Scariest game i've ever played...

[Mikeus Caesar]

...is a map for Half Life 2. With the name Nightmare House, you'd probably expect a few cheap scares, but no, this is something different. I fell off my chair and hid under the table at some points, it was that scary. A recommended must have for anyone who has Half Life 2!

http://halflife2.filefront.com/file/...re_House;47305

[Somebody Else]

Waaah! Now I can't sleep...

[Zain]

With the link, I don't see what Somebody Else's crying about.... Looks interesting though!

-ZainDustin

[Lemur]

There was an RPG called Vampire Bloodlines that did a genuinely creepy haunted hotel. I mean, jump-out-of-your seat scary. I know a person who couldn't complete it because it was too darn scary, so he emailed me his savegame, and I took his character through the sequence, then mailed back the savegame.

Never played the System Shock games; they're supposed to have some hair-raising moments.

[Lehesu]

I thought Aliens vs. Predator 2 was pretty scary. In retrospect, it wasn't really that bad. I guess the main thing was playing a human character that actually felt overmatched going against the other races. As a human, you feel more like prey than a hunter.

This is why F.E.A.R wasn't really that scary to me. It was creepy, but I knew that I had all the tools to take care of anything in my way.

[Xiahou]

There was an RPG called Vampire Bloodlines that did a genuinely creepy haunted hotel. I mean, jump-out-of-your seat scary. I know a person who couldn't complete it because it was too darn scary, so he emailed me his savegame, and I took his character through the sequence, then mailed back the savegame.

Yeah, that was definitely a good one.

Eternal Darkness and RE4 also come to mind.

[Mithrandir]

Resident Evil 2 on the PlayStation had some nice moments too, when you'd just walk on your high heels, and walk, and walk into a dark alley and walk past a door and WHAM the door slams open and a zombie jumps out to get ye.

(ofcourse playing it in the absolute dark with volume to the maximum also helps)

[Zain]

All the Resident Evils were good. Zombie's are an interesting story, and the T Virus.

-ZainDustin

[AggonyDuck]

Hehehe, to me it prolly has to be the original Half-Life. Having those headcrabs pounce at you always made me jump up from my chair.

[hoom]

I guess the main thing was playing a human character that actually felt overmatched going against the other races. As a human, you feel more like prey than a hunter.

AvP 1 for me but this is exactly it, you've seen the Alien & Predator movies and there you are walking down some enclosed corridor, knowing those scary buggers are out there while all you've got is a pop gun and a friggin motion detector going bii.....dok bii...dok bi..dok bi..dok bi.dok bidok bidokbidokbidok then a blood chilling Scream leaves you retreating down that corridor leaving a brown trail...

[Somebody Else]

AvP 1 for me but this is exactly it, you've seen the Alien & Predator movies and there you are walking down some enclosed corridor, knowing those scary buggers are out there while all you've got is a pop gun and a friggin motion detector going bii.....dok bii...dok bi..dok bi..dok bi.dok bidok bidokbidokbidok then a blood chilling Scream leaves you retreating down that corridor leaving a brown trail...

I dunno, I found that the way the aliens always always stood still to attack made them ridiculously easy to deal with. Facehuggers on the other hand...

[English assassin]

No, I'm with Hoom. That motion detector was an invention of satan.

[drone]

The Aliens mod for Doom2 was pretty freaky. They had a couple levels inside the hive, and little alcoves where they placed aliens. You could hear the hissing, it's dark, then all the sudden they would jump you.

[Ironside]

No, I'm with Hoom. That motion detector was an invention of satan.

Isn't it ironic how a great help can be such a scare maker?

Hearing the mumblings of the enemies in System Shock 2 has the same effect.

[Viking]

Wah...sorry for the lazyness, but, do I have to uninstall this mod in order to play vanilla HL2 again?

[Zenicetus]

Isn't it ironic how a great help can be such a scare maker?

