When a player traipsing through a horror videogame’s dark corridors explores the world around them, they tend to act a bit more guarded than they would otherwise. Players accept that, when they buy a Silent Hill or a Fatal Frame, there’s no real safe place for them, that they’re willfully entering a haunted house of frights and scares and know roughly what to expect from the experience. When I buy a horror game, I do it for the express purpose of it scaring the hell out of me, for reasons even I sometimes have a hard time understanding.
However, not every game gives you that warning up front. There are a number of videogames out there where the creators choose an odd moment—a boss fight, a far-off zone, a collection of off-putting enemies—to creep the player out. This is often done to provide a contrast to the rest of the game, or maybe to give a peek at hidden layers underneath, but ultimately give the player a quick shock to their system and to let them know that they should not assume they know everything about the game.
Here is a list of some videogames that do it well, though it is absolutely not exhaustive. These are the games I think of when I remember moments where my heart was beating out of my chest, games I really wish I hadn’t played at night. They range from images of frightening ghouls plastered on screen for a brief second and accompanied by hellish screams to somewhat vague implications of what death means in the context of a dying world. All of them had me rethinking the dynamics of tone presentation in the games they occurred in and appreciating the games more because of it.
1. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
As a series, Metal Gear Solid tends to bounce between campy spy drama and goofy science fiction, with most of its scarier moments tending to veer toward Disney’s Haunted Mansion more than Joe Hill. There are odd moments here and there, however, where Hideo Kojima seems to channel his craft of fear (choosing to ignore the boss named “The Fear”) and create something fairly unsettling. The best example of this is Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater’s boss fight with The Sorrow, a Christmas Carol-like ghost whose encounter involves showing Snake the sins of his many, many casualties of war.
As Snake marches through an ashen river, unable to damage the ethereal Sorrow in any way, the transparent forms of every enemy he has killed throughout the game appear in front of him, bemoaning the way they’ve been dispatched. Soldiers whom Snake has killed by slitting their throats walk toward him with their heads mostly detached from their necks, exsanguinating as they gurgle out unintelligible noises. Contrasted to the previous boss fight, wherein Snake fights an astronaut wielding both a flamethrower and significant anger issues, the Sorrow offers significant tonal (and incredibly creepy) whiplash. It serves a strange moment between sneaking into a base and the game’s action climax where your playable character is not Rambo with a light machine gun but is totally at the mercy of external limitations and, well, scary ghost magic.
2. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
Majora’s Mask’s core conceit is one of oppressiveness and the idea of denying, or eventually accepting, the inevitability of death. It presents this through the lens of quickly reused characters and assets from Ocarina of Time, which gives it the side benefit of a slightly off-putting feeling of uneasiness, as the things you’ve grown comfortable with are now different and strange. As a whole, Majora’s Mask is about making the player feel at odds with their memories, though very little of the game is outright creepy. That is, until Ikana Canyon.
The Zelda games play around with the idea of death fairly often, but usually with a cartoon-like backdrop. Death is rarely an immovable barrier, with characters routinely returning as charitable ghosts eager to give you items rather than simply shuffling off from the mortal coil. Ikana, however, is an area built around the idea of death, seemingly even worshipping the concept. To enter, you need to prove to a ghastly guardsman that you’re, simply put, dead enough to enter by wearing a mask of an executioner named Garo or the mask of mummies called Gibdos. The canyon is replete with the reminders that much of Termina no longer needs to fear death, since they’re well and truly past it. With a music box house where a daughter takes care of her undead father, a zombified dancing troupe of ReDeads that dance forever, and a somewhat simple graveyard for the less fantastical dead, Ikana relishes death and not necessarily as something to be feared, making it all the more unsettling. Unlike the rest of the series, and to some extent the rest of the game, Majora’s Mask’s Ikana Canyon is less about the inevitability of death and more the fascination with it.
