System Shock 2
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.(the bit in the abyss near the endShudder), not to mention much of the beginning.
Thief 1 creeped me the hell out several times. I think I skipped most of the undead missions on the first playthrough.
Half Life 2. Ravenholm. Just Ravenholm. Oh, and some of the bits in the collapsed tunnels with zombies.
to be honest I never found Dead Space to be very scary. It was definitely creepy, and had a great atmosphere, but you just had too much ammo and health for it to every really be that scary.
As for Resident Evil 5, the reviews at the moment are saying it’s much less “survival horror” than it is action, and that if you go into it thinking it’s a survival horror game you’ll be a bit disappointed, which is unfortunate. I still wanna giver 'er a go, though.
Eternal Darkness was a fantastic game, with the sanity meter and everything, absolutely brilliant innovation, especially cause the roman guy you play as in the beginning doesn’t have one (I used to say it’s cause he was a hardcore roman mofo, and is used to killing zombies on his way to breakfast)
System Shock and its spiritual successor, Bioshock, were fantastic games, though I think System Shock 2 is easily the best in the series. As far as scariest game ever? I dunno, it’d be either SS2 or maybe Silent Hill 2, that’s a tough one. SS2 is the better game overall though, imo.
For my money the original Silent Hill is still the scariest game of all time. It’s still the only game that’s managed to actually get me to stop playing solely because of the atmosphere. (It was 1 in the morning and I was in the elementary school. I had just made it into the courtyard for the first time and I looked around at the “unending” darkness and said “okay that’s enough for me”). The deformed babies with butcher knives didn’t help.
If I were to compile a (hypothetical) top ten list of “scariest moments in video games” the first ten minutes of Silent Hill would be number 1. Nothing has ever affected me quite as much as wandering down that blood splattered alleyway for the first time.
2 and 3 were both worthy sequels, ( I particularly enjoyed 3 as it continued the story from 1. And I liked Heather more than I expected to.) But 4 was… disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad game but Konami changed the formula up a great deal. I understand what they were trying to do but it just didn’t work for me. I never finished it as I quit halfway through when it appeared I’d have to play all the stages again as escort missions. (I might be wrong about that, but I didn’t have much enthusiasm for the game at that point, and it just killed what little I did have.)
I haven’t played Homecoming yet, but it’s on the list.
Aliens v. Predator 2. 'Nuff said.
Made
Of
Win
that owns on so many levels I dont even know where to begin.
The marine sequences in the beginning did have me jumping out of my skin.
The story in Eternal Darkness was phenomenal.
But the 4th wall breaking that it did inhabits a category all it’s own. I’ve never played a game that dared to to do anything quite like it. The one and only time I saw the blue error screen I was literally so stunned that I just stared at it for a minute. (Had I not been I might have shut the system off. I’m glad I didn’t. I’d seen the ‘healing resulting in getting your head blown off’ effect earlier so I had an inkling about what was going on.)
At that point I learned to keep a very, (VERY), close eye on my sanity meter.
agreed, it was a great and original mechanic in a game that hasn’t been replicated since. There were a few I thought were kinda cheesy (the volume going down, as the volume bar looked nothing like hte one on my tv, for instance) but enough of em screwed with your head so much the first time that, overall, it was a great innovation. One of my favorites, just for sheer frantic-ness
walking into a room and seeing it FILLED with zombies that instantly mob you and start chewing on your face, only to “wake up” seconds later outside the door
No, the surprise was that
Polito, who had been guiding you, was really SHODAN all along.
I could handle the monkeys, but going through the cargo holds was seriously nerve-wracking.
That was the scariest thing in the game, by far. It was in the afternoon, the sun is shining, and I’m screaming at my TV “OH FUCK NO!! THIS BETTER BE A MINDFUCK! THIS BETTER BE A MINDFUCK!”
Hilarious and scary.
Another scary part was seeing your character is a bathtub full of blood, but that was more thanks to shock value. It was so unexpected, and so in your face.
