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Areala's Thirteen Most Terrifying Retro Games!


Areala

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Well, it's October, which means the desire for pants-wetting fear has come back into vogue for a few weeks. So what better way to celebrate spooky season than a write-up about some games which genuinely scared me at one point or another!

Note that this is not a "best of" list, or similar type of ranking. The order here isn't indicative of a specific game necessarily being better than the one below it, or worse than the one above it. All I'm ranking here is how effective these games were at creeping me out personally. Your list (and you should totally make one, because your Retromags Goddess always wants to know these things) is likely totally different from mine, and that's totally cool. There are plenty of other places where you can find rankings of the "best" horror games; this is not one of them.

Finally, just so we aren't quibbling over definitions, I'm going to consider anything "retro" to be either fifteen years old or two console generations behind. The latest we'll be going, then, is the early PS3/360/Wii era and good lord does that make me feel old. But enough about me: let's get to the scares!

13 - Doom 3 (PC)

While there's no denying the presence of some grotesque and horrifying elements in the original two Doom titles, it wasn't until Doom 3 that id decided to go all-in on the idea of making a horror-themed shooter. Time may have blunted its impact somewhat, but this is still a gorgeous game that has aged far better than its contemporaries. When Doom 3 originally released, I didn't even have a computer or a graphics card capable of running it, so the only time I could play it was at a friend's house. Driving back home after my first encounter with it, I found myself looking extra hard into the night, especially when stopped at traffic lights, to make sure nothing was creeping out of the shadows to get me. A distinctively unnerving experience.

12 - Dead Space (PS3)

Taking a lullaby or nursery rhyme and subverting one or more lines to make it creepy or weird is nothing new. Prior to 2008 though, I'd have struggled to come up with a way to make 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' sinister. Then EA dropped this trailer, and...yeah. Dead Space became a must-buy, and I was not disappointed. Nor was I entirely OK while playing it either. Everything about the original game was perfectly constructed and executed to deliver a claustrophobic, haunted-house-in-space experience. I loved every minute of it, and I've replayed it numerous times over the years, but this game made it difficult to want to go to sleep after playing it until two in the morning.

11 - Echo Night: Beyond (PS2)

A number of games (including one further down on this list) have used Beethoven's incredible Moonlight Sonata to their advantage, but only one of them has ever gone so far as to use it to inspire the game's actual setting. Echo Night: Beyond, developed by From Software, is set on an abandoned research facility on the Moon which, as you discover while searching for your missing wife, isn't as empty as it seems. With no mechanic for fighting the angry spirits which now inhabit the base, armed with only a flashlight, you have to explore, restore power, and interact with the calmer ghosts who are all seeking something that will allow them to move on to the next life. You have no life bar, but rather a heart monitor which reacts negatively to scary events, and if it rises too high, you'll die. Further complicating matters, the more panicked you get, the more of your peripheral vision you lose through vasoconstriction, making it harder to focus on anything except what is immediately in front of you. This game left me genuinely unnerved several times across my first playthrough, and most of the multiple endings are shards of ice to the heart.

10 - Theresia (DS)

I know what you're probably thinking: it's really hard to do horror effectively on a handheld system. If nothing else, the small screen size and the ability to quickly turn everything off should make it almost impossible to scare a player. And while the DS has a number of horror-themed games available, none of them had the impact on me that Theresia did. It's a mixture of visual novel and point-and-click adventure game, but it deals with themes of torture, political imprisonment, sadism, and Stockholm Syndrome. It goes to some dark, dark places, and it left me kind of a mess after finishing. To this day, I think about some of the places where this game goes, and I still get the shivers. Theresia makes you afraid to walk down a hallway, open a cabinet, even just sit in a chair. That is a profoundly absurd thing to say, but I'm saying it anyway because it's true.

09 - Fatal Frame (PS2/Xbox)

Most survival horror games prior to Fatal Frame gave you a small arsenal with which to fight your enemies. There might not have been a whole lot of ammo for the various firearms, but you had it nonetheless, and if you ran out, you could always use a knife, a lead pipe, a 2x4, or some other weapon in hand-to-hand combat. Fatal Frame, on the other hand, threw all that nonsense right out the window. "Your opponents are ghosts, and all you get to fight them with is a camera. All the while, you're trapped in a decrepit manor house in the Japanese countryside. Have fun!". Fatal Frame spooked me something awful my first few attempts to play it. Part of that was learning how the controls worked, as the game shifts between third-person for exploration, but requires the use of first-person when you're aiming the camera. But the other part is the atmosphere: Himuro Mansion is a crumbling ruin that bodes nothing good will come of poking around inside it, and yet since it's where your brother disappeared, it's where you've come to investigate. I love my brother sincerely, but he knows damn well if he disappeared while exploring some ancient abandoned house in the middle of nowhere that I am not coming to his rescue. If nothing else, Fatal Frame convinced me of that.

