Most frightening horror game you've ever played?

[Bureacreative]

SCP Containment Breach is bowel loosening. Having other people in the room never changed anything, it just made 3 people terrified instead of one. It's brutal, old school simplicity with no visibility, quick deaths, and a really scary commitment to an atmosphere of everything, including the building you're in, wanting to kill you. I'll be the first to admit I'm a puss but I had to pace my play session with that game. Fucking alarming game.

 

[laggyteabag]

Probably Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I don't play all that many horror games, and unless you count Dead Space, Amnesia is pretty much the only one that comes to mind. Amnesia is really the only game that actually made me panic. There was this one moment where I was stumbling through a kitchen in the manor of which the game is set, and I was being pretty careless, holding my torch out as I was not expecting any form of enemy to appear. I was fairly wrong. I rounded a corner and one of the ghouls (or whatever they are, the ones with the gaping mouths) spotted me and started to run at me. I backtracked, through the kitchen, up the stairs, slammed open a door into what appeared to be a pantry, slammed it shut, slid a table in front of it, and then promptly cowered in a corner listening to the creature moan and slam at the door. It was pretty scary.

 

[Someone Depressing]

While Silent Hill 2 was certainly more intelligent and well thought out, I think Silent Hill 3 is scarier, because it takes a step back and analyses the series, and in a way, takes itself a little less seriously.

This is mostly because I simply can't relate to Silent Hill 2. None of my relationships of all 20 something years of my life has ended as spectacularly horribly as James's. But I've been a teenager and thus have gone through all of the fears and psychological trauma that simmply comes with learning who you are, and I can't stand to watch people I have any reason to relate to or know getting hurt. So I could relate to Silent Hill 3 and 4. But not 2. Still a great game, but not my psychological torment.

Oh, and how could I forget Fatal Frame? All of them. They're all scary as shit. Being armed with a rickety old camera that gives you rope burns isn't comforting at all, and not being shown how much film you have left is also very scary, because legging it is nigh-impossible, and you need all the experience points you can get.

Clock Tower is also very scary. Not "frightening" per se, since it's very slow paced, and very cinematic... oh, and it's a SNES game. Also, Sweet Home, based on a cheesy B-movie, which is incredibly gory and grim. Oh, and it's on the NES. Two horror games better than the average modern fare, pre 2000.

 

[stroopwafel]

I think FEAR and Dead Space(espescially FEAR) aren't really horror games, just shooters with a horror motiff. Espescially FEAR2 and Dead Space 2 were fantastic but scary...ehmmm no.

My vote would probably go to Outlast and Silent Hill 2 as well. Both were quite creepy for different reasons. Amnesia looks really cool as well though I never played that one. Console peasant.

 

[Therumancer]

Hmmm, well it's hard to say since even though I started gaming many years ago, by the time they really had horror games I was already kind of a jaded genera fan, and everything seemed like it was just going through the motions, and kind of afraid to push too far for fear of offending anyone too much. The first real "honest" attempt I saw to create a horror game was probably "Phantasmagoria" and really I felt it was kind of lacking. A lot of people talked about how gruesome it was, and how there was an "OMG" rape scene, but compared to horror movies at the time it was pretty tame.

"Resident Evil" struck me as being cool since it was at least trying something new, and I really dug the original "Silent Hill" because it was going into supernatural areas, and seemed a lot less afraid to offend to begin with. Honestly I didn't play "2" for many years specifically because they censored the game after complaints about the flayed killer children (which were in the first one) that appeared in the demo. While a lot of people appreciate that game, and it had a good atmosphere, it seemed to rely too much on psychological terror and really my basic attitude is that is a cop out to avoid having to do any serious work as a horror creator, as well as of course get around needing to sell some of the juicier bits. This is not to say that "Silent Hill 2" didn't have it's freaky moments, it's just that I feel it could have been so much more. It largely only upped the ante from the first one due to leaping ahead a generation in technology.

I suppose if I had to give the title to a game it would be the original "Silent Hill".

