Some of gaming's scariest moments came when we weren't expecting to be scared.
When it comes to creeping us out, games that aren’t classed as horror games have a real advantage over those that are. Horror games are supposed to be scary, so we brace ourselves, and when a big scare finally comes it can feel like a relief. In non-horror games, however, we’re less likely to flinch at the first hint of strangeness, so unease can grow inside of us without us even being aware of it—a trap set behind our defenses that springs open the moment we finally realize that something is off, chilling us to our cores.
Talking to the PC Gamer team about this, multiple people said they knew that things like this had happened to them in games, but that they couldn’t remember specifics—I choose to interpret this to mean that they were creeped out so bad they blocked it out. Below, read the unsettling moments in non-horror games we did remember, and share your own stories in the comments. Happy Halloween! 🎃
🍃 The whispers of Black & White
Whenever a villager died in Black & White, the fun-but-flawed 2001 Peter Molyneux god game, a spectral voice would whisper ‘deeeeeeeeeath’. Perhaps because it was barely loud enough to pick out over the regular FX, the sound wormed its way into my brain like the Ceti eel larva which Khan dunked into Chekov’s ear. The more I played, the more I started hearing ‘deeeeeeeeath’ elsewhere. In supermarkets. At school. On the shrink’s couch.
Well, not quite. But it was creepy. And potentially even creepier, because the game would also, very occasionally, whisper the player’s name, provided it was common enough to be in the selection of audio samples. Quite how it knew what you were called was hotly debated, with this thread suggesting it was actually based off your Windows registration. Haunting stuff. —Tim Clark, Brand Director
🪦 The woman in The Graveyard
Despite the title, The Graveyard is not a horror game. It’s an experimental art game by Tale of Tales. In it, you slowly escort an elderly woman through a cemetery. You listen to a strange little song, and then the woman sits down for a rest on a bench. That’s essentially it, at least in the free version. In the paid version, there’s a chance that while the old woman is sitting on the bench, she’ll die. My morbid curiosity led me to buy the game, and there I was, watching her rest on the bench for several long, uneventful minutes.
At one point my cat jumped onto my desk and knocked a bunch of things over. After a moment spent straightening up, I looked back at the screen. The old woman was dead. I’m not a deep thinker, but this still lead to a few moments of somber reflection on how minor distractions can cause you to miss the most important events in life, and how our lives are fleeting and someday we’ll all be passing away on that same metaphorical bench, perhaps while someone important to us is busy attending to something else.
A few weeks later, my morbid curiosity surfaced again. I’d gotten something out of The Graveyard, those few thoughtful moments, but I hadn’t actually witnessed that old woman die. I started the game again, determined to see it actually happen. When the game loaded, instead of it beginning with the walk through the cemetery, it simply started at the bench where that old woman was still sitting there dead.
I was aghast. I freaked out. I think I actually got out of my chair and left the room. I mean, yikes and gross and eww and nope. I had no reflective thoughts on how once we die we’re dead for all eternity, or anything like that. What got to me was the thought that there’d been an old dead woman on my computer for several weeks, just sitting there, dead and alone and dead while I was playing other games. I immediately uninstalled it, and then double-checked to make sure all the files were completely gone. It was just too damn creepy to know she was there, her lifeless virtual body haunting my PC. —Chris Livingston, Senior Editor
🕵️ The stalking of Creepy Watson
Some of the funniest videogame moments emerge from odd NPC companion behaviors, particularly their struggles with pathfinding. But even the silliest of them, like Geralt’s horse Roach winding up on rooftops, strike me as at least a little creepy, as well. (Have you seen Nathan Fielder show The Curse? It might affect how you feel about physics glitches.)
One of the best examples of unsettling NPC behaviors didn’t happen to me personally, but I’ve included it here to represent this whole class of experiences. It occurred in 2008 Frogwares detective game Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis. As the creator of the video above put it, “You never see or hear Dr. Watson move. He just edges towards you silently when you’re not looking.”