08 - Kuon (PS2)

Did I not just explain about how investigating a ghost-infested mansion out in the middle of nowhere is a bad idea? I'm pretty sure I did, but nevertheless, here comes From Software with their second entry on this list. At least Fatal Frame was set in the modern era; the poor shine maiden exorcists-in-training you have to guide through Kuon's world are from the Heian period, meaning this game takes place about a thousand years earlier, give or take a couple centuries. Depending on which of the two characters you select, you get either a very small knife, or a very small fan, with which to defend yourself, along with a limited selection of talisman-based magic spells, and that's that. So, yeah, running around in the dark fighting ghosts is bad enough when all you've got is a camera and a flashlight. Replace that camera with some magic charms, and the flashlight with a paper lantern, and you have the recipe for at least one sleepless night.

07 - Resident Evil (PS1)

First of all, I'd never seen this trailer before, and if that's the case, chances are good you haven't either, so give it a watch. My first encounter with Resident Evil was in college. The dorm where I lived had a large lounge area with a couple of big TVs set up, and one Friday evening not long after the launch of the PlayStation, a couple residents brought their console down, hooked it up to one of the TVs, threw in a copy of Resident Evil, and asked if anyone wanted to play. I watched a couple people fumble through the first few rooms, then I volunteered, convinced I had things figured out. Spoiler alert: I did not. Walking the halls of the Spencer Mansion unnerved me so thoroughly that the extent of my progress was to the first room with an item box, whereupon I made up an excuse about needing to use the bathroom, handed the controller to someone else, and got the hell out of there as quickly as I could. The problem was, this was a college town on a Friday night, and I lived on the third floor. Literally everyone else in the residence hall, it seemed, was either out partying, or locked in their room studying, and the utter silence (which normally I considered a godsend) I was hearing after having just played this game, frightened me all the worse. I was tiptoeing up the staircase, because I didn't want my footsteps to echo the way they did on the floors of the mansion. I locked myself in my room and thought everything was hunky-dory until I remembered we didn't have a private bathroom, so if I wanted to relieve myself, I had to go back out that quiet hallway and walk down to the shower/bathroom area. I can solemnly swear I have never peed so quickly in my entire life, and it was over a year before I got my own PlayStation, along with the courage to tackle the Spencer Mansion again.

06 - Silent Hill (PS1)

If Resident Evil brought George Romero-style horror to home consoles, then Silent Hill brought a creepy, distorted amalgamation of David Lynch, David Fincher, and David Cronenberg into our living rooms. My first experience with Silent Hill was sitting with my brother at a mutual friend's house, watching said friend tear the shrink wrap off his new copy and boot it up. The sun had long since gone down, we were all caffeinated, and excited to see what all the hype was about. We all learned a valuable lesson that day: you do not, under any circumstances, play a Silent Hill game in a pitch-black living room at midnight in a home situated beneath walnut trees, because you will hear something fall on the roof, and you will jump halfway out of your skin, and you absolutely will not sleep for the rest of the night. None of us even knew what to make of Silent Hill, just that it unnerved us at a deep, psychological level for reasons we couldn't articulate. Everything was wrong, but everything that was wrong was wrong only by a matter of degrees. It was so close to normal, and yet...! Subsequent playthroughs and in-depth analysis from the video gaming community have largely stripped away this game's power to scare me now, but that first experience has stuck with me since 1999.

05 - Condemned: Criminal Origins (360)

Monolith Productions has always enjoyed throwing some scares and horrifying imagery into their games, but Condemned: Criminal Origins took that to an entirely new level. It's about as close to a video game version of the film Se7en you'll ever see, with the player taking the role of FBI agent Ethan Thomas, investigating a series of homicides in Metro City. With every clue and every body, the case leads Thomas through urban-blighted hellscapes of tenement apartments, unattended subway stations, an abandoned department store, a closed down school, a burnt-out library, and more places that you could not pay me any amount of money to go poking around in IRL. Thomas has a department-issued sidearm, but that soon gets taken away from him, forcing him to rely on a variety of makeshift weapons like nail-studded boards and concrete-tipped rebar to defend himself from attacks by an increasingly-homicidal vagrant population. The melee combat is brutal and deadly, and the designers never seem to run out of tricks to startle, spook, and scare the player. Even when nothing is happening, Condemned is terrifying. If you play this game and claim it didn't creep you out, then either you're a liar or a Vulcan. The graphics are quite dated (and, honestly, the character models were bad even for 2005), but the sets, sound design, scripted sequences, and attacker AI are still top-notch. It's a pity they never got to finish the story, though, as this one ends on a cliffhanger which Condemned 2: Bloodshot failed to resolve.

