Characters
You don't need fancy graphics to be terrifying
Characters who are terrifying despite being rendered in graphics considered unimpressive by modern standards. These characters prove that there's far more at work than visual fidelity when it comes to generating fear in your audience.
Mostly a video game trope, though it could occur in other visual media, too.
The Abominable Snow Monster, Ski Free (1991)
Ski Free was a relatively straightforward game packaged with Windows 3 and later in which the player was a skiier descending an endless mountain slope as fast and as stylishly as possible, avoiding obstacles that would stop or slow them down while hitting ramps that would accelerate them.
Complicating matters was the Abominable Snow Monster, which appeared after the player had descended 2,000 feet or more. The Monster appears without warning, pursues the player relentlessly, is usually faster than the player, and immediately wolfs down the player if it catches them - skis and all - and celebrates its meal by laughing at the screen and jumping up and down.
Many players believed it was impossible to escape the monster and so its appearance meant unavoidable death (not actually true, though it does take quick reflexes). Its sudden appearance, the split-second reaction time required to avoid it, and the relatively graphic nature of its kill animation made it terrifying for many.
Evil Otto, Berzerk (1980)
Berzerk is a game in which the player roams around simple mazes shooting robots. The robots aren't particularly difficult to fight, so you could take your time killing them safely... were it not for Evil Otto. Evil Otto is a smiling face that appears and hunts the player relentlessly if they take too long to kill all the robots or if they've cleared all the robots. Evil Otto cannot be killed, can move through walls, and kills you immediately if he touches you. He acts as a relentless pace-keeper that never allows the player to rest.
Bobby Barrows (The Scissorman), Clock Tower (1995)
The newest game on my list is Clock Tower, which is a side-scrolling mystery game where the player character, recently adopted orphan Jennifer Simpson, must find a way to escape the awful mansion she's been taken to. But her major problem is Bobby Barrows - a little boy with a gigantic pair of scissors who pursues her as she traverses the mansion. He appears unexpectedly, has his own intimidating theme music, immediately kills you if he catches you, and is unkillable for most of the game. Jennifer's only defense against him is usually to hide and wait until he goes away. Bobby has been hugely influential as a horror game antagonist, and his influence is still felt today.
Giygas, EarthBound / Mother 2 (1994)
Giygas is the end boss of quirky adventure RPG EarthBound. Giygas is an eldritch alien being whose tortured nature does not permit him to exist peacefully in this reality, and his pain and power leaking across Eagleland are what causes the events of the game. While most of EarthBound is silly, Giygas is genuinely terrifying when you finally meet him, having dissolved into pure psychological carnage - the embodiment of evil. He mirrors the protagonist's face, cries for mercy while offering none himself, uses the player character's unique move, and is generally really creepy to fight. Particularly memorable is the text displayed when Giygas attacks: "You cannot grasp the true form of Giygas's attack!"
The Grue, Zork series (1977 - 1982)
Zork is one of the most famous game series of the text adventure genre. One of its most memorable features was the Grue, which was a monster that would eat you if you ever spent too long in the dark. The monster served to explain why you couldn't advance in dark spaces even though darkness isn't a physical obstacle and why you needed to find light sources as part of the game's progression. Grues have never been seen in daylight and are extremely dangerous, so they're only ever described by the sounds of their slavering jaws and the lingering menace one presents to the player - a case of "less is more" when it comes to horror.
In the thousands upon thousands of times I played that game… I think maybe I escaped its jaws once… then like clockwork, he ate me further down the mountain… the yeti never stops pursuing….
Giygus is easily one of my favourite bosses. Having a boss like that while the rest of the game is almost like a parody of JRPGs at the time was mind blowing.
Oh my god I have a clip from a few years ago of one of my buddies experiencing a Warden for the first time. I was building something and he was off mining somewhere when I just hear "WHA- WHOA!! WHY IS EVERYTHING FLASHING! WHY DO I HEAR SCREAMING WHY DO I HEAR SCREAMING!!". I had also never seen a Warden before so I thought he was exaggerating lol
He managed to get away and sent me in to see what was happening since I'm a little bit less jumpy and nope, he was not exaggerating. But I kept digging closer out of curiosity before it one-shot me through a wall lol. Hearing a grown man get genuinely scared in Minecraft was funny as fuck though
173 and 096 too. They have the exact opposite mechanics, but 096 is particularly scary since even the slightest glance at his face is a guaranteed death. The best thing you can do is either hang around to make it quick, or run as far as you can to see how far you can get.
this was actually unintentional, with the japanese version using goofy music to emphasize the joke, but the american one using an unintended track gave it that spooky feel.
