Seyon:
I said this in another threat but... When I was playing F.E.A.R. alone at home by myself with the lights off on a big screen T.V., my friend cut the power and sent in his little sister in a red dress, she looked just like the girl in F.E.A.R., I pissed myself till I cried, cost me $50 to get the photo back.

I don't want to encourage blackmail, but I think that's the funniest thing I've ever read in a forum. Of course, it wouldn't have been so funny if you'd struck his little sister over the head with a chair, an equally possible reaction to being badly frightened.

I don't have much to contribute to this that hasn't already been mentioned, so I'll be really brief and say that the original Alone in the Dark, Clock Tower and Fatal Frame (only played Crimson Butterfly) were pretty damn creepy. Hearing the scissors get closer and closer to you in Clock Tower induced panic like no other game. Alone in the Dark was just overall creepy in a Lovecraftian way. It actually got Pavlovian at some parts, where the music would just randomly change and you figure that something's coming after you. Sometimes, it's just random and not actually indicative of anything, though. And Fatal Frame... well... do I really have to explain this?

Another game which I don't think has been mentioned yet is one of my all-time favourite Sierra adventures, The Colonel's Bequest. Especially when playing on my old monochrome PC when I was 10, there were times when I actually turned it off and had to stop playing it. It wasn't scary in the survival-horror sense, but rather psychologically. Highly inspired by And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, dead bodies of murdered characters start showing up, and it really keeps you on edge, not knowing who the killer is. Sometimes, you'll be in a room, sleuthing around, and you'll see the shadow of somebody walking outside the window, and it terrified me. One other part in particular that stands out is if you find the hidden basement in the mansion, and discover that shortly after you found their bodies, the killer took the corpses and dumped them down the laundry chute to hide them. You walk through the dark basement with a lantern and find a pile of all the dead bodies that you found throughout the game. Creepy shit.

intplee:

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.

Heh, I was going to say the zombie portion of the second(?) mission of the original Thief.

Heck, even those spiders in the first mission could give you the willies.

+++

I don't want to sidetrack this discussion at all, but, do you think it's funny that the ESRB has *no* content descriptor for 'will scare the hell out of you the adult, so you can imagine what it'll do to your kid'?

Maybe games shouldn't just be rated by age it's too young to play safely, but by what hour it's too late to play safely.

I know a couple of people have said this, but to all of you who were scared by Bioshock, go out and get a copy of System Shock 2. That game still scares the crap out of me. Those bloody Psychic monkeys whan all you have is a spanner cos all your guns are broken/out of ammo...
Also, Alien Vs Predator on the Atari Jaguar... a long time ago now, but as i remember it, there was no music, just the deep rumble of the ships engines and you would hear them long before they found you...
Oh yeah, mad props to whoever mentioned watching their dad play Prince Of Persia cos i had to hide whenever i watched him play that as well!

The Potato Lord:

Anyhoo...
The scariest moments in a game for me have been:
Legend of zelda: ocarina of time-The tomb you enter after some lightning destroys the royal family's headstone with the life-sucking zombies that froze you if you looked directly at them

Legend of Zelda:ocarina of time-The entire Forest temple, That place was disturbing the second you entered and everyone has to admit the first time one of the big hands grabbed you you aboout P'd yourself((or you acutally did)

Second on that. OoT had some really scary moments, But if there's one thing I'll never forget are the zombies. They were so original with the weird wooden masks on and the shrieks, nothing like the Resi Evil zombies or any other zombie, matter of fact. And that's what made them scary, they were nothing you had ever seen before.

Mine was...

...falling asleep while driving a Jeep in "Mercenaries".

Not only it was a huge shock being woken up by the sounds of a crash, but also it was a very arkward moment that haunted me a long time whenever i would drive somewhere.

And for a game that teaches you to predict any "shock moments" two miles ahead, the "Spider behind the Computer" Scene in Doom 3 was pretty scary.

Playing any part of Condemned, I just can't mentally handle horrorgames.

Scariest moments for me:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - When your running around in the sarchopagus, killing Monolith Expert Stalkers, and that voice in the background trying to drive you insane, and the constant radiation, that ives a blurry corny filther on the screen. I wouldn't say it scared me, but it was very entertaining.

