In your opinion, what do you think the scariest video game is? (Any console/device, if in a series specify which one) Me, personally, I have not seen one scarier than the 1999 Silent Hill. (Not that I'm looking) I might be weird for this, but it's not even the demons or zombies that disturb me. It's the whole darkness and mystery surrounding everything. For example, there's a piano somewhere with blood splattered all over the keys. That disturbs me. Who's blood is it? What happened there? But, even though I do think it's creepy, I still have an interest in it, and I always have since I read/looked at the cheat book when I was, like, six/seven. Yet to actually play it, but I will stick around if someone else is.
Silent Hill 1/2 are pretty scary. 3 to a lesser extent, but Fatal Frame 3 for the PS2? Man, nothing made this manly man scream like a new recruit facing a drill sergeant.
Eternal Darkness for GameCube. I'll never get over it. I still use tracks from the OST when I write scary scenes. The game that holds the record for making me scream the most is Clock Tower 3, for PS2. Weird game. Killer jump scares.
For me personally, the first Dead Space game. I'd never played a survival horror game up until that point and it scared the pants off of me! The fast, dangerous enemies, coupled with the fact that your character moves relatively slow can't really move and shoot at the same time effectively, often had me jumping. However, while Dead Space was scary, it wasn't the most unsettling game I've ever played. That distinct honor belongs to a teaser, of all things: P.T. The general creepiness of the constantly evolving hallway mixed with the thought that you never knew what was going to happen or if anything was going to happen at all.
I would've also said P.T. Weirdly, one of my scariest video game moments happened when I was playing Bloodborne and went to a certain area with ambient music, dark hallways, and brain suckers. I'm not sure why that particular bit gave me proper heebie-jeebies. It was even worse than Dead Space 1.
I like horror games, but I'm not really one to be scared by them. I will say, though, Sunless Sea can be a very stressful game -- it has a murky, spooky atmosphere, and some of the mechanics that make survival horror work. Nothin' like running out of fuel in the middle of an unchartable subterranean sea and watching helplessly as your crew slowly devolves to cannibalism!
The Darkest Dungeon By the end of this party management horror RPG you come to realize that you have proved yourself to be the worst monster any of your characters could ever encounter. You torture your people, send them to die, send them to insane asylums if they fall in love, and ignore permanent psychological trauma because it costs too much to treat, opting instead to give them some coins and send them to get drunk in the brothel you own. All of that before you send them to fight demon possessed pig corpses in excrement soaked sewers.
Alien: Isolation. It goes right back to the horror-movie feel of the first film, creeping around trying to avoid an unstoppable monster that you can only briefly drive away.
I'm not much for horror games or movies, especially the jump scare type. However, I've still played a few and the scariest one is definitely Alien: Isolation. It has almost perfected that feeling of being alone, helpless and constantly hunted. Took me 30 hours over 8 months to finish it, which is twice the estimated playtime... (But I did finish it!)
I'm surprised so many people are mentioning Alien: Isolation. It was great in the beginning, but it got extremely repetitive to me. It suffered from the same problem as Outlast did, that the chases just got monotonous and annoying. Any time you were close to an objective, poof, the antagonist is there to force you to backtrack for 10 minutes, then spend another 10 minutes getting back.
Yeah. I personally found myself annoyed by the game at first. Bored later on as every time the Xenomorph found me I'd sigh, run toward it and just retry. Never did beat Isolation. Aliens Colonial Marines though....that horror comedy took many shots of good old tequila to finish. The horror...
System Shock 2. It’s like BioShock without the feeling of power. Remember when you had almost unlimited ammunition lying around? Nope. Remember when your weapons didn’t break? Nope. Remember when you could hack the security robots to fight on your side? Nope. Remember when the mutated enemies didn’t beg you to kill them? Nope. You start the game with garbage stats, no matter which class you pick, you can’t even try using most of the weapons or hacking most of the crates/doors/security panels until you find enough cyber modules, and the enemies never stop respawning. Never. There are only a handful of jump scares in the entire game, but the sheer desolation and lack of safety easily makes up for it. Come to think of it, that game’s probably why most horror movies don’t scare me that much. EDIT: That said, melee-focused builds get so cheap that it stops being all that scary by the end. Just takes a long time to get there.
Did you hear the latest info about Colonial Marines? The was a typo in the code that allowed Xenomorphs to read the map! So in the released version they just saw a tunnel between them and you! Makes you wonder how much QA testing they did to miss that...
Yeah, I actually laughed when I first heard about the typo bug. I think the director was the only QA tester and with his ego at the helm....we got the horror-comedy that was Colonial Marines. O_O
I bought it to play in VR, then I couldn't manage to play more than ten minutes without getting too scared.
Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 were tough to play through, both need some time to ease into. The first time I entered the village in Resident Evil 4 was intense, and reaching the infirmary in Dead Space was another moment of dread I wouldn't want to repeat. Now not technically a horror game, The Long Dark has moments of terror in it that gave me a lot of anxiety. During the story I found myself out in the freezing cold during a blizzard, with a massive feral bear somewhere out there with me. I could swear that I heard its roar masked by the wind, but the wind was so loud, and my visibility was so poor that I couldn't be sure it wasn't just my imagination. I had to quit the game because of how much anxiety it was causing me.
