The scariest video game experience of your life

[poppabaggins]

Vampire the masquerade the ocean house hotel, pretty creepy.

This. Without a doubt, the most well-constructed horror set-piece in any game. I played through it twice and was surprised and scared by new things on the second play-through.

If only survival horror games could come this close.

Also, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was decently scary in the early parts. Then it just got all too repetitive and predictable.

 

[ProfessorLayton]

Amnesia, or Minecraft.

Seriously... Minecraft is scary. o______o

After spending hours carefully constructing a path through a mine and turning around a corner and seeing a creeper right in your face is the scariest thing ever.

Everyone is saying Amnesia, so I'll say Fatal Frame. Both were equally scary in my mind.

 

[Cursed Frogurt]

The Applewood farm level in Condemned 1 was really freaky especially when SKX starts chasing you near the end. Also that bugs on the screen thing Eternal Darkness pulls.

Those are two excellent examples. The basement in Applewood was my scariest moment in gaming until I played Metro 2033 and met the Librarians. Having surroundsound headphones on was a like living a nightmare. Those things were unpredictable and the environment allowede them to dynamically chase you through walls and up/down floors, and it was nerve-wrecking trying to avoid stepping on broken glass and not alerting them. It didn't help that they made horrifying breathing sounds and looked like demonic gorillas.

 

[Ghengis John]

Realizing that yes, my brother and I HAD just played through Kane And Lynch 2: Dog Days.

 

[TriggerHappyAngel]

The Calling on the Wii ... the room with the Dolls D:

 

[Proverbial Jon]

*snip*

It sucks, I kinda rushed through that game with my friend, and never came across that room. I remember all of the other parts though, including one in a closet filled with mannequins. There was one just standing there between two shelves, and when you walk around behind another shelf, you hear a scream, and a thud. You walk back and the mannequin is bloody, and the head is on the floor.

One other moment caught me REALLY off guard, because it wasn't built up, and there was no scary music to go with it. At one point you're walking down a hallway, and you turn a corner and come upon a glass case, and a wheelchair with a teddy bear on it. If you examine the teddy bear, it says something descriptive about it, no big deal. Then, when you return to gameplay, there is a disfigured dead body holding a teddy bear, hanging in the glass case. I played it with my friend, and we saw it and were like "Ummm... Was that there before?" *Nervous laughter*.

Also, the creepy monster turning the crank in the distance. You probably know what I'm talking about.

Yeah it's easy to miss rooms in Silent Hill, depends how you play. I like to VERY methodically check each and every room because it saves me from having to retread the same terrifying path multiple times just because I missed something! The mirror room is in the alternate hospital and that whole place is far too bloody scary for my liking. Considering pretty much that entire level was lifted from Silent Hill 2 (albeit with some changes to otherworld layout and locked/broken doors etc) Team Silent did a bloody good job at making it even scarier for the second time round!

Actually thinking about it, the whole doll and letter thing from (Stanley was it?) to Heather was REALLY creepy. I had this terrible feeling that he actually WAS stalking me. Horrible!

I vaguely remember that glass case/mutilated body part that you mentioned... but don't remember it having that big an effect. Perhaps I simply didn't notice that there was not a body there before... considering there are bodies everywhere!

Oh and the guy turning handles in the background? That's Valtiel, he's a protector, a sort of equivelent of an angel in the Silent Hill occult. He's the guy who you'll see dragging Heather's body away whenever she dies. I assume because of the whole God birth thing... who knows, it's all very complicated!

Well in Silent Hill 2 I was pretty much shaking from the moment James got out of that restroom...
I´m pretty highly strung when it comes to games, and I do not deal with horror well, but I just had to continue playing, because I needed to know what had happened. The game just made me care about the protagonist, even if he hid behind the door on the day god handed out brains... ;-)

Now I´m trying to play Silent Hill 4, and that is even worse, somehow.
I mean, if someone gets a letter from his dead wife, and goes to find her, he might as well know that he will be in trouble. But the whole concept of having your home invaded like that just gripped me by some very sensitiv part of my body, or whatever ;-)

Also Silent Hill just has the most masterfull use of sound.
Just hearing Pyramid head scrape the Great Knife across the metal floor was probably the scariest moment of my gaming history.

