Scariest Moment In A Game

BoBoTheBum

New member
Dec 2, 2007
7
0
0
I'm a bit embarassed to say my most horrifying moment in gaming history was in Bioshock. It was my first play, and it was just before the first big daddy encounter (or perhaps second?). The music was building, the enemies were mysteriously absent...and BOOM flaming Bouncer comes shooting through the wall.
 

TimeTraveller

New member
Jan 6, 2008
10
0
0
Let's see:

As a young kid watching a friend playing RE1 I was terrified of the zombie turning around when you first go in the mansion.

The school in general in SH1, especially those squeking ghost things. And then that bit later when you go into a room and are like "ok, nothing here, all good" and you go to open the door and you hear a loud smash. Got me every time. And also when you were in the sewers, the music and static on the radio just freaked me out so much I legged it, convinced something was going to grab me from behind any second.

FEAR gave me chills, but nothing drastic. I traded that game in due to lack of interest rather than scare factor.

Project Zero. I love those games but dag nabbit they scared me. Good balance of atmosphere scares and jump scares. I tried to play the game at one point from peeking out between my fingers.
 

Anton P. Nym

New member
Sep 18, 2007
2,611
0
0
I thought this was an earlier thread from last year...

Well, since it isn't, I'll chip in my answer from that one. The scariest moment in a game for me came in Alien vs. Predator (the first one, on PC in my case) during the Marine campaign. For the longest time I just couldn't make myself go into the atmospheric processor on LV 426... the rain, the howling wind, the Alien calls in the background, the darkness... nearly made me reprise Hudson's dialog.

In second place was the first time a Flood Combat Form got back up on me in Halo. I spent way too much ammo putting it back down. Long, uncontrolled bursts...

-- Steve
 

the_tralfalmadorian

New member
Jan 11, 2008
221
0
0
Anniko said:
Why has nobody mentioned the beachfront hotel in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines?

Definetly the scariest moment in a game that I've played.
Also, if you like FPSRPG games, then that's definetly one to get (make sure you get the official and unofficial patches aswell, otherwise it's quite buggy).
holy god this. that level scared the hell out of me every time i played it. fortunately by about the third playthrough, i could just blaze through it, thus minimizing the horror. but that first time.... i damn near crapped my pants.
 

moytai

New member
Dec 30, 2007
3
0
0
Silent Hill 2 in the basement of the Hospital where ther is no lights and all you hear is a screech. That was the first time i was afraid to play a game in my life. Cudos SH2 for scaring the shit outa me
 

Bling Cat

New member
Jan 13, 2008
899
0
0
most of these arnt scary in "oh my god im in the dark and something else is here" way, but scary none the less
mass effect: when your talking to sovereign, and how hes just so emotionless when talking about genocide.
assasins creed: when you trigger your first city wide alert and have every gaurd attack you at once
halo 3: the first time you see the scarab come over the roof, in the minute or so before you realise you cn now kill them
 

RabbitDynamite

New member
Dec 31, 2007
60
0
0
Some of the sanity effects in Eternal Darkness really screwed with your head. Walking into a room and suddenly finding my character was a zombie really creeped me right out, to the extent that I threw down the controller and ran out of the room.

REmake for the Gamecube was just creepy all over the place.

Wierdly enough, the normal zombies in Half-Life or HL2 have never fazed me. First time I met a fast zombie was a wholly different matter. Bad enough this vicious rotted-corpse type THING jumps at me like lightning, bad enough I can't kill it with shots that would bring down a normal zombie, but HL2 keeps its sound effects looping when the game is paused,so when I pause the game in panic, this thing keeps grunting and snarling into my headphones right, like it was right next to my head.Gahhah.

Oh, and the amputees in painkiller's asylum. Logically, legless zombies shouldn't be especially scary, but the way thy move just presses the primal fear button for me right off.
 

FearTheLiving

New member
Jan 13, 2008
4
0
0
I'd Have to say The Suffering start of the game only two reasons weird ass monsters and you're in a prison.

(Off Topic) Very good game if you haven't played it. The second one is kinda shadowed by the first one though.
 

David Miscavidge

New member
Dec 13, 2006
38
0
0
I live in San Francisco. Many years ago I was playing through Quake 1 singleplayer for the 2nd or 3rd time, at about 4:00 AM. At that moment, there was a pretty intense little earth tremor, a real 'quake.' I live in an old apartment building which sways and moves even when commuter trains pass by a block away. Between the actual motion of the earthquake and the disorientation of experiencing in-game motion at the same time, I was heavily freaked out. I threw the headphones on the floor and ran down the hall, yelling.

