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Spooky season is upon us. The nights are drawing in, the smell of leaf mulch is in the air, and the clouds are stretching out across the sky, getting thinner and wider and seemingly further away – it all looks as if the barriers between the worlds are fading.
It’s the perfect time, then, to stay indoors; watch the long autumn evenings drip into night from the safety of your sofa, where you’re all wrapped up with a mug of tea and your favourite spooky game. Maybe you’ll turn to an old classic – Resident Evil or Dead Space – and by the time you look outside again, there’s only the pale light of a harvest moon, illuminating the dead streets and frigid pavements of your road.
Perhaps you don’t want to get back into a classic, though – you’ve played through SOMA one too many times, maybe, and Alien: Isolation just isn’t cutting it for you anymore. So we’re here to help.
But instead of reeling off the same 12 games you’ll have read about ad infinitum this year, VG247 has taken a slightly different track. We’ve combed through our (sometimes repressed) memories of the scariest moments we’ve experienced in gaming… that aren’t from horror games. Whether it’s an unexpected twist from a title in a whole other genre, a general expereince that’s made our neck skin crawl, or something else entirely, the team has come together to examine the scariest moments that come from places you didn’t expect.
Make sure the lights are turned on and you’re not on the cusp of a full bladder, and read on.
Connor, staff writer – Arkham Asylum’s mind games
Here’s a real spooky one. In Batman Arkham Asylum, The Scarecrow is one of the big villians you run into, and aside from having his own fear-toxin induced boss fight, forces the player through a legendary fright that still sits in my head as one of the all-time best fake outs ever.
We’re talking about a fake game crash, which for just a moment has you freaking out as the visuals and audio static out, before revealing a flipped opening to the game as the fear toxin does its work. It’s brilliant, and makes for a good excuse to go back to a classic brawler this Halloween.
Kelsey, guides writer – Undertale’s subtle moralising
Undertale is far from a horror game, but it’s one that didn’t fail to get under my skin the first time I played it.
I went into Undertale blind, and I mean, completely blind. I had little to no idea why people went wild for this game, nor did I know anything about the morality system it hid away. So, I took the approach that I do for most new games, and wanted to kill anything that got in my way.
When I eventually told friends I’d started Undertale, their first question was about Toriel, and if she remained alive or not. I casually told them I killed her at the first opportunity, and was met with shock and disbelief. This is when I learnt that in Undertale, you don’t have to actually kill anyone, even the bad guys. That day, real horror emerged as I suddenly became ridden with guilt knowing I’d murdered Toriel in cold-blood.
Fortunately for you, if you didn’t know about this beforehand, you do now. Hopefully you won’t encounter the shock horror and barrage of guilt that I did, but even so, Undertale is a game full of unique characters – two of which are some lively skeletons – which make it an appropriately cosy pick for Halloween.’
Sherif, staff writer – Playing a battle royale game solo
Often times, battle royale and extraction royale games play like they have more in common with horror than they do shooters. This is true for the majority of them, regardless of theme or stakes. Even a barely-BR like Warzone can have the same feel.
The trick to maximising the fear factor is playing the game on your own. This was my first experience with PUBG, back when it was a new janky shooter that most didn’t pay attention to. Playing any one-life game is guaranteed get your heart racing, and your hand shaking. It’s a whole other level of terrifying, however, when you throw in the scale of BR’s massive maps, which all but ensure that action is sparse.
Most of the time is spent in anticipation of something to happen, and the better players are often those who are unfazed when it does happen. I, for instance, tend to miss my shots if I get spooked in those games. Using a mouse with a shaky hand will do that.
So, give yourself a good scare this Halloween by jumping into PUBG, Warzone, Escape from Tarkov, or Hunt Showdown on your own. No background music, nothing playing on a second monitor – no distractions from the quiet. When you get shot at, it will all make sense.