Agreed. Some people say SH4 was rubbish and to be fair, I thought it was the least scary of the 4 originals. BUT it did have some truly terrifying moments, especially the levels in the second half (I won't say what, just in case you haven't discovered it yet), there are a few really terrifying things to be found later on, especially when you think back on them during a second play through...

enjoy.

As for SH's sound... I think it is one of the best games at NOT using sound. Some games try to overcompensate by shoving all this stupid atmopsheric noise in ALL the time and making stupid jump sounds when something suddenly appears. But you'll find very little sound in SH, which is WAY too unnerving. And like you say... when they do use sound... blimey you better keep a pile of spare pants close at hand! Every time I hear an air raid siren, I think of Pyramid Head!

 

[Deverfro]

I would have to say Silent Hill 2. The worst part was towards the start of the game when I was waliking past a car and one of those lying figures came scurrying out. I think I actually crapped myself xD

 

[adakias]

...Okay this is embarrassing, but umm...
I don't scare easily. Like, at all.
I was only ever truly frightened by a video game once.
I was four and I was playing that Lion King sega game. When Simba died it made really sad music and he collapsed. I was horrified, and completely burst into tears and refused to play it for about a year.
That's all I can think of.

 

[Terrorist_school_drop-out]

Shalebridge Cradle from Thief: Deadly Shadows. A scary game is one thing, but once you play enough of it and get into the survival-horror mind-set you can get used to the game's style and it can scare you less. But Thief: DS, while an atmospheric game to be sure, wasn't really scary as, beeing a stealth game, you were the predator and thus had the upper hand. But once you reach the Cradle you get bombarded by a new feeling, one of true dread and weakness you hadn't felt before, and that made that one single level more affecting and simply terrifying than any other "obvious" horror expirience. Same can be said about the Ravenholm section in Half-Life 2, the simple unexpected nature of a single section that the game knew exactly when to throw and totaly screw with you.

 

[Au Naturel.]

All of Yume Nikki disturbed me beyond belief, I began projecting it into my field of vision when I wasn't playing the game. I love the game though, I really do!

Fatal Frame 2 terrified me with it's atmosphere, so I stopped playing about 15-20 minutes in.

 

[Crystalite]

Agreed. Some people say SH4 was rubbish and to be fair, I thought it was the least scary of the 4 originals. BUT it did have some truly terrifying moments, especially the levels in the second half (I won't say what, just in case you haven't discovered it yet), there are a few really terrifying things to be found later on, especially when you think back on them during a second play through...

enjoy.

*hehe* Thanks! Also thanks for not spoiling, I´m not that far yet, and its going to take me quite some time, as I said, I´m really afraid as it is, just by the thought that whoever chained the door shut must theoretically still be in Room 302. Or in Henrys dreams...

As for SH's sound... I think it is one of the best games at NOT using sound. Some games try to overcompensate by shoving all this stupid atmopsheric noise in ALL the time and making stupid jump sounds when something suddenly appears. But you'll find very little sound in SH, which is WAY too unnerving. And like you say... when they do use sound... blimey you better keep a pile of spare pants close at hand! Every time I hear an air raid siren, I think of Pyramid Head!

Thats an interesting thought... I don´t play horrorgames at all normaly, so I never really noticed that, I pretty much thought that the silent passages where normal ;-) Love the siren to, even if I don´t hear one in real life all that often *gg*

But I also love that there are no real jump scares in Silent Hill. Monsters jumping at you is just cheap, whereas a game mastering real atmosphere can make you afraid all the time.
As Yahtzee said, startling someone is easy, but inducing that kind of Silent Hill dread is really hard but effective if done right.

I did not think I would ever say this, but I´m beginning to fall in love with a genre I never liked before... Its a strange thing, why do we like beeing scared like that?

 

[Sn1P3r M98]

Penumbra: Black Plague when that worm starts bursting through the wall. That worm is fucking scary, and I cowered in the corner where it couldn't get me for most of the sequence.

 

[Korten12]

Amnesia or from Thief: Deadly Shadows - The Cradle... That level was... freaky...