The old Infocom game The Lurking Horror scared the absolute shite out of me at the time, although I was about 6. And the original Doom had its moments too.
When I was playing Thief, I thought it was one of the creepiest games I’d ever seen.
Then I got System Shock 2, which made Thief look like a ride on a merry-go-round.
SS2 was of course based on some of the same code, from the same publisher, and traces its heritage back to the same game designer (Warren Spector) as Thief.
So it wasn’t that surprising, I suppose, when I realized that the searching zombies of SS2 held one hand aloft in exactly the same way an alerted guard held his sword high in Thief. That particular bit of animation got recycled, somehow. Strange, but that ruined SS2 for me - once I realized that, it just wasn’t as scary and immersive any more. I never finished it.
Just to nitpick, but Atari didn’t hit its death throes until about eight years later. Fractalas was actually produced during Atari’s apex – it was part of a collaboration with Lucas-freakin’-arts, after all – and nobody at the time thought the company would sink as low as it’d eventually get.
But yeah, the first time that alien popped up on your screen was a pants-soiling experience…
All this and nobody’s mentioned “The 7th Guest?” I remember playing that game in the basement with the lights off so I could see the screen, dreading what would happen when I clicked on different objects… That game scared the zits offf my little 14 year old self. Of course, sitting in that basement with the lights off, even Myst creeped me out.
Hmm… in retrospect, I don’t really remember much at all about that game. After reading some reviews, it doesn’t seem all that impressive anymore. Eh, at the time, it sure got me running up the stairs to the first floor.
Thirded! The level that I remember freaking terrifying me was the Dark Trooper “factory”, when the lights suddenly go out and you find yourself in total blackness, in a claustrophobic space, with the first of the knife-armed “phase one” Trooper Droids sounding like a steam locomotive bearing down on you. Clang! Pssht! Clang! Pssht! Clang! Pssht! Clang! Pssht!
Nightmarish and disorienting.
I’d have to say Silent Hill 1 and 3 are the scariest games I’ve played, though the Fatal Frame series comes in a very, very close second. My only beef with FF is that you have a reasonable expectation of what is going to happen: your light triggers, you see a ghost, and you take its picture. Admittedly, they’ve done a great job with it, and I think it outshines everything but the SH series, but that one little thing can make a difference.
I didn’t find Silent Hill 2 that scary, except for the prison, which freaked me the fuck out. SH2 had a much more coherent, if still veiled, storyline. It’s nice to try and figure out what the characters are all about, and it game me a much better feel for the town itself, rather than the 1/3 storyline which mostly focuses on the cult itself.
Tentacle Monster, on the harder difficulty levels of Silent Hill, the shadow monsters would actually do damage and come in pretty large flocks. Well, in Nowhere, anyway, not in the school. Christ, that school will remain the be-all-end-all creep for me. I cannot play Silent Hill 1 in one sitting alone in the dark, I have to take a break after the school and after the hospitol. Sheesh.
All the stuff I’ve read indicate that it is simply “one of those things” meant to scare you without any real indication of meaning anything, like the sound of glass shattering in 1 or other noise effects. Didn’t know about this stall surprise, I always shoot the thing. What do you get?
Here’s my take:[spoiler]First, Mary didn’t die three years ago, it was just a week or so ago in real time. James is severely repressing the events and Silent Hill is feeding him his own fears on the matter which is weighing so heavily in his mind. You have the insane creatures in straitjackets, a reference to his own insanity, the nurses as a reference to the hospitol the love of his life spent so much time in, and the mannequin monsters who only have a lower torso, a pretty blatent sexual reference that Pyramid Head emphasizes when you first encounter him in a cutscene.
But I don’t think Laura is conjured at all, I think she’s real, though I don’t know what she was doing in the hospitol with Mary, or how she ended up in Silent Hill, unless she’s a ghost. But I don’t know about that. She interacts with Eddie, who is real like James is real, and the “Born from a Wish” scenario with Maria shows us how ghosts in Silent Hill are manifested, so I think it is somewhat safe to say she’s a real person.
