The Scariest Video Games You’ve Never Played
I feel like if there’s any millennial cliche I’m thoroughly guilty of, it’s clinging to nostalgia. I’m often looking backward to the aesthetics of my youth when it comes to the media I consume for comfort. Survival horror video games were my jam, but after I played Silent Hill 2 back in the early 2000s, the story affected me so much that I threw up my hands and went “Welp, nothing’s gonna compare with that, might as well quit.” I sold my PS2 and considered myself done with video games altogether (until this past year, when I U-Hauled it with my partner who bought a PS4 just to play The Last of Us, and I started catching up on all I missed out on).
I love how much video games have evolved as both entertainment and art form, but I still can’t help but enjoy revisiting my original loves with polygonal boobs and tank controls. Maybe it was the limitation in graphics and janky storytelling, maybe it was the unavoidable lack of control, but something about the horror games of the 90s and Y2K just felt genuinely scarier. It’s probably why newer movies and games borrow from these eras. Sometimes, the less realistic and more ambiguous, the better (to borrow an old cinema theory term, ‘demystification theory’).
With the recent announcement of a Silent Hill 2 remake, I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of gaming memories, and have not only relived some long-forgotten gems, but stumbled onto some truly interesting obscurities. These are the scariest video games you’ve never played, from the most foundational era of horror.
5. Hungry Ghosts (2003)
Never originally westernized until fans came to the rescue in the last few years, Hungry Ghosts is a unique first-person horror game that takes place entirely in hell, placing you in the shoes of a recently deceased warrior responsible for killing many people. You’re greeted by death at the River Styx and are given the option to atone for your sins, the success of which will be quantified at the end. This vision of hell is not quite as horrific in comparison to others we’ve seen in art, but what makes this game so singular is its approach to gameplay—every single interaction affects your outcome.
If you see an item, you can destroy it or use it. If you meet another soul, you can interact with or kill them. Even how you deal with enemies is up to you. It’s debatable whether or not this is the most frustrating idea in the world because it’s not fully spelled out for you. But, it forces you to confront how you handle situations as a gamer—and to some degree as a person. Is your first instinct to blow something away or lend it your sympathy? Do you do the extra work to help another even though it might not reward you in any way, or do you just press on for yourself? I haven’t seen many video games go this deep in utilizing judgment of your morality as a metric for which ending you get, and it’s enough to earn it a place on this list.
4. Koudelka (1999)
An experiment in combining Resident Evil-style gameplay and Final Fantasy-style RPG combat, Koudelka is a strange little piece of horror game history unlike any other. While most RPGs can be colorful and generally whimsical, Koudelka is deeply macabre, and with an atmosphere so tense it can choke you, pulling from gothic literature and folklore to tell a rich ghost story. Following the events of a single night in a haunted Victorian mansion, Koudelka deserves a place on this list for the simple ambition of the developers. This video game serves up a perfect amount of pervasive dread in shadow-drenched settings and a surprisingly creepy lack of a soundtrack during non-combat gameplay.
3. Siren (2003)
From the director of the original Silent Hill (!), this is a wild one for its central gameplay tool: giving players the ability to see and hear what a nearby character can see and hear. Let me tell you, when you are trying to sneak through a pitch-dark empty town, listening to the soft footsteps in the distance, and then shift to see who’s stalking you, it’s fucking nerve-shredding. Oh, and when you ‘sightjack’ (as this ability is named in the game), you are frozen and vulnerable, completely open to the attack of the tormentor whose perspective you’re currently witnessing. It feels effectively like some PTSD nightmares I’ve had!
The story brings together infected corpse people (made so by the titular siren), supernatural disasters, religious hysteria, small-town isolationist mentality, space-time warps, and summoning an evil god—just all the best colors of the rainbow. I haven’t played this since middle school, and it still haunts me from time to time.
2. Rule of Rose (2006)
One of the most prized cult survival horror video games in existence, Rule of Rose is like if you injected Silent Hill with childhood trauma. You play as Jennifer, navigating an orphanage filled with vicious children as she pieces together the deeper puzzle of her history. Using children in horror can always be a delicate plot device, but here it’s not a matter of supernatural violence or melodramatic parental angst. It’s the simple brutality of bullying—and I think that’s an uncomfortable set of memories to which we can all relate.
This is a horror game that utilizes how merciless it is to be the one kid targeted by all the others, especially in girlhood, going beyond a jump scare to gleefully tinkering with your psychological damage. Rule of Rose centers on cruelty and patterns of abuse in children and adults, both as underlying themes and woven into the gameplay. The combat is so inescapably difficult and a story so ultimately full of despair that playing for long periods of time may require a chaser with your therapist.
1. Enemy Zero (1996)
This one is very near and dear to my heart, as it was a formative gameplay experience when I was a kid (I was 9 when it was released, what the hell were my parents thinking). The core team’s first game, the vampire first-person puzzle horror D, might be more recognizable as a staple of peak Sega Saturn days. But Enemy Zero has one of the scariest game mechanics I’ve ever played, and one I have never seen replicated: the monsters are invisible, and the only way to detect them is with a motion tracker in your character’s earpiece, giving different pings based on where they are in relation to you.
I spent too many evenings hearing the high-pitched beeps getting faster and louder, telling me something was approaching while I tried running in a different direction. It wasn’t until I heard the terrifying shriek of the creature that I knew I had fucked up. On top of that, the design of the creatures is mostly obscured, and is wildly unrecognizable except for the occasional jaw or tentacle. Enemy Zero owes a lot to Alien, but it managed to take what was scary about that movie and adapt it to palpable video game dread. It’s also way more effective than even direct adaptations of the Alien franchise (I’m glaring at you, Isolation).
As an addendum, I’m going to assume that hardcore horror fans will probably be wondering where the now revered Haunting Ground is on this list – and dear ghoulies and faes, I find that game so beyond comparison that it deserved its own piece, which you can find here.
Categorized:Editorials