Also, I'll second the nominations for the Ravenholm sequence from HL2. Those asthmatic sounding zombies with what looks like osteoporosis and clusters of poison-crabs riding around on them are genuinely creepy. (The whole concept of using organic parasites to suppress a dissident population is pretty screwed up--Thanks, Marc Laidlaw.)
 

downskitty

New member
Jan 15, 2008
16
0
0
Fatal Frame 2 creeped me right the hell out of my skin. It wasn't the ghosts so much as it was the creepy whispering sounds and whatnot, especially with having a 5.1 system and hearing it so much right behind me.

Manhunt sometimes gave me a jump whenever I'd get discovered, especially with the Smiley gang, and my pulse would quicken every time. But the moment in there that was the first time meeting Piggsy. I've just lost all my weapons escaping out of an elevator which he just began chainsawing into, and I climb out of the shaft into a decrepit, wooden floor with rot and decay everywhere. I creep down the hall and just as I reach the corner, he charges around right in front of me, squealing like a pig wearing nothing but a pig's head over his own, and chainsaw revving. And then to top it off, he otherwise searches by sniffing around the hallways, and in one room when hiding, "Sniff sniff" is seen on the wall smeared in blood.

In Bioshock, the two biggest for me were when I first pissed off a Big Daddy, and the second was the first meeting with the Houdini splicers. A guy shouts "I need some help here!" and only his departing shadow is seen. I follow, figuring it's likely a set up, and end up at the end of a darkened hallway with a desk that has some candles and a weird, wooden mask facing me. I hear "Hello, beautiful!" behind me, and turning around, am face to face with the splicer, and with the only other light source being around the corner at the opposite end, all I see is just his two eye holes of his mask, glowing red. I just stopped and we stared at each other for 10 seconds, and then he just suddenly disappears in a flash of red. My immediate words were "What in the FUCK?"

And then there was the first time seeing Pyramid Head. Just staring at me from the other side of those bars, as I approached. Holy hell.

And I have to second the mentioning of Adam from Dead Rising. The voice, his appearance, those two chainsaws being juggled, and seeing the two "kids" in the ride...creepy through and through. On the other hand, Stephen was pure hilarity. "THIS IS MY STOOORRRRRRRRE!"
 

bobofdeath9

New member
Jan 15, 2008
24
0
0
i scare so easily
and the jumpy headcrabs from halflife didnt help at all
i get jumpy when i play crysis and some Soldiers partols up right behind me without me notcing and lets of a few rounds

i jump SOOO easily its insance actually

I first played HL2 on my buds computer
and at 1:30 in the morning we just got to Ravenholme
so we were happily mincing our way thru that with shotguns and saw blades when his sister comes in his room
we dont notice bacuse were to enticed in the game and she puts her hands on both of our shoulders

ahhhh
we were shaking for like 45 minutes afterwards
it was INSANE
 

PhoenixFlame

New member
Dec 6, 2007
401
0
0
Chalk up another vote for the first Silent Hill. Talk about taking a graphical limitation and running with it...

Part of good fear is your own imagination wondering what is going on or what will come out of the fog or pitch-black darkness to get at you. The radio in the Silent Hill series made it all the much more worse, because when it crackled to life, you KNEW something was there but you didn't know what until it came at you. Have to love that.
 

PurpleRain

New member
Dec 2, 2007
5,001
0
0
downskitty talking about dead rising made me remember another one:

The Army Guy in the hardware store. What the fucking hell!!! Dead bodies hung off the roof, dripping and headless. Blood smeard throught the store, when you first go in and see the mess... horror creeps its way into your pants.

Actually, most bosses in the game were pretty scary. The snipers (mainly the father), the priest, the clown, the Fat Butcher scared the hell out of me. Fighting in amoungst dead animal corpses... not cool!
 

Kermi

Elite Member
Nov 7, 2007
2,538
0
41
My fiancee was recently playing Silent Hill: 0rigins on our PSP and the game advises playing it with headphones in a darkened room, so she did. She was playing it while lying on the bed in our bedroom while I was playing Halo 3 in the lounge room. Suddenly above the sound of dying Flood and gunfire came a short sharp scream.