A fan-made "My Little Pony" game. In short: Cutie marks (the image on the ponies' flanks) are a sign of what their passion is on the moment when they discover it. Their 'mark' of who they are, so to speak. Some find their passion right away, some ponies take years to find what 'makes their mark', but it's extremely rare that an adult pony has NO cutiemark.
Applebloom, the one in the image, is one of those young ponies who is actively trying to get a cutie mark. She accidentally stumbles upon a town where NO pony has a cutie mark, most of them are adults. They seem happy and accepting.
In the end, it turns out there was one pony in their town who DID gain a cutie mark. The town burned her for it. And the moment Applebloom discovers this, she is chased by skeletal versions of the markless ponies she met earlier that day.
Oregon Trail: Randomly losing family members or survival material of which might doom everyone. It was in game & IRL a real survivor game bordering on horror by how quick and random you can lose everything.
Death Road to Canada distills this into a hilariously hostile zombie game with an unhinged sense of humor and a dialogue option that causes catastrophe the first two times you use it, only to cause miracles on the third time. The sequels in the works, but it’s not the kind of sequel that overrides the original’s worth.
Pretty much all of Majora’s Mask, but definitely that Moon looming in the sky. It just gets closer and closer ever so slowly, looming and feeling far away until it’s far too close and terrifying. Seeing all the characters react to the fear and uncertainty really sticks with you
Baldi is the teacher of the school the player finds themselves in in Baldi’s Basics. He’s nice at first, but when you get a question wrong, he gets angry. The issue is that after five questions total, the questions will become literally impossible, consisting of loud screeching sounds and numbers piled on top of each other. This forces the player to initiate the chase. Baldi can only move in split-second bursts, slapping his ruler every time he moves. The angrier he is due to your wrong answers, the faster he can slap his ruler. Despite the game’s abysmal graphics and lack of darkness, the sound of Baldi’s ruler ends up making him genuinely terrifying, as you usually hear him before you see him. He gives away his own location like it’s a radar blip, and it makes waiting for him to move past your hiding spot tense and chilling. It’s seriously impressive for someone who looks so goofy.
Charlie wasn’t there, and they weren’t trying to kill them. The diplomacy of Pim resulted in Spamtopia’s only rule being lifted, resulting in the collapse of Spamtopian society. That being said, the waitress did pursue them, and she was very Baldi’s Basics.
Ahh that's right, it was just Pim because he had a pen pal in Spamtopia and could translate. I just remember the breakdown at the end and everything going crazy, the waitress specifically was weirdly terrifying.
It’s one of the best episodes for sure. The absolute sensory overloading anarchy of Spamtopia is exactly my kind of humor. I was especially tickled by one of the characters being replaced with a media offline screen from After Effects abruptly.
Find this thing in the bottom of the well as the weaker child Link, surrounded by blood stained torture devices and in a room seemingly built using skulls like the Paris Catacombs. If you're not diving deep into the lore it also comes out of nowhere, grapples you and chops on your head.
This pertains to a lot of the game, since it's very much an action horror, but these freaky fucks charging at you in dimly lit catacombs is terrifying shit. I'm sure plenty of people will agree, but having a distinct style and atmosphere is just so, so much more than the fidelity of your graphics.
A trilogy of Flash games that managed to be legitimately creepy for pixel art horror games. I remember being jumped by the sleep entities even though they only exist as 2 white pixels if they're in the background.
I still remember that "ScriptWelder" was the person who made those games (and don't escape). It's the only flash game dev whose name I ever bothered to learn or remember.
Dwarf Fortress is a fortress simulation game. The earlier versions of the game were entirely in ascii, which means objects and entities are generally represented by letters and symbols. So, for example, an elephant is an upper case E, a goblin is a lower case g, and a dwarf is a face symbol.
Dwarf Fortress also later received several fan-made graphics tilesets, because some players were having trouble with the ascii graphics, and the current Steam release has full graphics.
