While horror may not love us, many people simply love horror. Immersive movies, games and literature produced with intention and an incredible attention to detail can masterfully evoke a powerful fear and terror, even if it is just fiction. While in many games a player can eventually assume control over fear by defeating some force of evil or terrifying monsters, it is in those dreadful moments when your heart plummets that many horror buffs like myself find some catharsis.
These go beyond simple spooks or jumpscares—these are realizations or sudden bombshells that remind us of what we’re truly afraid of, haunting our brains long after we encounter them.
Here are the six most chilling moments from among the many titles I have played. Please note that while we try to avoid major spoilers, there are some descriptions below that are in spoiler territory. Reader beware!
6. Little Nightmares
Developer: Tarsier Studios
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Android, PlayStation 4, iOS, Xbox One, GeForce Now, Windows
Initial release date: April 28, 2017
I enjoyed Little Nightmares, but felt the nightmare was tame up until a moment that I think easily lands it on this list.
Up until now the player’s character, alittle girl in a yellow rain jacket named Six, navigates an ominous and mysterious world, puzzling through dark rooms that gradually unfold to reveal an even darker conspiracy. This comes to a head in what is perhaps one of the game’s most memorable parts:
Six must travel through a fancy hotel full of uncanny and ravenous creatures. Players are left wondering what violence drives them—and we find out in the kitchen, where the cannibalistic desires of the creatures are revealed. This moment disturbed me on many levels, and I felt my blood curdle with the ensuing dinner scene. Gnarly!
5. Minecraft
Developer: Mojang
Platforms: Apple devices, Linux, mobile devices, Windows, Chromebook, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox.
Release date: May 17, 2009
Believe it or not, Minecraft is a horror game. From deep dark caves full of nasties, to woodland mansions haunted by axe wielding killers and Creepers that stalk you from behind, it has made me jump, scream and panic.
Then, there’s the Nether—an underground dimension in the world of Minecraft. Piglins, characters hostile to the player’s character, are scary. The fatal burning lava you can fall into with just a single misstep? Yeah, pretty scary. But what really freaked me out was the first time I encountered a Ghast. I was playing at 3am and the game kept glitching into the Nether, to the point where I started to wonder if the place was actually cursed—and then I heard those weird cries and whimpers. Oh man, was I concerned, and wondering just what in the hell was down here. I had kept to tight caves that prevented the Ghasts from generating close to me, so at first I only heard it from afar. It wasn’t until I was on my way to a particularly ominous looking Bastion, a trap-filled structure in the game’s environment, that I encountered that fowl pale block of shock.
4. Resident Evil 4
Developer: Capcom
Platforms: GameCube, PlayStation 2/3/4, Windows, Wii, Xbox 360/One, Nintendo Switch
Initial release date: Jan. 11, 2005
The Resident Evil series is a horror classic, and I am torn between two moments in its fourth game. The first time you encounter the chainsaw wielding maniac? Or the first encounter with the spikey and extra nasty Regenerator, another kind of hostile character?
Holy sh*t, that caused me to gasp and nearly just turn my console off in fear. The chainsaw man appears multiple times and is always a scary moment, especially just hearing it from afar and knowing you’re in for it, but the regenerators’ weird whimpering in the dark and their ability to pull you onto their spikes is a very frightful moment indeed. I’m calling it a tie between them.
3. Fatal Frame 2
Developer: Konami
Platforms: PS2 and PS3
Date: 2003
Maybe it’s just the Gemini in me, but this twin-fueled Edo era scarer really spooked me on multiple levels. Its atmosphere fills you with quiet creeps, alongside the threat of ghosts that keep you jumping and a story that insinuates something deeply dark. The scariest moment however for me, was so simple, I probably shouldn’t even put it on the list.
Midway through the game, the player enters a large manor in the heart of a Japanese village in search of your lost twin sister who really REALLY likes just wandering off. In this manor, you find a room filled with little dolls. One ends up moving slightly and another shows up elsewhere, suggesting a that ghost took it. On paper, perhaps not the scariest thing, but something about this room and its dark connection to the family that must’ve lived there sets off my nerves. Just being in that room and coming back to it throughout the game feels chillingly icky.
