Topic: Has any horror adventure game actually scared you?

[KyriakosCH]

The dynamics are, of course, different in a game, than they'd be in (eg) a book, or a movie, but have you ever felt fear while playing a horror game?

[Stupot]

Dark Fall scared the tits off me. Other games like it (Barrow Hill, Lost Crown) had a good go but none of them shat me up like the first Dark Fall game.

[KyriakosCH]

Dark Fall scared the tits off me. Other games like it (Barrow Hill, Lost Crown) had a good go but none of them shat me up like the first Dark Fall game.

"And to him was given the key to the bottomless pit"

[Ponch]

It looks crude and goofy now, but the first Alone in the Dark game got a few jump scares out of me back in the day, along with a really immersive feeling of dread throughout.

[TheFrighter]

Personally I hate the dungeon-crawlin' and the sword/gun fights in adventure games, but this spinechilling deaths in Waxworks even scare me!

I pray someday a remake in AGS will come (whitout the action parts, please).

_

[Mandle]

The Last Door got a few good scares out of me during the first couple of chapters...

And the swarming mass of feeding pigeons in "Date In The Park" still haunts me... It was never explained what they were feeding on, which was a big part of the creepiness for me...

It could have been just that someone threw a bunch of birdfeed there...or...something much worse...

[Cassiebsg]

Yeah... I'm pretty sure I've assumed something much worse.

[Privateer Puddin']

Monkey Island 2 (ending in the tunnels), Alone in the Dark - both as a kid. Got real tense while playing Until Dawn, especially with choices or bits where you had to hold the controller perfectly still :o

[Cassiebsg]

Yes, I can join the Alone in the Dark team. I can also add that Half Live got me on my edge... specially that opening sequence.

[KyriakosCH]

The Last Door got a few good scares out of me during the first couple of chapters...

And the swarming mass of feeding pigeons in "Date In The Park" still haunts me... It was never explained what they were feeding on, which was a big part of the creepiness for me...

It could have been just that someone threw a bunch of birdfeed there...or...something much worse...

The Last Door was a cool game I think the general view is that its final chapter could have been better, though...

[NickyNyce]

Until Dawn is one of my all time favorite games.

The gameplay was so simple, yet so effective. Great story, no do overs which really makes the game tense and scary.

[LimpingFish]

No. Never.

Having said that, plenty of games have startled me (dogs jumping through windows in the original Resident Evil, for instance), but startling a player and frightening a player are two very different things.

Unfortunately, a lot of game developers confuse the two.

[Mandle]

Until Dawn is one of my all time favorite games.

The gameplay was so simple, yet so effective. Great story, no do overs which really makes the game tense and scary.

I thought it was a great concept that they couldn't quite pull off yet.

The game hammers over and over the point of the delicate effects that your choices will cause: The Butterfly Effect, but then the story hardly deviates at all from its path no matter what you did. In a few places things are slightly different and getting the "good" ending might be impossible if you made bad choices earlier on, but the finale is always in the same place and basically the same.

The story was good enough (if a little ridiculous at times) to hold my attention but I really did feel a bit let down by the lack of the true branching story that they kind of promised.

I ended up feeling a bit like I felt about "No Man's Sky", except without the hatred, just the disappointment...

[NickyNyce]

I agree with you mandle, the game does have flaws, especially the ones you mentioned. I only played the game once, so maybe that was a good thing for me. I never got to see the disappointment of playing more than once.

I really enjoyed the tense atmosphere of knowing that I can't start over. No going back and clicking the load button gave me a feeling that I haven't felt in video gaming in a long time. I thought they did a really good job with the game though. They took a chance with this style of game play, and I applaud that.

[Mandle]

I really enjoyed the tense atmosphere of knowing that I can't start over. No going back and clicking the load button gave me a feeling that I haven't felt in video gaming in a long time.

Yeah, I love that feeling too.

I have included the "one life and if you die you die" gameplay in a lot of my own games.

It was never a really popular choice from the feedback on those games that I have gotten, especially on "The Rotary Club"...

(I have completed that game of mine myself twice... but it is very hard... but you feel that much better when you beat it because of that!)

[KyriakosCH]

I really enjoyed the tense atmosphere of knowing that I can't start over. No going back and clicking the load button gave me a feeling that I haven't felt in video gaming in a long time.

Yeah, I love that feeling too.

I have included the "one life and if you die you die" gameplay in a lot of my own games.

It was never a really popular choice from the feedback on those games that I have gotten, especially on "The Rotary Club"...

(I have completed that game of mine myself twice... but it is very hard... but you feel that much better when you beat it because of that!)

I like such things (one life, no save etc). I also would want to not have visual clues as to whether some part of the background is an object you can click on, but feared this would make people give up on playing my own game...
Still, i really dislike having clues as to what to click on the background (eg text, or mouse pointer changing) Makes it less of an atmospheric setting.

[NickyNyce]

Another personal favorite of mine was Alien Isolation. I thought they did a really good job with the aliens AI. Not perfect, but well done. I'm also a huge Alien fan, so maybe this swayed me a bit, but there was some really tense moments playing that game. Sneaking around with almost no way to defend yourself is terror in itself. Scary atmosphere trumps jump scares any day IMO. The longer you play, the less scary it is, but I would prefer this over the game being too short.

As we all know, it's impossible to make everyone happy.

[Mandle]

I'm also a huge Alien fan

Never would have guessed so... not even after crawling around in ducts with creepy-crawlies everywhere in your game(s)...

[TheFrighter]

Random scaries? Here it is:

_

[Crimson Wizard]

Monkey Island 2 (ending in the tunnels),

Hah, I jumped every time LeChuck appeared, could not get used to it for some reason.


I was pretty much scared few times in DeFoe AGS game series (5 days a stranger, and on). Although some of them were cheesy jump scares, but the game built up an atmosphere pretty well too.
The "Trilby Notes" was special in a way that it kept horror feeling for a long duration because of the "overwordly hotel" section, with its ghastly appearance and disturbing music, which could also be emotionally exhausting at times.

For some reason the biggest scare I had in these games, perhaps because I was not expecting anything like that was-

Spoiler: ShowHide

when in "Trilby Notes" hotel after a random room change player character was having a monster's appearance for several seconds before turning back to normal view.