Brilliant game. I’m glad I still have my Gamecube.
“Kiiiiiilllllll meee!”
System Shock 2, hands down.
If you get a copy, find the Rebirth mod which fixes a lot of graphical issues and brings it up to antiquated rather than ancient levels.
Deadspace uses shock rather well, but it really isn’t any more scary than having someone jump out unexpectedly and say “boo!”. Bioshock was creepy, but the fact that you were an invincible, immortal God who could clear out entire levels with nothing more than a wrench and patience kinda killed its horror factor.
I’d also second the Call of Cthulu game, especially the level where you have to escape from a hotel room while being pursued by deranged Dagon cultists.
That part of MGS2 is actually really stressful for me, even when I was replaying it for the benefit if A Priori Tea when MGS4 came out. Especially the translucent skull bits in addition to the random, robotic dialog - the fact is you come to trust your CO so much in the game that having him betray you and turn out to be an insane AI with a defeatist kick, talking to the player instead of the player character, is really quite disturbing.
And I’m ecstatic that so many others here have played Eternal Darkness. It’s a game that deserves to see a great deal of popularity, even now. One of the most crazy sanity effects I’ve heard of was the Gamecube itself randomly turning off - no power light, video output, or anything for a few seconds… before flashing back to life with your character screaming, “This isn’t really happening!” That game’s just insanely cool.
I wonder how many people returned Eternal Darkness to the store thinking that the disc was defective.
No mention of Clive Baker’s Undying yet?
Great writing, great beginning and there’s a mechanic that let’s you look into the past. The gameplay get a bit bogged down towards the middle.
You walk over to normal family portrait, and you hear “see…see…” being whispered into your ears. You cast the spell and everyone in the portrait are being drawn as monsters blood scattered all over it.
.
I played it and, to be honest, it struck me as neither a particularly scary game nor a particularly well put together shooting/survival horror game.
There was a game for the Playstation 1 called Clock Tower.
This is the scariest video game of all time.
Hands down.
NO contest.
There is only one enemy in the game…but he’s more than enough. Easily capable of giving you a massive fatal heart attack. Seriously…find this game, buy it, and play it some night, all alone, with the lights out.
You will agree with what I’ve written.
I’ll nth the suggestion of System Shock 2, and second the suggestion of the mod that improves the character models.
I can’t believe no-one has mentioned Silent Hill! (The first one)
I’ll never forget the first time I played it alone in the dark with surround sound.
I refused out of principle to not reload when I was killed. This was before the update came out that allows you the option of turning the chambers off, so death can now just return you to the title screen.
Right now I’m playing through hard difficulty with the chambers off. The first Big Daddy fight was an interesting experience, but after playing through the whole game on normal difficulty a while back, I died only once in that fight this time around, as opposed to the six or seven times I died the first time around (on the normal difficulty).
I still managed to escape the Pavillion level with full bars of eve and health, and full reserve health/eve (i.e. 9 of each). One thing about hard is that the hacked bots and turrets are much more helpful than in normal mode, because everything has more hit points and does more damage (except you, your damage and hitpoints don’t change with difficulty). I would intentionally lead the splicers into my hacked cameras and/or turrets to save on ammo. Unlike Normal where a head shot can take down even the leadheads in the beginning, only the normal thugs are taken town by a single headshot in Hard. And the leadheads hardly ever miss on Hard, unlike their normal counterparts.
Although I realize that the OP was looking mostly for action games, there are very scary Adventure Games:
Phantasmagoria 1 and 2. Particularly 2.
Gabriel Knight 1, 2 and 3.
My little pony: Pinki pie’s party (Warning, graphic content)
But, for my money, I would vote for scariest adventure game the John DeFoe quadralogy. With the added incentive that they are completely freeware and ready to download: 5 days a stranger, 7 days a skeptic, Trilby’s notes and 6 days a sacrifice.