So yeah, this isn’t exactly a game of giggles. Dollops of criminality are complimented by a central story that surrounds a terminal respiratory illness. It’s a game about the birth of capitalism, the slow decay of the Old West and for this specific article, a really freakin’ scary mission involving a cave network of cannibals that comes out of nowhere.ĭon’t get me wrong, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game loaded with heavy subject matter. Rockstar’s open-world prequel masterpiece is one of the best games I’ve ever played.

Think like the celebration of being offed in all kinds of violent ways in The Callisto Protocol, but with a reliance on your mind building it up, and you’ll be close to realizing why this game left me scarred. That’s something Heart of Darkness did with a terrifying perfection. This is the epitome of what I like in horror, which is that rather than showing you every gruesome detail of an in-game death, sometimes leaving the gorier parts of a killing to the player’s imagination allows the thoughts of what happened off-screen to ruminate and become a whole lot worse. From shadow monsters snapping your spine to giant centipedes pulling you helplessly into their burrow, and watching your legs flail then fall lifelessly limp after a horrifying snap, Infogrames pulled no punches. Think like your standard Goosebumps story, but with an additional family friendliness… At least that’s what I thought.īecause you see, the real horror was not in the story of overcoming your childhood fear of the dark - it was in the many creative ways you can die. The story is innocent enough: a boy named Andy flies to a mysterious planet in his spaceship to save his dog Whiskey, after he’s kidnapped by a mysterious dark force during a solar eclipse. Now let’s talk about the many terrifying ways the kid protagonist can die in the Darklands. While I write about this, I want to emphasize one thing: this game is rated ‘E for Everyone.’ Got that? Good.

Scary games to play in real life