Realizing that Alien Isolation hasn’t been discussed too much here as a spooky game. Knowing it’s following you and then sprinting into a hiding space and watching it go by is terrifying. The Stealth and Horror combo is pretty potent.
Also, the “trope” of a singular unstoppable enemy that is always stalking you is always terrifying in video games. Even if it’s just Big Boo chasing you through a ghost house. That guy in RE2/Remake fits the bill as well. Some times you hear his music building and that scares you and sometimes you turn a corner and he’s just there taking 2 yard strides towards you and you jump out of your skin
Hot take: Cause that game is dumb and shouldn’t be talked about!!
Jokes aside, if that game was a tight 8-10 hours, it would be in my top 5 (hell, maybe top 3) horror games of all time. But that thing took over 20 hours to get through and the last 3rd of it is an absolute miserable slog.
And the pursuer horror trope is a good one! Mr. X in REmake 2 is a shining example, but I would say that the xenomorph is absolutely the most terrifying and effective example in any horror game. Too bad I spent about 12 more hours than needed with it.
I still think the focus and intensity of the Alien in Isolation is commendable. But that format of game is suited to a shorter game length. Heck, even most horror movies barely make it past 1hr30m
I’m thinking the scariest gaming experience was playing Doom 3 on Xbox in 2005-ish when I was a kid. Did not complete the game, but it haunts me still!
Alien is one of my favorite movies so i was super into the VIBE of Isolation, but I have such a hard time getting into first-person games that i didnt mess around with it.
Also not to humblebrag but that game is INSANE if you have surround sound cause it really sounds like it’s running around in the vents behind you etc
I guess this is an obvious one for scary games but a less funny answer since we were all presumably at least like 22 years old when it came out (I’m much older): Phasmophobia.
I actually think the game is now less scary than it was when I played it in early access. The bad PS2 graphics and low quality made it feel like anything could happen. Now it’s just too polished to freak me out, but also knowing how the game actually works makes it less scary. Those first several times playing it though, it was legit terrifying and hilarious. Now it’s a game we play a couple times in October for a laugh which is still valuable, but not as scary.
Phasmophobia is a good scary game. So are adjacent games like Lethal Company.
What makes those games so scary, in my first few interactions with them, is not knowing all the rules of the game and thus not knowing what might be a dangerous action. So with Phasmophobia, I didn’t know what might trigger a “hunt,” how to hide, or things like that, so when any random event would happen, I would be terrified, and I had several moments where I’d hide barely outside and hope my friends didn’t notice.
As for Lethal Company, there are a lot of freakish interactions that cast a terrifying pall around every action until one builds up routines. For instance, there is one enemy that will sneak up behind you and kidnap you, but if you make eye contact briefly they will back off. It’s a lot more scary when you don’t know how to get it to go away.
Also, my friend group has learned to communicate so surprises are rarer. “There’s a coil-head!” over the walkie talkies can introduce some fear, but it’s more controlled than genuinely not knowing anything and then finding their bodies with some soundtrack gore and a monster looming in your field of vision.
I wonder what single instance jump scare got the most people in video game history. P.T. comes to mind but not sure enough people have played it, high success rate though I suspect
i once stayed at an airbnb for a week cause our plumbing was out and the house had a ps4 with PT on it!! I felt too scared to play it but forced myself to do it cause when am I gonna get that opportunity again.
Ah interesting! I haven’t seen Caveat but I will check it out. My partner loved Oddity and is much more of a horror fan than me so I’m sure she will like it!
Going into big spoilers here...
What I liked about Oddity was that while it was a traditional ghost/demon scenario as you say, I felt it was subversive in that the true horror just came from real people doing normal evil stuff. So the scene that really got under my skin was the home invasion, it felt suffocatingly inevitable as a viewer that the weird guy at the door was telling the truth… and yet I know I couldn’t have acted differently in that scenario (though getting in the tent was dumb). I loved the whole build up of waiting for the reveal of the intruder, and the way that scene was executed.
Conversely all the supernational stuff was really on the side of “good” in the movie, like the ghosts and the weird wooden man were super creepy visually… I was rooting for them by the end.
The resident evil window dog was so effective that Capcom put multiple riffs on it in subsequent games. In Code Veronica they break basement windows and come up from underneath a building!
some other considerations, although I think window dogs is likely to be ultimately correct:
is Sinistar a possibility. What is the total volume of player first encounters with Sinistar vs later console game jump scares just by virtue of an arcade game getting a lot of novel players. Does a populated arcade setting reduce the likelihood of a jump scare landing
P.T. had a million plus downloads in its early days. Does a near 1:1 jump scare hit rate for roughly a million players put it at the top. Also: P.T. did circulate pretty heavily on twitch, so do viewers getting jump scared in tandem with the streamer count?
Resident Evil sales look like 5.3 million and that Batman game with the bat guy jump scare is also over 5 mil. Is this the real winner?
yeah definitely see Caveat. Dont get me wrong, I liked Oddity and appreciated what it was doing, I only mean to point out that Caveat is stronger on the raw weird scariness at least to me. It’s all at the home invasion sequence tenor
I was wondering if it might be a non-horror–branded game, since Horror Games tend to filter players who don’t enjoy Horror Games. So like the eel in Mario, or Bioshock Infinite sold like crazy and has what I understand to be a pretty high success rate scare
