Old School Demons And Zombies

I was on a commercial airliner the other day when it occurred to me: the amount of control a person has over a situation is directly proportional to how much fear they might exhibit in said situation. For instance, if a person has no control over their surroundings (such as when they’re on a commercial airliner), such a scenario has the potential to elicit fear in certain people.

I find myself completely comfortable on planes. However, if you put me at the edge of a cliff, my stomach starts to do backflips. I can look out of the window of a plane and feel fine because I have no control over the situation; let me believe that I could accidently slip and fall over a cliff under my own power, and I’ll maintain a healthy distance.

I find this concept true for video games as well. It’s hard to be tense when a cut-scene or cinematic takes over and something attacks you, but when you’re the one in the driver’s seat, things take on a life of their own. Generally, I don’t really deal in horror games, but I’ve got a few under my belt, and two in particular are both so uniquely terrifying that I still remember every trap, every tense moment, and every time I psyched myself up for “just another twenty minutes.”

The two games in question? I thought you’d never ask.

Doom 3 for the Xbox

This game was easily scarier than any movie I’d ever seen, any book I’d ever read, and certainly any video game I’d ever played up until senior year of high school. Starting off with nothing but a flashlight, you’re stuck in a decrepit, understaffed, and progressively haunted laboratory complex on Mars. Just after you arrive, the top scientists decide to open up their own little portal to Hell (mostly because they’re just dicks like that). The resulting morass of demon-filled chaos is, in a word, freaky. All of a sudden, you go from being the silent, innocent Marine transfer to the guy who’s using a flashlight to bash in some possessed lab technician’s skull. In short, you’re basically the unluckiest guy in the solar system.

Is unlucky a strong enough descriptor?

Not that the wanton murder of Hell’s minions isn’t all well and good in the Doom franchise. On the contrary, it’s to be expected. What wasn’t expected was relying on the flashlight for most of the game. You couldn’t hold it with any other weapon, which meant if you weren’t close enough to blast a demon with the butt of your flashlight the very moment you spotted them, they had a good chance of getting the drop on you. This is especially if the room or hallway you were currently in was pitch black (like the majority of them were).

Ammo was scarce, enemies were plentiful, and more often than not, you had to dig through the lab employee’s PDAs to find passwords to unlock ammo cabinets and new levels. The personal logs of these unseen characters only served to raise the tension level due to the average creepiness of the entries. Enemies jumped out at you from unforeseen angles, lights went out with no notice, you randomly hallucinate—oh, that’s right, you have messed-up devil visions from time to time, too. Walls start to bleed, the floor bursts into flames, Lucifer starts to describe how prison rape in Hell goes down, and then, just like that, you’re back to normal, the stain on the front of your pants growing by the second.

No warning. No quarter. A tiny box that whispers little nothings in your ear when it’s ready to start killing stuff for you (The Soulcube, for those of whose dreams this game doesn’t haunt). Stuff all of that in a CD-ROM, FedEx it to Hell, and you’re on the path to beating Doom 3, the scariest 1st person shooter ever made available on the Xbox.

Resident Evil 4 for the Playstation 2

This title brings the fear in a totally different way. You’re armed, you’re dangerous, you’re ultimately able to handle the grotesque things you see around you. Sure, there are people being burned at the stake or stuck to a wall with a pitchfork. And yeah, there are hideously deformed monstrosities attempting to eat your brains and gain your knowledge (or however that works). You’ve seen it before, right?

Right.

Wrong. Some of the stuff in this game is uniquely and totally messed up. For example, a certain percentage of the zombified fodder you’ll come across actually enjoy being shot in the head. The more it happens to them, the better the chance of a gigantic worm erupting from their neck in an attempt to bite your head off. The ones that usually don’t like being shot in the head are the ones who happen to have chainsaws lying around.

Scarface, MUTHAFUCKA!

Still pretty tame, right? I mean, who hasn’t seen someone get cut up with a chainsaw? This is 2010, people. Get with the times.

While I’m thinking about it, do you like bugs? Bugs that move absurdly fast and can run on the ceiling? How about if they’re a hundred times the size of your everyday grasshopper? Oh, and they’ve got a pretty good camouflage system, rendering them virtually invisible. They’re big fans of making lots of noise and then running away just to mess with you. Unfortunately, they could be right in front of you and you wouldn’t know it until you tripped over it. Yeah, they’re in the game, too.

Then there’s this guy…

…who turns into this guy…

… and starts

swinging around in the rafters once you’ve put enough bullets into him. Thank God the building you’re fighting in is burning down around you; otherwise, this fight might have been easy.

The enemies usually don’t make much noise, so it pays to be paranoid and check every corner of a new room. It’s easy to pull the trigger a few extra times (just to make sure), but when you’re down to your last few shotgun shells, you’ll be wishing you hadn’t gone all Animal Mother on that undead ass and just played it safe with the knife instead. There’s a little girl who follows you almost everywhere, and if she dies, you might as well have pulled the trigger yourself; Game Over. It’s like every aspect of this game is tailor-made to put you on the edge of your seat at all times, just waiting for you to slip up and miss a shot or forget about that last scythe-wielding maniac. It’s not quite as frightening as Doom 3, but I still get nervous before I have to fight two of these:

Giants in bondage gear aren’t nearly as scary as the English dialogue for this game.

There you have it; two games that have inspired me to lock my doors, bar my windows, and sleep with a loaded shotgun under my pillow (one of those facts is actually true). A short list, to be sure, but if you’ve got scarier games out there, Internet, you just be a good sport and let me know. I’m all in for some terror.

Honorable mention: F.E.A.R. demo for Xbox 360

Yes, I only played the demo of the game, but even that was enough to realize that F.E.A.R. contains some truly frightening scenarios. The only thing I can remember is being in a short hallway that was partially flooded with blood. There was a little girl at the other end, and, in the spirit of the game, I emptied my gun into this ghostly abomination. She disappeared.

Thinking myself to be in the clear, I proceeded to the other end of the hallway. Upon finding the door locked, I turn around, only to find the little girl behind me—this time on the ceiling—and as she walked towards me, flames slowly followed her, igniting everything she passed.

It was pretty trippy. Given the chance, I’ll be checking F.E.A.R. out.

Until then, stay scared, Internet. Who knows what’s lurking around the next corner?