Self-Inflicted Scares: The Creepiest Video Games

We asked, you answered and we’ll never sleep again.

By: Charlene Jimenez

For some strange, masochistic reason, we’re addicted, as a culture, to scaring ourselves silly. From haunted hayrides to scary movies and beyond, we can’t get enough of raising our heart rate in a non-cardiovascular capacity. Yet, moreso than their filmic counterparts, horror video games may be the pinnacle of making us want to pee ourselves because it puts us in control. Recently, we asked you to tell us your favorite horror video game series and the results may just shock you.

Silent Hill – Take everything you’re used to seeing in horror movies – scary town, random bouts of creepy fog, monsters – and add all sorts of stuff you weren’t deranged enough to come up with on your own – like Pyramid Head – put it all together and you’ve got a recipe for nightmare soup. And a hit video game! You’ll probably want some soup to calm your nerves afterwards.

Fatal Frame – What’s that? Regular ghosts in a game aren’t scary enough for you? Well, how about a game where you have to get all up-close-and-personal with said spectres? If that’s still not enough for you, Fatal Frame 2 added this weird twin storyline that still has us afraid to pick up a camera. This series is perfect for those who were too terrified to read the R.L. Stine/Goosebumps classic Say Cheese and Die.

Resident Evil – Easily one of the most popular horror franchise to come out of Japan, Capcom’s classic series plays on both our fear of zombies and our fear of crazy viruses. And dogs. We’ve never looked at dogs the same. Oh god, when it bursts through the window? We’re still shaking. Save us, master of unlocking, save us!

Parasite Eve – With a game that starts off with an entire theater of people spontaneously combusting, you know it’s going to bring the creepy in a serious way. If nothing else, we learned to be afraid of our own mitochondria, any sort of “ultimate being” (or sisters, for that matter) and it has made our frantic, late-night WebMD searches all the more terrifying.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent – Amnesia is one of those games that sticks with you long after you turn it off, because not only did it play off our totally-legitimate-and-not-at-all-childish fear of the dark, it’s also the only game on this list that doesn’t give you any weapons to fight back against the monsters. And that flooded hallway sequence where you’re running from a monster you can’t look at, the doors all open inward and you’re most likely out of lamp fuel? As if getting up to pee in the middle of the night wasn’t scary enough. Thanks a lot, Amnesia.

Forward to a Buddy Invite a Buddy