suppliedHorror in video games is such a hard thing to pull off. Too often games fall into the trap of glamorizing action and outlandish set pieces over real atmosphere and themes. So, it’s nice when a game comes along and reminds that the survival horror is meant to scare us not entertain us. This Halloween, dust off that $500 Netflix machine, grab your controller, and scare yourself silly checking out these spoooooOOOOOooooky games.
Silent Hill
My first pick exists purely to scare you. It nails its horrific atmosphere but doesn’t scratch beyond the surface, and frankly, it doesn’t need to. The game just wants to scare you à la the reveal that you’re playing as Raiden and not Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid 2, The Evil Within’s constant grotesque imagery, and the entirety of the Spencer mansion in Resident Evil. However, I think it is done best in the 1999 PS1 title Silent Hill. This game still terrifies me. The atmosphere is so damn perfect and the story barely needs to dig deep to scare the absolute shit out of you.
Resident Evil 4
The next pick is among the action-heavy survival horror games that attempt to give you an ounce of power to fight back against the horrors ahead, walking the balance of horror and action without sacrificing the best qualities of both. Think: Resident Evil 5’s attempt at horror, Dead Space 2’s horrific action set pieces, or Doom 2017’s ability to through wave upon wave of demons all meeting their gruesome end. There is one that stands tall beyond the rest: Resident Evil 4. This game has tense action backed by moments of true terror and is guaranteed to keep you from going to bed even when it’s one o’clock in the morning and you want nothing more than to step away from that chapter you’ve been trying to read for you comparative lit class.
Alien: Isolation
This pick maximizes the despairing feeling of total helplessness. The weapons they give you, if any, don’t have any effect on the horrors you have to face. No game does this better than Alien: Isolation. You spend most of your time attempting to hide from the Xenomorph with no actual way fighting back. Even when you do get a weapon, it’s rendered useless against the overpowering enemy that stalks you throughout the game. Even when I did finally get revolver, the Xenomorph quickly reminded me of the gun’s futility.
BioShock
Some of the best horrors exist in space. You’re trapped in space far away from the comfort of the Earth’s surface, you can’t escape, there are safe places you run to, but you’re stuck in a tiny vessel far from home. These setting show up in games like Dead Space, System Shock, and Doom 3.
I’m going to cheat a bit and claim that the best game to do this is BioShock. While not set in space, the game incorporates the underwater terrors of Rapture. The game manages to maintain a constant sense of dread as you are stalked by the inhabitants, but are never able to confidently fight back. Being trapped in this underwater hell managed to provide me with the same sense of terror as a desolate ship drifting through space — minus the extra-terrestrial terrors.
Silent Hill 2
Finally: horror games that play you just as much as you play them. These games get in your head and make you question everything that is happening on the screen. It scares you because you can’t tell reality from nightmare leading to the terrifying combination. If you’re chasing a psychological high, try looking for the sanity meter in Sanity’s Requiem, the plot of Alan Wake, and the psychiatrist sections in Until Dawn.
The game that nails this, and the genre in general, is Silent Hill 2. No other game scares me like this one does. Watching YouTube videos of it manage to conjure up the same terror as playing. Even while writing about this, I’m having flashbacks of being 10 years old and begging my mom not to play the game right before I was going to bed. My complaints were ignored and, of course, I couldn’t not watch her play it. The absolute dread I witnessed at this young age frightened me into many a sleepless night, cowering by a nightlight with the hope that the pathetic light it emitted would protect me from the horrors of Silent Hill.
