Which game has scared you the most?

[vict0r]

F.E.A.R. was pretty "meh" to me.. In DOOM, scary very often equaled having to react fast to avoid death. In fear, there were a general FPS part of the game that was pretty mediocre and quite easy, in my opinion, and there were the scary part that usually were only meant to be "movie-scary" or something like that... Interactive cutscenes almost! Doom tried this as well, but it weren't half as scary as having to constantly switch between flashlight and shotgun to locate the surrounding zombz...

[Rincewind]

I always found the atmosphere in all three of the Gabriel Knight games to be really intense and fright-inducing, to be honest. Just in the way the story and the mood was slowly raised, and how the researching of the early parts of the game successively gave way to some really suspense-ridden parts. (i.e. the zombie-statues of GK1, the woods in GK2 and the investigation of the murders in GK3) It isn't "horror-movie scary", there's just something genuinely unsettling about them all. In a good way.

[OneDollar]

Bananas In Pyjamas

There was a game? :o

[Oliwerko]

Here's a list of pretty scary games. But I don't know what game has scared me the most .. I guess Doom for one and also Resident Evil.

No Thief?
Damn, the Thief series is definitely scary enough to catch up with these games. I played some of them a while, but nothing compared to thief for me...

[hedgefield]

CONDEMNED.

I. AGREE.

The part where you're trapped in the abandoned farmhouse with the serial killer is MURDER. And whatever the hell those crawling things in the subway service tunnels were, I don't ever want to think about them again.

[Paper Carnival]

Thief 1 scared the crap out of me. So did System Shock 2.

Resident Evil was only "meh". Of course it startled me sometimes, for example when it had enemies abruptly appearing breaking through a window or one-side mirrors , but it wasn't scary. The puzzles were ridiculous too - and why the hell would anyone put riddle statues in a Police Station anyway?

In System Shock 2 I really didn't feel welcome at all. The people who made it really knew how to scare me. The voices of the Many were creepy, and the fact the enemies never completely disappeared made me feel uneasy and always unsafe. It was successful in making me actually feel the presence of a force hating and stalking me.

[Aulis]

Thief 3 isn't bad, but it really cranks up the terror at Shalebridge Cradle.

Just the sound effects, I think. Am I the only one who thinks this?

Aulis

[Mouth for war]

I just remembered when i played the first Blair witch project (actually quite good trilogy. Almost all games based on movies usually sucks in my opinion) When you arrive to town and spending your first night in the hotel room, the character wakes up in the middle of the night and there are noises coming from the bathroom...when you approach the door a damn creature comes at you....that made me jump high i remember....think i almost broke the world record in high jumping

[Oliwerko]

Thief 3 isn't bad, but it really cranks up the terror at Shalebridge Cradle.

I don't quite remember playing the third one, because it didn't catch my attention as much as the second and first part. Thief 3 is good, but it kind of lacks the heart thrilling feeling you get in the first two ones. They are more to my taste, more "original".

[miguel]

I always found the atmosphere in all three of the Gabriel Knight games to be really intense and fright-inducing, to be honest. Just in the way the story and the mood was slowly raised, and how the researching of the early parts of the game successively gave way to some really suspense-ridden parts. (i.e. the zombie-statues of GK1, the woods in GK2 and the investigation of the murders in GK3) It isn't "horror-movie scary", there's just something genuinely unsettling about them all. In a good way.

Yeah, I found the same experience with the GK series.
The third one is a good example, books and even games (Broken Sword) used the Templars theme before but GK3 captured it very well. It was lovely to discover the village and all it's creepy characters.
Even the librarian was scary!
Every character had its personality so everybody was a suspect at some point.

[GarageGothic]

Thief 3 isn't bad, but it really cranks up the terror at Shalebridge Cradle.

The Shalebridge Cradle is indeed one of the scariest settings ever deviced for a game. The whole atmosphere mixed with the slow revelation of little bits of backstory on each of the inmates makes for an experience that I would never ever be able to play at night with the lights off.

