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MisterBananaFoam

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'Child-oriented' games with a twisted, evil side

Most video game developers have to do something to make their games enticing, even to the younger generation. You have to set the stage with vibrant colors, catchy music, and an easy-to-learn control scheme that responds well, and for the little ones, just tone that last element down a notch, right? Yeah, sure, you could go ahead and soften it up for those crybaby losers, but where's the fun in that? Why not spice your game up a little bit with tremendously difficult levels, spine-tinglingly terrifying monsters and distorted, hellish music, just to throw a knuckle-ball at those wimps? Here's a list of some... 'Child-oriented' games with a twisted, evil side. Truly whoever developed these games is a psychomaniac hell-bent on terrorizing us and fueling our minds with paranoia... well, more than there already is, at least. (This is also another one of my periodically-updated lists, so keep your eye on this one, too)

List items

  • Before Naughty Dog set the stage for Jak and Nathan Drake, they constructed everyone's favorite cocaine-crazed Bandicoot, Crash. I didn't get to play a whole lot of Crash in my childhood, and I can certainly see why; the game is pretty damn relentless, even on the first island. A lot of jumps require tricky timing to pull off, and since Crash can't take a single hit without Aku Aku to help him out, you'll have to rely on a sharp wit to make it through a lot of the levels. You can obtain emeralds that lead to shortcuts and other bonuses, but in order to do that, you have to break EVERY SINGLE BOX in certain levels, and these are usually the longest and hardest to get a perfect score on. Even worse still is the fact that the game doesn't even allow you to use the SAVE feature without completing a jumping puzzle, and in order to access said jumping puzzle, you have to collect three Tawna tokens, which could be in ANY crate throughout the level. So, if I have to put in work just to be able to RECORD MY PROGRESS, imagine how bad it must be for a kid almost half my age. Yeah, it wouldn't be pretty.

  • Donkey Kong was one of the most known staple character in the video game market to date. His first appearance was in the old Donkey Kong arcade game, which featured a young soon-to-be Mario battling the titular ape in order to rescue Pauline, Mario's first girlfriend. Since then, Rare decided that they were tired of the simian being downplayed as a villain, and decided to invent his own spin-off series, Donkey Kong Country, and MAN, was it a huge success. The gameplay took everything that was good about the Mario games and increased it tenfold, with a multitude of secrets, characters, and scenery that puts most other SNES games to shame. To this day, DKC is Rare's most fondly-remembered franchise sans Banjo-Kazooie, and the series has maintained luster even with the more recent Donkey Kong Country Returns, which was the first non-Rare Donkey Kong platformer. Of course, Rare couldn't pass up the opportunity to frighten the absolute crap out of us, and jeez Louise, did they ever. The series, straight from the get-go, had VERY unsettling Game Over screens, showcasing, in respective order, Donkey and Diddy Kong bruised from head to toe, Diddy and Dixie locked away in a jail cell, and Dixie and Kiddy trapped in a creepy cradle, complete with a dark background and, in the second game's case, a RED BACKGROUND after a few seconds of waiting. That's not the only thing about the original trilogy that scared our socks off; in DKC2, in the middle of a stage where you infiltrate a Zinger hive (Zingers are essentially GIANT WASPS), you begin to hear unnerving music. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you find a GIANT RED ZINGER that chases you relentlessly, forcing you to speed up or get crushed. If that wasn't enough, the unnerving music transforms into PANIC MUSIC, which jump starts your fight-or-flight response, and let me tell you, if you're a normal person, you BETTER be on flight mode during this segment. Oh, but this is absolutely NOTHING compared to the series' first (and only) 3D outing, Donkey Kong 64, which might as well have been named 'Donkey Kong: Freakish Nightmare Edition.' At first, everything seems to be normal, what with the dark, mechanical replica of K. Rool sailing across the seas and DK Isles peacefully placed in the middle of the ocean. And then you get to Frantic Factory, an already disturbing, haunted toy factory with many haywire mechanisms going off and that is populated by autonomous wind-up crocodiles which have to be killed with explosives. Then you reach the level's boss, Mad Jack, and mother of mercy on a Cracker Jack, is this guy terrifying. Imagine, a giant, possessed Jack-In-The-Box that sounds like Donald Duck on crystal meth, who can SHOOT LASERS at you, raise pillars of damaging light anywhere he pleases, jumps at you at mach speed, and can turn INVISIBLE, of all things. Yep, the third boss of the game is, essentially, a giant toy version of the Bloodsuckers from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadows of Chernobyl, who are already pretty damn scary to begin with. If that wasn't enough, let me introduce you to Kracshot Kroc, a henchman who has a favorite motto, and that motto is "GET OUT." Every time you do something wrong (or RIGHT, depending on what area you're in), a cursor appears onscreen, coupled with the previous quote being yelled in a TRAUMATIZING voice, and you have a set amount of time to evacuate the area before being one-shot killed. The first time you hear him, I GUARANTEE you will immediately soil yourself from the sheer terror in his voice, let alone his business ethics of sniping your face off. Not even the most recent entry in the series, Donkey Kong Country Returns, fails to bring chills to your spine. At one point later in the game, you're progressing through what appears to be a rather empty-looking level... until you walk ten meters to your right, and then you suddenly get chased by a SWARM of black spiders. And by 'swarm,' I don't just mean 'swarm,' I mean a f*cking TIDAL WAVE OF SPIDERS. The music also speeds up to accompany the madness, and the only way to avoid being bitten to death is to move your ass or lose your ass. If Rare went out to make a cutesy platformer series, they certainly did, but they offset it quite a bit with such mortifying features as the ones listed above. Those damn, dirty apes.

