News The Scariest Games

Amnesia scared the **** out of me. I literally can't bring myself to play it.

 

The problem with Doom and such is that they are scary because soething jumps out of the dark behind you. But the game isn´t tense.

If you think that is scary, try playing the water level of Amnesia. The one with the invisible monster that walks arround in the water. THAT is scary!

In order of scariness I would name:
Amnesia
Condemned
CoC Dark corners of earth

Runner ups, 1st FEAR, Stalker, Elvira (MSX)

No doubt Amnesia is the scariest...

BUT i prefer to play Condemned from all of these because is a good game too. That "apple seed orchad" level in the abandoned house gives me chill just for remembering it. You can hear undistinctive voices all over and people running arround in other floors. There nothing jumping at you from behind. VERY tense!

CoC was pretty scary too. The visuals and the atmosfere is really tense too. The game has no HUD display! Unless in the status screen. And that thing that you start to become crazy as you look into certain things.. And the ending... The end in that game is one of the best all time! I can´t say much but it makes you really depressed.
That level when you go to sleep in your first night in the town, that you have to bar the door, and the villagers start to pound in it trying to break through.... Geez... creepy!

Too bad Condemned: blood Shot never made into PC. I would love to play that...

 

as was i, i was around 13 at the time. I put off playing that for 4 years until i plucked up the courage to finally finish it xD.

Penumbra, i found that quite scary too haha

 

Scaredy cats

 

Oh yeah took me a while to do Ravenholm... I'm a certifiable coward!

 

Definitely Fatal Frame - that game was absolutely terrifying

 

So I may be ancient but I still remember Clive Barker's game "Undying" - scary enough for me to not want to go into dark and badly lit rooms even though I knew I had to.

 

I'd say Dead Space 1, so many good scares, the first encounter with the Hunter is like wtf. The voice acting is excellent, the build up to it with Dr. Challus Mercer telling you(Isaac) to just surrender to it and of course the growling sound of the Hunter itself, make that first match up fairly intense.

Amnesia's first encounters are terrifying too - quite a shock having to run, dodge or best of all hide somewhere dark preferably crouching, as (key point) they can run too! Although, being a small independent you're left wondering what Frictional could have done with something like Frostbite 2 and major backing . The add on "Justine" has its moments too, the bit near the end where you're wading through water with the turn wheel operated doors trying to save the guy in the cell then escaping through the other door yourself, pretty tense stuff.

 

If I may chip in

Amnesia is hands down the scariest game ever. Even watching my brother play it was too much for me, let alone actually sitting down and doing it myself.

Dead Space 1 is probably the scariest game I've managed to complete. The first 4-ish chapters are terrifying and instilled a real feeling of 'I don't want to go on but I must'. However, the game changes in style later as you upgrade your weapons and armour and become a death dealing machine (well, killing the dead again at any rate), which I welcomed as it was a relief! Dead Space 2 was excellent but didn't have the same gravitas - I must say, I found the

Spoiler

exploding babies

so ridiculously harsh in concept that I chuckled.

Doom 3 - jumpy rather than scary and the ability to save whenever nullified any sense of danger - this is a chief argument for a checkpoint based system in games. Still, brilliant game - I've played through it with the Sikkmod and the engine still has a lot of life left in it.

FEAR; hmm. Had its moments but the slow time ability killed any tension for me. I've yet to play FEAR 3 though.

Half Life is a good shout simply for the headcrabs. Heading through an air vent then suddenly a shriek, a loss of some life and armour and a sudden surge in adrenaline!

Finally, the classic, AvP. I bought this when I was about fifteen and found it reasonably scary: I now can't play it as I seem to have turned into a big scaredy cat in my old age! Personally, I see it as proof that as you get older, your perception sharpens.

 

FEAR is one of the most effective horror games I've played. It's very smart about catching you off guard and mind****ing you with strange shadows, movement, sights and sounds out of the corners of your ears and eyes, with escalation in both the scale and intensity of the scares throughout the game. It's even got a strange mix of David Lynch and comedy in there with the fat systems admin guy (Norton or something?), who I honestly was never sure was supposed to be creepy, funny, or just strange. By the time most of the plot details have been revealed (they hold off on getting into details even so), it goes into full-on crazy mode in one of the more memorable endgame climaxes I've played in years. In the end, you get a game that's atmospheric, scary, and action-packed in equal doses, and most importantly, ends up being satisfying in the end. Not the most terrifying game ever, no way, but at least it was consistent within itself and achieved what it set out to do - provide some great FPS gameplay, a good horror storyline, and excellent atmosphere. It's rare for horror games to actually maintain the act for their entire running time, and FEAR managed it for me.

