The best Horror game of all time is not belong to resident evil or silent hills imo but..

[happyninja42]

I will always remember FEAR fondly, mostly because of a perfect moment of in game events, and out of game stuff going on.

So, when I first played FEAR, I decided I would only play it at night, in the dark, with all the lights off except one small light in the room to help with my sight, and headphones.

Needless to say, this amped up the creepiness for me considerably. And I had reached a point in the game, where I was then going against nekked Samara, when something happened that freaked me the fuck out.

My girlfriend at the time (now wife), is a tall woman, with looooong dark black hair. She was asleep, as it was late at night. Now, in the game room, the computer was at a table in the corner. If i looked to my right, I was able to see straight out the doorway, to the connecting hallway, that was perpendicular to the room. This hallway lead between our bedroom and the bathroom....and my wife, sleeps in the nude.

So...at a point in the game, when it was no longer a shootem up, and was going for the "Samara is around fucking with you." with the audio feedback sounds in the headset, and the HUD fritzing out, and her giggling....I see movement out of the corner of my eye, and in the dim glow of the one lightsource, I see a tall naked woman, with dark hair covering her face walk past the doorway and out of sight, right as Samara is giggling in my fucking ear!

Needless to say, I freaked the fuck out, and screamed in sheer terror, even though my brain knew it was my wife. My hindbrain didn't give a fuck. It just kept screaming "OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK!! IT'S HER SHE'S HEEEERE WE GONNA DIE!!! FUUUUUUCK!" It took me a good five minutes to calm down, and then I proceeded to playfully berate my wife by thumping her on the chest and telling her she shouldn't scare me like that. Of course she had no clue what happened, being half asleep, and oblivious to what she did by walking past the room.

So that game will always have a special place in my heart.

 

[go-10]

FEAR was really good, I loved how the AI took alternate paths and reacted to y position, it felt challenging. But as great as it was it was nowhere near the best game horror game ever, REmake and Silent Hill 2 I feel are way better and Amnesia is WAY better than all of them

 

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

Too bad like Crysis sequels. FEAR sequels are utter trash. I still want Real FEAR sequel and not consolized crap

I mean in this day and age. developers can make multiplatform games without dumbing down PC version. case in point Doom, Deus Ex, Shadow warrior 2 etc.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I'd say it's a shooter with a horror gimmick rather than a horror game.

 

[Skatalite]

Within the action-horror genre I think Dead Space is a better game, but Fear is definitely up there. Amnesia is to me still the best horror game ever made though.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

It was pretty groundbreaking at the time. Did slow mo shooting in FPS pretty much better than anyone else had... in fact had anyone else done it by that point or was Max Payne the only other shooter with slow mo? and that was 3rd person. I loved F.E.A.R and agree it was a phenomenal game that was quite scary in parts. But the first Condemned did the whole unsettling, tense, shit scary atmosphere even better in my opinion. I think it was made by the same guys using assets from F.E.A.R as well. I remember feeling far more scared and on edge during Condemned than during F.E.A.R (god thats a ballache to type out each time). Play through the abandoned department store level in Condemned and you'll see what I mean. Or at least, you'll never look at mannequins the same way again!

I say scared in relative/videogame terms though. I.e, not ACTUALLY scared.

Condemned has been my favorite horror game for awhile. That game nailed the creep factor and still holds up relatively well. I was playing it not that long ago because I got it for $2 around Halloween. It definitely feels a little old and clumsy but the atmosphere and scares are still really effective. I should get back to that. It's a shame 2 wasn't as good and now the franchise is just dormant.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

I will always remember FEAR fondly, mostly because of a perfect moment of in game events, and out of game stuff going on.

So, when I first played FEAR, I decided I would only play it at night, in the dark, with all the lights off except one small light in the room to help with my sight, and headphones.

Needless to say, this amped up the creepiness for me considerably. And I had reached a point in the game, where I was then going against nekked Samara, when something happened that freaked me the fuck out.

My girlfriend at the time (now wife), is a tall woman, with looooong dark black hair. She was asleep, as it was late at night. Now, in the game room, the computer was at a table in the corner. If i looked to my right, I was able to see straight out the doorway, to the connecting hallway, that was perpendicular to the room. This hallway lead between our bedroom and the bathroom....and my wife, sleeps in the nude.

So...at a point in the game, when it was no longer a shootem up, and was going for the "Samara is around fucking with you." with the audio feedback sounds in the headset, and the HUD fritzing out, and her giggling....I see movement out of the corner of my eye, and in the dim glow of the one lightsource, I see a tall naked woman, with dark hair covering her face walk past the doorway and out of sight, right as Samara is giggling in my fucking ear!