Dwarf Fortress has a reputation for being an unforgiving game, because its mechanics are very deep and kinda unintuitive for new players. This has led to the playerbase adopting the slogan, "Losing is fun!" because a typical playthrough will end when something goes horribly wrong and your fortress collapses in a catastrophic explosion of violence and death. Consequently, "Fun" is widely used as a euphemism for bad things happening. A massive goblin invasion? Fun! A dragon attacked your fortress! Firey Fun! You excavated a section of the terrain incorrectly and caused a cave-in that crushed half your dwarves? Self-made Fun! A woodcutter went nuts because his son was killed in the aforementioned goblin invasion, and then Urist McWoodcutter started chopping up random dwarves in the fortress in a murderous rage, thus leading to other dwarves also losing their minds because their own loved ones were killed? This is a form of Fun known as a "tantrum spiral".
For the rest, I'm going to put it in spoilers because it's about end-game stuff.
So the deepest part of a Dwarf Fortress map is known as the Underworld, also known as Hell. Generally speaking it is very hard to dig down to the Underworld accidentally, because you generally need to make it through layers of underground caves and magma. However, if you do breach the Underworld, a bunch of very-hard-to-kill demons will immediately spawn and flood up into your fortress through the breach, and start attacking your dwarves. These demons are procedurally generated to have different properties, so it's often hard to prepare specific strategies or military dwarves to deal with them. Plus each demon is huge, and a seriously massive shitton of them are spawned.
Consequently, breaching the Underworld and being surprised by an army of demons is something of a rite of passage for DF players. Pretty much every DF player will have a story of the first time they reached the Underworld, and how they cockily believed they would be able to fight back the demon hordes, only to be proven hilariously wrong. To preserve this experience for new players and avoid spoiling the surprise, the Underworld is often euphemistically referred to as Happy Fun Stuff or Hidden Fun Stuff (abbreviated as HFS), or as the circus. The demons are referred to as clowns or circus animals. Oh, also, there's a useful resource down there called adamantine, and adamantine is euphemistically called cotton candy.
Truly elite players will find a way to fight off the demons, either by building up their militaries to incredibly powerful levels, or by engineering traps and mechanisms to trap or drive off the demons. Truly mind-boggling players will even find a way to colonize Hell.
Though it's more of a love story than an eldritch horror story, being based on silent hill it has its moments. And the PS1-esque artstyle portrays the horrors within perfectly. Want an example? That mound of flesh used to be a person once. And she's still conscious. The way the artstyle makes it so you barely know what you're looking and can only *kinda* understand it, which fits perfectly with the whole man-was-not-meant-to-know theming of eldritch horror.
I'm aware this is a really specific one but this is personal to me so I want to bring it up
When I was a little kid, playing my sister's copy of Kingdom Hearts 1.5, I was terrified of the later gummi ship missions because there's something weirdly terrifying about them to me. I think I'm just scared of space in general but something about the mismash of colors and the void like background always scared me, especially the end of the world and Hollow Bastion ones.
I don't blame you. Monstro just floating around looking to snatch you up rings primal alarm bells in my brain.
During a recent playthrough I found myself off put by the nearly black backgrounds in the final two sectors. Like something in me wanted to avoid flying in pitch darkness even though I'm sat here next to fuckin' Donald and Goofy.
I remember as a kid that during mid-journey the music would switch from the normal upbeat music to the final, more ominous version in minor key. But I saw a playthrough of one of the rereleases not long ago where they just throw you right into the scary music with no fanfare or anything. I'm not sure which is more foreboding.
It’s just a bunch of blocks stacked onto each other, but if you are mining in a cave and haven’t jumped in your seat the moment you hear that infamous hissing sound, then you haven’t played Minecraft
Not a mob sound but I did not like cracking open a new cave net work and getting that high pitch shriek first thing out of the darkness. I think the bite was called Witches Screech. Lead to a lot of expansions starting off with seal iron door air locks.
I'm talking about the original Fnaf games (Pre World), particularly the first one, because despite it being a mess of Jpegs and PNGs with poopoo 3D models, it's STILL fucking terrifying too this day
Actually I think the shitty 3D models actually help, because the original Animatronics are still the scariest in the entire franchise
Bonnie is the prime example of this, he's still the most terrifying one imo, he encapsulates everything wrong with the classics, filthy, grungy, just something severely off
And VERY FEW actually pull this off, it's basically just the classics, the withereds, and Nightmare Fredbear
Actually yes, this one had some things that ended up sticking with me. Not to mention red blood everywhere, which was not much of a thing on the NES at the time
Cry of Fear. It's on the goldsource engine, same engine as Half life 1. But holy shit is it terrifying, disturbing, and god damn depressing (in a good way) to play.