Hearing the mumblings of the enemies in System Shock 2 has the same effect.

Yeah, I'd have to rate System Shock 2 as the first game that really scared the crap out of me. That was so well-done, and at a fairly early stage of PC game development.

[Mount Suribachi]

Whilst HL & HL2 have their spooky moments, and the Resident Evil series of games have the odd "made-you-jump" moment, nothing, and I mean nothing comes close to the terror inducing System Shock 2. The entire game was built around making you scared, all the time!!!. Not by making you jump, not by the odd freaky moment. But by the relentless psychological pressure, by the fact the enemies respawned and sought you out, and by the brilliant use of sound.

When someone says a game is scary, the gold standard to which it should be compared is SS2. I'm not ashamed to say I was too scared to play it. So scared I uninstalled it after quitting the game in terror.

[econ21]

Yes, System Shock 2 scaried the heck out of me. I would occasionally load it up, do the training missions, get to the first door that leads to combat and then quit when the pumping techno music started. BTW, there's a nice piece on gamespot about Bioshock during E3 - it sounds very like a SS3 in spirit. Audio logs, freaky mutants, mad robots, cameras etc. Very promising.

[LeftEyeNine]

Noone ever mentioned Silent Hill series..That's weird..

[GoreBag]

The original Doom games had some very intense surprise flavour going on, and I still say Manhunt was a scary game.

[frogbeastegg]

No one has mentioned the thief series!? Gah! Soon fix that ....

The thief series were damned scary; I've seen more than a few say they found them more terrifying then SS2. Garrett was so vulnerable, and your best hope of success lay in skulking unseen. Like any game which requires you to hide constantly, moving from area to area, shadow to shadow, the pressure could get very intense. The game was built to increase that tension, with the music and creature sounds feeding the emotion and refining it. The creatures themselves, the levels - simple description does them no justice.

The Cradle level in Thief 3 was infamous when the game was new.



I repeat everything that has been said about System Shock 2. I still get very nervous when I hear certain monkey noises.

[Mikeus Caesar]

Wah...sorry for the lazyness, but, do I have to uninstall this mod in order to play vanilla HL2 again?

No, you just put the four maps into this folder: C:\Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\*your name goes here*\half-life 2\hl2\maps and then go into HL2, bring up the console and type "map nightmare_house1" (without the ").

It's brilliant!

[Sjakihata]

System Shock 2

[Viking]

No, you just put the four maps into this folder: C:\Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\*your name goes here*\half-life 2\hl2\maps and then go into HL2, bring up the console and type "map nightmare_house1" (without the ").

It's brilliant!

Ah, thank you. I`ll download it right away.

[Divine Wind]

Eternal Darkness was an absolute haunting experience for me. The parts where your character would lose their sanity (quite literally) was just freaky! The moans and screams from the dead "flesh and bones" really sent a chill down my spine. Also the parts where your character went mental, actually involved you with it too as strange things would happen on the screen until you regained your sanity. Stuff like the volume turning itself up and down, hundreds of flies swarming onto the screen, error messages coming up, poltergeist activity, getting spawned into hell, it was quite an experience!

I hated playing on my own, so i made my friends come round and keep me company

Edit: I just went onto the homepage http://www.eternaldarkness.com/ and i did laugh out loud when they described the sanity.

"The descent into insanity begins slowly, with mild memory relapses and fleeting delusions, then plunges with horrific speed into manic hallucinations and death."

Lovely :)

[professorspatula]

Whoever mentioned the Aliens mod for Doom 2 - they were spot on. It's probably the first time a first person shooter was turned into a slow-paced nightmarish survival game. Hardly any ammo, aliens that would hiss and jump out when you least expect it and excellent use of ambient sounds taken from the film led to an incredible spooky experience. If anything, Doom 3 is a very similar experience - slow, has you constantly on your guard, and full of spawning enemies. Although the predictable tedium of D3 counts against it. Yawn, another imp behind me as I pickup the medikit.