The theme of 2 seems to be that people coming to Silent Hill face themselves. Eddie doesn’t see monsters everywhere, he sees people that have taunted him or are taunting him, and Silent Hill beckons him over to evil by giving him the freedom to treat them like he treated the dog. James is fighting against everything he incorrectly holds responsible for Mary’s death, including (in a sense) himself (symbolically in Pyramid Head) and Mary. Angela, of course, is there to find her family, and she finds her father again. She’s unable to deal with the rape in her past, her family’s essential betrayal through inaction, and her subsequent murder of them all by killing her father (we find news clippings) and burning down her own house (the fire scene in the end, where she indicates she sees this all the time–not the monsters James sees). Laura, however, is essentially mystified by James thinking the town is dangerous. Perhaps as an innocent child, Silent Hill has nothing to take from her. She’s done no deed for which the town can manifest her guilt.[/spoiler]
Just wanted to second TentacleMonster’s mention of Eternal Darkness. This game had, in addition to health and magic meters, a sanity meter. The more you were exposed to the various monsters and creatures lurking around, the more sanity you lost. And when your sanity was low, creepy things would start to happen. The less-creepy things involved bleeding walls, whispers, footsteps, etc. As you got worse, you’d start with some serious hallucinations. Parts of your body would fall off, your head would explode, you’d turn into a zombie… And then sometimes it would do things like “mute” your tv, or go all black as if the game reset itself, that kind of thing. A great game for playing in the dark, by yourself.
I was just thinking about this one too… I didn’t find it too scary overall, but the “insanity” effects were pretty damn creepy. Like when the character goes into a room and something is just wrong, or a spell is cast but backfires, then you go back a few moments and realize that what you just saw didn’t really happen… excellent immersive idea for that game, and it really worked.
I’m finding myself more and more disappointed that the Silent Hill series is only for Playstation. Those games sound right up my alley.
Most FPS’s can be scary when an enemy suddenly jumps out at you and starts firing. I’ve been startled (and usually severely injured/killed) like this playing Halo, GoldenEye, Serious Sam, and other FPS games.
But the all-time scariest game has to be Super Mario Bros. 3.
Especially World 2. You’re minding your own business, when suddenly the god*** sun comes out of the sky and starts trying to kill you. I tell you, I almost left a big brown stain in my underwear when I first saw that!
Another Eternal Darkness vote here…gah, that game is awesome, but disturbing. One cannot forget the stupid bathtub, which was the only thing to make me jump, nor the descriptions you get from Maximillon’s autopsies…
Not quite. Those shadow monsters in Nowhere are shadow versions of the mutant kids in the school. Squeakers are quite a different animal, and are shaped differently.
Ooooo, I remember playing that back in the old days. That creepy pulsing cloud over the baby’s crib freaked me out.
What about Ripper? Same kind of genre, FMV, starring Christopher Walken, and a ton of other people, including Jimmy Walker! Not a great game, but there were a couple of scares.
1984 was the end of Atari Inc. Atari Corporation was a different animal in my mind, which “died” in 1996.
erislover, I mentioned to Dunderdude2 what happens in the restroom, so I’ll just quote it here.
Your theory on James’ sense of time seems plausible, my only problem with it is when he’s in the hallway leading to the main room in Heaven’s Night, he can (if you push the “examine” button) notice a stack of liquor bottles, and he goes on to think about the drinking problem he’s developed since Mary died. I don’t think that would be possible if his wife’s been dead only a week. However, Laura said that Mary died “last year,” so that would give James enough time to become an alcoholic (however long that takes) and let enough time pass so that a letter sent from his dead wife would be unexpected and creepy.