FEAR 2, meanwhile, completely ruined things by explaining far too much of the plot, having too many chatty characters ruining the mood with their constant wisecracks, and focusing much more on jump scares than ambiance. The only place that really felt particularly scary to me was the ruined school you visit, but other than that there's too many ghosts, monsters, and mutants flying around, not to mention Alma screaming at you every 10 minutes. There's no subtlety with it at all, as in the first game - like sex without foreplay. I'm not sure what happened in between the games, but it's like Monolith just suddenly forgot how to be scary and decided they'd simply copy every modern horror film cliche instead.

I was way too distracted by all the plot holes, stock characters and other issues in Dead Space to be scared by it. Whether that's the "monsters are attacking us all, we'd better split up!" to "hey, the entire station is completely ruined and infested with mutants, let's stick around!", there were just too many situations where I found myself questioning the sanity of my "friends." I know that it's a horror game and people are allowed to be a little bit stupid, but after a while it just wrecked what would otherwise have been a pretty scary game. I feel almost like Isaac was specifically made a silent protagonist solely so that he couldn't point out how ****ing idiotic everyone else was being - it was like playing a parody of horror movie cliches. The sequel is generally even worse - someone needs to send them a memo that says "disgusting monsters and gore are not horror", because I think they missed it the first time.

Also, anyone who says that something isn't scary because it can't actually hurt you - death isn't scary, especially not in a videogame. I don't need to see a game over screen to be terrified by something.

 

You'll find, as with anything else, familiarity really does breed contempt. This is my one gripe with every one of these games, there simply isn't enough variation in the bad guy cast list to hold the scares throughout the entire game. What was scary becomes, " Oh you again, hi " by the end. Developers really need to work on the repetition issue imho, though I understand the asset limitations.

 

Original Alien v Predator. Play as a marine with shitty life expectancy and your frickin bleeper going off at every thing. And pitch blackness, flares or night vision that kills your radar. With headphones and full volume. That's scary.

 

And yeah, Dead Space is truly the most atmospheric game I've played. Again, headphones, no lights on.

 

Maybe he meant 'physiological' and not psychological, maybe he 'doo-doo' in his underwear?

 

() I'm not the only person who didn't find Amnesia very scary, am I?
I ended up playing it on a friend's computer after hearing him and everyone else rant about how scary it is, but I literally fell asleep after a couple of hours on my first play through it!
The atmosphere was fairly good, though having played Penumbra a ton it had a lot of moments where I felt like I was having a bit of deja vu.

I have to agree with Blademrk that Eternal Darkness (Game Cube) was for me by far one of best horror game ever made, simply because it fully messed with your head rather than tried to scare you.

The game that gave me the biggest jump was probably Cryostasis, as I wasn't really paying much attention to what I was doing when the first major bad guy jumped out at me. After 2-3 encounters though is was very familiar so you could predict every moment. It was still enjoyable though.

Along with Eternal Darkness, Silent Hill 2 and ObsCure are two favourites of mine.
Penumbra and Fatal Frame are a joint 4th place. after those three.

 

Greetings!

There were also the terror sites from the old UFOs\XCOMs games.
Specially at the begining, when the weapons\gear was so weak.

 

System Shock 2 in bits.
Condemned in a couple of bits (not the sequel).
VtM Bloodlines in bits.

Not Eternal Darkness (I actually thought it was crap :/)
Not FEAR or the sequels (although I thought the first one was well done and did have some good bits. The sequels definitely not).
Not really Half Life 1/2 (although again very well done).
Not Dead Space (again, I actually think it's pretty crap).

Haven't played Amnesia yet. Been sititng in my list for ages.

Silent Hill games were too stupid to be scary. The worst of Japanese horror in my humble opinion.

 

hahaha, sorry i just don't find it that scary, and i played it when it first came out actually i'm replaying it at the moment.

The first resi evil had a good atmosphere.

 

I stopped playing F.E.A.R on something like the second level because it scared the crap out of me for exactly the same reasons - surround sound, late at night, etc. I haven't gone back to it.

 

FEAR's scariest parts are early on. Once you have a bit of an idea of what to expect you can at least prepare for what's to come and sort of get into the ebb and flow of things. I recommend going back to it, it's one of the few arcade shooters I've played in the last decade that really has great adaptive AI and actual tactics involved, rather than just "look down iron sights -> hit mouse button".