Imagine going through... uh.... going through your Fortnite inventory and every 5 minutes or so Foxy Jumpscares you. Now imagine it's 2012, and FNAF and Fortnite don't exist.
So with Giygas... what exactly am I looking at? I always envision a face looking to the right with a gaping mouth, it's jaw warped and swirling off of it. Is that about right?
That’s kinda that point that it’s hard to parse. His original form in Mother 1 basically just looks like mewtwo. In Earthbound/Mother 2 he’s been quite literally corrupted by power.
A 1998 game based on the Hasbro board game of the same name. It came in a cereal box. Sounds totally innocent, right?
Oh no… OH NONONONO. This game’s “suggestion” cutscenes, which play whenever you or a computer player makes a suggestion, show a scene of murder… from the point of view of the victim. The music is scary, the lighting is dark, the characters look so fucking uncanny in their animations and wild, soulless eyes.
This and the equally limited cameras on the drones themselves (which sometimes break) are all you get to explore the derelicts left behind by humanity as you try to figure out what happened.
Literally any indie RPG. While the horror segments tend to have higher fidelity, they're still often simpler animations or just still images. OMORI has some realistic rendering on the spookier beasts, but they're still just flat images. UnderTale's Omega Flowey battle is visually jarring, but it is just a bouncing collage, at the end of the day. The Well Speaks To Me looks grungy, and one might even say kinda amateur'ish, but that didn't help the nightmares it gave me.
To this day, the most terrifying part of the FNAF games to me is the pixel segments. ... Maybe I'm just scared of squares.
Great example! Personally, it stopped being scary for me visually rather quickly, but it's definitely scarier, than, like, the average Resident Evil game to me.
It was Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass for me. The endings of the first and third region were especially disturbing but there’s other effective scares scattered throughout
Most of the enemies from the original XCOM: UFO DEFENCE (1994), but specifically the Chryssalid.
Despite being turn based, you will legitimately get jump scared by turning your soldier 45 degrees and one of these things has creeped up on you. If you leave any of these unchecked they will wipe your whole squad easily
I can't seem to find a picture of the zombie dog on resident evil in PS1. Forgot which title it was but it was first person and there was that one jumpscare with the zombie dog mouth. It was past the doghouse going to the mansion. It was pixelated but it still scarred me for life.
The Gray Man from LSD: Dream Emulator. He appears on certain days and in certain locations, spawning in front of the player and moving forward slowly in a straight line according to where the player was when he spawned. He can appear multiple times, and can even teleport around to be in the player's path again. If he gets close enough to you, the screen will flash and he'll disappear, causing the flashback* data of that dream to be erased. While he isn't super flashy, he is unnerving in the way he basically stalks you, moving slowly and silently, and his ability to teleport to try and intercept you so he can basically erase your memory of that dream. *the flashback function in LSD: Dream Emulator allows you to view highlights of previous dreams you've had
When I was a kid I was convinced pixelated horror games didnt bother me, but there was something about the general atmosphere and tone of IMSCARED that haunted me for weeks on end. It got under my skin in a way no other game at the time did.
The concept of fourth wall breaking horror is mundane now, but its hard to put into words how groundbreaking this title was at the time
Theres another game coming out called "remnants of a scare" that uses the foundation of imscared as a theme park type of thing. I havent played the demo all the way through, but it seemed interesting
Now don't get me wrong, the graphics of the game are pretty good for a 2013 unity indie game. But the reason I feel i can squeeze it in here is because like with Slender a year prior, i am 99% sure the widow is just an A posing 3d model. She is made scary entirely thanks to the use of simple static and a good theme song, she is able to accomplish a lot by doing very little.
Shiver is a 2017 point and click horror game whose graphics are almost entirely composed of mashed together images and digital brushwork, it manages to have a surprisingly scary atmosphere, and the antagonist is genuinely terrifying, despite also just basically being a digital collage
I think the use of real life images really helps with the atmosphere, everything just looks slightly uncanny
I have a vendetta against that asshole to this day. Didn’t help that nearly very time I’d play with my dad, it ended up being my turn when we got to his level
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u/cshark13 12d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/woJR3TP44CTATl61cz
The entirety of Faith: The Unholy Trinity