As a general rule I think the definitive horror game has yet to be created. "The Evil Within" looks like it might have some potential, but so little has been said about it, that it's hard to say. Given the lack of controversy over content and massive ratings battles this close to release, I imagine it's been designed to be marketable so it's going to be "gruesome in the most politically correct and marketable way".

I feel to create the first "real" horror game for serious fans they will probably need to start looking towards what are called "extreme" horror writers, guys like Edward Lee, Bryan Smith, "Wrath" James White, and others. Perhaps a few people from the "Bizzaro" genera like "Carlton Mellick III" could pull it off as well. They need writers like that, a great graphics an animation team, a high budget, and a complete hands off from management, as well as pretty much forcing things through/ignoring the censorship process even if that means selling the game special order or through direct download and letting the simple fact that it has to be ordered that way help generate the infamy and sales (if
it comes to that, which I don't think it will). Then you will probably see a true horror game... basically you need to send your casual fans and average guys running to the bathroom to gag, or having heart flutters, ordinary people ready to light up the torches and pitchforks, and jaded people like me able to occasionally raise an eyebrow and go "wow, that was messed up".

Basically if your not going as far as Dario Argento in his classic works decades later, your not doing your job as a horror creator.

 

[Areloch]

On the more visceral side, if I'm being honest, Slender probably takes the cake. Stalking? Paranoia? Dark forests? Minimal sound cues? Body horror? Yep, just checking off my list of deep seated fears right there. Add in a giant spider and there's no way I'd be able to finish the thing.

I disagree completely with your post. The first three quarters of it are just personal taste, and I get that. I've been in one relationship, and it was with the spawn of Satan, and I was glad to get out of it. So I can very much relate with James Sunderland. But that's ad acta at the moment.

What I can disagree with you on factually, is Slender. The game is cheap. It focuses on cheap scares, cheap pursuit tactics, and just overall cheap atmosphere. Forests? The Blair Witch Project called. Not to mention that the game breaks one of the most basic rules of horror. Try not to show your monster. Keep it in the shadows. That's how you establish a pursuit mentality. The on/off idea of chasing. It may be there, it may be not. It may be safe to turn around, and it may not be. In Slender, you're pretty bloody aware that there's a tentacle thing behind you and it's looking to kill you. And yes, I am thoroughly aware that horror is a genre steeped in anticipation, but this is the wrong kind of anticipation. Anticipation of the horror variety is supposed to keep you on edge, to keep you involved in the plot, to keep you guessing. Slender does virtually none of that.

Also, how exactly does Slender as a character fit the bill of body horror? I mean, there's noting particularly unsettling about him. Nothing gory or shocking. He's might as well be LeBron James wearing a Doc-Ock costume. Slender is youtube bait, and a classic example of it. From what I've played of it, it felt like a cheap game that had zero effort put into it and was aiming to exploit the Slender craze of the moment, which it did brilliantly.

Slender is scary only if you're frightened of your own shadow and/or desperately inexperienced in real horror. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I am an arsehole, and I wear that banner with at least a certain dose of pride.

Aye, I think while Slender was an interesting attempt, in the end it feels kinda weak.

Part of the problem is it's hard to "do" Slenderman correctly in a video game. Part of the reason I got so much enjoyment out of the representation of him in Marble Hornets is because you have a saga that runs for weeks and months, with the constant pressure of some teleporting, reality-defying horror stalking you apparently for giggles.

It's that slow, perpetual erosion is what makes it terrifying(outside the snippets of slenderman stories where he just flat out dissapears people or guts them and mounts them on trees).

However, that's reaaaaaaaaally hard to do in a game. You'd have to somehow sell people on playing a normal life sim for the vast majority of the game as juxtaposition for when Slenderman shows up. Because that's when it would actually be scary. You were playing some other game, having fun, building progress, everything was great. And then Slenderman shows up and begins stalking you from afar. You know he's there and wants to kill you, but hasn't yet. You'd get more scared of him killing you and rouge-liking all your progress away than a game of Slender would ever be able to do, but you have to convice people to play the "wrong game" first.

