Scariest Moment In A Game

[PurpleRain]

I just recently bought Condenmed: Criminal Origins and began strolling through it with some easy and bordom. Towards some of the middle and later levels the horror and fun had bosted tenfold! Killing nasties with random objects, snaping necks and carving your way to the well scripted storyline. While at the start this seemed a bit of a job but now it was just getting fun. The game itself has made a great little game engine for the AI where they hid and stalk you providing some big shocks for when out of nowhere someone beats you over the back of the skull with an iron pipe.

Anyways... more to the point, what are some of your defining moments in gaming history when you wished you were wearing nappies instead.

-Condemned: Walking up to a maniquine in the toy story to find out it wasn't actually one and leap out at me and attack me with a frikken club! Also, the same level where a group of maniquines surround you and follow you.

-FEAR: Any scene with that little girl. Also the part where you're walking throught the corridor when it fills with blood. Sloshing your way through to the door which the screams are comming from.

-Half Life 1: Seeing the giant tenticle thing for the first time.

-Half Life 2: The zombie level in the dead town.

-Dead Rising: Crashing your car in the carpark for the first time. Dark and surrounded by at leats 25,000 zombies!

-CoD4: Being exicuted. One of the most frilling and frightful scenes in gaming history.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Pretty much all of Project Zero. I know people who have been unable to play that game because it's too damn terrifying. (Story's creepy too)

 

[JimboG]

I've never really been scared by a game, but my friend was SCREAMING the whole way through watching someone play Doom3 on a laptop.

Mind you, this was at 5am, and we had eaten a mixture of coffee and beef paste* to the extent at which we could barely string thoughts together.

*It was disgusting, don't ask.

 

[Heatseeker]

-CoD4: Being exicuted. One of the most frilling and frightful scenes in gaming history.

i loved that scene all the cutscenes for that game were brilliant, especially that one where you crawl out of the heli (i wont give any more away) it was awe inspiring. the multiplayer gives me dread causing moments as well, like when you hear the clink. clink, clink of a grenade near you, i cant think of a worse sound.

but i'd have to say some of the most terrifying (but in a good exciting way) moments for me would be from Twisted Metal: Black, the individual character endings where quite scary when i played it (i think you might still be able to watch them on youtube) the best one (only one i really remember) was the priest's, who throughout the whole game keeps telling you about this time when he tried to exorcise a devil out of a baby but the devil went in him and he killed them both, in the end he remembers what really happened, the baby had been brought in for a baptism and he had just gone nuts and killed it and the parents. it was gruesome, i was on the edge of my seat.

EDIT:

my friend was SCREAMING the whole way through watching someone play Doom3 on a laptop

i forgot about that, only played it for a little bit and it scared the hell out of me, there was this one but near the beginning where all the lights are off and you only have a torch and a pistol but u can only hold one at a time, i walked into something in the dark and freaked out spamming my pistol only to turn on the flash light to realise it was just a corpse hanging from the ceiling, one of the only times i've actually jumped in my seat.

 

[Frapple]

The part in Condemned where the mannequins come alive seriously screwed me up, it seemed really realistic and made me turn off the game till it was daytime and someone was home.

Haven't played a game since that scared me as much, most them just use the "oh no it's dark and things jump out" mechanic *coughbioshockcough*, yawn.

Ravenholme the 'zombie level' in Half Life 2 was nice and scary, the silhouettes and shadows made the atmosphere unbearable, you'd see a black head crab carrier on the 'horizon' and start preparing, just then the dreaded drain pipe climbing sound of fast zombies kicked in, good stuff. I again had to turn it off till someone else was around.

Only even played Resident Evil 4 for PC and Wii, both had awful control systems so were unistalled and sent back after an hour or so. The Japanese version of what they think the West (Also hate that term) is and their version of 'horror' is tiresome and unimaginative. Same with all the other survival horror games.

I think it's the addictive thrill that makes me love horror gaming, can't wait till the next big scare

 

[XPelargos]

You make me want to buy Condemned now.

