Resident Evil has it moments, but IMHO isn’t the scariest. I own RE, RE2, and RE Nememsis for Sony Playstation.
However, I would have to say that in overall creepiness, Silent Hill scared the shit out of me the first time I played it through. This game made my hair stand on end more than once. It gave me the MAJOR creeps one night, when almost everything outdoors in my neighborhood was near identical to the game… the quiet, the fog, the dog faintly barking in the distance, the absence of any other people in sight or sound, etc. :::shudder:::
Excuse me now, while I go find my old childhood teddy bear, my crucifix necklace, a baseball bat and my bible. Ô¿Ô?
The part where you’re crawling through the ventalator duct, and a face hugger(Not what it’s really called, but it might as well be) leaps out of the darkness with a hair-raising screach.
Well, I don’t know if it can be typified as being a horror video game, but I’m about to finish System Shock 2 at the moment, and it freaks me out big time. Especially the midwives that in their eerie voices moan about the safety of their babies give me the willies.
I actually had to stop playing for a couple of weeks because it gave me nightmares. This is a very well done game.
For those of you who don’t know the game, it is about a spaceship that is taken over by an alien infestation. Only you and an artificial intelligence have survived and the AI is guiding you through the different decks of the ship. Only, the AI does not have very humane plans with you either.
I know the above discription sounds rather corny, but the game has great atmosphere and I recommend everyone with steel nerves (which seem to be a requirement if you want to play this game) to buy it.
I don’t really typically play ‘Horror’ preferring SF and Fantasy. But Parasite Eve (which certainly feels ‘Horror’ to me) is a DAMN creepy game at points. The Demon Rat transformation…::Shudder::
My favorite is a first person shooter called ‘Medal of Honor’. It’s an American commando behind enemy lines, sometimes posing as a Nazi, sometimes being chased through tunnels by search parties with attack dogs…
The first Resident Evil didn’t scare me that much but #2 (especially the part where you run by the windows) and Code Veronica (where the metal grates on the basement windows start rattling…brrrrrr…) were pretty scary.
An old 3DO game called “Space Hulk” was really scary- you led a team of armored “Space Marines” through various spaceships infested with super-scary looking aliens. You were in constant radio contact with the other members of your party so you could hear their screams as they got taken down, one by one, by the aliens. Playing in the dark always raised my heart rate.
System Shock 2. Lots of crawling around in dark areas and some very well timed fake scares, (panels exploding, things falling off tables) of using the amazingly well done incedental sounds. Things could have been truly horrifing if the voice acting wasn’t so poor.
The bad guys looked really goofy, but that’s forgivable, I guess.
Not “scary” as such, but generally games only scare me when they do something I was utterly not expecting. When Geese Howard grabbed me out of the air in the first Fatal Fury, I almost had a heart attack. Or the first time an unseen bad guy shot out a window that I was standing in front of scared the crap out of me, because I wasn’t used to that level of realism.
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“There seems to be a little hold up on the horror, I’ll check backstage and see what the problem is.”
I was going to mention Half-Life, but Sealemon88 beat me to it. That was the first game I ever played that made me jump out of my seat a little. That exact scene too. Nothing like hosing down an area with bullets out of fear, to kill a crab.
I think the creepiest game I ever played was the first Alone in the Dark game. Sure the graphics were kinda cruddy by today’s standards, but the first time I saw a zombie crawling in through a window gave me the willies.
I thought Silent Hill was creepy, but it wasn’t necesarily ‘frightening’. I’ve gotta go with the original Resident Evil. When the dogs jump through the windows at the very beginning…oh MAN… Also, the music played a big part in it as well. If it weren’t for the music, RE wouldn’t have been very scary at all. RE:CV came in a close second. I dont actually own the game, but I watched a friend pretty much play through and beat it. Some parts were ultra-freaky, but it didnt match the sheer ‘nervousness’ that the original RE inspired.
Unreal had some really good setups and scripted sequences that were scary.
Half Life had lots of scary moments, and the Zombie mod for it called “They Live” made by Neil Manke made it even scarier (you can download this for free from PlanetHalfLife).
Phantasmagoria, a couple years ago. I had a couple bad nights lying awake trying not to think about the creepy death scenes in the mirrors. I never did play it all the way through.
Silent Hill was very psychological scary indeed… Oh wait, except for that one part in the school where that body falls out of the locker. That was ridiculously scary. Too bad the ending of this game was so strange. Any of em actually, they didn’t seem to make much sense.
