Fear is a biologically necessary emotion; it alerts us when something is simply not right. The scariest moments in media harness our fears in implausible ways to make us cower viscerally at what our conscious brains recognize as non-threatening, only to be overwritten in the moment by our amygdala. It’s only natural, then, to expect not to be afraid when you’re playing games that aren’t known for being outright horror. These are but a few stories of times that games lulled us into a false sense of security, only to pull the rug out from underneath us. And underneath that rug? Dead little girls.
The fantasy of controlling Batman in a video game is the allure of becoming one with the night. You’ve adopted the darkness. Shadows are your friends. Fear is your weapon.
Scarecrow exists to upend your comfort with the absence of light. While the first game in the series, “Arkham Asylum” plays with this paradigm in unsettling and evocative ways, nothing could have prepared you for the Man-Bat.
By now, you’ve likely become quite familiar with the experience of gliding and grappling around the night skies as Bruce Wayne’s brooding alter ego, as “Arkham Knight” is already the third game in the main series. The open air is your playground, the rooftops your home. You’ve grappled up toward the apex of a building hundreds, if not thousands, of times already. You know what to expect. You’re comfortable.
You grapple up toward the top of a building just as you always have, ready to launch yourself in the air like the graceful, musclebound gymnast that you are, when suddenly you are greeted not by the satisfaction of acceleration, but the horrific face of science gone awry, and the blood-curdling scream of a man who has lost his humanity. It’s Man-Bat.
Successfully pulling off an open-world jump scare like this has never really been replicated in other games. There’s no way to see it coming, and anyone who played through this moment and didn’t need a fresh pair of Batman underwear afterwards should be working on a bomb squad, because they have nerves of steel.
Do you remember the whimsy with which you approached life when you were five years old? The world was nothing but possibilities and Disney Channel original movies back then. Pokémon is supposed to be an adorable animal fighting simulator for twinkle-eyed youngsters, not a nightmare from which there is no waking.
There are still few stimuli more bone-chilling than hearing the Lavender Town theme, even as an adult. Listening to it is like hearing nails on the the chalkboard from your kindergarten classroom that you had repressed from your memory because of that time you accidentally called your teacher “mom.”
The horror runs much deeper than that, though. The town isn’t much more than a graveyard for Pokémon. Ascending the tower when you first arrive, which most players will attempt to do, is impossible because of the ghosts that haunt the building. They are unidentifiable without an item, and they’ll simply tell you to get out when you try to battle them.
The trainers that dwell in these halls of the dead, channelers, seem to be possessed by the ill at ease spirits, and one will even say “Give… me… your… soul…” I thought this was a baby game!
Everything about Lavender Town is so unnerving and hostile to a child. Suddenly the game has started operating in different ways than it has before, there are haunted specters and the music is making your skin crawl. The generation that grew up on Pokémon has some collective unconscious trauma.
The scariest moments are all about playing with your expectations. The “Dark Souls” series, while not full-blown horror, has been known to subject players to some creepy sections. These games also put players through so many ambushes that if you’re not playing in a constant state of paranoia, you’re not doing it right.
You’re adventuring into the Cathedral of the Deep. It’s still early on in the game, but you’ve seen enough ambushes to know what to look for. You stumble across a large, empty room with an item resting in the middle, and nothing else. It’s tantalizing. It beckons to you with its illuminating curiosity. You want it. You need it. You know it’s a trap.
You slowly enter the room, looking left and right, up and down, scanning for any irregularities. You don’t see any, so you think perhaps the game is just toying with you. You think that they want you to think that there’s an ambush, but really there isn’t. They’ve done that before. After all, if it’s a trap every single time, they’ll become too easy to predict. They’re in your head.
You proceed to the center of the room to claim your prize. You’ve earned it, you think to yourself. You turn to head back out of the room, only to find that an enemy called Deep Accursed has dropped down from the ceiling while you claimed your bounty. Such greed.
The Deep Accursed is a massive and horrifying spider-like creature. Its eyes are the eternal void into which you’ll stare as you fight for your life. You haven’t seen anything like it to this point in your perilous travels. You’ll never be able to un-see it, either.
This one’s a stretch, but bare with me. This isn’t an obvious choice for one of the scariest moments, as it’s not frightening in a traditional horror kind of sense, but it’s worth mentioning for how it turns the hero dynamic on its head.
About halfway through your joyous romp as everyone’s favorite web-slinger, the game takes a dramatic turn in tone as a terrorist attack is carried out in front of your eyes. You’ve spent the whole game thus far leaping from tall buildings and defeating hordes of bad guys with stylish ease, but when tragedy strikes and Peter Parker is rendered unable to act, the perspective switches to Miles Morales, before he got his own powers.
As Miles, you desperately shamble your way through a disaster zone, climbing through crumbling structures, narrowly avoiding gunmen as they brutally murder innocent people right in front of you. Again, while this is not traditional horror, it’s arguably among the scariest moments in all of gaming history because of its proximity to real events.
Giant spider-like creatures aren’t real. Man-Bats aren’t real. Terrorist attacks, however, are far too real. While the exact means of the attack are implausible in that Marvel kind of way, the fallout from such an unspeakable act is. I can only imagine the horrible PTSD that a survivor of a mass shooting would feel playing through this section in an otherwise light-hearted superhero game.
Let’s lighten thing up again, because lord knows this game is goofy. “Detroit: Become Human” approaches topics as serious as civil rights in America and domestic violence with a hilarious lack of tact. It’s a great game, but it deserves to be made fun of because it takes itself so seriously.
One of the three androids you play as, Markus, has been left for dead in a mass grave for androids. What had been a dramatic QTE-a-thon suddenly becomes a straight up horror game as you trudge through blood, mud and the remains of your fellow androids. It’s complete with jump scares and the option to euthanize some robots that the game desperately wants us to believe are sentient beings, so that’s fun.
What an experience this game is. You’ll go from painting with a sad, elderly Bob Ross to leading a civil rights revolution. You’ll go from literally taking out the trash to following the Underground Railroad, attempting to sneak across the border into Canada. You’ll also go from negotiating a hostage situation to slapping a drunken Mr. Krabs in the face.
The game’s brilliance and its shortcomings are the same things. It swings wildly for the fences and tries to make you feel every single human emotion on the spectrum. The way Markus pulls himself out of the primordial ooze with a new sense of self is incredibly inspiring. He’s overcome so much, and you, as the player, have overcome your fear. You’re ready to lead the android emancipation movement, apparently.
We’ve saved the ultimate example for last, as this is a non-horror game that is also absolutely a horror game. “Bugsnax” is similar to Pokémon in many ways. It’s ostensibly for kids, its gameplay is reminiscent of “Pokémon Snap,” and the stars of the show are the imaginative and adorable critters that inhabit their respective game worlds.
Where Bugsnax differentiates itself, however, is this constant feeling that something isn’t quite right. You play as an anthropomorphic creature called a Grumpus, and you’ve found yourself on an island inhabited by the titular bugs that are also snacks. So far it’s a little weird, but still harmless. Right?
As you capture and catalog the Bugsnax, you are also encouraged to feed them to your Grumpus companions, and in turn, their limbs will transform into the corresponding snacks. As you get farther along in the game, it becomes increasingly unclear what the true nature of the snacks actually is. Are they harmless little critters that just happen to be delicious, or are they something more insidious?
While I wouldn’t dare spoil the answer to that question, nor the ending, this game somehow manages to be adorable and deeply unsettling at the same time. It’s cute, it’s body horror and it’ll make you hungry, all at the same time.
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