  • You gotta love how the media consistently bickers about how video game violence corrupts our youth and that killing children in video games is considered 'unethical,' and yet they still managed to let a game like Heart of Darkness, in which you control a ten-year-old boy who essentially can get CRUSHED, MAIMED, DEVOURED, DISMEMBERED, and altogether DESTROYED in TERRIFYING WAYS, slide by with a stippled 'E' rating. I still can't wrap my head around that; was the ESRB sleeping on the job or something? Did they look at the cover of this game and think, "Oh, it's just a game about this young boy and his cute bulgy-eyed dog, how could this possibly be violent?" Maybe it's the fact that there's no blood in the game at all, but that still doesn't excuse most of these deaths. If you fell off a high mountain, snapped your spinal cord and died, but your corpse didn't show any traces of blood, would it be considered a tame death (or "Mild/Fantasy Violence," as the ESRB likes to call it) compared to being shot or getting decapitated? No! Just because there's no blood doesn't mean a game can't be brutal at times (look at some of the moves in Soul Calibur, for goodness sake), and that's exactly what Heart of Darkness comes off as. Did I also forget to mention this game is frustrating beyond belief to play? Andy responds to your inputs very awkwardly, and coupling this with dying instantaneously on contact with anything hazardous makes it a VERY punishing quest just to make it past the first level! If there was one game in this world that deserves a higher rating on the parental guidance scale, it's Heart of Darkness. There's almost nothing childish about this game, sans the cheesy opening; it's as dark and twisted as the plot to Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time, maybe ever WORSE than that, who knows.

  • Plok, unfortunately, is a largely unknown game, since everyone had their sights set on 3D games by the time it was released. If people had stopped for a second and held onto their Super Nintendos for one last time, they would have found one of the most charming (and challenging) platformers available on the system, with an absolutely INCREDIBLE music score by none other than the legendary Tim Follin. Oh, did I say challenging in parentheses in that last sentence? Because I MEAN IT. This game is BALLS hard to beat right from the get go, with a hair-tearing set of tutorial levels to foreshadow your many upcoming failures. There's monsters disguised as harmless signs, skeletonized fish jumping out at you, harmful water, logs that drop out of the sky, and many other perilous obstacles that make retrieving Plok's stolen flag a hopeless effort. May I remind you that these are the FIRST STAGES IN THE ENTIRE GAME. Oh, thought you could get away with selecting "Child's Play" mode from the main menu? Well, TOO BAD, SUCKER! You can't access levels, boss fights, even the final world without playing on the tougher difficulty, you wuss. Plok is a game about an animated pile of clothing, and believe me, the many deceptive traps and enemies this game has packing WILL wash you out.

