After reading on Yahoo News that Silent Hill 4 will be out soon. I Was just wondering what games have you fellow dopers played that scared the bejesus out of you.
All the **Silent Hill ** games have given me the heebie jeebies.
Well…?
Tomb Raider games have done that for me. I sit there jumping out of my skin and getting laughed at by the wife. I also try to peer around corners in the game so things don’t jump out at me, and have to stop playing after a while cos I am all freaked out. I am such a wuss.
The Resident Evil remake for the Gamecube. Scary as fuck if you play it in the right atmosphere, at night with the lights off and the volume all the way up. RE0 is scary to but has yet to make me jump like RE1 has.*
*[sub]Just bought RE0 three weeks ago and still playing for the first time.[/sub]
Shadow Man.
I think most people hated this game but it was so damn creepy and wrong. It had such a dreadful and expansive location. Deadside (the afterlife) felt so huge and deep, and you keep opening up more tunnels downard to more horrors. And the Asylum (bad guy’s “castle”) was huge – there were entrances everywhere and it really seemed that it was a gargantuan fortress made from evil. Not to mention the creepy psycho killer/demented baby theme inside.
And then there’s the chasing serial killers through the London sewers and a condemned NYC building.
The first Silent Hill on the Playstation was extremely creepy and freaked me out. I was also creeped out by Resident Evil, but when I first got my Playstation, I bought three games for it: Wipeout, Warhawk and Alien Trilogy. Alien Trilogy was pretty creepy because I would play it with all the lights out and the little beeping radar screen was a lot like from the Aliens.
Oh man, System Shock 2 from beginning to end. Scared the hell out of me countless times.
Also, the They Hunger mod for Half Life.
Clive Barker’s Undying scared the bejezsus out of me. Not only was it scary, like stuff popping out at you scary, but it was very creepy, like when you turned on some kinda alternate view mode and the walls would be covered with blood and the pictures were changed to people being killed.
Resident Evil 2 for Playstation. Lights off, sound via living room reciever at very high level.
Nothing before or since has been so damn scary.
For creepy – that dude with the traffic cone head in Silent Hill 2, who appears to be, ahem…“taking” that zombie thing from behind when you first walk in.
Good combo of WTF and 
Oddly enough, Dark Forces for the PC/Mac was pretty scary, because the Dark Trooper(s) would jump out at you from nowhere and kill you all the time. My roommate would play it in the dark and I’d peek into the room and say “Dark Trooper!” and he’d jump a foot.
For me, the scariest is in any first person shooters where you get a little too involved with the storyline and then hear the scary, hard-to-kill monster’s signature noise (the howling of the hunter robots in Marathon, the “OMNAMAH!” of the Mancubus or the low “rrrrr” of the Arch-Vile in DOOM, the “haaaaah” of the floating, venom spitting monsters or the “ROOOOAR” of the Shambler in Quake, etc.
It’s amazing how much a little noise and a couple dozen pixels would freak me out, given a dark room and too much time on my hands.
If the game lives up to the promise suggested by the website Forbidden Siren should be the uncontested champion.
Been over a week since I looked at it, and I still occasionally flash on it and get chills.
Well the usual suspects.
Resident Evil, Undying, System Shock 2.
Plus I’d like to say Sanitarium was very creepy with no jump out at you shocks (it’s an adventure game) Just to give you an idea you have to play hide and seek with mutated childern to solve one puzzle…the last child is dead and you have to dig up his grave. After that another child carries the corpse around on a little wagon. And who’s not afraid of creepy clowns?
Not so much a horror game, but Opposing Force for Half-Life can be pretty darn scary at times.
I’m thinking of the part where you’re in a truck loading station or something. You crawl down a ladder and an explosion causes the hole to be blocked. You find yourself in some dead white light. At the edge of the light there’s a skeleton, and around the corner darkness. You have to run through the darkness, using your night-vision and killing these giant crab-like aliens, dodging their electric bolts. Of course you start to run out of ammo and your night-vision battery runs low.
Great heart-pounding terror if you play it alone at night.
Old, old game, but Marathon for the Mac…
Crapload of freaky moments in that game–the first time I saw a Hulk bear down on me and realized that the thing just… wouldn’t… die…
Grenade after grenade went right into his face and had no effect. Then he swung his fist and put me right into a wall.
Some of the terminal story text really scared the crap out of me, especially when Durandal was going rampant, Leela was dying, and crewmen were getting turned into simulacrums (or smeared against pillars by those damned Hulks).
Or walking into a room unsuspectingly, motion sensor showing no reading and seeing rows of Hunters… So you unload an entire assault rifle clip, and then realize they’re all deactivated.
But the worst moment of all for sure was boarding the alien ship and seeing the dissected crewman for the first time. Ugh.
Not that anyone else ever played the damn game except me, but there you go.