Doom - Second level in "Thy flesh consumed" the 4th episode. About all 7 spots in the level, were a door opens suddenly, and a Baron of Hell attcks you from 3 meters away. That howl it makes, is really creppy.

Commander Keen 4: Secret of the oracle - Laugh all you wan't but this the only thing that has ever scared me in a videogame, and i was 8. The waterlevel, were you have to swim through a well, to find one of the wise men. It looked very easy since i only had to deal ith sprites and small fishes. Then near the end i found Dopefish. Big green fish, with huge square shaped front teeth. I swam past it thinking it was harmless, upon were it swam after me, and swallowed me whole. THat freaked me out so much, i didn't play the game for the next 5 years.

A lot of people mention moments in Doom 3. But in that game, only one thing REALLY scared me: The Cherubs.
Those...THINGS. God damn them back to hell where they belong.

Children ARE scary. Children fused with huge-clawed disformed flies that jump-scuttle towards you (laughing and giggling all the way, god damn them!) until they suddenly lunge twenty fucking meters and knock off a fifth of your health are even scarier.
And they never travel alone. So the air is filled with the buzzing of oversized flies and the laughter of infants well before you see even one, let alone the ten others that are just far enough away so that you'll see them once the first one bites the dust.

Resident Evil 2, where you first see a Licker walk across a window, scared the shit outa me. In fact those games were pretty scary as a whole, eccept for RE4, but it my have been because i was younger when i played them.

I'm going to vote the original AvP, playing as the marine. You'd be walking along and you'd hear the aliens screaming, but wouldn't see anything, then suddenly your motion tracker would start to beep....

Doom 3 was okay for the first level, after that the "scary" went away. Go into a room, lights go out, fight monsters, repeat.

FEAR had okay parts and suck parts, but the parts of the level that were gunfights were too seperate from the parts that were scary. It took something away when I was thinking, "Okay, now I'm at the part where I see monsters and hear voices. There won't be any bad guys here. Oh! Bad guys! Guess the horror is over for awhile."

Bioshock never really scared me, but I found some aspects interesting, like the woman crying over the baby carriage.

Thinking about it now, maybe I'm just older and more jaded, but I like to think that AvP really was that creepy.

- J

Resident Evil: Zombie Dogs + windows = scariest moment

also up there... when you first go into the sewers in RE2

The classic, dogs jumping through the window at the beginning of Resident Evil 1 truly shocked me at first play.
Back at the beginning of the playstation era.

Condemned, for the 360, and those damned mannequin's.
Great game, scary as sin.

Survival horror games are on of my top genres.

Probably the intro to Silent Hill 4. The game itself wasn't too terrifying but that opening was intense. Some of the noises that the victims made were pretty disturbing and the first one coming out of the wall just rocked. It was also sometimes a little shocking when Walter Sullivan came out of NOWHERE in the forest. Though the scariest part was undoubtedly his godly accuracy. How the hell could that bullet hit me if i was standing behind him. =_= If anything, he was feared just for that, and the way he swings the chainsaw around like the mad man he is.

Other freaky highlights would be wandering what the hell he was doing with that body at the beginning of the hospital world and wandering how the hell he made Cynthia bleed so much. Though sadly the Silent Hill series hasn't scared me as much as it probably should. Most of the monster designs were just to cool to fear. Pyramid Head, Gum Head, Wall Man, Door Man.. At least PH can usually make me jump with that first rape scene in SH2, i know it's there but just forget to expect it. >_<

The Irrelevant Gamer:
I just remembered another one. There is an asylum level in Painkiller, and it full of quadruple amputees who flop around on the floor, and heave themselves at you when you approach. Those things creeped me right the hell out. It didn't help that I thought they were just dead bodies before they moved.

That was the only level in that entire game that I actually felt a little thrill playing. Genuinely weirded me out how they moved so wrong.

Apart from one circumstantial mess playing Doom 3 I don't ever really find games even mildly startling.

The zombie level in half life 2. Mostly, the fast zombies. You hear a random scream, the suddenly-

CLUMP CLUMP CLUMP

Then you turn around and something jumps out at you.

Awesome

Fort Frolic in BioShock was creepy as all get-out, especially the creepy "statues" and Cohen's audiotapes. FEAR had some good n' scary bits in there too, like bodies getting thrown through windows, and the bleedin' hallways.