I guess you'd have to get people to play a one-life version of minecraft, and then slenderman shows up and threatens you with a horrible death and days of lost progress. Good luck with that.

OT, I'm thinking on it, and it's hard to say. I remember when I was really young, Silent Hill came out and I played that in the middle of the night with all the lights off. It didn't matter that there were 2 of us playing the game together, it scared the piss out of us.

Nowadays, it's actually really hard to scare me. I tend to prefer psychological horror because it works far better, and for more people than throwing guts at the screen, but those are unfortunately a rarity. Stuff like Amnesia or the recent Silent Hills don't really do anything for me, let alone "horror" games like Dead Space or other jack-in-the-box bloodapaloozas.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Gonna be crazy unoriginal and say Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Hey, don't look at me like that. I liked it before it was cool damnit! I was following Frictional since the release of Penumbra. Get off my lawn!

It was well paced and it didn't rely on jump scares. You'd usually hear the monsters coming long before you saw them. Hell, you'd often go through an encounter with barely more than a glimpse of something vaguely humanoid and mutilated shambling about in the dark.

I also liked that it wasn't in a desperate hurry to show you its monsters. It had a sense of restraint. You go a good 20 minutes without seeing anything and the first time you see one, it's just a hazy figure standing in a gloomy corridor that turns and walks away after staring at you for a few seconds. And it's way creepier than having it attack you. Compare to, say, Dead Space, where you walk in the door and within 2 minutes the game is shouting, "LOOK! MONSTERS EVERYWHERE! CAN YOU SEE THEM?! HERE THEY ARE!"

I also liked that you couldn't fight back. You had to either stealth past them or flee. It made for somewhat barebones mechanics, but it was better than the (once again) Dead Space situation where an unspeakable horror comes bearing down upon you... and then you calmiy blow its legs off, decapitate it and then kick it around like a big fleshy pinata until ammo comes out.

Can I be on your lawn if I like this game too? Very little made me feel more freaked out... It was terrifying to hear the monster sounds, knowing it's somewhere, but you have no idea where... It's absolutely terrifying going through that game

SCP Containment Breach is bowel loosening. Having other people in the room never changed anything, it just made 3 people terrified instead of one. It's brutal, old school simplicity with no visibility, quick deaths, and a really scary commitment to an atmosphere of everything, including the building you're in, wanting to kill you. I'll be the first to admit I'm a puss but I had to pace my play session with that game. Fucking alarming game.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF... My vote was ninja'd >.< Oh well. Pretty much this. I showed my friend this game, and he was pretty much shitting himself in the first 30 seconds. And it was mid-day, in a well lit room. It freaked him out THAT much. And man, my first time with this game... Was before 096. But once 096 came into play, I am still really terrified of going back. Those screams... Those sounds of doors breaking and being pulled open, just so a single monster can hunt you down and -AAAAAAAUGH!!! *Dead*

 

[MysticSlayer]

I would say Amnesia, but once I found out that there was no real penalty for death and that committing suicide was actually beneficial at times, it sort of took away from the actual horror of the game.

With that said, I guess I'll have to go with F.E.A.R. Sure, some people don't consider it actual horror, but I think the first game actually did a very good job. It made it clear early on that Alma, and to a lesser extent Paxton, couldn't just be confronted with conventional means, so even if Point Man was a super soldier, it was apparent that it wouldn't help him against the game's antagonists, which made him vulnerable when dealing with them. Having all that power stripped away after relying on it to gun down comparatively weaker enemies created a sense of horrifying tension that only Amnesia has been able to match.

I also felt that it did a decent job of playing with the player's head. The game established early on that Alma could kill anyone in an instant, and the fact that she wasn't doing that just gave the sense that she was toying with Point Man, and the fact that she often presented herself as a young girl only made that possibility seem more likely. The fact that other characters she let live for a time often came to horrifying ends pretty much left me just waiting until she finally got bored with watching me kill countless soldiers and decide to kill me as well. At least for me, that whole idea went a long way to reconciling the action-based gameplay with the psychological horror story.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly.