Prince of Persia - I remember on my old mac in the early nineties, playing this game through. There were skeletons littered throughout the dungeons so I was completely terrified when one of them assembled itself before my eyes and began having a sword fight with me. (Keep in mind that I was 5 at the time)

The scariest moment in Video gaming for me, though has to be in Doom 3 when you are trapped in that tiny room and you first encounter that huge hell-hound. The room has a large window which lets you see the hound bashing again and again against the door. With each thud, the metal becomes more crumpled, and I backed myself into a corner, itchy finger holding my shotgun. Then, the lights went out and there was a pause. I was blown away when the hound jumped through the glass, catching me from the side and eating me. id did a wonderful job building suspense in that scene. Second-place would be when the guy is leading you through the bowels of the station with his lantern.

Most of my other scary gaming experiences have been simply creepy.

Max Payne 1 & 2 - The dream levels were downright creepy, especially when Max's baby screams.

Portal - When GlaDOS decides to put you in a furnace, calmly assuring you that the portal gun can withstand this sort of heat. While not heart-pumping scary, it was scary to hear such an innocent sing-song voice declare your death sentence.

Half-Life 2 Ep.1 - The second section, trying to get to the surface. The dark section with zombies had me jumping.

Sanitarium - creepy game, jumping back and forth from an asylum to disturbing locales.

Darkseed - When the doll turns into that grotesque . . . thing. The scariest adventure game I have played.

The Lurking Horror - Scariest Text adventure game, by far. When that janitor stared at me, I was more than a little scared. Then I turned my back and he killed me.

I completely agree with everything else you said as well. CoD4 had one of the best credit sequences of all time.

 

[Niccolo]

Haha, mine's kinda tame compared to that actually.

In the first level of Bioshock, when you enter this room that's been flooded, and all you can hear is some guy singing as he hacks away at something. You can see his shadow, then he just disappears...

About five seconds of carnage later, you realise the it's not water you're standing knee-deep in, it's blood.

 

[hobartuk]

fear, when you're walking through a corridor in the office level in interval 4

and two bodies fly through the windows randomly

made me scream!

 

[KurtNiisan]

I got a sharp fright in Bioshock, where you're going through the "Sander Cohen" story arc and there're those supposed-plaster statues but then they move and you realise that you've now got four Spider-Splicers on your tail. That whole story piece was just creepy, and bloody fantastic.

 

[KurtNiisan]

In the first level of Bioshock, when you enter this room that's been flooded, and all you can hear is some guy singing as he hacks away at something. You can see his shadow, then he just disappears...

- That was a female, my friend. It's the same female Spider-Splicer who attacks you when you're trying to get into the Fisheries. Damn crazy *****..

 

[sean7690]

i disagree about the survival horror comment. Although the most recent ones have been more action based than fear, Resident Evil 1 for gamecube was fecking scary in places. Playing at 3am, the first time a zombie broke down a door, scared the shit out of me and hitherto desecrated all the areas of the mansion that i had deemed safe.

Condemned is by far the scariest though, one bit in particular, when you're walking thought the clothes store, and the lights flick off, and theres the big circle of manequins standing around you. that actually made me go turn the lights on in the room.

Project Zero? is that the one where you have to take pictures of ghosts? if so, then thats pretty scary but the game concept and overall design is so terrible that its ruined.

 

[BonsaiK]

F.E.A.R. isn't scary at all, at least not for me. As soon as you realise the little girl isn't a genuine threat to your character's survivability but just a graphical effect (and it takes about ten minutes into the game to realise this) all the scariness flies out the window faster than you can say "second-rate japanese horror film ripoff".

Scariest game I've ever played is Forbidden Forest on the Commodore 64, especially the last level. No game before or since has matched it for atmosphere.

 

[intplee]

I choose Silent Hill 2. There were a few scenes, particularly those involving the enemy with the triangular headpiece. He seemed to come out of nowhere, dragging and scraping a monsterous sword, limping from the shadows with his disconcerting gait, skin flickering as the torchlight scattered off his slimy exterior. In almost complete darkness, in unfamiliar terrain and after about two hours of solid play, I was both gripped and terrified. Also worth mention is the incredibly creepy prison section, which for me was the point where the Silent Hill 2 really began torturously playing with my mind.

Talking of creepy prisons, I think special mention should go to Thief: Deadly Shadows. It is not, strictly speaking, a horror, but the section in the abandoned mental asylum/orphanage, stands out as one of my scariest experiences from any interactive entertainment. With its strange zombie-like inhabitants, flickering and fading lights as danger approaches, and the bizarre ghost sequences which inform Garret about the history of the orphanage. I was simultaneously on edge and creeped out the whole time. Moreover, the way in which a whole mythos about the place had been built up throughout the game, really added to the sense of anticipation.

