Scary things in non-horror games

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That obscene heart attack inducing sequence of music when you realize you're drowning in sonic the hedgehog and the wretched doom-waltz speeds up and you can't find a bloody bubble anywhere to stick your furry blue face into, then the DA-DANG death knell when the blue swine descends off the screen, absolutely traumatized me everytime! Sometimes I just don't bother going down to the water but I get bored of him tapping his foot waiting for me. Need an arm bands power up or summat!

This moment in Bioshock Infinite's Burial at Sea dlc:


http://youtu.be/-vnoWbQnKdE

In the early Sims games if a burglar was coming to rob your house, it would play really scary music while showing the burglar close up in a game window. The same music would also play if you skipped work or got fired. *shivers*

There's some surprisingly scary stuff in Dragon Quest IX, especially when it comes to some of the enemy/boss designs and implications from the bestiary entries.
For instance, this guy here


turns into this:

Thanks for the nightmares, Squaresoft ._.

^Jenova is probably the scariest thing I've seen in a video game. *shudder* Even worse, in the movie, she looks like this:

Her theme song doesn't help one bit. It sounds suitably alien and creepy to me, like she's trying to take Cloud over and control him.

^ Ahah, I remember talking about this to you before. That music seriously sends chills down me, I had so many nightmares as a kid on account of that game and also did when I replayed it last year. It's weird how inconsistent that game is, like when you get out of Midgar and then walk from that cyberpunk dystopia to a dated looking town and a hut where they breed giant chickens for the purpose of travel. The basic premise that the game starts with - that you're fighting a giant corporation/world government that monopolises the planet's life force and uses it for energy - is actually really compelling, then you have some goofy stuff like Cloud implicitly being raped by a gay mustachioed body builder so he can get woman's lingerie in order to crossdress as a girl in order to find Tifa, who is in Don Cornio's medieval torture chamber/horrifying BDSM dungeon. THEN the entire population of Sector 7 is murdered and you sneak into Shinra HQ only to find yourself in the aftermath of a bloody massacre at the hands of an unfathomable alien creature. It goes from being goofy to terrifying so quickly, and you're hardly expecting to be scared by the game at all until that part.

Incidentally, the tune that plays at that point? Also horrifying:



Not to mention this one that usually plays when Cloud is having one of his episodes:

There's too many scary things in Pokemon to list.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Pokemon

As a kid I was always scared of bugs and glitches in games, it felt like a game was somehow coming alive and doing something that it shouldn't and that really terrified me, so I remember Missingno in the original Pokemon gen (Red, in my case, because Charmander~) scaring me quite a lot. I still get this somewhat actually; falling through the floor or into some sort of impossible infinite space through a glitch still scares me. Not just through glitches either, games where you're in open water scare me and flying in Battlefield games terrifies me because it's so easy to blast out of the area. I'm not really sure what it is about those that I dislike so much though

e: can't believe I forgot to mention this, given that I've spent most of the weekend replaying them, but Ecco the Dolphin and the sequel Tides of Time are surprisingly spooky.



The last level of the first game is also absolutely ridiculous. It's an auto-scrolling level where you're swimming through the inside of an alien machine, the direction changes constantly and enemies appear from offscreen who will kill you almost immediately. You get to the above boss, the Vortex Queen, and if you die (and you will) then you have to do the whole thing again. Apparently, the level takes around six minutes if you avoid dying (and there are no checkpoints), but I refuse to believe that anybody has beaten it without save states. The whole thing, combined with the horrible Giger-esque aliens and the music, is completely sadistic for what a lot of people mistook as a cute game about a dolphin.

Here's a playthrough of the whole level. He makes it look too easy, but you get the gist.

Last edited by Almajo88 on 26 Jun 2016, 12:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There's this intensely scary shark in Okami. It'll keep chasing you to try and eat you.

A youtuber got a copy of pokemon ruby, and believe it or not, there wasnt a save file on it! So, he went ahead and made one, but he saved it and turned it off, and when he came back to play it, his save wasn't there, but this girl named Mae.. Kind of ironic cause May is from the Advanced Anime, but I kid you not, his name is SilverLeaugeNetworks, and he doesnt do creepypastas!

Ah I remember being scared as hell playing those levels in Ecco. Also found the Vortex Queen scary in the Tides of Time even in her larval form, particularly when she rouses and starts chasing you. It didn't help that playing through those was so tense because failing usually meant having to replay an entire level again. Nowadays we realise that it was bad game design; I always find it funny when people accuse modern games like Dark Souls of being unfairly difficult when I think back to game design like this:



I find Minecraft is a pretty pleasant game for the most part, then occasionally I'll just be minding my own business and a creeper will trigger right behind me. It's even worse in VR when those creepers are your height and your first instinct is to run into your nearby real life wall. Ghasts are also occasionally scary, particularly that noise they make which is always really hard to localise and sounds like they're right next to you.

Zelda Majora's Mask was in many parts just really creepy. The music especially, but also other things like the mask salesman and weird copies of yourself you can later summon. And the horrifying mask transformations, where it looks like you're in agony.

There's this pirate game, I think it's for the NES, called Wait and See! It's based loosely on an old Russian cartoon. You play the Hare, who looks like a bad copy of Bugs Bunny who is being chased by the Wolf, who looks like a bad copy of Wile E Coyote. They don't look like the characters in the cartoon. Not only is it really terrible, but the game over screen is pretty disturbing. It shows the Hare getting swallowed up by the Wolf, who then taunts you. You'd have to see it to know how creepy it looks.

The ghost valley levels in mario kart on the snes have always been eerie to me, it's the music more than anything, that peculiar desperate drifting waltz it has going on, the ear piercing squeals your pixel tires make as they frantically attempt not to skid down into the abyss, those silently screaming boos in the background just plastered to the darkness with their mouths looking like they are in need of spookhydration or whatever... yeah I never like playing those levels!

When playing Minecraft for the Xbox One, I was scared of the skeletons that come out at night and attack you. I felt safe inside my house until the thing started attacking me through the windows. I guess it's supposed to have a bow? I didn't see it holding anything.

Jenova from Final Fantasy VII, especially when Cloud breaks into the ShinRa building in the beginning of the game and there's an unnerving trail of blood throughout the building that belongs to Jenova. There's also a really scary music track playing when that happens.

Another Final Fantasy VII moment: Hojo's transformation towards the end of the game when you fight him in Midgar. It was terrifying looking.

Moonside from Earthbound is creepy. Everything in Fourside becomes neon on a black background and the people talk really strange. In the end, you find out that the Mani Mani Statue was causing it and you wake up in a warehouse with the statue broken.

Another Earthbound moment: When you travel through time to fight Giygas. It wasn't the battle that bothered me. It was the environment and the fact that all of the characters were temporarily turned into robots.

And not to forget Magicant from Earthbound.

For me, Zelda: Majora's Mask is as whole very scary, especially the motion soundtrack and special effects. The gameboy color Pokémon Red version is fear in lavender town but the legend of young boys' death while playing the first release games makes most. The boss of the chapter 9 in Final Fantasy XIII is pretty awful to me too.