The Scariest Game You've Played and Why?

Fatal Frame 2 for me, Amnesia a close second. Those are the only two games that I've played, had to stop because they scared me too much, and have then been too afraid to start up again. I managed to fight through that and finish Amnesia. I've been trying the same with FF2 (which I last played when I was like 13) and can't play more than half hour chunks at a time. Damn near had a heart attack last night.

Scariest game? or game that scared me the most? Probably Resident Evil Zero and REmake for GC. Was a teen at the time and something about those pre rendered backgrounds reeaallllyy creeped me out. They really nailed the atmosphere for those games though. Don't get scared as easily now unless I'm really baked. The first Dead Space got me pretty good too now that I think about. With that regenerating necromorph chasing you, not knowing which room it would pop out.

Silent Hill, I don't play scary games anymore, I'm pretty sure Silent Hill was the last one I played/finished. Resident Evil 2 probably had the best jump scares.

The blood pit in Tomb Raider freaked me out for a bit this year, thought it was going to turn into some Descent nightmare, but it ended up being nothing.

Last Half of Darkness scared me quite a bit as a kid. Amnesia was scary, but I think the overall most tense and kinda scary game experience I've had was X-COM: Terror from the Deep, probably for similar reasons as those listing Dark/Demon's Souls - the totally unforgiving nature of it, just about every move could (and generally would) end in disaster, and you didn't lose when your entire squad died - but man, did it have consequences. Of course I didn't know about it's game breaking bugs that would make most people's games unfinishable, though I never got as far as to where that would even matter.

My first time with Minecraft, back in 2009 or so was certainly pretty scary too - pretty much the only thing I knew about it beforehand was that you should make sure to find coal and wood to craft a torch and find somewhere to hide when night fell. While the visuals and sounds are silly, that game got really tense as you heard the footsteps and growls of zombies and whatever other creatures where outside your little hiding spot.

Like some other duders here I have to go with RE1 & 2. I was a kid and there was nothing really like that back then. Most people who played when those were released would agree I guess.

Fatal Frame games are also scary but a different kind of scary, same goes for Silent Hill 2.

I really recommend the FF series, not only the 2nd. The 3rd specially I find to be great. The 1st needs a remake in my opinion as it doesn't hold up as much as the others in terms of gameplay. FFIV is good too but the awkward controls detracts a bit from the experience though. It's one of the best horror series in terms of appealing gameplay.

Silent Hill 3, AvP2, and Amnesia were all very frightening for me. The build up in all of these games are fantastic, and when the scares finally do start coming, they are expertly done.

Fatal Frame. I played the first 5 minutes and say "FUCK THIS!" and never played it again. Something about J-Horror always messes with me in the worst way.

Silent Hill 2 was pretty freaky, I never finished it though. I have no desire to.

The Suffering was pretty scary, but I really enjoyed that game.

What scares me is really weird. I thought Resident Evil 4 was more terrifying than any of the ones before it, I found Ocarina of Time and Metroid Prime to be tense and frightening, and Dead Space was nice and scary.

Most recently? Year Walk. That was really unnerving.

Dead Space:

It is truly the scariest game I've ever played. A lengthy game that takes between 10-12 hours to complete it. Your character, Isaac Clarke, is fighting for his life against these creatures called Necromorph's on this space station, while he's trying to repair it throughout the whole game. The final level takes place on the planet where the infestation started.

I've never really played any horror games before, and the reason I got this is because of all the good reviews it got from the critcs. I recently bought Dead Space 2, and I plan to play them back-to-back.

Resident Evil 2 - played this game when I was a teenager, just a kid. The first time the tyrant broke through a wall made me panic. I'd never seen that happen before in a game. Enemies could only come through doors in cut scenes if they weren't in the room already. The fact that an enemy could just burst through the fucking wall at any point made nowhere feel safe.

Fatal Frame 2 - The game wasn't really scary as it was filled with tension. There is one jump scare that made me yell and drop my controller. It happens in a stairwell. If you've played it, you know what I'm talking about.

I had a sleepover recently and me and a couple friends played Bloody Mary. I nearly shit my pants when she appeared in the mirror.

Silent Hill 1 as a kid. Honestly, I played it for like 15 minutes before I had to give it back to my brother, with the lie that I'd died and couldn't be bothered to start over.