I would perhaps mention the Half-Life series, but they deliver a different kind of fright. In Half-Life, it is all about the adrenaline rush and fantastically executed "you have got to be kidding" moments. However, Half-Life doesn't get under my skin in the way which the two aforementioned titles did; sure I was scared, but not creeped out.

 

[Garfunkle]

Three games really jump out at me for this topic:

In Doom 3 when you just got the shotgun and you feel invincible, you exit the area and come upon a large set of stairs. Halfway up, a demon bursts from underneth and you procede to crap yourself.
Near the beginning of the game in Bioshock, where you go to investigate a table in a corner of a room. Picking up some supplies you turn around and theres a Splicer standing right in front of your face. Safe to say he got blown away with my shotgun, but still...
And in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, where the main character Alex enters a bathroom and the camera flashs, tilts slightly and shows Alex dead in the bathtub drowned in her own blood. The music in that games creepy too...

 

[IronRanger]

Call of Duty 4, when your life, as Sergeant Paul Jackson, comes to an abrupt halt at the wrath of direct exposure to a nuclear explosion. It's particularly eerie when as you're staggering husk of a body falls from the back of the Chinook helicopter the last thing you see before your heart stops beating is a children's playground and a building being vaporised in the background. It's also curious to note the amount of pain such an individual would feel before dying which also adds to the shear horror of the sequence. It could probably be summed as the same feeling one would acquire from being put in a microwave and forgotten...

 

[devilondemand]

Alien vs Predator scared the crap out of me. The first time zombie arms grabbed you through a window in Resident Evil 2 will forever be in my memory. Silent Hill scared me too a couple of times as well. And someone said Doom 3 earlier, that was terrifying!!

 

[Stargoat]

my memories of the most scary bits in games were
shadow man: the playroom.
theif, deadly shadows: the asylum/orfanage.
eternal darkness: anytime when your sanity is low (a favorite of mine was when there was room full of zombies and it tells you that the controler is unpluged and you freak out for a couple of seconds before realising that the gamecube dosent do that, then you wake up in the past room.)
the guys with the parasites in rez 4 were pretty bad untill you got the scope.

 

[runtheplacered]

@ IronRanger,

Somebody already mentioned that scene, only they stopped way ahead of time so they wouldn't spoil things for people. Then you go and describe the entire scene in detail.

 

[LordOmnit]

I just (finally, finally, finally) got Half-Life 2 and just got out of Ravenholm and that area was freaking crazy. Especially when I found out that I wasted about thirty minutes on the wrong side of town, wasting ammo on infinitly respawning zombies with no reward at all except for the crazy pastor(?) saying, "Are you stupid? This is the wrong side of town!"
Parasite Eve (at least as much as I played) was also very creepy, but coming from God's POV diminished that some I think. If that had been a FPS then it would have been really creepy.
Although I haven't played many games with horror motifs and they've been mentioned before I thought they deserved yet another note.

 

[Kermi]

Condemned: Criminal Origins where you're in the abandoned mall and you walk down a corridor to a dead end. Then when you turn around to go back the way you came you're completely surrounded by mannequins. That scared the hell out of me.

Bioshock: when I was in the dentist's area and I was just exploring, thought I'd cleared the area. I turned around after looting a safe and there was a splicer in a gown and surgical mask standing right there, as in his entire face was filling the screen. It was so surprising it took me a few seconds to register what I was seeing, then I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Lastly, when my fiancee was playing Silent Hill 2 she got up to a part where you climb down a ladder and go into this circular hallway which leads to a room where you find a great knife. There's not really anything else to do down there. Anyway, all the while she was going round and round this hallway she could hear footsteps but she couldn't find any monsters. Eventually she gave up, went back up the ladder, and continued on her way through the game. several hours later I was flicking through a walkthrough for the game to make sure she hadn't missed anything important, and we had this conversation:
Me: You know that circular hallway where you could hear the footsteps?
Her: Yeah.
Me: That was Pyramid Head following you.
Her: ...god DAMN IT.