That's mine as well. The Fatal Frame games are just scary in a way that other survival horror games aren't for me. They brilliantly used a mixture of atmosphere, setting, combat and well placed jump scares to get me right down to the bone. As much as I personally like the Silent Hill series, I find them way more intriguing and interesting than actually frightening.

 

[lacktheknack]

What I can disagree with you on factually, is Slender. The game is cheap. It focuses on cheap scares, cheap pursuit tactics, and just overall cheap atmosphere.

I disagree with you that the scares are "cheap". Truly cheap scares are ones that come out of bloody nowhere and launch at the screen without adequate buildup. Meanwhile, Slender's jump scares follow a simple ruleset: If the monster gets too close, you get a burst of harsh static. While it's not particularly refined, it DOES have a reason and conveys a message to the player (get moving!), so it avoids being cheap.

Also, atmosphere does more or less nothing for me in terms of actually scaring me, so it's pretty irrelevant to me. After all, I wasn't freaked out by Silent Hill 2, the "master of atmosphere", soooo...

Forests? The Blair Witch Project called.

So it did.

...what about it? Are we not allowed to use setpieces more than once in entertainment? Silent Hills 2 and on are going to be pretty sad about this news.

Not to mention that the game breaks one of the most basic rules of horror. Try not to show your monster. Keep it in the shadows. That's how you establish a pursuit mentality. The on/off idea of chasing. It may be there, it may be not. It may be safe to turn around, and it may not be. In Slender, you're pretty bloody aware that there's a tentacle thing behind you and it's looking to kill you.

Have you actually played it? You're only aware that it's behind you if there's static going, but just because there's no static doesn't mean it's not there. You're entirely wrong on this point.

Also, if you're getting good looks at the slenderman, you're playing it wrong. Some games obscure the monster by hiding it in shadows, while Slender hides the monster by making prolonged looks at it fatal. This assumes you can see it, because it's often well obscured by the trees. Amnesia made the same thing happen, if I recall, except prolonged looks made your sanity go down rather than killing you. And if you want to see the monster in good light, there's really nothing stopping you from walking over and getting killed. Plus, in Amnesia, you bloody well knew there was a monster chasing you because of that music. If there was no music, that didn't really tell you much about what was behind you.

...What I'm saying is is that your critiques of Slender happen to apply nicely to Amnesia, one of the most celebrated horror games of all time that is constantly praised for "hiding its monsters".

And yes, I am thoroughly aware that horror is a genre steeped in anticipation, but this is the wrong kind of anticipation. Anticipation of the horror variety is supposed to keep you on edge, to keep you involved in the plot, to keep you guessing. Slender does virtually none of that.

No... that's thriller anticipation. Good try.

Horror anticipation is much simpler, it's all about whether or not you'll survive the next encounter. And while many good horror games use a combination of the two, Slender is probably the BEST example of the pure "will I survive" anticipation, because there's no guarantee that you will, especially towards the end.

Also, how exactly does Slender as a character fit the bill of body horror? I mean, there's noting particularly unsettling about him. Nothing gory or shocking. He's might as well be LeBron James wearing a Doc-Ock costume.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u46/faceless_person.jpg

Do you not find this unsettling? I find this as unsettling as hell. It's the same type of body horror that I really appreciated in Silent Hill: The models themselves weren't all that gory for the most part (Resident Evil and Parasite Eve beat them hands down), it was the features they had removed, added and changed that made them creepy.

Hell, the most celebrated Silent Hill monster, the Silent Hill 2 nurses, were positively pleasant to look at below the neck, and above the neck was mostly featureless. Are you going to tell me that the most popular Silent Freaking Hill monster has no body horror involved because you dislike Slender?

Slender is youtube bait, and a classic example of it. From what I've played of it, it felt like a cheap game that had zero effort put into it and was aiming to exploit the Slender craze of the moment, which it did brilliantly.

It's cheap, yes, but it's damn effective. The reason it's popular on Youtube is because it scares people. You know... that thing that horror games are supposed to do in the end?

