Warning: Contains references to murder, drowning and images that could trigger arachnophobia. Read at your own discretion.
Usually when you’re buying a game, you know what to expect. Reviews, billboards and gameplay trailers provide us with a fairly clear picture of the product you are buying long before you take it home. However, some developers clearly like to keep players on their toes.
Sometimes, whether it's to draw your attention or to simply scare the pants off you, developers will decide that the best way to do this is to include moments of absolute terror in otherwise non-horror games. Below are some of my favourite examples of when developers decided to terrify us when it was absolutely uncalled for.
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
The long-awaited follow-up / remake to the old-school Lego Star Wars series was, for many people, a safe bet for a fun, family-friendly adventure. Understandably so, after all, how could animated plastic Star Wars toys ever be considered scary?
Well, clearly TT Games wanted to punish this kind of hubris with their inclusion of a Nobot easter egg. In Mos Espa on Tatooine, after completing part of The Phantom Menace’s story, the player follow a silver protocol droid into a house in pursuit of a collectible kyber brick. So far, so Lego Star Wars.
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| (Image property of Traveller's Tales and Warner Bros. Games) |
Once you enter the house, named the “Haunted Hovel” things start to change for the spooky, though. The silver droid runs across the room before settling in a corner and staring, head tilted ominously, at the player. If you take a closer look, the camera will go full dutch-tilt and zoom in on the droid’s empty stare.
After this, the droid runs into the next room but there is no point in following it further as it will have completely disappeared.
Now this on its own is also way beyond the boundary of creepy for a Lego game, but if you, like me, had your interests piqued by this scene, then this was only the beginning. You see, if you look into the droid’s origins, it is a reference to a character called Nobot, created by Shaun Flaherty of the Star Wars fan club “Hyperspace”.
Outside of the confines of the game, Nobot is a droid that ghoulishly wanders Tatooine’s deserts, always arriving back at Mos Espa. The story goes that Nobot witnessed the murder of a pregnant woman and, ever since, has mysteriously avoided shutdown or malfunctions while roaming across Tatooine communicating with only the recordings it took of the mother-to-be’s murder.
Rated PEGI age 7 by the way. Joking aside, this deep cut reference will go over kids’ heads but I can’t deny that it still manages to send shivers down my spine when I think back to my first encounter with Nobot simply because of how jarring and unexpected it was.
Pokemon Platinum
Pokemon is another series whose popularity and widespread appeal, one would assume, prevents it from going full nightmare-fuel on a regular basis. That assumption would be wrong, however, as Pokemon has an oddly long history of causing children to need unexpected trouser changes.
Between Lavender Town in Red and Blue, the ghost girl in X and Y or stories of Drifloons carrying lost children away, Pokemon has been a pretty effective child-scarring institution for almost three decades now.
However, my favourite amongst the occasions when Pokemon has declared war on children’s trauma counsellors was in Pokemon: Platinum. While broadly remaining the same game, Platinum made a few key updates to Diamond and Pearl to focus on the legendary distortion pokemon, Giratina.
One of these updates included a scene where, usually, the player would meet Dialga and Palkia in Diamond and Pearl. However, in Platinum, a void opens up in the ground with glowing red eyes shining out at the player, almost breaking the fourth wall. Then, before the player can realise what is happening, Giratina’s dark shadow dives out of the ground straight towards the camera.
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| (Image property of Game Freak, The Pokémon Company and Nintendo) |
While jump scares can be hit or miss, this example is really elevated by the fact that Platinum remained mostly faithful to Diamond and Pearl, as it allowed players to slip into a false sense of security, making it all the freakier once the game got weird. Good job Game Freak, you monsters.
Metal Gear Solid
Just in case you were starting to think that sudden heel-turns into the horror genre were exclusive to kids games, Hideo Kojima also hit us with a prime example back in 1998.
On its surface, Metal Gear Solid is all about “Tactical Espionage Action” as its box so proudly proclaims. However, as you’re probably realising from this list so far, you can’t trust the marketing copy. You see, once the game has finished settling you into the series’ new 3D graphics and its stealth-action gameplay, things get real freaky, real quick.