2. Evil Within 2
Developer: Tango Gameworks
Platforms: PS4 and Xbox One
Date: October 2017
This game scared the sh*t out of me! So much so that I never even completed it. This is the scariest game I’ve ever played by far, and within it is a moment that got me shaking so much that I really didn’t want to play it afterward. Don’t get me wrong—I beat the boss and witnessed the new twist, but I saw the hell along the horizon and decided, “Nah, I’d rather just have a nice, chill, not-terrifying time.”
In Evil Within 2, the player’s character is the sad dad badass Sabastian Castellanos, who is trying to rescue his daughter from a mysterious organization named STEM, a weird company that creates simulations of pure terror and horror. Throughout the game, you take on demons and frightful mutant creations born of some symbolic relevance to the character and his dark past. These aren’t slow ghosts or zombies either—these demons are fast and incredibly deadly. Like, one-hit-kill deadly. Ammo is scarce and the tension is always building, while the environment barely gives you cover or easy stealth. This game makes you pucker and panic hard, especially with headphones on. The abyssal growling and primal screams of demons and human alike fester into a dread that is not easy to shake off.
After hours of trauma-inducing twists and turns and battles and unsettling story, the game hit me with a boss encounter that made me lunge out of my chair and grit my teeth in panic. The Guardian, as it’s called, is a hulking monster made of many limbs and heads of women, wielding a giant buzzsaw. She chases you around numerous tight places and is impossible to kill. You simply must evade her and run in the hopes that eventually she’ll lose you. She is Nemesis from Resident Evil 2, if Nemesis went to hell and had a nightmare. The relief I felt was incredible one I finally evaded her and managed to secure 10 minutes of playing the game without constant impending murderous doom. An hour later, she shows up as you are randomly exploring an old ghost town. Then, again and again. After the third time, I just couldn’t do it. The haunting sad song she’d sing, the scraping of her blade on surfaces and the absolutely brutal death animations that happen when she grabs you with those tragic hands, was too much. Yikes!
1. Silent Hill 2
Developer: Konami
Platforms: PS2 and PS3
Date: Sept. 21, 2001
Developer Konami, who also created Fatal Frame 2 (ranked at #3 in this article) always seems to nail it in their series’ second titles.
This game has a special place in my heart. When I was a young, dumb teen gamer and an enjoyer of psychedelics and strange experiences, I couldn’t help but play this game on 4 grams of potent fungus. I proceeded to get lost in a particularly cryptic puzzle in the apartment early on the game. I wandered around its dark, moldy, maze-like halls and stairwells searching for anything to get me out. I spent at least three hours desperately pressing x on my controller on nearly anything that could trigger an event to get me anywhere interesting. This was the setting of my scariest moment ever.
Several years later in my early 20s, I played the game again, determined to get further with a clear mind and good intentions. I blasted through the puzzles with razor precision and realized how spooky the game really was without an intoxicant. Popular spooky spots like a lake and hospital proved classically scary, but it wasn’t until the Historic Society that I felt deeply spooked to my core. It wasn’t the antagonist Pyramid Head, who wears a triangular helmet, or the jumpscare dogs that rattled me much—it was instead the subtle and despairing sense of descending into hell that filled me with dread, awaiting the inevitable final destination of the player character. This was hell and it was getting worse. Something felt alchemical about it, poetic in a way Edgar Allen Poe would smile knowingly at. It felt almost personal for me at this point climbing long ladders and descending dark deep stairwells, all the way down to the heart of all the darkness.
Love and the loss of it. Love and its restless ghost.
No other moment struck me with existential terror like this game and those moments of descent.
Honorable mentions:
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater – The Sorrow! The Fear!! The Fury!!!
Producer and director Hideo Kojima knows how to scare people. While other games in the series have scary moments, there’s something about the bosses in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater that are just so unique and frightening.
Super Ghouls and Ghosts – While known for its brutal difficulty and Halloween atmosphere, the true horror of this game lies in its final level. This level, and the enemy—the Flameberge demons in the Devils castle—might actually be possessed by demons. I died over 100 times. No joke. I was outsmarted and taunted in ways that were just diabolical. This was truly frighteningly difficult and I am convinced the only way to beat this level is with holy water and a pure heart.
Death Stranding – The corpse cargo moves. I will not spoil this moment further as the game is more recent, so I’ll just let you discover this one for yourself.