Just a little taste of a classic, epic, and often freaky storyline…
I see Dark Forces has already been mentioned, so I’ll second it. There’s this one level where you’re making your way through a sewer system and you’re hip-deep in sludge. Gradually you become aware that there are these… things in there with you. Soon those things are popping up in your face and scaring the hell out of you.
Also, the original Doom. Played in the dark.
Those pink things… I just couldn’t handle them.
I’m on the System Shock 2 bandwagon. Maybe scary isn’t quite the right word, though. Startling? Made me jump a few times, on the first play through, anyway.
(I should mention that it was the very first game I played after purchasing and hooking up my subwoofer. And cranking it.)
The original Aliens vs Predator. I got the game, installed it, and sat down in a dark room, and played my very first mission as a marine. First alien I encountered made that… noise, somewhere ahead of me, just on the other side of a cloud of steam jetting from a broken pipe of some kind. Then it came flying through the fog, and I unloaded a full clip at it with the trusty ol’ pulse rifle.
I might have hit it four times, total. Then I had to start over.
And the first Thief game was good for making you jump out of your seat. Screen so dark you had to play it at night. And you skulk through the mines below the prison where you’re trying to break out your buddy, the fence.
And you stumble across this body on the floor of the tunnel, not knowing there were any zombies in this game, to this point. And it jumps up and goes, “…rrrrrRRRRAAAAAGGGHH!!!”
I knocked my friggin’ chair over backwards trying to get away from the monitor.
Good times. 
Lessee… the Silent Hill series entire, for starters. They all had the radio, but SH1 made you use it the most. Even worse, there were little transparent black ghosts (I call them “squeakers”) that are completely harmless, but still cause static on your radio. I’d try to smack them anyway just out of spite. And those roaches. Damn roaches. I will not hesitate to waste a shotgun shell on one of those little bastards.
Silent Hill 2. Pyramid Head. Maria. Eddie. Too creepy for words.
Silent Hill 3. Have yet to play through all the way, but I will ask this: Whose bright idea was it to give those zombie nurses guns? At least there were some decent melee weapons for a change.
Eternal Darkness was just disturbing on so many levels. The gamer wasn’t born that isn’t scared if the game tries to erase all your saves. Even if it is just kidding.
Okay, enough of those mainstream games. Any of you guys remember Phantasmagoria? Made by Sierra, almost entirely FMV, came on an obscene number of CDs (IIRC, over 6). At the tender age at which I was exposed to it, the gore really disturbed me. I don’t even want to try to play it now.
Capcom released a game called Sweet Home back in 1988 in Japan. This game was only fan-translated a few years ago, and I am ever so grateful for that. You see, I was six years old, and have always been a lover of video games. Sweet Home was the great-granddaddy of the survival horror genre, and I’m convinced is as scary as an eight-bit system will allow. The game features among its enemies: worms (covering the entire floor), legless zombies, mutated maniacs covered in boils and wielding massive swords, and an enemy simply called Man. He looks like a normal guy standing away from you, but hit him once and he turns around to reveal that his face is half rotted off. This is also the first game I’m aware of where a character can just die permanently, and in fact when one does die, it shows a short clip of the death.
Now, E.T. for the Atari 2600 scared the crap out of me when I was about that age. If Sweet Home had been released in the US about '88 or '89, I would have either played it myself or watched someone else play it. Frankly, I think it would have turned me off to video games in general.
[nitpick]Assuming you mean the PC version, that was actually the second Aliens v. Predator game. There was another one on The Jaguar system.[/nitpick]
You’re not alone. I loved that game. And it is mention earlier in this thread by El Escorpio.
Well, if we can reach back into the mists of time (and it appears that we are)…I have to go back to yet another game based on the aliens of Alien fame. The game was called Alien, creatively enough, and the platform was the Commodore 64.
Now, obviously, the visuals were limited. Pretty much what you got were maps of the Nostromo, extremely low-res pictures of each crew member’s face, occasionally the cat running by, and the alien itself. But what really made the game was the sound.
The object of the game, of course, was to survive. To that end, you controlled the members of the crew and executed whatever plans you could to survive. Blow the alien out the airlock, draw it into the shuttle, kill it with weapons, whatever. While playing, you heard primarily two sounds: the heartbeats of your crew members, and the sound of the alien sliding from room to room. Occasionally, you hear the alien removing the grate from an air vent. And that leads us to the real fun part of the game: panic.
As bad stuff happens, your crew will get more and more nervous. When they find open air vents, when they are left without weapons, when they are left alone, or when they confront the alien and live, they slowly get more and more agitated, and the sounds of their heartbeats speed up. This makes you get agitated right along with them, until finally your entire crew is wiped out. And it doesn’t help that a loud siren goes off when the alien attacks your crew, or that one random crew member (you never know which) is an android who will attack a lone human if given the opportunity, so you have to move the crew around in threes…
I never got more than a 20% success rate on this game. That’s what you get for saving three crew members and the Narcissus shuttle, while killing the alien by self-destructing the Nostromo. If the alien makes it to Earth, you get 0%.