I ran in to discover she'd been assembling a dummy by placing human organs inside a dummy, and when the last organ clicked into place, the dummy's eyes snapped open.
 

Sayvara

New member
Oct 11, 2007
541
0
0
Late entry...

One moment I remember very clearly and that got my pulse up to about 120 (I average 55 at rest ;) ) was actually in good old Dark Forces. At one point in the game you have worked your sorry self deep into some... structure and finished your objective. At that point you get your first taste of how mindbogglingly detrimental to your health the dark trooper can be, as a first gen. version jumps you and almost shivs you to festive confetti.

After I defeated that one and sat there wideeyed and panting I realized I hade to make my way out of the damned place and - of course - I couldn't go the way I came in. Instead I had to navigate a maze of Jefferies Tubes - ooops, wrong universe - maze where I had 10 meters of visibility at the most. While in this place and almost utterly lost I suddenly hear another dark trooper running around inside the maze! And the sound gets louder... and louder... and fades... and gets LOUDER... and fades... and I'm nearly getting into a bloody panic since I can't see the damned thing! Then without warning the entire screen flases red as the enemy starts to make hashed meat of my arse! AAAAARRRGGGHH!!!

That was a scary moment.

/S
 

Ricknub

New member
Dec 19, 2007
10
0
0
A friend of mine rented a Dreamcast many years ago, along with Resident Evil: Code Veronica. System rentals didn't come with memory cards, and obviously we weren't about to buy one for a 5-day rental.

We weren't exactly Resident Evil masters at the time (being a huge fan of the series, I had played through all of the previous games, but I wasn't doing knife-only speed runs, to say the least), so we didn't make it a priority to conserve a lot of ammo and herbs or to avoid as many fights as possible. After tempting death one too many times, we finally died at the Tyrant battle (not on the plane), which I believe was somewhat close to the end of Claire's scenario.

While the game wasn't the most frightening one I've played, the fact that we were not saving at all made it much more intense, and reintroduced a fear of video game death to me that I had not felt in quite some time.

Oh yeah, and Fatal Frame with the volume blasting and the lights out. Playing that once was more than enough.
 
Nov 28, 2007
10,686
0
0
Playing RE4...my first RE game...in pitch black (could barely see my controller)...and no ambient sounds. That and playing Doom 3 for the first time in a room with the lights off at 8:30 at night.
 

Vigormortis

New member
Nov 21, 2007
4,531
0
0
One of the first, and most scary moments for me was in Half-Life when you first come across a Gargantua. You're moving down the tunnel and you hear gun fire from a group of marines, then you hear thunderous foot-steps that shake the ground beneath you. When you finally reach a point in the tunnel where you can see them you see this huge thing come out of no where, 12+ feet tall, spraying flames from it's hands killing the soldiers. Then, it sees you and starts running towards you, it's one bright red eye glowing in the dark. Man, when that first happened, I about jumped out of my chair. All I could think as I ran was "oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, don't stop running, don't stop running". Didn't help when I came to realize every shot I fired at it bounced off. That and EVERY time I'd be crawling around in a duct and a friggin' headcrab would jump out. They always, ALWAYS caught me off-guard, lol. They're not even scary just watching 'em crawl around or fighting them, but when they jump at you from out of seemingly no where and you remember, for a fraction of a second, what they do? Yeah. The screech they make doesn't help either.
 

Weimdog

New member
Nov 18, 2007
20
0
0
werepossum said:
F.E.A.R. - Monolith did such a great job of having Alma scuttle past in the corner of your vision. And the scene in the demo where you get to the top of the ladder and Alma appears in front of you - I jumped and cursed out loud. A lot of the rest was hokey though.

One scene in Doom 3, where an imp bursts through a stairwell you're about the climb. Actually, once you install the Ducttape mod it's a decent game.

AvP2 when you're on a lift and you can hear the aliens around you. So many times when I was playing that game my wife would open the computer room door and I'd jump like crazy.
All of the above, and add a bunch of halflife scares (the typical headcrab/fast-zombie hiding in a vent). Also half-life, is ep.1, trying to get the lift to work in the dark. Oh, and Ep. 2, when you go down the elevator shaft on your way to pick up the yellow car, there is a door that bursts open... *sigh*, you'd have to see it and hear it.

Also, believe it or not, in Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire for N64, I was pretty frightened by the sewer level. Tentacle monster in murky water? Ick.