  • Another lost treasure from the olden age of the Nintendo 64, Glover was a game about a magician and his mortal gloves. When an experiment goes wrong in his alchemy lab, he is sent careening into the depths of his castle, petrified in stone. One of the gloves falls from the tower, while the other climbs into the pot full of slimy chemicals and emerges as an evil possessed glove hell-bent on destroying Glover's realm. He himself looks terrifying in his own right, with a stitched-up mouth and his ominous dark laughter that repeats constantly in the hub world, but just wait until you get to the actual game. Glover is tasked with escorting a bouncy ball to the exits of every level so he can defeat the bosses that reside within and banish the wizard from his petrified state. Yes, I said 'escort,' and yes, it's about as harrowing a task as you'd think it is. It's not hard enough that most of the levels are pretty spacious, but they contain a rigorous amount of obstacles and enemies that impede your progress quite often, and moving the ball around is a huge chore in itself, since the turning and maneuverability are hindered when you drag it around. Coupled with multiple bottomless pits, death traps, and a 3 hit life bar for both you AND the ball, the game becomes a frustrating romp at times. As a kid, I barely managed to get past the 1st set of levels and hardly got much further. At one point, I was faced against (if my memory serves) a zombie boss in a graveyard, and after stumbling around for hours and hours trying to figure out what his weakness was I finally just gave up. Glover has a great premise, and in general the controls are responsive enough, but the difficulty ranks up quite a lot here and there, and the creepy imagery in the hub world might be enough to draw the young'uns away.

  • Mario 64 is the best example of a series that transitioned from 2D to 3D seamlessly. This game took up pretty much all of my childhood, and it really comes off as no surprise. The 3D platforming schematics drifted along with the expansive environments and the smashing visuals like a majestic feather, and to this date I have a very hard time finding suitable comparisons, in sheer quality, to Mario 64. However, some of Bowser's devious obstacles would most likely make your children wet themselves in terror. To start, there's the giant frigging killer eel in Jolly Roger Bay, who only shows himself and starts swimming around when you travel RIGHT NEXT to his cave. He has monstrous teeth and big, bulgy eyes, and it's required to aggravate him to obtain a Star. Think that isn't terrifying? Wait until you reach Big Boo's Mansion, a level pretty much filled with eerie tricks and traps. The level is set in a haunted mansion, and inside said haunted mansion are ghosts, haunted bookshelves, a merry-go-round in the flooded basement that plays a very unnerving tune, and a HAUNTED PIANO. Why did I place emphasis on that last one, you ask? Well, once the unaware creep up on it, it bears its HIDEOUSLY large teeth, chases after you, and makes the TERRIFYING sound of a child bashing his hands on a keyboard EVERY TIME it steps toward you. It's also one of the few unkillable enemies in the game, meaning your only defense against it is to RUN LIKE HELL. Thankfully, the piano is only in that one area throughout the entire game, but towards the end of the game, Bowser throws yet another reason to cower and hide at us: the dreaded endless staircase. If you try and face Bowser for the third time, the game tells you that you don't have a sufficient amount of power stars... but lets you enter the room anyways. What you find inside is a staircase, and at this point, you're probably thinking "Hey, maybe I DON'T have to collect more stars! The boss fight is just up this flight of stairs!" That is true, the final encounter with Bowser resides at the top of the staircase... except when you try and climb it, you realize IT DOESN'T END. And in the time it takes for you to figure out that the staircase is endless, it plays a VERY unnerving loop that sounds like someone repeatedly hitting sharp notes on a xylophone, OVER and OVER and OVER again until you finally can't take it and you are forced to exit the room. Looking back at Mario 64's scare factor, it's relatively tame by this list's standards, but Mario 64 definitely had its moments that terrified me the first time I experienced them.

