2Spooky4Me (Games that shouldn't be scary, but are)

[cambertian]

Happy (soon-to-be) Halloween! Sorry if this has already been a topic.

Sometimes things go wrong during development, and you end up putting a Giygas moment in an otherwise perfectly clean game.
Maybe you're just freaked out by a certain idea? Phobias getting in the way of enjoying something?

Whatever it is, if it's scary and not from an intended horror game, post it here.

Tonic Trouble immediately pops into my mind. The premise of the game is that an alien accidentally dumps some sort of mutagen on Earth. Yeah, yeah, it's the cartoony type of mutation, but I'm still freaked by it.
Another one is Hyperzone. Apparently the last boss is a fetus-like monster, though I've never gotten far enough to experience it myself.
And in Wario Land 4, every time you transform, Wario says something like "No, No!" or "Wow!" as metal clanks in the background, followed up with distorted music. For some reason that always put me off.

[Weasel]

Wario Land 4 is a seriously trippy game. The thing that gets me isn't so much the distorting music...it's the self destruct sequence. That music is crazy intense.

[The Great Klaid]

Mortal Kombat 2. This thing

SPOILER: Click to show

Quick aside, I ran through MKII Genesis to get a screen cap of this, I'm not sure if it exists in any other version or not. But, holy hell that game looks a lot worse then I remember it. It was the only way I'd played it until recently, and it was on like a 10" TV. But, jeez those portraits look so bad.

[Ike]

The boar wolf things from Willow on NES terrified me as a kid.

[Joseph Joestar]

The IRC regulars will know this one, but I'm still kind of "scared" of extremely depressing or harsh game overs. Like ones that show your character skeletonized, executed, your corpse rotting, or shit like that. Examples being:

Dragon's Lair: First one I can think of from when I was a toddler - on Game Over, Dirk's rotting corpse is dropped onscreen suddenly with creepy music, and then dissolves into a skeleton. Scared the shit out of me.

Cliff Hanger: Second one I can think of, from when I was a kid - each time you died in the game it would play the "hanging" scene from the beginning of "Mystery of Mamo," which disturbed me for a while.

Death Duel: You're dead, your rotting dead body is left out and mocked by everyone because you screwed up and humanity is fucked. People bring up the Friday the 13th game over when they really should be bringing up this.

Warhawk: All of them. They're text only but range from graphic descriptions of how your body is abused by the enemy; graphic descriptions of how you drown then rot then are torn apart by sharks, then never see the sun again; how you're spit roasted and eaten by the main villain for some reason - considering who made the game it makes sense in retrospect, but they just felt really disturbing, mean-spirited and hateful (not to mention pointless), and I just never played the game again after a couple game overs.

Elf: (The Psygnosis game, not the bad movie cash-in GBA game) - otherwise a "mascot"-type game, when you get a game over there's a scene where your character is beheaded by guillotine. There was even an option to turn it off on the main screen - Yeah...

[Bobinator]

Commodore 64 games. While most of the ones that really scare me are the ones that were actually meant to scare people at one point, most people would probably think that they're... well, not that scary anymore. Not me, no. There are C64 games out there so scary I can't even watch a video of them. I don't know what it is, really. I don't want to say it boils just down to the graphics and sound being somewhat unnatrual.

It's more... a lot of them have you put into some kind of impending doom, with no way to really fight against it. That, and these games tend to make a lot of loud, frightening noises. I mean, there's a game out there that's just a trivia game, only the loser gets eaten by a monster, and I literally can't gather the courage to watch a Youtube video.



And then there's this game, The Rats. Apparently, it's some kind of adventure game about stopping a plague of rats from escaping London. ...And I'm not gonna lie, the thumbnail alone scares the shit out of me.



It's weird. Resident Evil doesn't do anything for me. Silent Hill? Eh. Dead Space. More gory than scary. But these 30 year old games have literally, at least once, given me actual nightmares.

[vetus]

R-Type Delta. The hardcore difficulty (even if you want to "cheat" with quicksaves on emulator it won't help so much) combining with its detailed, spooky enemy/level design and soundrack make me shit my pants even today. That's why I love this game. Even back when it was first released and I wasn't a shmup geek like I'm now, for me it was one of the most impressive games for Playstation 1. And it still is.

[ZenithianHero]

He used to creep me out when I was young, and also didn't like the thunder.

[Joseph Joestar]

Bob wins.

Anything by that one guy Paul Norman from Cosmi (like Trivia Monster) seems really "off" and kind of horrifying. They're like something that were designed by a malevolent being from a different plane of existence.

[TheChosen]

The name sounded familiar so I looked it up, turns out the guy did both Aztec Challenge and Forbidden Forest! That explains a lot.

Rats looks intriguing, have to check it out someday.

When I was a kid, the Sega Genesis version of Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego scared me. Most of the game is silent, apart from beeps, boops and swoosh's of the time machine, but whenever you meet a V.I.L.E henchmen it plays a short creepy tune. I think it even made me cry at one point.

[Allie]

When I was 7, the "BOING!" sound when you died in the NES version of Kung-Fu scared the living hell out of me.

[The Great Klaid]

Oh I don't know if it counts, I'm not sure if it's supposed to be scary really but Predator 2 on Genesis scared the hell out of me. I refused to play it by myself or in the dark.

[shelverton]

It may not be scary but going through parts of Fable II felt kind of unsettling and made me feel surprisingly uncomfortable. Wraithmarsh in its entirety including the road leading to Bloodstone was particularly stressful. And most of the dungeons, caves and crypts were way scarier and atmospheric than one might expect from a game like this. The fact that you couldn't really die didn't help much; I was still on my toes. "I'm never EVER going back here!" was a common thought of mine.

And then there's that one place... The cabin. Looks all welcoming and warm and christmasey from the outside. But then you enter it and....well, if you've played the game you know what I mean,

I couldn't go through Fable III cause it bored the hell out of me but I got the same feeling at times there too. I love the atmosphere in the Fable series a lot more than the actual gameplay.

[Deleted]

Beyond the Forbidden Forest is without a doubt the scariest Commodore 64 game ever made, mostly due to audio.

The "GET OUT!" challenge rooms in Donkey Kong 64 definitely spooked a lot of kids, as well as the sudden and unpredictable changes to tension music in Crystal Caves.

[munchy]

So many games scared me when I was little.

Earthworm Jim for the Sega CD was one of the first I think. That level with the blind purple things, as well as the secret bit on Level 5 with the giant pair of eyes that followed you in pitch black to ragtime piano.

It was meant to be a little scarier, but Bram Stoker's Dracula also made me shit myself. Those moaning and gurgling monks as well as the Tom Waits/Renfield boss kept me up many nights.

Don't take much of this seriously. I was also scared by a Speak 'n' Spell I had when I was five or so years old.