The spooky season is coming. As night fell, the smell of leaf cover was in the air, and the clouds stretched across the sky, thinner and wider, seemingly farther and farther away – it all seemed as if the barriers between the worlds were disappearing.
Well, now is the perfect time to stay indoors. Watch the long fall nights drip off the couch into the night, where you’re all in for a cup of tea and your favorite horror game. Maybe you’ll turn to an old classic – Resident Evil or Dead Space – when you look out again, only to harvest the pale glow of the moon, illuminating your lifeless streets and frigid sidewalks.
However, maybe you don’t want to go back to the classics – maybe you’ve played SOMA too many times and Alien: Isolation is no longer for you. So we are here to help.
However, instead of the same 12 games you read about Ad Infinity this year, iGamesNews took a slightly different trajectory. We’ve combed through our (sometimes repressed) memories of the scariest moments we’ve experienced in games…those that aren’t from horror games. Whether it’s an unexpected twist on a title of a completely different genre, the general experience of getting the skin on our necks crawling, or something else entirely, the team has come together to examine the scariest moments from places you didn’t expect.
Make sure the light is on and you’re not on the tip of a full bladder, then read on.
Connor, Staff Writer – Mind Games at Arkham Asylum
This is a real creepy one. In Batman Arkham Asylum, the Scarecrow is one of the big villains you encounter, and in addition to having boss fights triggered by his own fear poison, it forces the player to experience a legendary scare that still persists One of the best fake outs ever made in my mind.
We’re talking about a fake game crash that startles you when the visuals and audio freeze, then reveals a flipped game opening when the fear toxin comes into play. It’s awesome, and a great excuse to get back to the classic brawler this Halloween.
Kelsey, Instructing Writer – Undertale’s Subtle Preaching
Undertale is far from a horror game, but it didn’t fail the first time I played it.
I got into the Undertale blind spot, I mean, totally blind. I have little idea why people are crazy about this game and I don’t know the moral system it hides. So, I took the approach I do for most new games and wanted to kill anything that got in my way.
When I finally told my friends that I started Undertale, their first question was about Toriel, and whether she was still alive. I told them casually that I killed her at the first opportunity, to shock and disbelief.This is when I learned that in Undertale you don’t have to Actually Kill anyone, even the bad guys. The real horror came that day because I suddenly felt guilty for knowing that I had murdered Toriel in cold blood.
Luckily for you, if you didn’t know this beforehand, you know it now. Hope you don’t encounter the shocking horror and guilt barrage that I did, but even so, Undertale is a game full of unique characters – two of them lively skeletons – that make it Halloween suitable choice.
Sherif, Staff Writer – Playing the Battle Royale Game Alone
A lot of times, battle royale and battle royale games are played more like horror games than shooters. That’s true for most of them, regardless of theme or stake. Even someone with almost no BR like Warzone can feel the same way.
The trick to maximizing the fear factor is to play the game yourself. This was my first experience with PUBG when it was a new janky shooter that most people didn’t notice. Playing any single player game is guaranteed to get your heart racing and your hands shaking. However, when you throw in the scale of BR’s massive map, it’s another terrifying layer altogether, which pretty much ensures that the action is sparse.
Most of the time is spent in anticipation of what is happening, and the better players tend to be the ones who stay unmoved when it happens. For example, if I get spooked in those games, I tend to miss shots. This can be done using the mouse with trembling hands.
So jump into PUBG, Warzone, Escape from Tarkov or Hunting Showdown this Halloween and give yourself a good dread. There’s no background music and nothing is playing on the second monitor – no distraction from the silence. When you get hit, everything makes sense.
Dom, Feature Editor – Watching Sonic Drown
You all know this – when playing Hydrocity or Labyrinth zone you get a false sense of security and then you jump into some water you think it’s going to be for seconds.You’re blocked by some rings, mechanical enemies, or hidden paths… all of a sudden that music Start playing.
You panic. “Fuck,” you think. “damn it“. Your eyes flick across the screen, hoping for a bag of air to emerge from the cracks in the pixelated slab. You urge Sonic to rise, to the surface. But it’s too late. He’s dead…. .. you just made his last moments even scarier. He’s 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 a pier, I think my strong gut reaction to Sonic’s drowning might be a little… overdone. But I know I’m not the only one; an entire generation of us has been traumatized by watching Sonic’s little erinaceinae’s lungs fill with water as he desperately grabbed his windpipe before eventually sinking into his young pass away. Sega has a lot of questions to answer.
Jim, Welsh Actor – Going All Out in Star Trek Jeffries Tubes
’90s Star Trek was a huge factory for mass-producing popular science fiction, so it’s no surprise that the series often dipped ridged toes in horror-themed waters. There’s an entire Voyager episode that’s basically a straight copy of Alien (and it rules).
Star Trek: Elite Force is a first-person shooter in the Voyager series, powered by the Quake 2 engine, and from 2000, it offers as much fan service as you’d expect: a faithful reproduction of settings and techniques , fully voiced alongside the cast of the main show, and a goofy storyline that allows for a slew of otherwise unrelated fan-favorite villains all in one place. In the case of one unforgettable level, the same space station – Scavenger Base, a mixture of Klingon, Hirogen and Mirror Universe Terran ships and crews.
It was the latter that scared me half to death as a child. When you’re sneaking around in the stealth section of the classic Constitution-class ship from the evil alter ego of the Federation, you end up going through the ship’s “Jeffreys pipe” (or “air pipe” if you’re not a virgin). It’s tense and claustrophobic, the possibility of discovery weighs on you like an enraged Klingon, and the tunnels are full of terrifying space weevils that give orders before they pounce on you The annoying clicking sound. terrible. scary.
Anyway, it’s a good game, it’s on GOG.com and you can vaporize Neelix in the cafeteria on October 10th.
Alex, Assistant Editor – When Technology Goes Wrong
Let me make a different argument: the scariest experiences in video games have nothing to do with horror games or accidentally scary games – it has to do with when something goes wrong. When I say something, I mean our expensive, beloved video game hardware.
As someone who loves cutting-edge PCs and loves original retro arcade hardware, I know this feeling well.You turn on the arcade for the first time in months and you hear a nasty, high-pitched sound Popular music! Transistor burned out? Or is it an issue with the display, an expensive, nearly irreplaceable, and difficult-to-repair basic component?
Or what about that fear when you upgrade or tweak your PC? It doesn’t matter that I’m a dab hand right now, when I review GPUs and CPUs, I’m used to pulling parts in and out with surprising regularity for testing and benchmarking purposes. I still have a little shit every time I do this. real horror? When you get that black screen of death. You changed something and now the PC doesn’t even POST. My heart beat faster. Is this broken, or is it just a matter of spending hours checking connections and screwing up to power up again? Either way, it’s terrifying — and the most chilling thing about the game.
So there you have it; iGamesNews’s own list of in-game scary moments you won’t find anywhere else on the internet in another SEO-baiting “Best Horror Game” title. Hopefully it’ll give you some inspiration this October and help you decide which horror game you’ll be playing as we get closer and closer to Halloween.
Of course, though, if you want real fear…you can go to bed early and think on your own.
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