System Shock 2 is the scariest game I've played though. Aside from the fact you have hardly any ammo for ages and your hi-tech futuristic guns stop working after about 3 shots, the eerie sounds of your enemies approaching and their soul destroying respawn rate creates a game where you're constantly panicking and unable to relax for a second. You charge through a series of corridors, killing a few zombies in your path, and then you suddenly hear their cries behind you - and you're running for your life as they've magically spawned through a locked bulkhead behind you. Actually their respawning annoys me so much I really don't enjoy the experience as much as I'd like to. I haven't been able to bring myself to play it that far. Apparently you're supposed to be able to change the respawn rate, but from what I've read at various SS2 forums, for the most part it has no effect.

Realms of the Haunting was quite scary in some places. A bit Silent Hill like in places, albeit in first person mode.

A less obvious candidate for scariest game - Alien on the ZX Spectrum. You have to guide your crew off the Nostromo, avoiding or killing the Alien along the way, only it picks your people off one by one, leading to your crew panicking and stop responding to orders, and with Jones the cat leading you on a merry goose chase as it messes up your motion detection readings. And then just when you think you're safe on the escape shuttle and you're ready to scuttle the Nostromo, the Alien sneaks in and kills your final character. The annoying xenomorph!

[econ21]

Actually their respawning annoys me so much I really don't enjoy the experience as much as I'd like to.

The ability to reduce this with the patch works well enough. In my user.cfg, I have written:

"no_spawn
gun_degrade_rate 0.1
safe_texture_manager "

The "no spawn" might be optimistic, but it makes for a fairly quiet and peaceful game once you've cleared an area. There are exceptions, of course - the path through engineering to command control and the cargo bays was insane without the above patch; with it, it is still occasionally hairy.

The guns don't appreciably degrade - you can upgrade one and just use that through the game (maintain it once or twice).

[Favre]

Im stuck, I've been througha bout 4 rooms and I got to a room with 2 couches, any some kitchen appliances. I have no idea where to go from here, Help?



For the 5 mins i played it, I had some twitchy moments where i almost ENROLLED IN FLOWER ARRANGEMENT CLASSES FOR myself.

[Phatose]

I think of all the games I've played, only 2 have scared me. The original Silent Hill, and Aliens versus Predator for the Jaguar.

Eternal Darkness...well, it didn't scare me for the same reason System Shock 2 didn't scare me. I was by far the most dangerous thing around. You give the tome of Mantorok to a porty elderly doctor in a powdered wig, and he goes from wuss boy to Avatar of Destruction. Old goggles could handle just about anything with just a wrench. Both were wonderful games in their own right, but hard for me to get scared in.

The later Silent hills didn't do it for me - the second one was too psychological, not really horror, and at any rate the improved graphics took out a lot of the 'what the hell is THAT?' for me. Plus, the first one presumably wasn't well translated, or was designed to leave you with the "What just happened???" feeling even after it was done.

And the AvPs were good games, but never quite managed to recapture the horror of the sound of a facehugger you can't see. Or the preds whispering. On the jag, if there was a pred or hugger anywhere near you, you knew it from that sound - but good luck finding it before it finds you.

[Fragony]

The ability to reduce this with the patch works well enough. In my user.cfg, I have written:

"no_spawn
gun_degrade_rate 0.1
safe_texture_manager "

The "no spawn" might be optimistic, but it makes for a fairly quiet and peaceful game once you've cleared an area. There are exceptions, of course - the path through engineering to command control and the cargo bays was insane without the above patch; with it, it is still occasionally hairy.

The guns don't appreciably degrade - you can upgrade one and just use that through the game (maintain it once or twice).

What fun is that? You get a great psi power at tier 2 that eliminates all weapon breakdown completily, and without the respawning enemies there is nothing to be nervous about. System Shock 2 is about never being safe, why take out the best part.