  • Now that we've taken a look at the world's most famous plumber, how about his rival? Did his games fare any better in terms of not making us soil ourselves? Well, no, it didn't. It looks cheery on the outside, with a plethora of cuddly critters and a mad scientist who goes nuts and wants to harvest their energy and turn them into robots. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Well, nobody said anything about any of this taking place underwater, and in some sections, it did. Much like any other living creature, Sonic requires oxygen to stay in the fray, and whenever you enter a large body of water, you hear what sounds like a bell ticking every five seconds, until you hear that dreadful tone... DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUN... and as the music stops, Sonic expires and drowns with an exasperated 'glug.' This game REALLY wants to let you know when you're drowning, apparently, and if you don't find a valuable source of air, that music starts playing and you instantly become more paranoid, frantically pressing buttons just to ensure the music stops. And almost every canonical entry in the series history contains this music, even the recent Adventure games and Sonic Colors, which ORCHESTRATED the damn thing. Oh, but that is mere CHILD'S PLAY compared to two other games in the series: Sonic Spinball and Sonic CD. The former is an... ahem... SPIN-off... of the series that turned Sonic into a household pinball game. Some of the sound effects are absolutely grating to listen to, and this goes DOUBLE for boss fights, which make a TERRIBLE screeching noise every time you land a hit on them. As for Sonic CD, well... let's just hope you manage to get through the game without failing, because if you do, SATAN LAUGHS AT YOU. No, I'm not kidding, when you game over, you hear what amounts to POSSESSED LAUGHTER and BLOOD-CURDLING ORGAN PIPES playing for a good 10 seconds before being booted to the title screen. This laughter also plays during boss fights, which also sounds like you're in a dark biochemistry facility, complete with metallic clanging and dark bass hits. So yeah, mainly, the scares and frights that come packaged with the Sonic games are in audio format, but your ears will probably close themselves for weeks once they hear those sadistic sounds and tracks.

  • A lot of games failed to live up to their predecessors once the gaming industry got their mitts on 3D technology in the mid-90's. Bubsy the Cat and Earthworm Jim are the most exaggerated examples, although I'm absolutely sure that there were other games that couldn't edge past mediocrity. Fortunately, Ubisoft's trademark protagonist Rayman managed to blissfully avoid such a treacherous fate, with an engaging supporting cast, above average visuals and several lush stages. The game became such a huge hit that it eventually garnered a remake for the PS2 dubbed 'Rayman Revolution,' which was the version I owned. So how is this game scary? I'll tell you how in two words: ZOMBIE CHICKENS. That's right, you're not reading that incorrectly, this game has ZOMBIFIED CHICKENS, and oh BOY, do they look creepy. To start, they don't have any appendages below the waist whatsoever, and they don a rugged, tattered cloth above their hideous torsos. They are downright bone-skinny, with pale gray skin, sharp nails and a jumbled mess of hair. They populate the Marshes of Awakening, and upon appearing they dart towards Rayman, forcing you to dodge out of the way. They're not completely unforgiving, allowing for an easy dodge, but they still look mortifying. Oh, but that doesn't even compare to the diabolical level from Hell that the game delivers later on in the Marshes of Awakening: The Cave of Bad Dreams. Believe you me, this stage WILL live up to its nickname, as you are forced to platform above murky, piranha-infested waters while attempting to avoid being smacked around by the arms of the tortured souls that reside within. To make matters worse, there is a floating cyclops swamp monster with a top hat and skull staff named Jano, who acts as the guardian of the cave's treasure, and not only does he summon miniature versions of himself to impede your progress inside the cave, he also eventually threatens to EAT Rayman, which leads to a terrifying chase down a slippery slope with the camera being shown FROM INSIDE JANO'S SHARP-TOOTHED MOUTH. As a kid, I couldn't bear to watch the cutscene culminating with the chase sequence, instead turning my head away from the screen for as long as I could. The rest of the game is, thankfully, much more tame, but the Cave of Bad Dreams very well could give you nightmares in its own right.

