I feel like I’ve played a good amount of horror titles, and I find I don’t really get scared much anymore.
What are some titles that scared you the most? I would love to hear your recommendations!
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it’s gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming’s sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Probably one of the VR ones.
Phasmophobia is tense and mostly because you can die and get no points, but there’s plenty of VRChat horror worlds as well. The quality varies wildly though, and you often face the worst VR horror of all: awful frame rates.
It’s gotta be Penumbra: The Black Plague and Amnesia: The Dark Descent back when I played them 12 years ago. Not many games have created the same amount of tension for me while playing.
the original resident evil. couldn’t even get through the first 15 minutes before i threw the controller across the room. i don’t play scary games anymore, but i love watching other people play!
silent hill was super fun to watch.
The friggin’ dogs in Resident Evil.
I have a kind of funny story about that. I was too young to be playing RE when it came out, but that didn’t stop me from sneaking it out of my dad’s collection of grownup games to try it anyway.
So there’s this well known jump scare, probably in the first fifteen minutes as you say where you’re running down a hallway and suddenly some dogs jump through these glass windows. I screamed, fumbled the controller, and was eaten by dogs. Might have been the first jump scare of my life.
So I hadn’t hit a save point, so you have to start the game over. So I decide to just leave the mansion through the front door instead of going out that way. And you get a cutscene where a dog jumps through the door and you have to wrestle it away.
I still haven’t played the game since.
But my wife and I are a big fan of the series, so eventually we decided to marathon them on the condition that she plays RE1. She’s playing the remake and goes into the room where the dogs jump through the windows and I’m holding my breath waiting for it to happen. Only it doesn’t.
So I’m a little disappointed, but I figure it’s a remake so maybe they’re switching things up a bit and going to put the jump scare somewhere else in the mansion.
Sooner or later you have to backtrack through that corridor though, and on like the third time going through this “safe” corridor the dogs jump through the window. She screams, fumbles the controller, and is eaten by dogs.
Seven-year-old me was vindicated that my adult wife also got punked and I’m not alone.
it’s the dogs! i love dogs, but having them jump through the window destroyed me.
I don’t know if I would call it horror, but Dredge is fantastic with creeping dread
Ooh I think I’ve heard of that. Thanks, I’ll check it out!
I found the batman vr game on psvr scariest. It wasnt that scary a premise, but because of the immersion, it was extra. You knew joker was in a cell and you had to Kean in to see. Although you knew he would get you, you had no choice. You had to physically force yourself to be attacked bybsteppibg forwards.
Similarly, the jumping off a cliff to commit suicide in suoerhot vr was quite confronting and scary. I think they edited it out.
During my search, I keep seeing things about VR, and it seems like it very well could be the next big thing to scare me lol. The added immersion might be just the ticket.
I think some have said the start of resident evil village is quite scary on vr, but I havnt played it. Probably less so if you’ve already played it. There are a bunch of junonscare games but they interest me less.
The original Resident Evil was pretty revolutionary and terrifying for me, but the 100% scariest I’ve played is the original Dead Space.
More recently, The Outlast Trials is really good, and I would HIGHLY recommend any of the Dark Pictures Anthology games, but my favorite is Man of Medan.
Dead space is great. I recently played the remake and thought they did a pretty good job! The anti grav sections were cool
I really loved it. But way too early i realized what was up. I remember reading about the gas leak incident in some comic i read when i was a kid in the 80s, and my mind made that connection rather early. I still enjoyed it throughly, and I’m always waiting for whatever Supermassive is up to next.
PT
Soma is definitely up there. It’s slowburn and not jumpscares. But when that shit hit, it hit hard.
I thought it was pretty good! There were definitely some tense moments for sure
But what type of spooky are you looking for?
Oh man, absolutely anything to make me feel dread or have me not knowing what to expect. Which is vague, I know. I feel like I’ve played so many horror games that they start to feel too gamey? If that makes any sense? It’s like I can predict when scares will happen or the gamey aspects sometimes don’t immerse me.
