Gaming

Alien: Isolation. That shit is unplayable it's so scary.

Minecraft probably. I avoid legitimate horror games (and movies) and the fact that you don't have saves can get a little stressful when you're down in a cave, don't know how to find your way back (and thus probably won't find your body) and then basically get jumpscared by dangerous enemies or holes in the ground.

Subnautica can straight up give you thlassophobia.

Soma is definitely up there. It's slowburn and not jumpscares. But when that shit hit, it hit hard.

F.E.A.R (the first one only) was absolutely scary and psychologically nerve wrecking...

The multiplayer was amazing though, the nail gun was something else !

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's requiem. It's an older game, GameCube era. I don't like horror games and this one isn't true horror. There are some good jump scares and body horror though. I had to stop after a certain scene because of the jump scares. The sanity system is really great.

At the time, PT was the scariest thing I'd ever played. Was super obsessed with that demo.

Will never get over silent hills cancelation

The original Resident Evil was pretty revolutionary and terrifying for me, but the 100% scariest I've played is the original Dead Space.

More recently, The Outlast Trials is really good, and I would HIGHLY recommend any of the Dark Pictures Anthology games, but my favorite is Man of Medan.

cliched yes, but I will always remember how scared as hell I was playing Silent Hill for the first time in high school, when you go down that dutch angle alleyway and the evil toddlers stab you to death...

i couldnt play any more for a few days haha, it was a pretty stand out memory for scary game stuff. Its hard to state how unexpected it was at the time, I hadnt played any early horror games, and I dont know how many similar experiences there were at the time (year 2000ish) so it really was brutal and surprising

I don't know if I would call it horror, but Dredge is fantastic with creeping dread

I don't play horror games, Amnesia was too much for me. After that bit with the invisible creature in the flooded corridor, I uninstalled the thing and never touched it again. That was fifteen years ago

The first Layers of Fear was pretty spooky, very PT inspired. The second one was decent too, but not as scary.

Outlast is the standard I hold walking sim horror games to. I can speedrun through it now since I've played it so much, but the first few times were terrifying.

Some people have mentioned Amnesia, so I'll throw in the recent iteration with Amnesia: The Bunker. It's like Alien: Isolation in a WW1 setting.

Speaking of which, Alien: Isolation is probably no. 1 for me. Between the alien, the androids, and even other people, that game is very stress inducing.

by tradition we don't talk about the game and instead tell people to play Outer Wilds

I found the batman vr game on psvr scariest. It wasnt that scary a premise, but because of the immersion, it was extra. You knew joker was in a cell and you had to Kean in to see. Although you knew he would get you, you had no choice. You had to physically force yourself to be attacked bybsteppibg forwards.

Similarly, the jumping off a cliff to commit suicide in suoerhot vr was quite confronting and scary. I think they edited it out.

the original resident evil. couldn't even get through the first 15 minutes before i threw the controller across the room. i don't play scary games anymore, but i love watching other people play!

silent hill was super fun to watch.

Easily the scariest was „Amnesia: The Dark Descen“ (2010).

S.T.A.S.I.S.

Nightmare House 2

Silent Hill 2

Halo: Combat Evolved (the Flood levels are horror masterpieces)

Lone Survivor

Crow Country

Dino Crisis

Killing Floor VR

I am not a fan of horror games all that much, and Half-Life Alyx is not one, but the horror elements are stronger than previous titles and I still haven't finished the game because of that. The game is incredible, but I just can't get past the scary parts.

Amnesia.

Dead Space scared me so much it made me numb to lot of horror games since.

I found 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors to be very unsettling. I played it in bed at night with headphones on and it totally sucked me in. I guess this is a different type of horror to many of the games suggested here, which I personally don't find scary.

When I played the original Fatal Frame it was unlike anything I had played at the time. The Penumbra series was also up there.

These 2 series lead to me realizing I disassociate when I watch or play horror and I stopped consuming that genre.

PT

I don't much like scary games myself, but here's someone asking /r/HorrorGaming what their scariest games are:

https://old.reddit.com/r/HorrorGaming/comments/1303c5t/in_your_opinion_what_are_the_scariest_games_of/

EDIT: And yet somehow, despite not liking scary games, I've wound up owning some of these, like Darkwood, the Amnesia games, Clive Barker's Undying -- which I wouldn't call that scary -- Doom 3, Lone Survivor, Outlast, and Subnautica.

I've also played Clock Tower, which was on there.

How has nobody mentioned Condemned yet? That game is unnerving from the very first minute you start playing.

The Cradle level in Thief 3 will forever and always be the scariest experience I've ever had in any video game, including horror games. It elevated an otherwise mediocre game to be a worthy entry besides the first two games.

Some games it was just the difficulty that scared me.

There were plenty of jump scare games that definitely got me like the early RE and SH games. Even Metroid games got me when I was a kid.

I haven't tried a horror game in more than 20 years though!

@Megaman_EXE Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It is an absolute masterpiece in it's genre, the next 3 scariest games I've played pale in comparison to it, and all of them are also by Frictional Games. Frictional is an A+++ studio.

Your ability to be scared has more to do with your ability to be immersed in the game. Some people need outlast and some people only need minecraft. But also if you play amnesia as it was intended it is very scary. You can also run around a table repeatedly and get a good look at tge monster if you are not in the "horror mood" nothing is scary.

Recently, some games that shouldn't have freaked me out, but did, were parts of Outer Wilds and Subnautica. Subnautica, in particular, got me with a very good jump scare that I think made me jump harder than any horror game has in the past decade lol.

I find games that induce dread really help with being scared. If you have any niche titles I would love to hear them too. I must have missed a lot probably anything prior to 2005. But even recent titles there's a chance I could have missed them too!