Readers share tales of video game terror
The Horror
This week’s edition of the Gameological AVQ&A was all about the games that scared us. Not just ones that caught us with a jump scare. We’re talking real prolonged terror. Anthony John Agnello mentioned the original Silent Hill, and PaganPoet backed him up:
I’m just fine with Resident Evil being the template, of sorts, for survival horror games. It’s a fine game, and it’s plenty spooky. But let’s be honest. At the end of the day, it’s really just a playable zombie film. Nothing about that game is anything that the average teenager hasn’t seen before. That and you’re relatively aware of—even early on in the game—what is going on, even in spite of the various plot twists and turns. Okay, we’re in this giant mansion and there are zombies on the loose. Our goal is to not only survive, but try to unravel just what is going on here.
Silent Hill, however? I know the game has a lot to owe to films like Jacob’s Ladder, but even the films that it pays homage to are not necessarily “classics” that most people have seen before. It was such a mind-fuck the first time I played it. Your only goal in the game is to find your daughter, but you have no idea what keeps happening. Why am I being attacked by a gray little alien kid with a knife? Why does the world keep switching between this foggy, snowy world, and a world of rusted chain link fences and endless darkness? Why are there so few other human characters here? What the fuck is going on? It may not seem like it now because 1) We’re all so used to the series by now and 2) The series has dropped in quality in the past half-decade or so, but this game is so disorienting and so scary.
It’s probably related to the age I was when I first played the game, and the fact that I have a real fear of being lost. It’s the reason I was freaked out by The Blair Witch Project, it’s the reason I was freaked out by House Of Leaves, and it’s the reason I still, to this day, have a recurrent dream about being lost in a building where the hallways and doorways keep shifting and changing.
Contributor Jake Muncy talked about the effect The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask had on him. He wasn’t alone. It also got to Alf Pogs:
Majora’s Mask and the apocalypse didn’t start scaring me until the third day, when you go and see the Postman who’s been dedicated to maintaining his routine but finds it doesn’t help him in the face of impending doom. He’s terrified, on his knees in his room sobbing, and because you’re a voiceless protagonist, all you can do is hear him jabber in terror.
And kylebuis followed up with:
The scariest thing about that game is how little control you have over the events that keep repeating. Sure, you can solve a few people’s problems, spend a whole three-day cycle reuniting Kafei and Anju, and save part of the world. But then the clock ticks past midnight, and the dread hits you: Soon you’ll have to pull out the ocarina, but there’s not enough time to save everyone. On top of that, most things you fix will be reset to the peril they were in when you first started. It isn’t until you finally beat the game that you get that moment of catharsis and see the whole world set right. Well, as much of the world as you set right anyway.