Fucking wheelchairs and knife wielding babies man.

Probably Amnesia: The Dark Descent, most recently. That game actually had me scared.

It's either Silent Hill 2 or Amnesia. Silent Hill 2 because of that one moment near the end of the game where you have to give up all your equipment and you suddenly realize that the monsters were never making sound throughout the entire game; it was just your radio. Amnesia because it's actually a scary experience rather than a mediocre adventure game with horror dressings.

Binding of Isaac hit close to home for me. Not in a fear sense. More I know where this is coming from sort of way. :(

Silent Hill. Was 12 when it came out. Scared the shit out of me.

I'd have to say it was Fatal Frame 1...i feel like the obscuring of the ghost's faces was more effective than FF2 and also the cumbersome nature of the controls, for me made it more tense. Also it was the one i played first which goes a long way.

Outside of that, i'm pretty jaded by horror games these days and have a backlog of'em that i'll play when i buy an Oculus Rift.

Silent Hill 2 was the last horror game I finished. I played with a friend (which made it easier) but it was a harrowing experience. We were 14 maybe. Both the environment and the story are really, really tense and it never really lets up. At the time (and it holds up not so bad) the graphics were pretty amazing, and it was legitimately fucking messed up as far as story goes too.

The Resident Evil remake on GameCube is also excellent.

Tried Amnesia, couldn't play it for more than 10 minutes. Something about the camera angle just implied too much horror.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Couldn't get past the first part. I'm the best horror game player.

I get the MOST scared.

The only game I can remember getting to me is probably Fatal Frame 2. Like everyone else has already said, it does an excellent job building tension and really making you feel helpless. I guess that's probably why the Fatal Frame series tends to stand out to me in a genre that I normally find uninteresting.

If you expand that to games that made me feel uncomfortable, I'd include Rule of Rose to that as well. There's something very unsettling about watching a group of kids beating a dog trapped in a bag and then burying someone alive, even in a video game.

Silent hill 1-3 (the only ones I've played) weren't in your face scary but they were creepy as hell and probably has the most tense and thick atmosphere in the medium. Really like them for their more subtle and creative horror-moments, like when you first see pyramidhead behind the bars in the apartments or that fucked up mirror room in silent hill 3

Tried a little rule of rose and it felt very promising, but it didn't run well with the emulator and I found no way to fix it.

Siren: Blood curse also had some freakishly tense moments like when you were hiding and you saw that the shibito you hid from were staring at the place that you were hiding. Also when the cameraman turns shibito and chases you as the little girl in the hospital.

Speaking of Tanks, does anyone remember Tiny Tank? That game is awesome.

Silent Hill was probably the only game to have me dread booting up a save every time I played it. That fucking radio made the game way scarier than it actually was. Also, the first time I got to Midwich Elementary, I pretended to get stuck on the piano puzzle because I didn't want to leave the room.

Well, I'm something of a coward, so Dead Space, up until the first stupid necromorph thing waking up after I shot it to make sure it was dead.

Also, it probably doesn't count because I was about 8, but there was a scene in Myst 3:Exile where this scary witch lady threw fireballs or something, had nightmares for weeks.

Pretty much only game I remember being scary was the original Fatal Frame game, mainly because the protagonist is very low power compared to most horror games.

Miasmata has some of the scariest things I've ever experienced.

The first encounter with the creature gives you the feeling you are really being hunted, something is out there and you can't do anything to stop it.

It's also one of the best games I've ever played, so check it out!

The Fatal Frame series is the ONLY horror series that I just cannot play. Only horror game that genuinely scares me.

Wasn't that the game with profanity filled cutscenes? If so then yes I fucking loved that game.

Fear 2

I'd have to go with Penumbra Black Plague. If I'm remembering correctly that was the game where Frictional started with the whole not being able to fight back thing. I also thought the Condemned series was scary as hell and of course Amnesia.

the first Silent Hill really fucked with me, but I was 13 or something. Amnesia had a decent atmosphere and was scary, I just got bored with the mechanics after an hour and a half of playing it.

It's weird, I was able to play Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, all those Japanese tank control games at a young age. It always frightened me, but it wasn't until this generation did I really become scared.