Slender is scary only if you're frightened of your own shadow and/or desperately inexperienced in real horror. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I am an arsehole, and I wear that banner with at least a certain dose of pride.

Well, it is harsh. And it's wrong on multiple levels, which makes the harshness annoying. And you had the gall to say that I'm "factually wrong" for finding something scary, which makes it doubly annoying. And you apparently say it all with pride, which makes it the most annoying thing I've read in quite a while. >:/

And you can freely tell me that I'm desperately inexperienced in real horror, but you'd be very, very wrong...

 

[pearcinator]

Gonna be crazy unoriginal and say Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Same here, although the game got less scary when I reached the torture dungeon area (the Nave?) which I found incredibly interesting in a macabre way. I didn't care about the monsters, I just wanted to find out what the next gruesome torture device was.

It's still the scariest game I've played though. Looking forward to SOMA; their next survival horror/sci-fi game

 

[Mikejames]

It's somewhere between Silent Hill 2 and the Fatal Frame for me.

Silent Hill 2's brilliant, but sadly I don't think one can really replicate the experience of playing it through for the first time and not knowing what's going to happen; discovering whether that slithering sound in the dark was getting closer, or why the characters were becoming increasingly off-kilter, etc.

It's not loud and in your face, but there's a slow sense of rising dread throughout the whole story. It was the solid balance between Shattered Memories' intelligent narrative and Silent Hill 3's macabre.

The Fatal Frame games are just scary in a way that other survival horror games aren't for me. They brilliantly used a mixture of atmosphere, setting, combat and well placed jump scares to get me right down to the bone. As much as I personally like the Silent Hill series, I find them way more intriguing and interesting than actually frightening.

Fatal Frame redefined the jump scare for me. Plenty of games are one trick ponies in that regard, trying to startle the player over and over in the same manner, but Fatal Frame kicked the crap out of me.

 

[V TheSystem V]

Since Amnesia was taken I'm going to say Condemned Criminal Origins. It probably hasn't aged super well but I remember it being one of the most fun and scary games I've played. Good story with a nice mix of atmosphere, psychological, and violent horror.

The part with the mannequins in the shopping centre made my mate cry. It was hilarious.

For me, scariest games have to be Resident Evil Remake and Outlast. Still haven't summoned up the courage to beat either of them.

 

[Poetic Nova]

Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl did scare me multiple times during my first playthrough, nothing can be more scary than mutants that can cloak AND claw your eyes out at the same time while there's still the need to have a tactical mindset. Oh and don't forget the parts that are set underground, almost no light and a ambeance that fits the whole atmosphere.

That's why it's my favorite FPS, or atleast one of them.

 

[Trude]

Most recently, the underlooked gem The Fall [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/189665092/the-fall-dark-story-driven-exploration-in-an-alien]. Anyone who enjoys a good sci-fi horror narrative about artificial intelligence should check this out.

 

[lionsprey]

since i tend to avoid horror games the scariest one ive played was probebly corpse party blood covered

 

[Rylot]

I recently watched an LP of a Korean game called 'White Day' that was pretty good. You're a school kid who stays late at school one day and gets locked in. You have to defeat the supernatural elements of the school while being chased by murderous janitors. I'd recommend checking it out.

 

[LAGG]

Here's a list of very scary games:

Siren
Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly
White Day: A Labyrinth Named School
Penumbra: Overture
Penumbra: Black Plague

 

[Programmed_For_Damage]

I've played a lot of "scary games" and I agree with people saying Silent Hill 2 (although I found the original a bit more unsettling for some reason) and Fatal Frame; but the scariest game I have ever played would be Outlast. That has made me jump out of my seat on more than one occasion, and swear profusely at the screen. I found myself literally holding my breath in instances where I was hidden under a bed and one of the bad guys was randomly searching for me. The sound, the atmosphere and the vibe are just A+. I will say this though, I found it got a little less scary the more it went on. But the first hour or so, man it's intense.

Shout out to 'Call of Cthlulu: Dark Corners of the Earth'. Highly underrated and downright freaky in places.