howling of mutated creatures outside echoed the dank halls along with my heavy breathing (you must wear a mask when you go outside and the breathing reflects the intensity of the situation), it totally put me on edge. Suddenly the room I was in got a little warmer in color and something quickly moved about in the darkness. I looked around and wasn’t sure if I was seeing smoke, or a ghost or something else when suddenly something whispered in my ear, "save us" and flipped me the F out!
I ran ran ran towards the nearest door, turn a corner, bolted down a nearby stairway well leading me down stairs to an open door and I rushed through it hoping to find a nice corner to hunker down in. Lo-and-behold, one of the mutated creatures from outside worked its way in to greet me. I fired off some shots but it wasn’t enough to stop him from pouncing on me. He tore into me but I shoved my knife into his neck a few times killing him.
My mask was now shattered making it very difficult to see some of my surroundings clearly. I wandered around the floor eventually finding another mask to wear.
I have always ran from scary games, but i was most scared of resident evil 1 2 & 3 because once when i was 7 i started a playthrough and after the first zombie apeared i was kinda nervous and waiting for one to pop out of nowere but then my uncle (who used to play horrible pranks on me) grabbed me by the ribs and did a loud scream. From that moment on i was always scared from RE games, and even hearing the zombie spelling the title at the beggining made me run for my mom.
But now im 15 and my mom (who always since i was 7 loved terror games from fatal frame to silent hill) bought bioshock and i gave it a go... what scared me most isnt the monsters way of jumping and screaming or the monsters at all, but the ambience of blood and feeling trapped (im claustrophobic) in that underwater metropolis that made shiver.
and for my actual scare moment, it ironically hapenned last night with that exact same game, a friend stayed over the night and we played a part, where you are looking for the telekinesis plasmid and you find a dead splycer with a shotgun and when u go and grab it ALL LIGTS go down exept for where u are standing and 6 or 8 splycers jump out of nowhere, my friend goes FU*& RUN!!!! and i follow his stupid advice only to get cornered by them in the darkest corner of the room and killed, im ganna play that again tonight... wish me luck
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