We here at HorrorBuzz have something a little different for you today. Instead of picking up something new and praying that it’s good, we’re going to be looking through some older games that didn’t get enough attention when they were first released. However, not just any game will do. Instead, this list aims to find games that went beyond easy jump scares and instead created something truly and deeply disturbing. Here are the scariest games that you have never played
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
Do you like monsters, madness, and ancient gods beyond human understanding? Well then this is the game for you. Eternal Darkness eschews a singular story in favor of having the player play as many characters over the course of thousands of years as they all come into contact with magic and extradimensional gods before they are inevitably driven mad by their exposure to something from outside of reality as they know it. Eternal Darkness predated the flood of cheap Lovecraft knockoff indie horror games while still understanding the man’s work better than any of them. In addition to its masterful storytelling, the game had a system where in addition to a health meter, the character had a sanity meter and would be slowly driven insane, with some elements of the sanity system even being designed to mess with the heads of the player and not just the character. It didn’t sell particularly well, but if you’ve got a GameCube you owe it to yourself to pick this one up.
Siren
Siren (or Forbidden Siren if you’re in Europe) was created by Keiichiro Toyama, best known for his work as the creator of the original Silent Hill. Much like Silent Hill, Siren is all about an eerie, abandoned town and the cult responsible for its desolation but this time we have a very Japanese take on it instead of the clearly very western design of Silent Hill. In this game the player jumps back and forth between multiple characters who are all stuck in this town which seems to have been transported to the underworld. While this and the utterly gruesome nature of some of the game’s more violent scenes are creepy enough, what truly pushes it into the world of the disturbing is the way that the monsters act. These are no zombies, instead the possessed townsfolk often go about a grotesque parody of their normal daily lives. Much like Toyama’s more famous creation it’s creepy, it’s weird, and there is truly nothing else quite like it. Get it here.
Rule of Rose
This is the point at which this list stops being for the faint of heart. Rule of Rose is a game set inside of a Victorian orphanage. In this orphanage, the player character is told that she must bring offerings to a group of children who seem to wield some sort of power and authority over the rest of the orphans. This, of course, quickly spirals out of control and the player witnesses several scenes which seem to be very real, very horrible trauma filtered through the imagery of a nightmare. To underscore the extreme cruelty which this game deals with, let’s talk about the real world for a moment. Rule of Rose was pulled from release in both the UK and Australia following a storm of controversy over the game’s content, and while it did get released in the rest of the EU that was not for lack of trying, since a motion was actually put forward in the European Parliament to ban sales of the game within the European Union due to “obscene cruelty and brutality”. It can be very difficult to find a copy of this game, but if you want something that pushes into all the dark corners of your brain, this is it.
Haunting Ground
Many video games shy away from overtly sexual themes, choosing instead to dress characters in skimpy outfits and then just never talk about it. Haunting Ground is not one of those games. In Haunting Ground, you play as a young woman named Fiona who awakens in a castle dungeon following a car crash which killed her parents. Fiona then must flee from pursuers and escape the castle with no means of self-defense. This may not seem all that creepy but when you add in the game’s sexual themes it becomes a true, Argento-esque vision of horror. The game’s antagonists (they aren’t really monsters in the traditional sense) don’t necessarily want to kill Fiona. Instead, they all want her body for something. Not her corpse, mind you, but her still-living body. This takes the form of a man who views her as a plaything for his own amusement, a woman who is envious of her perceived sexuality, and a man who wants her for her ability to give birth. It can be an incredibly difficult game to stomach at many points. Haunting Ground is not a game for everyone. It’s not even really a game for most people. But if this seems at all up your alley then you’ve definitely got to play this game.
The Path
Okay, this one may be cheating since it is my all-time favorite video game. The Path is a game based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood. The player picks one of six sisters (with names like Rose, Scarlet, and Ginger) who is then sent on an errand to their grandmother’s house. In true Little Red Riding Hood fashion, the game instructs the player to stay on the path, but you fail the game if you actually do just walk down the path to grandmother’s house. Instead, the player is supposed to wander off into the woods where strange things await them before meeting an untimely end when they find The Wolf. Each of the girls has a different reaction to the items and scenes found in the woods, and each of them sees The Wolf very differently (for one it may be a handsome young man, for another an overbearing manifestation of responsibility). After an encounter with The Wolf, the player finds themselves at Grandmother’s house where things are dark and horrid, hinting at something different about each of the sisters. The Path is mechanically very simple, but it taps into that horrible place that seems to lurk underneath most fairytales. This is a game which is less “played” than it is “experienced”. There is nothing else out there quite like it.