04 - Siren: Blood Curse (PS3)

The original Siren on the PS2 is one scary-ass experience. The sequel, which we never got here in the US, is equally unnerving. But to get the full experience, you need to play Blood Curse. Released as a PS3 exclusive (and only as a digital version in North America), Blood Curse is a remake of the original PS2 game, with high-resolution textures, better controls, and much better voice acting. Blood Curse uses non-linear progression to tell its story, swapping between a number of different viewpoint characters at different times of the day or night. It forces the player to put things together by paying attention to the environment and what the other characters are doing, saying, and witnessing. The enemies you face, the Shibito, are un-killable zombies: you knock them down, they get up again, so your only defenses are to sneak or run past them, using the environment to distract them. But your characters also have a special skill, called sight jacking, they can use when a Shibito is nearby. You essentially tune into the enemy's visual frequency, and you can see through their eyes. Using this skill is of paramount importance, since it lets you get an idea on where the Shibito is, what it's focusing on, and how it moves around the level, thus allowing you to plot a (hopefully) safe route. It also allows you to hear the Shibito mumbling and gibbering to themselves, which is profoundly unnerving in its own way. I'm not sure when I've ever felt so tense playing a video game as I did with this one. The characters you control are all much, much weaker than the Shibito, and one wrong move will see you torn limb from limb. Even with perfect play, not all of the characters you control throughout the adventure will survive to see the end. If any retro game deserves the title of 'The Dark Souls of Horror', the Siren franchise is definitely it.

03 - Silent Hill 3 (PS2)

If I were ranking games on this list by the 'best' criteria instead of the scariest, then Silent Hill 3 would have been ranked number one. This is my favorite game in the franchise, and Heather is my favorite horror game protagonist of all time. But since this is only a ranking based on how badly it scared me while playing it, I have to put it in the number three position. Silent Hill 3 has its fair share of creepy and unnerving elements, but the truth is that Silent Hill 2, while scaring me silly, also helped immunize me to some of this game's tricks and imagery. Don't get me wrong, Silent Hill 3 is still scary, and chances are if I'd played this one before its predecessor, their rankings here would probably be reversed. It just didn't hit me quite as hard as...

02 - Silent Hill 2 (PS2)

Plenty of games prior to Silent Hill 2 managed to scare me. But Silent Hill 2 was the first horror game I ever played that truly got under my skin in ways I had never anticipated. This game's story dealt with ideas and themes I had never before confronted in a video game medium. When I first got this game, I was working almost exclusively second shifts at my job, meaning I usually didn't get home until almost ten o'clock in the evening, well after the sun had gone down. And since my girlfriend would be in bed at this point (she had to get up very early for her job), that left me with the run of an essentially empty house. So my traditional order of business was to get something to eat, get settled in, do some gaming until two or three o'clock in the morning, then head to bed. Silent Hill 2 forcibly broke me of this habit; there were numerous times where half my brain was saying, "Oh, keep playing!" and the other half was telling me, "You need to put down the controller, because I cannot take any more psychological abuse tonight." This was utterly unlike any other gaming experience I'd had up to that point, and even to this day, it's the only game that has ever made me turn it off due to empathy fatigue. Given the (some might say over-)saturation of horror in gaming media today, it's almost impossible to explain this to gamers under a certain age. It's like trying to describe the experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time in 1977: today, there have been hundreds of movies with better writing, better special effects, and bigger budgets, and kids grow up watching them whenever they want courtesy of the internet, smartphones, and tablets. In 1977 though, this was not the case. There simply was nothing like Star Wars, no one had ever seen anything like Star Wars, and regardless of how you feel about the state of the franchise today, in 1977 it was the asteroid that obliterated the pop culture dinosaurs. Silent Hill 2 left a similarly-sized crater in the world of home console gaming, and once it hit, there was no undoing the aftermath. The Pyramid Head could not go back in the bottle. When people proclaim Silent Hill 2 as their choice for best horror game of all time, those reasons, and what it did to gamers like me, are why.

01 - Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (Xbox/PS2)

Considering what I just wrote about Silent Hill 2, you might be confused how another game could hit harder or scare me worse than that game did. And honestly, up until I played Crimson Butterfly, I'd have agreed with you that there was simply no topping Konami's horror titan. But then Tecmo took everything they did right with their first Fatal Frame game, fixed a bunch of the things they didn't get quite right the first time, then saw how much 'horror' spice was left in their programming kitchen and were like, "Fuck it," and dumped every speck of it into the creation of Fatal Frame II. This game, where you play a young girl trying to reunite with her twin sister after they stumble upon the vanished Minakami Villiage while exploring the nearby woods, takes a scouring brush to your heart. There are four endings in the original PS2 offering, and none of them is happy, something Tecmo opted to change by adding a fifth to the Xbox version, which they dubbed the Director's Cut. Unfortunately, the canonical ending according to Fatal Frame III: The Tormented is one of the bad endings, so even this ray of sunshine is squashed. I talked about being creeped out and mentally overwhelmed by Silent Hill 2; Crimson Butterfly, on the other hand, physically overwhelmed me. It's the only video game that ever caused me to hyperventilate while playing, because I was literally that ensnared in the narrative. I've replayed every game on this list, some of them multiple times. Crimson Butterfly, however, I refuse to play through again. I've watched other people play through it, I've watched all the endings on YouTube, but despite the fact I bought the Xbox Director's Cut over a decade ago, it's never gone into my system. I've beaten every horror game I've ever sat down to play. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly is the only one that ever beat me in return.

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"The PS3/Xbox 360/Wii will soon be retro." Yeah, I feel old too. It's similar when I've been indexing magazines lately as I've been doing stuff from 2011 lately and I'm thinking, "Man these systems seem so old and it was only 2011?!"  

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