I remember an ooooold game called Abuse, sort of a side-scrolling shooter. The sound effects were great, so playing that at night when you're 12 years old was pretty darn scary.

Scariest moment in my gaming history is probably that lovely bit in Resident Evil 4 where you have to walk through an abandoned kitchen that hasn't been cleaned in months. Theres one part where you're walking towards a window and someone walks past on the other side of the filthy glass, thats not so bad but the second bit is slightly worse. You walk into a darkened room and the oven in front of you explodes with flames and releases a unique enemy that stumbles towards whilst slowly burning to death. A pleasing little label on the door of the oven says; "Do not open, we left Bernie in her"

werepossum:

Seyon:
I said this in another threat but... When I was playing F.E.A.R. alone at home by myself with the lights off on a big screen T.V., my friend cut the power and sent in his little sister in a red dress, she looked just like the girl in F.E.A.R., I pissed myself till I cried, cost me $50 to get the photo back.

I don't want to encourage blackmail, but I think that's the funniest thing I've ever read in a forum. Of course, it wouldn't have been so funny if you'd struck his little sister over the head with a chair, an equally possible reaction to being badly frightened.

She was scared too when I started screaming and pissing myself, poor little girl >.>

I was playing through Resident Evil 4 the second time at my friends house. I was at the cemetery right before the tram event (I think... don't remember it too well any more) and he asked me if the game was scary. "Not really," I said. I start clearing the villagers in the cemetery while talking. "It can kind of creep you out every once in a while but it didn't really freak me out very much." I snipe the last villager and start to head up to the tram at the top of the hill. Just to make sure, I press down-B (do a quick 180 degree turn) to check behind me. The crazed villager behind me starts shrieking and stabs my face with a pitchfork. I jumped 3 feet in the air and we both start yelling swear words. I looked pretty stupid after that...

Also in Bioshock I remember having a hook splicer running after me while I was at Fort Frolic. I just started running away from him (stupidly) and he kept chasing me. I got that panicky feeling you get when you're running away from something and you're not sure exactly where it is. When I got to the frozen room I turned around and he was breathing heavily while running through the hallway after me. That whole sequence freaked me out quick a bit and it took a good 10 seconds of bludgeoning his corpse with the wrench before I calmed down completely.

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...

Good Job dickface, you just gave away a major point in CoD4 -_-*

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.

you've pretty much sold this game to me.

As for mine...

-Pretty much all of the first Silent Hill. Shame they appear to be getting less with every installment.

-A section of Still Life where you travel alone through the sewers of 1929 Prague (considering the streets weren't exactly a walk in the park). Coincidently, if you've not played Still Life and Post Mortem, do so.

-Resident Evil (PSX)Zombie jumping out of the closet after the 'itchy, tasty' diary entry.

This is probably gonna sound a bit lame...

I was playing Half-Life 2 and I was mucking about in an air vent. I turned a corner and WHAM, headcrab belly to the face. Creepy because I had no fuckin' clue the crab was there, then there's a toothy maw chomping on my scalp. Blergh.

I don't play any straight-up horror games, but RE4 is something I've always wanted to play.

System Shock 2 is the only game so far that's come close to scaring me. It's very nerve-wrecking, playing through Hard, going through the Engineering block, knowing that a security robot is only a few feet away and you only have a minimum of health and no anti-armour ammunition left. As well as that, those monkeys are seriously head-screwing - I can hear their howls still in my head.

Silent Hill (PS) - Those knife wielding babies... they ALWAYS scare me - especially in the school and hospital.

Resident Evil (GCN) - This game had an atmosphere that always had me on the edge of my seat. Never knowing what is around each corner and if those windows will hold, that game really was frightening... the series unfortunately left that aspect behind after 4 =(

Clock Tower 3 (PS2) - This game had so many surprises! It was technically only one enemy during each scenario... but the ****ers would come out of no where! You think he is gone, you think he is far to the east... but no! He is in the curtain behind you! haha.

There are more, but those are the only ones I can think of at the moment.

I was somewhat let down by Clocktower 3. The endless running in a loop and not getting anywhere because the villain would cut me off, and the dumb music playing.