It all starts with the Gray Fox sequence where the player arrives in a new area only to be met with corpse-laden corridors caked in blood, complete with music that sounds like it was ripped from a slasher film. The anxiety of this scene is then exacerbated by the realisation that the cause of the massacre, the screeching, unstable cyborg Gray Fox, is an invisible ninja with a sword, meaning the threat could come from anywhere at any time.
Unfortunately for players back in 1998, even after you defeat Gray Fox, Metal Gear Solid continues to push forward with its creepifying weirdness by introducing Psycho Mantis. For anyone unfamiliar with Mantis’s work, this telekinetic villain wears a gas mask, will read the player’s memory card to find out their real-life play history and can disable the player’s controller, forcing you to plug it into a different port in the console in real life.
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| (Image property of Konami) |
Sonic the Hedgehog
If we’re talking about fear, the first image that comes to mind probably isn’t Sonic the Hedgehog and, even if it is, it’s more likely to be the nightmare that was Sonic (2006) than the 1991 original. However, fear comes in many forms and while Sonic may not inspire existential dread or sleep paralysis, he does specialise in a specific kind of terror; anxiety.
Those of you that have played probably know what I am talking about already but, in case you don’t, Sonic became notorious after its release for causing players a disproportionate amount of stress with its underwater levels.
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| (Image property of Sonic Team and Sega) |
With each second, an air bubble leaves Sonic’s mouth. In turn, the game also has music that plays specifically when you are underwater that speeds up as you run shorter and shorter on air. The result of this is, as a player, you start to panic. As the bubbles escape and the accelerating music combine with the glacial pace of Sonic’s movement, your stress levels are maxed while making you feel totally powerless to stop the inevitable game over.
As you can imagine and as many 90s kids can attest to, Sonic’s underwater levels prove a valuable point; that sometimes sheer anxiety alone can outshine real horror. It’s just a shame that it isn’t supposed to be a horror game.
Fallout 4
The universe of Bethesda’s Fallout is a brutal one at the best of times. Between radiation, mutated animals and depressing glimpses into the potential cruelty of the human soul, you can probably imagine that the series has had some fairly horrifying imagery over the years, and you’d be right.
Cannibal cults and monstrous mutants are staples of the series but, despite the prevalence of such horrible concepts, there are a few examples of walking nightmares from Fallout that stand out from the crowd, particularly in Fallout 4.
In particular, I’d like to highlight is the Pickman Gallery. This is a large home in the Commonwealth which, when you arrive, is being besieged by raiders. Inside, there are various disturbing paintings of hellscapes along with various beheaded corpses.
While this, accompanied by the threat of raiders, is unsettling, the situation is made worse by the discovery of tunnels under the gallery where you will find Pickman, the owner, painter and self-aggrandizing serial killer of the home. As you delve into the tunnels, you learn that the raiders are after Pickman for murdering members of their gang and stealing their heads.
What’s worse is that they know Pickman’s name because he invited them to try and take revenge with letters drawn in their friends’ blood, making Pickman all the more disturbing to be around.
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| (Image property of Bethesda Game Studios) |
The Legend of Zelda
Last but not least, there is The Legend of Zelda series. Zelda is loved by many for its intriguing stories, intelligent use of gameplay mechanics and its rewarding exploration. However, Zelda also has a long history of surprisingly horrifying moments. In fact, the Zelda series has had so many surprisingly horrifying moments, there isn’t even a specific game that I can single out for doing it.
Breath of the Wild has its Guardians with lasers the beep rapidly when they are targeting you, bringing back some of those traumatic memories of Sonic’s water levels.
Majora’s Mask has the nightmarish moon face that gets closer and closer at various points throughout the game, always starring and menacing the player with the prospect of total catastrophe once it reaches the earth.
Ocarina of Time has the Dead Hand mini-boss at the bottom of a well where Link can be grabbed and scratched by long, bloody, haunted hands sticking out of the ground.
If there was a single moment from the series that I had to highlight, it would probably be Twilight Princess’s Armogohma, an enormous, hairy spider boss with an orange eye in the middle of its back. The reason I point to Armogohma specifically is that it perfectly captures what is terrifying about spiders from this thick black hair to the fact that, when you first enter the boss area, you don’t even see it because its is on the ceiling above you, ready to drop down onto you when it sees an opportunity. I don’t even count myself as arachnophobic but Armogohma still had me sheepishly checking the ceiling for other eight-legged nightmares.
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| (Image property of Nintendo) |