This is an excellent article, originally published in PC Gamer, about the creation of that mission and also features a thorough analysis of the level. There's plenty of spoilers, so don't read it if you haven't played the game but intend to. And really, everybody should play Thief Deadly Shadows just for that mission.

[Miez]

Realms of the Haunting had me whimpering a couple of times. Way back when...
Oh and good call on the Gabriel Knight games - part II freaked me out a couple of times...

[SurplusGamer]

Call of Cthulu : The Dark Corners of the Earth is fantastically creepy, especially once you get to Innsmouth.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Realms of the Haunting was good but not scary in any way; in fact, there isn't a single game that I would classify as 'scary'.  Some have parts deliberately designed to surprise you, but none of them are so outright frightening that they become, at times, unplayable.  Now I will say that the 'Attack of the Fishmen' scene in Call of Cthulhu was harrowing, mostly because of your character's impossibly horrible jump skills and the perfectly-measured jump distances during the chase, which often had me cursing as my character would limp off the side and to his doom.  It would have been far more exciting had the jump skill been reasonable in any way, and instead it just frustrated me and made me dislike a section of the game that could have been awesome.  I think this is an important trap for designers to avoid, action sequences that are heavily scripted to be great but fail because they punish you by trial and error.  To me, trial and error is one of the worst flaws in most adventure games and adventure-action hybrids, because you may know exactly what to do (or not at all) but due to a total lack of balance you have to die repeatedly to succeed, which pulls you out of the game, pisses you off, and ruins the atmosphere.

Call of Cthulhu had such an effect on me.


Parts of The Thing had me interested, though they totally botched the infection aspect by having your followers randomly transform just moments after you administer a test proving them human.  This happened especially (and predictably) at checkpoints, which made the entire test aspect and the fear/trust meter useless. 

[LimpingFish]

Oh, yeah, The Thing went pretty much off the rails around the halfway point. The games designers seemed unable to recreate the tension of the movie, so instead they just rehashed a bunch of survival horror "standards".

I'd also agree with "Attack of the Fishmen", or rather the latter sections of the level that require you to make awkward jumps. The first few minutes of the level, locking doors and such, creates a fine sense of urgency. The jumping does indeed manage to kill it, though.

[TheJBurger]

The last scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where you have to pick the holy grail; that used to KILL me as a kid when I played it.

When you choose a cup and drink from it, it goes to a close-up of Indy's face. If you chose the right cup, he lives. If you chose the wrong cup, he suddenly turns into a ghastly skeleton and your speakers scream out a ear-pearcing midi noise.

That got me every time.

[GarageGothic]

"He chose... poorly."

[MoodyBlues]

The last scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where you have to pick the holy grail; that used to KILL me as a kid when I played it.

When you choose a cup and drink from it, it goes to a close-up of Indy's face. If you chose the right cup, he lives. If you chose the wrong cup, he suddenly turns into a ghastly skeleton and your speakers scream out a ear-pearcing midi noise.

That got me every time.

I never got that far in the Last Crusade, but that reminds me of a very scary moment in The Fate of Atlantis:

Spoiler

That part at the end where either you or the Nazi ends up as a specter that fills the entire screen and stares at you with huge, freaky, glowing eyes.  I've never looked at conversation trees the same way since.

[close]

[Johanas]

I'm a big fan of horror games, I like all the silent hills and the resident evils etc. I enjoy the disturbing images and the generally creepy atmosphere. (To illustrate the point I actually downloaded the soundtrack to Silent Hill 2 and listen to it on long bus journeys just loud enough that the person next to me starts to fear for their life).

Scariest moment in any game was SH4. I was playing on the PC in a tiny dark room with headphones on for hours. I put the controller down in my lap to use the mouse and keyboard. I turned a corner and a ghost jumped into my face making the controller vibrate like mad. I jumped back so quick i nearly took the door off the hinges.

[GarageGothic]

I never got that far in the Last Crusade, but that reminds me of a very scary moment in The Fate of Atlantis

You just reminded me of Bishop Mandible's bloody demise in Loom. Not that scary, but definitely unsettling.