Amnesia took me months to complete. I remember the first time I ever played it, I nearly flipped my computer desk. I immediately turned it off, and had to leave the lights on for the night. I wasn't a kid anymore, how any game did this to me really stuck with me.

Outlast came close, but after the first hour I grew to understand how everything worked, and easily got through it. It had real promise. It has all the jump scares needed, but that's not enough. The awful ending didn't help, either.

It's the feeling of being helpless, with no combat whatsoever. You have to hide, and even then they could find you.

So yeah, probably Amnesia. The water section, the infamous water section. God fucking damn that level.

Fatal Frame 1 and 2 really freaked me out as a kid, even more than Silent Hill for some reason. The first Dead Space also was really scary for me, probably the only sorta recent game that has been actually scary, as much as I liked DS 2, it just wasn't scary. Have not played Amnesia: DD yet though, I'm waiting for halloween to dive into that.

Condemned. I didn't like the mannequins that followed you around

@ghostnpc: I haven't really been scared of a video game since I was a kid. If something does it is always usually just a jump scare. But when I was younger the first Resident Evil and Clock Tower is what jump out to me. A few years back I did pass out to the Siren Blood Curse title screen on PS3. Waking up to that at 2 in the morning fucked with me a bit.

Phantasmagoria.

I was about quite young when my father showed this game to me, it had some gruesome deaths my young eyes were prepared for.

The most scared I've ever been with a game was playing Thief: Deadly Shadows - specifically during the ship level full of undead and the infamous Shalesbridge Cradle. Now normally I'm not that scared of the game itself but rather cheap jump scares that will make me, well jump, but in the case of those two areas I was genuinely frightened of just moving about or being seen/heard by the creatures lurking the halls.

People remark how Amnesia is scary because you can't fight back, and ironically that is the reason why it's not scary to me - because I know there isn't a way "out" of the scenario. You either hide or you die, it's very binary. In the case of Thief, the fear came from the fact that I could fight the undead, but I was largely outnumbered and only special types of arrows would kill them, of which I had a really short supply. It was the fact that I wasn't cornered into a binary situation and could move about as I pleased that scared me infinitely more in those levels.

Amnesia, or Clock Tower for the SNES. I've only played a few hours of Clock Tower because it was just too scary for me to keep playing. Something about the Scissorman absolutely terrifies me. The clacking of the Scissors, the creepy music that slowly builds, the randomness of where he appears, who dies, when he jumps out, the player's helplessness. Ugh.

That first Penumbra game certainly didn't make me want to play the rest. That team sure knows out to freak you out.

I remember finding System Shock 2 really scary when I first played it. Just something about that world. Other than that, I generally don't play horror games...because I'm a big pussy.

Alien vs Predator 1. That damn marines campaign...

Other than that, I don't have a good answer. I am a wuss when it comes to horror games.

A kid on the block insited on lending me Resident Evil 2 instead of Gran Turismo when I was.. nine? It was more unnerving and oppressive than scary but RE4 was the first in the series I felt like playing afterwards.

I want to get into (play 1-4) Silent Hill but even a 360p video of the mirror room in 3 freaked me out.

Extraordinary. I never thought of this. The more agency and options given to the player, the more petrified he/she will become of actually making a decision. It turns it less into a 'game' per-say but more of a survival situation. It pushes your 'self' further into your character if the world is a more reactive presence, giving a stronger fear of failure/death. Afraid of Monsters mod for Half Life had a very similar feel to this, for almost the same reasons.

I didn't finish Amnesia, so I'll say that's probably it.

I don't really like horror games all that much. I do like intense games, games that leave you exhausted and a little strung out from the tension. The best kind of tension is the fear of real consequences for failing at the gameplay - not bringing enough skill and mental intensity to the game. Demon's Souls sticks out as a high water mark for tense games for me. Dead Space with the difficulty cranked was good too but much of that was the awesome lighting and atmosphere.

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream - Everybody in this game is a complete mess - and for good reasons. At first it seems more depressing than scary, but once you realize the flaws you're sympathizing with it sort of turns inward. It probably rings true for nobody else but the self is way scarier than any monster.

NBA Jam - Big Head mode

Silent Hill 4. I said it.

Oh, also the ghost house part of Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines. Fuck that part.

amnesia, the part where the invisible creature that splashes in the water I had to stop