Needless to say, I freaked the fuck out, and screamed in sheer terror, even though my brain knew it was my wife. My hindbrain didn't give a fuck. It just kept screaming "OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK!! IT'S HER SHE'S HEEEERE WE GONNA DIE!!! FUUUUUUCK!" It took me a good five minutes to calm down, and then I proceeded to playfully berate my wife by thumping her on the chest and telling her she shouldn't scare me like that. Of course she had no clue what happened, being half asleep, and oblivious to what she did by walking past the room.

So that game will always have a special place in my heart.

Sorry for double posting but this is absolutely amazing. Thanks for sharing Ninja. I would have shit my pants if that happened to me.

 

[Saelune]

I love the FEAR series, but I think it gets unfairly classified as a horror game, in the scary sense. Plus the best horror game is probably one I could never stand to finish. Hell, the girl turns out to be on your side.

 

[Wrex Brogan]

...you know, neither of those gifs really sold the 'horror' aspect. 'Aw shit, slow walking girl in the shadows and light physics! We're all going to die!'.

Anyway.

'Best Horror game' is one of those things that... really just doesn't work. Everyone's scared of something different, there's so many different kinds of horror and honestly, you've got to be in the right mindset for the horror to actually work. I've played a whole mess of horror games, but I've always approached them from a technical aspect, so I just end up ripping 'em apart rather than getting immersed in them. Too bloody many of 'em use Jump Scares wrong anyway, throwing off whatever atmosphere they're building for a cheap startle.

Like... I play horror games to be unnerved, not startled. 'What the fuck' is what I want to happen, not 'AHH FUCK'. I can get 'AHH FUCK' from getting surprise-sniped in Halo. The closest to 'What the fuck' I've got from a horror game recently was PT, and even that fucked up on occasion with the ghost-lady straight murdering you too often if you fucked something up, which REALLY spoiled everything. 'Hey I know you were getting super-immersed in this horror, but let's just have a 30 second gratuitous death screen because you looked at the wrong picture. Fuck you.'

...I will say, the most memorable 'horror' experience I've had was when I was leveling with some mates in World of Warcraft, and we were getting ganked by a high-level rogue before we had access to mounts. Dude was legit stalking us and would unstealth to pick us off one by one. Even killed everyone in the nearby town, so when we tried to get the flight master we just came across a pile of corpses and him walking towards us. Loudest I've ever screamed 'FUCK IT, RUN!' over Skype when I saw that. Good fun*.

*[sub]And this only really stands out because me and my mates figured 'fuck it, we'll play it like a slasher film' and got really into it amongst ourselves. 'Ganked by a level 100' normally isn't a horror moment, but we turned it into one because... well, why not?[/sub]

 

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

If you're going to pick FEAR over Silent Hill, just go one further and pick STALKER. It does everything FEAR does, but better, and loads more on top of that too.

STALKER is one of my fav game of all time. but horror was done better in FEAR.

 

[Potjeslatinist]

A great game indeed but I can only classify it as a great fps with horror elements. The reason being is that all of the horror is passive. None of it ever hurts you and you never engage it so it presents no danger.

Well, I'm going to second this. I love FEAR dearly, one of my favourite games, but its two domains horror and action do not overlap. You shoot the soldiers, you are scared by visions and atmosphere.

If we're talking FPSs, than may I suggest Undying. This game can get very scary indeed, and its horrors are constantly out to murder you. But at its heart, it's really a balls to the walls action game, just like FEAR.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

FEAR, along with Dead Space, is just lazy jump-scare silliness. At no point during the entire length of it did I feel even mildly disturbed, unsettled, or anxious. It doesn't help that the "spooky black haired waif" motif has been driven into the fucking ground.

Scariest "game", still by a long shot, is the Shalebridge Cradle from Thief 3. It had all the hallmarks of good horror.

1. Slow build up. Hints about the Shalebridge Cradle are littered about long before you ever go there, and you're in the Cradle for well over an hour before anything overt happens. Everything else is just the gradual mounting of dread through excellent sound work and atmospherics. Too many "scary" games want to blow their wad all at once. This is also something Amnesia did reasonably well, if I remember correctly, although game play awkwardness was always an enemy there.

2. Player helplessness. Garrett is not a skillful combatant and the game trains you throughout its running time to avoid conflict at almost any cost. It also teaches you to be hyper aware of audio cues, and Shalebridge fucks with that beautifully.

3. Player investment. Shalebridge is just part of a larger story, you're involved in your character (who is now in his third game), and the level and its background story are so well written you get involved in them too.

4. Subversion of expectation. Thief 3 was not sold as a "scary" game. When you sit down expecting horror, it's very tough to be taken off guard. As one person memorably wrote "I bought this game to steal gold and knock out guards, not creep around an abandoned insane asylum bricking my pants". This is a pitfall MANY horror games fall into (horror films as well, really). Horror works best when it's unexpected.