Sadly, I checked and Watson now trots to keep up with Sherlock instead of materializing a few feet away like an evil doll. Pity, but I suppose I can’t fault Frogwares for patching a human soul into poor, creepy Watson. —Tyler Wilde, Editor-in-Chief US
👻 The phantom fifth friend in The Forest
Last year when Sons of the Forest came out, I played through the campaign with my go-to group of survival crafting friends. It’s always the four of us and we figured we could make short work of the SotF campaign if we stuck together. Some might consider it a horror game—its island of dangerous experiments and dark caves is definitely scary and a bit creepy—but that’s not how our party of survival crafting adventurers were approaching it.
Late in the game we were spelunking through one such dark cave, armed with axes and glow sticks, when we heard a noise we hadn’t encountered before, some kind of abstract screech like the sound effect for a jump scare. Except it sounded like it was coming through someone’s shitty old Xbox headset and not the game itself. Off in the distance we spotted an extra player tag. It was our friend’s username. Our friend who was definitely standing right next to us. Huddled together and creeping deeper into the cave we kept hearing the noise, wondering aloud if there was any way an extra person could have gotten into our session to troll us with spooky sounds. But why would it have our friend’s name? After about five minutes it finally vanished and we never did figure out if it was some weird glitch, an intentional meta scare within the game itself, or a group hallucination that we all still recall to this day. — Lauren Morton, Associate Editor
🧟♀️ The tragedy of Edda Pureheart
This might be bucking the trend a little, in that the developer’s objective here was to be creepy, but Edda Pureheart—a side-character in Final Fantasy 14—and her story’s resolution scared the living crap out of me. Spoilers for sections of A Realm Reborn ahead.
You first encounter this character during the main scenario quest in a, quite frankly, messed-up aside that’s meant to teach you how grim adventuring can get. You overhear her talking to her adventuring party, who’ve just come back from a very, very bad time in a dungeon. Edda’s their healer, and she wasn’t able to save her fiancé and childhood friend, Avere. Oh yeah, also, she’s keeping his head in a bag. Normal!
Later on, once you clean up the Copperbell Mines, Edda approaches you to tell you how much of an inspiration you are, and that she wants to get past her grief to become a strong adventurer. She does not do this. Instead, she gets a little too into necromancy, culminating in the haunting dungeon of “Tam-Tara Deepcroft (Hard)”—a level 50 variant of the dungeon that saw her betrothed beheaded.
This entire thing is creepy enough in isolation, as you make your way through the mind-controlled members of Edda’s former adventuring troupe and hordes of undead, before finally killing Avere’s reanimated head. She topples, hauntingly, off the edge of the cliff to die a Disney villain death.
But then, for some reason, Square Enix decided to put the nightmare of a cutscene embedded above at the end of the questline that unlocks the dungeon and—twelve forfend, who greenlit this? It comes out of nowhere, and while FF14 does occasionally have spooky and harrowing scenes, nothing ever quite reaches this level of chilling again. —Harvey Randall, Staff Writer
💀 Down in the Bonehoard
Like a master thief slinking past unsuspecting guards, I’ve already snuck a Thief game and mod into our list of the best horror games. Now I’m going to have my cake and steal it too by talking about Thief as if it’s not a horror game.
And horror really isn’t the primary focus of these foundational stealth games, but the atmosphere is so brutal and oppressive, its occasional digressions into something spooky leave a lasting impression. A lot of love deservedly goes to the third game’s Shalebridge Cradle, a haunted orphanage/sanitarium (what a combo!), but I want to shout out the O.G. Dark Project’s Down in the Bonehoard.
It begins with a descent through some claustrophobic crypts and tunnels before opening up into a dizzying necropolis stuffed with zombies. The creatures are threatening enough, but the true horror here comes from this feeling that you are an interloper, even more so than The Dark Project’s usual infiltrations. You’re breathing in air gone stale from centuries of isolation, kicking up dust that settled before your forefathers were even born, and you can practically feel the disapproval emanating from the complex’s low-poly creepy statues. Throw in a memorable jump scare with a talking trap and a mission objective guarded by a perpetually burning man, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for an unsettling night at home alone. —Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor
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