Sep. 3rd, 2021

rionaleonhart: final fantasy x-2: the sun is rising, yuna looks to the future. (look at yourself)
I've just finished reading [personal profile] zarla's Screencap Adventure/Let's Play of EarthBound, which has been an interesting experience!

I've never played EarthBound - it's not easy to get hold of in the UK - but I am familiar with Homestuck and Undertale, both of which were inspired by EarthBound. EarthBound was technically new to me, but its shape felt familiar; I'd gained a sense of it from its legacy. In particular, EarthBound and Undertale are very tonally similar; a lot of the dialogue, details and descriptions in EarthBound felt like they'd fit perfectly into Undertale.

Anyway, Zarla talked a bit about how unsettling the Giygas fight was (it does look it!), and it got me thinking about times videogames have really scared me or freaked me out. I've played a lot of games over the years, but only a small handful come to mind when I think of times a game has genuinely frightened me:


- Pokémon Red: encountering Missingno when I was eleven. I'd gone looking for it, of course - I wanted to use the glitch to duplicate the Master Ball - but actually seeing it terrified me. It was so clearly wrong; it didn't belong in this world. I was powerfully unsettled and regretted my decision to cheat.

- Silent Hill 2: pretty much everything to do with Pyramid Head, but especially the encounter on the hospital roof, when you suddenly hear scraping and you can't actually see what's going on. I also physically jumped the first time I went 'oh, James is looking at this car; what's over there?' and wandered over and A MONSTER scuttled out from under the car.

- Bravely Default: the game's subtitle suddenly changing on the title screen, well into the game, to something more sinister. Absolutely chilling, perhaps because the game hit me on the title screen, a place where I really didn't expect it. I had trouble getting to sleep afterwards because I was shaking, which is a stronger reaction than I'd generally expect to a small text change in a work of fiction!

- The Last of Us: the David fight, probably the most frightening boss fight I've ever experienced in a videogame. The Last of Us often forces you to creep around in tense situations, but the David encounter took it to another level. He's as smart as you are, he's stronger than you, and he's hunting you down when you're armed with nothing but a penknife.

- Undertale: Flowey crashing the game. This terrified me because it felt like something he was doing to attack me, the player, rather than the character I was controlling. Flowey's boss form was also extremely frightening; like Missingno, it was something that clearly didn't belong here.


Looking at this list, it seems like most of the things that have really scared me in videogames have been things that clashed with my expectations.

I don't expect the title of the game to change halfway through. I don't expect the game to close itself without my input. I expect monsters in Silent Hill, but I'd come to expect 'James is looking at something, and there's no radio static; it must be a useful item!' and I wasn't prepared to have that expectation betrayed. I knew I was pursuing a glitch in Pokémon, but I still hadn't really braced myself to encounter a 'Pokémon' that clearly wasn't supposed to exist, and seeing it jarred my understanding of the world I was in.

In their own way, each of these moments gave me the sense of unknowingly reaching the top of a staircase and trying to take a step that wasn't there. They shocked me in a way I needed a moment to recover from, and I still remember that experience years later - or, in the case of Pokémon Red, decades.

(Pyramid Head and the David fight are the exceptions here. They didn't contradict anything I expected; they were just extremely well-executed scary things.)

I'm curious now: what are the times a videogame has frightened or unsettled you in a way that's stuck with you? Feel free to talk about videogame moments you found particularly memorable for other reasons, too!