It wasn't all bad as the story was occasionally interesting and mature (seeing the man and mother shoved in the vate of acid...) but the AI on the enemies somehow reminded me of Odie from the garfield comic strips, chasing left and right like a victim of piggie in the middle.

If you liked it though, checkout Haunting Ground/ Demento (its spiritual sequel).

SPOILER

Just playing episode 2 of HL2. When Alyx got stabbed by the Hunter. Wasn't actually scary, just a different kind of fright. Bastards at valve making us play through the entire episode 1 with her just to build the relationship and then bamn! They take it all away.

The Thief series has always been once of my favorite creepy games, especially because it's not actually a horror series at all so when you do come across the frightening missions scattered throughout the series, they have all the more impact! Two moments in particular stand out, the much mentioned Shalebridge Cradle from Thief 3, or the Asylum as some people call it, and the Trickster cutscene from Thief: The Dark Project. There's just this feeling of 'Oh Shit, what have I done!' that came over me the first time I saw that which no other game has quite duplicated.

The cutscene in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AAzkPkiImo

Thief in general has a large number of "scary" moments.

Fatal Frame, pretty much all of the time. In the first one, I was near a reflecting pool when a ghost came down from a tree and killed me. I stopped playing immediately afterward. Although I've played the sequels which unnerved me as well, I'm not sure if I've ever turned on the first one again.

Resident Evil 4, with the Regenerators.

You're all like 'Hmmm, so before I fight these things, I'll get an infra-red scope to kill 'em with'. Then, the b******s start getting up and you're all RvB-esuqe like 'Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, running, running, running!'

I don't play a lot of scary games. I also don't find some 'scary' parts that frightening either.

B = EoCWASO x AICW

Where B = Bravery
EoCWASO = Effectiveness of Current Weapon Against Scare Offender
AICW = Ammo In Current Weapon

For example, in the Ravenholm situation, you are given saw blades at the start of the level. Play it correctly, and you can make one of them last for a significant portion of the level. When using this saw blade, AICW is infinite, given how you can use one blade over and over and over again. The blades also instantly kill most enemies, with the Poison Zombies taking two hits to kill, so EoCWASO is very high as well. So long as I have one of those blades on hand, nothing scares me in Ravenholm. I lose it however, and I'm out of there.

Having the Gravity Gun also means headcrabs aren't scary anymore, seeing as the primary fire is capable of killing one of 'em in 3 shots.

When I first played Doom 3, I was so scared that I couldn't play more than 1 minute consecutively before having to return to the menu and take a breather. Seriously, the whole not being able to have a torch and gun at the same time made for some scary moments, and wastage of ammo.

I'm a little disappointed with so many peopling saying Ravenholm was scary, it wasn't. Although I admit the first time I went there I was expecting them to be everywhere, but once you figure out the triggers it's pretty meh. They could have done alot more with the zombie horror in that level if they made a couple of extra zombie models instead of the regular white shirt one. Where were the females, children even? No baby carriage smeared in blood because a headcrab had a nice meal, with a dead body locked in a closet nearby only to realize it's the mother that starved to death?

Maybe I'm a little weird, yeh.. I just expected more, alot of times these days it's all about the teen rating having to be slapped onto everything. For instance, if you take the prison level in hl2 where were all the prisoners? I expected it to be pretty brutal, with mangled beaten corpses all over the place and some clues here or there in the computers/hidden parts in the walls to explain what happenend to make you actually hate the combine. I remember one dead body though, but it was the default "burned" body and had absolutely no effect at all.

Anybody ever play avp2, marine campaign, in the middle of the night in a pitchblack room, sound through a headset and the difficulty on hardest? Seriously, that was fun. I couldn't go on for long though, they just keep coming at hardest!!!! "madly first his pulserifle"

My most sceared moment in game has to be S.T.A.L.K.E.R In the underground and i first met the blood sucker, that compleatly scared me shitless! look it up on youtube.

I can't really define this as a scary scene, but the first time I got to the Skein level of NWN II - Mask of the Betrayer, it had a certain eerie feeling to it...especially when you'd hear the hag in the distance ranting and knowing you'd have to fight her at some point. Just as an example : "When they come, kill each one, when they die, stack'em high, when I'm through, EAT THEM TOO!"