  • Just a few years back, Notch and his colleagues at Mojang decided to work on an expansive game called Minecraft. It was going to be bigger than anything anyone had ever seen, with a nearly-infinite, randomly generated landscape, several tools and building materials to make your own armor and weapons, and many elements of survival and resource management packed into one epic, blocky adventure. However, what Notch didn't know was that he also set out on creating the most diabolical, nerve-wracking games of this generation, and when he finally found out where Minecraft was headed, he actively PUSHED the game towards demonic levels of terror. Where do we start with Minecraft... well, first of all, it's incredibly hard unless you REALLY know what you're doing. Once you start up a new world, you're left with only your wits and your guts to figure out what to do, and if you decide NOT to use the official wiki during your playtime, you might as well give up, since the game does not tell you a SINGLE DAMN THING about what to do. Once you figure out your objective, you finally get to experience how punishing Minecraft can be at times; in order to increase your chances of survival, you need coal and iron, which can only be mined in dark caves filled with hostile, mobile creatures, also known as 'mobs.' These creatures range from your standard zombie to a giant, RED-EYED spider that can CLIMB WALLS, a green hedge-like monster that EXPLODES when he gets close to you, a skeleton with a bow that can SHOOT ARROWS at you, normally with godlike timing and accuracy (they're the worst in every category, no doubt), and that can ALSO RIDE SAID AFOREMENTIONED SPIDERS, a giant glob of slime that splits into multiple slimes as you strike it with your sword, and a tall, slender, emotionless and pitch-black apparition that, at first, seems neutral, but then RAISES ITS MOUTH and makes HORRIFYING noises when you look at it, TELEPORTS, makes scary buzzing noises when hit and does MASSIVE damage to your character. That last one, the Enderman, is one of the very reasons why I always vouch not to play Minecraft for as often as I can. Apparently, Notch has stated that it was created for the SOLE PURPOSE of invoking fear in the hearts of the players, and oh boy, does it ever. But you know what the funny part about all of this is? All of those things are the monsters that reside outside of the game's own literal Hell, the Nether, and it houses some pretty gross monstrosities as well. You've got the Ghast, a gigantic octopus-looking creature that hurls flaming cannonballs from its mouth and makes VERY creepy child noises, the Zombie Pigman, which is pretty much self explanatory, rotten decaying flesh and all, the Blaze, a fiery head with multiple rods for a body that flies, shoots fireballs at you and breathes like a mechanical MONSTER, and Magma Cubes, which, if anything, are Slimes that can SUPERJUMP. All of these monsters spawn periodically in darkness and in their personal habitats, and the only way to stop them from spawning is by illuminating the area, which involves making torches, which involve travelling INTO DARK CAVES. You see where I'm going with this? The endgame isn't much better; you're transported to a fiendish realm known quite simply as The End. That should just about tell you what you're in for already, but I guess I'll elaborate. Endermen, who previously only spawned rarely compared to other mobs, spawn TENFOLD in The End, and their hair-trigger hostility is still maintained. To make matters worse, THERE'S A F*CKING DRAGON ON THE LOOSE. And it's not just any dragon, oooh, NO. It's the Enderdragon, a massive flying holocaust that can destroy almost any block it flies into, and charges after you if you look away from it for too long, doing MASSIVE damage in the process. Minecraft may come off as a cutesy, cube-filled paradise, but once you pick up Survival Mode you get slapped in the face and tortured by the paranoia-inducing monsters, locations, and even ambient background noises.

  • The Zelda series is Nintendo's other killer app besides Mario, and it shows. Zelda had quite a few more sequels than most of the franchises under Nintendo's belt, and to this day the only Nintendo platform that is missing a Zelda game is the Virtual Boy. In the later years of the Nintendo 64's life, a second 3D Zelda game rose from the ashes, bearing the name Majora's Mask. It boasted time travel and mask collection as its primary features, but another thing they forgot to mention was how nightmarish the game turned out to be. There are so many things about Majora's Mask that make children cry out for their mothers, but the things that often tortured me the most were the giant moon and the masks themselves. Every time you adventure outside and wish to take a break and stare at the sky, you get to experience the wonderful image of a GIANT, DEMONIC MOON staring down upon Termina, with evil intentions oozing out of its soulless gaze. Did I mention that if you take too long in saving the world and forget to warp time backwards, the moon actually collides with Termina and creates a NUCLEAR F*CKING APOCALYPSE?! Because it does, and when it happens, you get to see EVERY JUICY MINUTE of it, with Link's body being hurled back by the blast. But hey, at least that part is AVOIDABLE. The titular masks, as hinted at by the title, are REQUIRED to progress throughout the game, and whenever you don a mask that shape-shifts you into a different creature, you get to see yet another enlightening scene of Link's agonized facial expressions as the mask contorts his body into a Deku/Goron/Zora. Thankfully, those terrorizing scenes are skippable after you view them once. The antagonistic Majora's Mask is also quite disturbing, as it appears to be haunted with hatred and corruption, and CONTROLS THE MINDS of whatever poor sap that it happens to attach itself to (in this case, the Skull Kid). It's the perfect game for your children! In all honestly, Majora's Mask intentionally veered off the light-hearted path of the past games, if Nintendo is to be believed, but the nutjobs at the ESRB still gave it an E for Everyone, so it still deserves its place on this list.
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