A terrible time has arrived. The nights fall, the smell of leaf mulch lingers in the air, and the clouds stretch across the sky, becoming thinner, wider and, it seems, further away - it looks as if the barriers between worlds are disappearing.
This is the perfect time to stay home; watching the long autumn evenings fade into night while sitting on the sofa, curled up with a mug of tea and your favorite spooky game. Maybe you'll turn to the old classics - Resident Evil or Dead Space - and when you look outside again, there will be only the pale light of the moon illuminating the dead streets and cold sidewalks of your road.
Perhaps you don't want to return to the classics - you've played through SOMA too many times and Alien: Isolation is no longer your thing. Therefore, we are ready to help you.
But instead of listing the same 12 games you've been reading about endlessly this year. We combed through our (sometimes repressed) memories of the scariest moments we've experienced in non-horror games. Whether it was an unexpected twist in a game that belongs to a completely different genre, a shared experience that made our necks crawl, or something else entirely, the team came together to analyze the scariest moments that came from somewhere you wouldn't expect.
Make sure the lights are on and you're not on the verge of a full bladder, and read on.
Connor, Staff Writer - Arkham Asylum Mind Games
Here's a real scary case. In Batman Arkham Asylum, Scarecrow is one of the main villains you face, and in addition to having his own fear toxin boss fight, he puts the player through a legendary scare that still lingers in my head to this day. as one of the best fake outs of all time.
We're talking about a fake game crash that makes you feel scared for a moment as the visuals and audio are static, and then shows the game opening upside down as the fear toxin does its thing. It's great and a good reason to revisit the classic Halloween brawler.
Kelsey, Guidebook Writer - Undertale's Subtle Moralism
Undertale is far from a horror game, but it had me hooked the first time I played it.
I came into Undertale blind, and I mean completely blind. I had almost no idea why people go crazy over this game, and I knew nothing about the morality system that it hides. So I took the approach I use for most new games and wanted to kill everything that came my way.
When I eventually told my friends that I started playing Undertale, their first question was about Toriel, was she still alive or not. I casually told them that I killed her at the first opportunity, and was met with shock and disbelief. That's when I found out that Undertale doesn't have to be actually kill anyone, even the bad guys. That day, I experienced real horror when I was suddenly overcome with guilt from the realization that I had killed Toriel in cold blood.
Luckily for you, if you didn't know this before, you do now. Hopefully you won't experience as much shock horror and guilt as I did, but even so, Undertale is a game full of unique characters, two of which are animated skeletons, making it a fittingly cozy choice for Halloween."
Sheriff, Staff Writer - Playing a single player battle royale game
Oftentimes, battle royale and extraction royale games look like they have more in common with horror than shooters. This is true for most of them, regardless of topic or bid. Even in BRs as subtle as Warzone, you can get the same feeling.
The trick to maximizing the fear factor is to play the game alone. It was my first experience of playing PUBG, when it was a new shooter that many people did not pay attention to. Playing any single player game is guaranteed to make your heart race and your hands shake. However, it's a whole other level of horror when you add in the scale of huge BR maps, which practically guarantee that the action will be infrequent.
Most of the time is spent waiting for something to happen, and the best players are often those who are unflappable when it happens. For example, I usually miss if they scare me in such games. Using the mouse with a shaky hand causes this.
So, give yourself a scare this Halloween by playing PUBG, Warzone, Escape from Tarkov or Hunt Showdown alone. No background music, nothing playing on the second monitor - nothing to distract from the silence. When they start shooting at you, everything will become clear.
Home, Art Editor - Watching Sonic drown
You all know that false sense of security that comes with playing Hydrocity or Labyrinth Zone and diving into the water for a few seconds. You are led astray by some kind of rings, or a mechanical enemy, or a hidden path ... and suddenly ... This music starts playing.
You panic. “Damn,” you think. "Fuck". Your eyes dart around the screen, willing a bubble of air to escape from the cracks in the pixel slabs. You push Sonic up, up, towards the surface. But it's too late. He's already dead... you're just making his last moments even more terrible. 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, visceral reaction to Sonic's drowning might be a bit... over the top. But I know I'm not the only one; there's an entire generation of people who have been traumatized watching Sonic's little erinacein lungs fill with water as he frantically scratches at his breathing tube before eventually drowning to his untimely death. Sega has a lot to answer for.
Jim, Welsh actor - stars in Die Hard in Star Trek Jeffreys Tubes
In the '90s, Star Trek was a huge mass-producing sci-fi factory, so it's no surprise that the franchise often dipped its toe into horror waters. There's an entire episode of Voyager that is essentially a direct rip-off of Aliens (and it's cool).
Star Trek: Elite Force is a first-person shooter game built on the Quake 2 engine, dating back to at least 2000. It's got as much fan service as you'd expect: faithfully recreated sets and technology, a fully voiced cast with actors from the main series, and a wacky storyline that allows for multiple unrelated fan-favorite villains to appear in one place. In the case of one memorable level, this is the same space station - the Scavenger Base, a fusion of Klingon, Hirogen, as well as ships and crew of Terrans from the mirror universe.
It was the latter that scared me half to death as a child. Hiding in the stealth compartment of a classic Constitution-class ship owned by the Federation's evil alter ego, you end up making your way through the "Jeffries Tubes" (or "ducts" if you're not a virgin). It's tense, it's claustrophobic, the possibility of detection looms over you like an angry Klingon, and the tunnels are full of hideous space weevils that make a disgusting squelching click-click-click sound before attacking you. It's horrible. Terrible.
Anyway, it's a good game and it's on GOG.com, you can vaporize Neelix in the cafeteria 10/10.
Alex, assistant editor - When technology goes wrong
Let me make another point: the scariest experiences in video games have nothing to do with horror games or games that are randomly scary - it has to do with when things go wrong. And by things, I mean our expensive, beloved video game equipment.
As someone who loves cutting edge PCs and also loves original retro arcade hardware, I know that feeling well. You turn on the arcade machine for the first time in months and hear an unpleasant screeching sound. POP! Transistor burned out? Or is there a problem with the display - an expensive, almost irreplaceable, difficult to restore component?
What about the horror of upgrading or rebuilding your PC? It doesn't matter that I'm now a master at it, and when I review GPUs and CPUs, I'm used to throwing parts in and out for testing and benchmarking with alarming regularity. I still shit myself a little every time I do it. What about real horror? When the black screen of death appears. You changed something and now the computer won't even turn on. My heart rate increases. Is it broken, or will you have to spend hours checking connections and fiddling around to get power again? Either way, it's terrible - and that's what chills my blood most about games.
