Tales from a scaredy cat

It’s Halloween, so I figured I should get into the spirit of today’s festivities by writing about the top three most spooktacular games I have ever played. Games that kept me up at night questioning if every noise I heard was coming from someone -- or something -- that was shuffling their way around the house, slowly making their way to my room.

Dark Seed

This one gave the creeps. PC games were still foreign to me at the time and a lot of them seemed to have horror themed stories. Dark Seed was no exception. My cousin’s dad had this game on his computer and showed it to me when I think I was 12, so I was at that point in my life where things like this shouldn’t be scary so I was putting on an act that it wasn’t, but on the inside I was terrified. I think the most unnerving thing about Dark Seed was my cousin telling me that you die on the 6th day (the story takes place over a period of a few days) by seeing your character wake up and then getting stuck on the ceiling, having the game be in an unwinnable state where you would have to restart from the beginning. I don’t know if he was lying or may have noticed a bug in the game, but just the thought that your death was imminent within just a few days gave me chills.

Blood

A game full of dark humor, but I was unaware of it all when I was playing Blood. I was taking it all in face value and being frightened by seeing a mass of zombies, occultists, and gargoyles running towards me with their axes, Tommy guns, and sharp claws. I will admit I only played the shareware version, but couldn’t even finish that because Blood scared me enough that I had to stop playing and I never got around completing it. And that’s a real shame because that game was so cool with all its weapons and level designs. Take for an example the flair gun. Shoot it at an enemy and nothing will happen at first. Only sparks will be firing out from their chest. Soon after they will combust into flames, running towards you screaming until they drop and turn into a pile of smoldering ash. Scary, but efficient since it’s a one hit kill. Levels were fun to explore and involved running around places like a train station, a moving passenger train perfectly named the Phantom Express, and a carnival.

Silent Hill 3

Of all the games I’ve played throughout my life, this is the one I was forced to stop playing because the palms of my hands would be so sweaty from fear that the controller would slip out from my grip. So I would have to rest for a bit, dry the controller and wash my hands before I could continue on. I don’t’ know. Maybe the reason it was so scary to me was because the level designs were so great with details that the world looked incredibly real to me. Couple it with the fact that the locations you visit are more in line with actual places you would go to like a mall or an office building, then it has a stronger ability to resonate with you and pull you deeper into its world. Check it out yourself. That game came out in 2003 and graphically it’s aged pretty well.

Happy Halloween, everyone.

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