Dom, features editor – Watching Sonic drown
You all know this one – the false sense of security you get when playing Hydrocity or Labyrinth zone and you pop into some water for what you think is going to be a few seconds. You get side-tracked by some rings, or a mechanical enemy, or a hidden path… and suddenly that music starts playing.
You panic. “Fuck,” you think. “Fuck“. Your eyes flit across the screen, willing a pocket of air to bubble up from cracks in the pixelated slabs. You urge Sonic up, up – to the surface. But it’s too late. He’s already dead… you’re just making his last few moments even more awful. He is dead, and his blood is on your hands. Game over, loser.
Given that I have an irrational fear of bridges over water and that I can’t bring myself to walk on piers, I think my strong, gut reaction to Sonic drowning might be a bit… over-the-top. But I know I’m not the only one; there’s a whole generation of us that have been traumatised by watching Sonic’s little erinaceinae lungs fill up with water as he desperately scratches at his windpipe before eventually sinking to his untimely death. Sega has a lot to answer for.
Jim, Welsh Actor – Doin’ a Die Hard in Star Trek Jeffries Tubes
’90s Star Trek was an enormous factory for mass-producing popular science-fiction, so it’s not really surprising that the franchise has frequently dipped a ridged toe into horror-themed waters. There’s an entire Voyager episode that’s basically a straight-up rip off of Aliens (and it rules).
Star Trek: Elite Force is a Voyager set first-person shooter, built in the Quake 2 engine no less, from the year 2000, which is rammed with as much fan service as you’d expect: faithfully recreated sets and tech, a fully voiced cast with actors from the main show, and a daft storyline that gives license for a load of otherwise unrelated fan-favourite villains to all show up in the same place. In the case of one memorable level, the same space station – Scavenger Base, an amalgam of Klingon, Hirogen, and mirror-universe Terran ships and crew.
It’s the latter that scared me half to death as a kid. While skulking around in a stealth section on a classic Constitution class ship from the Federation’s evil alter-ego, you end up spelunking through the ship’s “Jeffries Tubes” (or ‘air ducts’ if you’re not a virgin). It’s tense, it’s claustrophobic, the possibility of discovery bears down on you like an enraged Klingon, and the tunnels are full of horrid space-weevil things that make a nastly squelchy clicky chirpy sound before lunging at you. It’s horrid. Horrid.
Anyway it’s a good game and it’s on GOG.com, you can vaporise Neelix in the mess hall 10/10.
Alex, assistant editor – When tech goes wrong
Let me put forward a different thesis: the scariest experience in video gaming isn’t anything to do with horror games, or games that are accidentally scary – it’s to do with when stuff goes wrong. And by stuff, I mean our expensive, beloved video game hardware.
As somebody who loves a cutting-edge PC and also adores original, retro arcade hardware, I know this feeling well. You power on an arcade machine for the first time in months, and you hear a nasty, sharp POP! A transistor has blown? Or an issue with the display, an expensive, near-irreplaceable, difficult-to-repair essential component?
Or what about that terror when you’re upgrading or adjsuting your PC? It doesn’t really matter that I’m now a dab hand at it, and when I’m reviewing GPUs and CPUs I’m used to yanking parts in and out to test and benchmark with alarming regularity. A little bit of me still shits myself every time I do it. And the real horror? When you get that black screen of death. You’ve changed something, and now the PC doesn’t even POST. My heart rate soars. Is this broken, or is it just going to take hours of checking connections and messing about to get power again? Either way, it’s horrifying – and is the thing in gaming that most chills my blood.
So there you have it; VG247’s very own list of terrifying moments in games that you’re not going to find in another SEO-bait ‘best horror games‘ headline, anywhere else on the internet. Hopefully it’s given you some inspiration this October, and helped you decide which terrifying game you’re going to play as we draw ever closer to All Hallow’s Eve.
Of course, though, if you want a real fright… you could just go to bed early and be alone with your thoughts.