Halloween Tribute: Five of The Scariest Video Games

5. Resident Evil Zero

On July 23, 1998, STARS Bravo team is sent in to investigate a series of grisly murders in the Arklay Mountains region outside of Raccoon City. On the way to the scene, Bravo’s helicopter malfunctions and is forced to crash land in the forest. The team soon discover an overturned military police transport truck, along with the mutilated corpses of two officers. The team split up and Bravo team’s field medic, Rebecca Chambers, finds a train stopped in the middle of the forest; the Ecliptic Express.

Soon after, she discovers that it is infested with zombies. After a little exploration, she teams up with the man the military police were escorting to his execution; former Marine Billy Coen and the two explore the remaining train compartments whilst combating the zombies, swarms of strange leeches, and a mutated scorpion.

As the train begins speeding out of control towards a cliff, the two manage to apply the brakes and divert its course towards an abandoned research and training center. They investigate the underground facility, being forced to defeat the Umbrella Corporation’s experiments; mutated insects, spiders and primates.

4. Condemned: Criminal Origins

Condemned: Criminal Origins begins with the protagonist, SCU agent Ethan Thomas, arriving at the scene of a murder. He and his fellow officers go into an abandoned building that is surrounded by psychopaths and criminals. The murder they observe is one of a young woman. She is on the floor with strangled wounds across from a male mannequin. Ethan along with his colleagues agree that the murder was most likely one of the Match Maker’s, a murderer that Ethan has been on the trail of for quite a while.

After they observe the scene further they move into another room where they smell smoke. They decide to go after the suspect they hear above them by splitting up. While searching for the suspect, Ethan is flung from an electrical box by the resulting charge of activating it. This makes him accidentally drop his weapon. A man hiding in the shadows takes it and flees. When Ethan manages to chase the man into a small dead end room, the man subdues Ethan and begins to try to convince him that they were on the same side. Ethan’s colleagues enter the room as this event takes place. The man then shoots them with Ethan’s gun and shoves Ethan out a window onto the street.

Ethan wakes up in his apartment with Malcolm Vanhorn, a friend of Ethan’s father, at his side. Malcolm warns Ethan that he is wanted for the deaths of two of the officers that the man at the crime scene shot. Ethan is determined to prove his innocence.

3. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly

Twin sisters Mio and Mayu Amakura are visiting the spot where they used to play as children, which is due to be swallowed by a dam soon, when Mayu, who walks with a limp after a childhood accident, follows a mysterious crimson butterfly deep into the woods. Mio, concerned for her twin, follows, and the two girls are led to a village shrouded in fog. While it seems abandoned, the twins soon realize that the tortured souls of the dead roam, forever reliving the day of the failed ceremony that trapped them in this state.

Mayu soon falls under the village’s spell and, beckoned by the crimson butterflies, she leads her sister deeper into the village. As Mio chases after her, she slowly learns of the Crimson Sacrifice Ritual, the failure of which caused the disaster known as the Repentance, which shrouded the village in darkness.

2. Silent Hill 2

The game follows James Sunderland, who arrives in Silent Hill after receiving a mysterious letter from his wife, Mary, who died from an illness three years ago; the letter beckons him to their “special place”, although James can only assume its meaning. As James explores Silent Hill, he encounters others searching the town.

Angela, whom he meets at the beginning of the game, has also just arrived to look for her mother, but in later encounters, seems to be depressed and suicidal; the slow-witted Eddie, meanwhile, seems defensive, and later tends to linger around areas with corpses, though he denies having anything to do with their deaths.

Looking for their “special place,” James decides to search Rosewater Park, where he meets Maria, a woman who strongly resembles Mary, but with a more provocative outfit and personality. She claims that she has never met or seen Mary and, as she is scared, James allows her to follow him. James also briefly encounters a young girl named Laura, who seems to have no knowledge of the dangers of the town, including the monsters.

1. Eternal Darkness

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem revolves around protagonist Alexandra Roivas, who is investigating the mysterious murder of her grandfather Edward Roivas. While exploring his Rhode Island mansion, she discovers a secret room containing, among other odd items, a tome bound with human skin and bone. When she reads this book, The Tome of Eternal Darkness, she experiences a scene in the life of Pious Augustus, a respected Roman centurion in 26 B.C.

Pious is led by mysterious voices to an underground temple, where he chooses one of three mysterious artifacts. The artifact transforms him into an undead warlock, the Liche, and makes him slave to one of three Ancients, powerful godlike beings whose “Essences” are incarnated as the artifacts. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that Pious is attempting to summon his Ancient into this reality, while the powerful fourth “Corpse God” Mantorok is bound on Earth already, apparently helpless to stop it. If this summoning came to pass, the Ancient would feast on the bodies and souls of all living beings, and cast the universe into the horror of eternal darkness.