Oddly enough, subnautica really had me on my toes a few years back. Fatum Betula was an indie that also gave me some heeby jeebies but wasn’t exactly scary either.
I feel like I’ll probably need to crawl through dozens of indie titles or something. Or possibly go back to titles made prior to 2005. I’m also not caught up on recent games in the past couple of years, so maybe there’s something special I’ve missed.
But I’m also just curious to hear what made everyone else scared, too!
Welp, as a tie-over I can recommend plowing through some of the stuff on Gamejolt.
There’s a few pretty good indie spookies for free. They aren’t too long, but have some pretty good concepts if nothing else.
But yeah, one tends to get a bit numb on horror after a while. It helps to take a break every now and then.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been on gamejolt before, thanks, I’ll take a look!
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess I’m chasing that next scare. Something to wow me again, haha. I’m sure there’s gotta be something out there
Minecraft probably. I avoid legitimate horror games (and movies) and the fact that you don’t have saves can get a little stressful when you’re down in a cave, don’t know how to find your way back (and thus probably won’t find your body) and then basically get jumpscared by dangerous enemies or holes in the ground.
Lol that’s true. Nothing like a creeper or two to sneak up behind you in the dark.
if you want to know how to get back, pick a side (i chose left) and always put torches on that side going down. to come back up, keep the torches on your right. 🔥
Doesn’t work that well when the way is constantly twisting and splitting. Cave layout can be extremely confusing.
Subnautica can straight up give you thlassophobia.
Absolutely! It was probably one of the scariest games I’ve played in recent memory. The dread it made me feel was unmatched compared to a lot of horror titles
Dead Space scared me so much it made me numb to lot of horror games since.
Alien: Isolation. That shit is unplayable it’s so scary.
When it came out, I saw the trailer and decided that it’s not for me. Way too scary. Then recently I watched a commented speed run and thought “Yep, I was right”.
It has a VR version and I’m pretty sure if I tried it I’d run into a wall in a panic a few times at least.
It was definitely intense, that’s for sure. The aliens AI is pretty cool. At release, it was very exciting to see how advanced it seemed.
F.E.A.R (the first one only) was absolutely scary and psychologically nerve wrecking…
The multiplayer was amazing though, the nail gun was something else !
It’s a shame that I’m a quivering pussy, because I think the combat against the replicants in FEAR fucking rules. The shooting feels awesome, slow-mo karate is awesome, the game feels awesome to play.
…and then the game goes quiet after the shooting stops, and it delivers some of the spookiest atmosphere I’ve experienced even after two decades of age. A single light fixture moves suddenly, showing the shadow of something just behind me, and I jump out of my skin and have to take a break from playing.
The nail gun was so satisfying! The AI was cool! The way they would flank was pretty good for the time! The light and shadows were really great. Lots of tension mixed with the gun fights. In a lot of ways, Condemned reminds me of it, too.
So truee ! Yeah I remember that was something really unique to FEAR ! Never had seen a similar AI in other games :/
Yeah now that you mention it, there really haven’t been too many releases similar to FEARs gameplay style since then. It was a very unique combo of fps and horror. I would love to see someone tackle that style again
Killing Floor VR
Oh man I haven’t gotten a chance to try VR yet and I bet that would help immerse me in a whole new way. I can’t wait to see how VR improves over time
Recently, some games that shouldn’t have freaked me out, but did, were parts of Outer Wilds and Subnautica. Subnautica, in particular, got me with a very good jump scare that I think made me jump harder than any horror game has in the past decade lol.
I find games that induce dread really help with being scared. If you have any niche titles I would love to hear them too. I must have missed a lot probably anything prior to 2005. But even recent titles there’s a chance I could have missed them too!
You should play voices of the void then. Game is chock full of random spooks with lots of very quiet and relaxing downtime, so they hit pretty hard when they happen.