I also agree with your comment about the character’s fears manifesting themselves into whatever their psyches create, such as with the “door monster” that James sees which manifests itself in Angela’s eyes as her rapist father. However, I always thought that Pyramid Head was a manifestation independent of anyone, taking the form of the ritual executioners at Toluca Prison, which was run by the members of the cult in Silent Hill. It seemed that every prisoner there was executed according to the rituals of that cult, i.e. strangling or skewering. (remember the skewers the Pyramid Heads carried after James took the Great Knife?)
As for Laura, I accept that she’s normal little girl, but where the heck are her parents? Is she an orphan, staying at a Catholic orhpanage? (the “sisters” mary mentioned in her letter?)
Finally, a word about SH1. For me, the creepiest part was the sewers. Harry’s radio didn’t work, it was dark, the music was extra creepy, and there were evil sewer turles (not the ninja variety) hanging from the ceiling!
Not exactly the scariest game in the world, but since most of the big ones have been mentioned, I’ll mention the sewers level in Shadows of the Empire. It was pretty creepy walking around in the sewers while every so often hearing the far-off cry of the giant diagna.
Another scary surprise in an otherwise non-scary game would be the Thanatos boss in Secret of Mana. I was only 8 or 9 when I first played that, and a giant skeleton sorcerer combined with really dark, fanatical music is a recipe for creepiness.
On another note, I always found it amusing that my little brother was scared of the beginning part in Mario 64 when Bowser greeted you upon entering the castle. He was only 4 at the time, but still.
Ah. yes, the sewers. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could actually see those bastards hanging from the ceiling. The best you can do is walk around with the shotgun or rifle, and stop and aim often.
My favorite thing about Silent Hill, other than the psychological aspect, is the humor that the makers somehow manage to shoehorn in. The UFO endings in 1 and 3, the Dog ending in 2, the key in the jellybeans and the can full o’ lightbulbs. 3 especially was full of humorous bits. I damn near asphyxiated the first time I saw the Transform costume.
Tentacle Monster, there’s a way you can get around not being able to see the sewer turtles. While you’re walking, keep pressing down R2 (I think that’s the button) to have a view ahead. You should be able to see the turtles hanging from the ceiling a good distance away. If you fire your shotgun at them from that distance, you can hit and kill them before you walk under them.
As for the UFO endings, I just knew that the SH2 UFO ending would include Harry helping the aliens. I enjoyed the end credits of the Dog Ending best of all, though. It was reminiscent of the “outtakes” at the end of SH1, I think.
There are trailers for Silent Hill 4 at http://www.sh2004.com/
Ah, then my memory of the events is simply a little shakey. If this is what Laura said, I’d believe her, not James.
They call this a door monster, but I’ve always considered it a bed monster. If you can find some good screenshots of this thing, there’s a sexual assault being played out on its back.
Not that we could ever have a definitive take (SH’s beauty is in its interpretive qualities), but SH2 seemed so character driven rather than context driven that I feel compelled to analyze all the creatures in terms of the characters, rather than the town. James executed his wife, and Pyramid Head(s) repeated killing of Maria is the town trying to tell James over and over that she didn’t die, she was killed. The Toluca Prison Executioner provides a reference point for James’s psyche.
I wonder this, too. One of the things that I’ve not quite felt like I have an answer about is whether there is a real Silent Hill town with normal people there the whole time these events take place. One of the horrifying things about 1 was that, for me, I was never quite sure whether Harry was in a school killing normal children (killing real nurses, etc), or whether the characters we see in the games “cross over” to a different, but spatially identical, town. After playing through 3 I’m inclined to believe the latter.
Yeah, the sewers did suck. I especially hate the part when you find the key in the water. Man that game can just inspire total panic in me!
Another huzzah for Eternal Darkness. The story itself wasn’t scary but when you’re insane and you hear a woman and baby crying in the distance…shudder.
And when you get close to a door and suddenly you hear someone banging on the other side of it, I dare you not to look at your own door to see who’s trying to get in.