With Halloween quickly approaching, I thought it might be a good time to get in the mood with some good scary games.
My favorite are the ones that aren’t really jump out and go “Boo,” but have an overall lingering tone of creepiness, with maybe a few “boo” moments a long the way.
I’ll start out with the obvious: Silent Hill. Maybe not all of its sequels, though many of them were pretty good as well. For awhile after playing it, just hearing radio static made me unnerved.
Sanitarium, while not necessarily scary in the classical sense, is great, and the overall theme is pretty creepy.
It’s been awhile since I’ve played it, but I remember Dark Fall having a few moments where I had to turn the lights on when I was playing it.
So, what games have you played that made you consider sleeping with a nightlight?
I know that some will disagree, but I honestly found Resident Evil 4 terrifying, even when playing it with others in the room. Hell, I still do, even though I’ve played through it three times. Damn those regenerator!
Also, Dead Space is freaky as hell too, although it does lean a bit closer to the “boo” mechanic you mentioned.
Clock Tower for the original Playstation is pretty freaky. It can be tedious to play because of the point and click interface and the lengthy text-based dialog which was clearly translated sloppily from the original Norwegian, but the action sequences with Scissorman can still make you jump after all these years. The game is designed so that Scissorman’s location will be randomized; you never know where he might be hiding - inside a locker, an elevator, a ventilation shaft, a cabinet, anywhere.
Those damn Regenerators from Resident Evil 4 were definitely freaky. But most of the game was pretty much an action shooter, so there weren’t a whole lot of scary moments because you were killing guys all the time. The original Resident Evil games got the scariness factor down a lot better because the enemies were very few and far between, and ammunition and health items scarce; you never knew when you were going to get it. I think Resident Evil 2 is ultimately the best of the series (and it frustrates me to no end that it never got the remake that it deserves.) The regular scenarios for Claire and Leon are great, but the B-scenarios are really where it’s at. The placement of all the items are scrambled around; different enemies will surprise you in different places; and occasionally Mr. X in the green trenchcoat will smash through the wall and make you piss yourself.
Thief 3 had a lot of good scares - not of the boo-out-of-the-closet kind, but of the creeeeepy ambiance kind. The Shalebridge Cradle level is infamous in level design communities.
You know we were just talking about the Fatal Frame series over in the Bioshock thread. Those games are so atmospheric your eyes will melt out of your skull. It’s like playing a Japanese horror flick.
It’s a simple premise. There’s a camera that actually captures souls on film and run down locations that are invariably infested with evil due to the ritual sacrifice of a teenage girl going bad (I’m not sure why all minor sects in Japan feel the need to sacrifice teenage girls in gruesome ways but there do seem to be a lot of them). So the protagonist who coincidentally is always a teenage girl herself is stalked by ghosts and the only thing she can do about it is take their picture. Naturally the most effective time to do this is just before they claw your face off.
Oh, and did I mention that these are ghosts? Which means they walk through walls, vanish and reappear behind you, and generally hate the living who they enjoy trapping in creepy Japanese manor houses. So you have to be constantly on edge against an attack that could come from anywhere and panic at every creak and groan that surround you.
It’s nerve wracking and tense and incredibly creepy. Perhaps not as cool as Eternal Darkness which is the most Lovecraftian game I’ve ever played but if I had to pick a game series to fill you with a lingering sense of dread it would be the Fatal Frame games.
Bits of Fallout 3 are certainly creepy, and the Anchorage DLC adds a few mobs that can be almost invisible. I stopped playing for a bit when I started having too many dreams set in the gameworld.
The original Fox Aliens Vs Preadator dark hallways, foreboding sounds and eerie shapes on the motion tracker showing trouble in the distance. Alas, Windows XP will not run it!
A quick googling shows that there are possible workarounds. Not to say it will for sure run on your system, just that it has been run on some XP systems.
Doom 3 may have too much “Boo” moments for your liking but if you play it the original way without the flashlight mod, it is sufficiently creepy to be worth it.
For my money, nothing beats the Silent Hill series though.
Many of the enemies just look silly. The werewolves look like overgrown platypuses. The zombies (supposed to look like discolored, rotting corpses in tattered clothes) look like Roswell aliens in Hawaiian shirts. But some parts of the game are just creepy.
My personal favorite- (Minor spoiler)
You find a note that reads ‘You think you have won? I have let you get this far! Come to me in my prison. I will eat your soul and walk free in your body.’
Just a few weeks ago, I finished playing “Penumbra: Overture” and “Penumbra: Black Plague”. It’s one of the creepiest games I’ve played in a long time, mostly because you have little to no way of defending yourself. Guns take away a games scare value because you always have some comfort in knowing that you can just kill the damn thing. No guns, then you really have an incentive not to get caught.
