Horror Games (yeah it’s October. What else was I going to talk about?); they’ve been around since the dawn of gaming. From the simple terror of 3D Monster Maze through to the utter zombie panicfest that is Left 4 Dead, games have been making us collectively soil ourselves for a good thirty years now. So because someone’s bound to do it at some stage and because I know a lot of you weren’t even foetuses when some of these games came out, here’s a list of the 10 games that put the frighteners on this Black Dog.
Looks like a lot of fuss for an old piano...
10 Alone in the Dark (PC) 1992
Released in 1992 on the humble 486 PC, before it was ever considered a game platform in its own right, Alone in the Dark was the first ever survival horror game. Taking its influences from HP Lovecraft (the Only Fools and Horses years), you play a private investigator asked to locate a piano in a rather dodgy abandoned house. The game worked exactly like Resident Evil (which wouldn’t appear until four years later) with 3D characters overlaid over rendered fixed camera backdrops. It looks very simple by today’s standards, but trust me: when the first monster attacks you in the drawing room, after a twenty minute build up, I could have floated out on a cushion of my own flatulence like an organic hover craft*.
Grrr... Arrrgh...
9 Dead Space (Xbox360) 2008
Taking top-of-the-line graphics and ripping off as much as it could from films like Event Horizon, Alien and The Thing, this game was, for at least the first 40 mins of game play, a string of brown-trouser-creating set pieces. You play Isaac Clarke, an engineer, searching for his missing wife on board a supposedly abandoned mining ship the USG Ishimura. Soon enough, you and Isaac realise that the ship is far from empty in a sequence where you are separated from your crewmates by the mutated and reanimated remains of the Ishimura’s crew, requiring you to escape the ambush completely unarmed into the bowels of the Ishimura.
That's going to be murder to get out of the grouting...
Kids today, eh?
8 F.E.A.R (PC / Xbox360 / PS3) 2007
American, big gun, lunkhead, First Person Shooters get a visit from the J-Horror scary fairy. F.E.A.R. seemed on the surface like the usual-run-and gun game until you met Alma, a spooky little girl with a penchant for wiping out whole Delta force squads with the blink of her little shark-like eyes. F.E.A.R., like many of the games in this list, had some fantastic shock set pieces but what differentiates this one is its ability to scare with just sound and shadow. Nothing is scarier than being on your own playing a game in the dark and hearing ghostly children’s laughter and occasionally catching glimpses of… something… Play with the lights on.
Avoid ugly scenes - tip the toilet attendant
7 Doom 3 (PC) 2004
One of the old masters of SF shock horror FPS games, Doom 3 used light and shadow in the intricately detailed sets to create some unnerving play areas, but unlike F.E.A.R. or Dead Space, once the creatures attacked the shock was your biggest problem. The game continually pulled the “Boo!” trick on you and at one point I got so wound up playing this game and constantly having some bastard thing leap out of a shadow at me I stopped playing and stayed in a single room of the game for fifteen minutes just for a rest.
Bonnet Dramas. They're a bit rubbish innit.
6 Forbidden Siren (PS2) 2004
Part stealth game, part Resident Evil 4 before it came out, but all chills. This game finally went the whole hog with the J-Horror bag, telling a story of a village infected by red water that turns them into ‘corpse people’. You get to play ten different survivors of the outbreak in their own stories that are out of chronological order from each other, further giving you an uneasy feeling as you see a character you played twenty minutes before doing what you were doing at the time. The scares came from the games core trick, which was ‘far casting’: an ability to psychically tune in to the sight of a wandering corpse and seeing their point of view. Nothing was worse than tuning into a ‘corpse person’ only to realise they were staring at the back of your zoned-out, ‘far casting’ head and running towards you, at speed.
The large-intestine-draped-up-and-OVER-the-ear look was very big in 1999
Her name was SHODAN, she was a showgirl. Kinda.
5 System Shock 2 (PC) 1999
Like Dead Space’s ‘zombies on a space ship’ plot but ten years earlier, System Shock 2 was, at the time, dripping with atmosphere. You play a soldier awaking on the spaceship ‘Rickenbacker’ to discover not only are the rest of the crew infected with a alien infection that turns them into psychic mutants who constantly taunt you with psychic lures (leading to some stunningly chilling sound design) but also the ship’s computer has been infected by an evil artificial intelligence called SHODAN that wants to evolve to godhood. The twists in the story add to an already pretty bloody nerve-wracking game and SHODAN’s final game twist leaves you feeling that even if you’ve won, you’ve actually lost…
Somebody hasn't been exfoliating and moisturising.
4 Resident Evil (PS1) 1996
The grandaddy of modern survival horror games. Sure, Alone in the Dark did it first, but this did it better and arguably set the template for survival horror in cold, cruel stone, with its limited ammo and sweat-inducing encounters (including the classic first zombie reveal). Naturally, being a Japanese game the American voice acting was hammy; who can forget the toe curling “It’s… it’s a… MONSTER!” but nevertheless when the undead hordes moved in and your ammo ran out, nothing got the adrenaline and cortisol going like running blindly between rooms looking for some refuge and supplies.
This is box art. Lovely, lovely, neat and tidy box art
3 Alien vs Predator 2 (PC) 2001
Like Doom 3 but several years earlier, AvP 2 (no relation to the bloody awful movie that came out six years later) relied heavily on creatures in the shadows leaping out and scaring the pants off you. But unlike Doom 3, AvP 2 gave you the Colonial Marine motion tracker which heightened the tension. If Aliens moved you knew they were around; if they stayed still you were liable to be ambushed. Many a gamer had minor heart attacks as their tracker started making the “weeep weeep weeep” noise all of a sudden. The game also allowed you to play either an Alien or a Predator which added to the fun especially in multiplayer when the scares were in your control, jumping on unsuspecting Marine players.
Smile for the camera, young lady
2 Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (PS2) 2004
Normally when you see something that scares you, the urge is to look away. What Fatal Frame (aka Project Zero in Europe) did was force you to look for your own good. Playing a girl called Mio looking for her missing sister, you search a seemingly abandoned village (it’s always ‘seemingly’ abandoned isn’t it?) but soon find it inhabited by ghosts of the villagers all rendered in the usual J-Horror style, all lank hair and white clothes. But the mechanic of dealing with the ghosts was a novel one, with Mio having to photograph the spirits in order to capture them. This caused many a pant-wetting moment as you’re forced to search a room through the camera viewfinder and shoot the ghost that leaps into view with horrific effect. I tell you, this had me change my jeans into brown corduroy trousers* instantly many, many times.
Bloody pookas, they get everywhere...
1 Silent Hill (PS1) 1999
Released almost on top of Resident Evil, Silent Hill is a disturbing game. Set in the titular town, we follow Harry Mason as he searches for his daughter Cheryl who disappeared after a car crash. After going into the town, we find it snowing out of season and apparently abandoned (yet again!)… Until the air raid siren goes off… What follows is a mind bending, monster infested, twisted landscape that you have to survive in total darkness. It’s a terrifying game with a disturbing apocalyptic tone and Lovecraftian plot involving cults bringing old gods to Earth. Definitely one that will live on in the darker recesses of your consciousness long after you’ve completed it…
*[possibly the most horrific image in the whole feature – ed]