5. Doesn't overstay its welcome. You're in there for a few hours and then it's done. Like comedy, horror wears out its welcome incredibly quickly. Something that is unsettling/surprising/alarming can quickly become routine/dull. The first necro-thingy in Dead Space might make you jump, you're probably whistling cheerfully to yourself while you routinely vivisect the 100th.

It was a master-class in level/chapter design and one of those memorable "genre" moments in the history of gaming. Shame it came nested in a game that received an otherwise lukewarm reception for straying from the design ethos of its forerunners.

 

[happyninja42]

snip

Agreed, that level was creepy as fuck. I seem to recall an interview with one of the developers, where they specifically sought out particular sounds/notes/tones, that are known to unnerve humans and set them on edge, and then put them in that game. The lighting, the sounds, the Uncanny Valley movement of the inmates of that place. Yeah, definitely creeped me out hard core.

God I love that series of games, wish the reboot hadn't crapped all over the franchise. Le sigh. Ah well, maybe we'll get a reboot reboot.

 

[MysticSlayer]

FEAR has definitely had the longest-lasting impression on me, as far as horror games go at least. The way it played with the player's expectations of power was great, and it did a fantastic job of giving the sense that you were simply a malevolent god-child's toy to play with in her twisted, macabre game, and once you ceased to amuse her or gave her what she wanted, she could kill you in whatever way pleased her. Unfortunately, that was a sense FEAR 2 sort of lost (still loved the game though), and FEAR 3 seemed to do everything in its power to try to undo that (seriously, who thought being Alma's guardian angle was a good idea!).

However, in terms of first impressions, I would say that BioShock probably got me more. Yes, there was no consequence for death (not that that stopped people from loving Amnesia), but to me, that just gave the impression that I could be forever stuck in a cycle of death and rebirth, being doomed to spend an unknown amount of time killing my fellow inmates in this insane asylum of a city. It also did a decent job of making Jack slowly go insane, and the atmosphere provided an almost constant sense of dread.

In the end, I would say both BioShock and FEAR have stuck with me as the top horror games. Unlike Resident Evil and Silent Hill (with the exception of RE4), they didn't get bogged down by annoying gameplay, and unlike Amnesia, they didn't become numbing or have an easily exploitable way to move forward without fear. Both were really frightening for me, and I felt that they did an excellent job of mixing action and horror.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Ehh....I'm not even convinced Fear was scarier than Doom 3. I mean Fear was...cheap scares. Like Woman in Black. Yeah its kinda' scary, and may jump scare you once or twice, but looking back its very traditional and playing more on ingrained societal cliches perpetuated by a thousand horror stories rather than trying to create its own thing. Fear always struck me as horror by committee, specifically a committee of the writers of American remakes of Japanese horror movies, which to be fair makes them miles above Resident Evil's apparent horror or whatever the fuck Evil Within was trying to do.

Like someone molests a violin, and we know that's a horror movie trope they do when something scary happens, therefore something scary must have just happened. And all that really happened is a door closed...
Weak sauce if you ask me.

 

[Gorrath]

FEAR was alright, and I enjoyed it but Silent Hill 1 and 2 take the cake for me. Going back and trying to play SH1 doesn't work because of how dated the graphics are but I've never seen a bunch of Army guys turn off a game and turn on all the lights in a house with any other horror experience.

 

[Poetic Nova]

If you're going to pick FEAR over Silent Hill, just go one further and pick STALKER. It does everything FEAR does, but better, and loads more on top of that too.

I cannot disagree with this.

While it's scare factor (in SoC atleast) lied in the underground labs, it atleast always manages to make me feel uneasy. At times it did genuinly scare me.

Darnit. Now I want to play it again.

 

[lacktheknack]

Eh. I had a better time with Alan Wake... and Silent Hill 3 was better than that.

 

[The Madman]

4. Subversion of expectation. Thief 3 was not sold as a "scary" game. When you sit down expecting horror, it's very tough to be taken off guard. As one person memorably wrote "I bought this game to steal gold and knock out guards, not creep around an abandoned insane asylum bricking my pants". This is a pitfall MANY horror games fall into (horror films as well, really). Horror works best when it's unexpected.

Unless you're a Thief fan, in which case you're already familiar with the idea that though not strictly a horror series the Thief franchise has always had heavy horror influences and tended to include at least one horror level. The Haunted Cathedral in Thief 1, the Pagan Forest in Thief 2, then the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief 3.

Such a damned good series, I still get irrationally spiteful just thinking about the 'new' game that came out. Which also incidentally included a horror level just, like everything else about that game, shittily.