As brave as the editors of CFD! are, sometimes that certain moment in that certain game can still reduce us to vulnerable, quivering infants. These are (mostly) rare occasions, keep in mind, and we’re only sharing them with all of you on account of it being Halloween and all.

So get comfortable, dim the lights, pull up that trough of candy you’ve collected, and have a hearty, mirthful laugh at our collected cowardice.

Rob R.:

Game: Silent Hill

To this day, the freakiest moment I’ve ever experienced in a game was in the first Silent Hill. I’d played plenty of Resident Evil by the time I took command of Harry Mason, but that was all jump scares. I wasn’t accustomed to psychological horror. I had no idea what I was in for.

I was exploring the school when I stumbled upon the locker room. After braving the halls full of knife-wielding demon babies and giant roaches and finding more than one strung-up, rotten corpse, I was more than a little on edge when I heard a very loud rattling upon entering a room. I started to move, slowly, weapon at the ready, when the camera shifted to show that the door for one of the lockers was the culprit. Something was obviously in there, and it wanted out.

I edged up to the door, trying to prepare myself for what I might find, when a cat burst out of the locker and nonchalantly leaped to the floor and walked off. The stupid thing nearly made me choke on my heart.

A few minutes later I managed to unlock a clock tower in the school’s courtyard. I entered, climbed down a ladder and began walking down a long, straight corridor. At the other end I found another ladder, which I promptly climbed. I opened the door at the other end and found myself… back in the school yard? This was the point where I began to realize that real world rules just didn’t apply anymore. Suffice it to say, upon entering the school I was greeted with lots of rust, barbed wire and blood.

Fast-forward a few more minutes and I’m back in the locker room again. Only this time it’s infinitely more sinister-looking. The same locker is banging away again, with something inside that I was sure I really, really didn’t want to see. The (dried?) blood dripping out from the bottom of the door didn’t encourage me. But I knew I had to go through with it, so I began my cautious approach. I reached for the door and the banging stopped. Before I could even touch it, it began to open very slowly to reveal… nothing. It was empty.

Breathing a massive sigh of relief, I began to move past the locker to explore the rest of the room wh-

BAM!

A corpse spilled out of another nearby locker right at my feet.

It’s a miracle I didn’t shit myself.

Game: Dead Space

So I fucking love Dead Space. Seriously. I love it so much that once I beat it, I started a second game right away. On Impossible. Let me tell you, playing that game on Impossible is a fucking nightmare in and of itself, but there was one particular moment that truly stands out in my mind and is a close second to my previously mentioned Silent Hill fiasco. Keep in mind that I was playing on Impossible, with no credits, weapons or upgrades carrying over from my last playthrough, using no DLC suits or weapons and going for the One Gun achievement (i.e. only use the Plasma Cutter).

I’d been playing for a bit when I made it to the chapter with the centrifuge or whatever it’s called. As anyone who’s played the game knows, before you get there you have to walk through a room that gets locked down due to contamination. The lights shut off, shutters slam down over the windows and it’s just you, the measly light on your gun and the reanimated horrors that used to be the ship’s crew.

Since I’d already played through the game once, I knew this was coming. I bolted to a corner the second the shutters dropped and kept sweeping my light from air duct to air duct. Eventually, the Necromorphs came and I dispatched them. That is, until the last one.

I began blasting away the second I saw the Leaper climb out of the vent. I took off one arm but it was still moving, so I began to reposition myself for a clearer shot of the other appendage when it jumped at me. Thankfully it missed since I was moving at the time, but when I spun around to face it it had already moved. So I suddenly found myself locked in a dark room with something that could kill me quite easily (again, playing on Impossible with no special armor or guns), but I had no idea where it was.

Those few moments of stumbling around in the dark, hearing that thing scuttling around, never knowing where an attack might come from, was the single most terrifying moment I’d experienced in Dead Space‘s entirety. In the end, I managed to find it and take it out, without sustaining any damage no less, but it felt like an eternity while I waited for it to jump out of the shadows and rip my face off.

Dustin:

Game:BioShock

One of my dirty little secrets of gaming is that I never finished BioShock because… it was too scary. From the time you enter Rapture, when a crazy bad guy is somewhere out there chasing you, to the first time you hear the “thump thump thump” that I assumed was Big Daddy boots following me… I freaked out. The epitome of terror for me came when you walk down a hallway, seeing the shadow of a mad scientist… then the lights flicker and the shadow disappears. I put down the controller after that and never picked it back up.

But then, I also remember the time I booted up my PS1 to see that my generic memory card had fucked up my save file on Final Fantasy VI (via FF Anthologies) after forty hours of play. That left me with a different type of horror…

Nate:

Game: Super Mario 64

The first game I can remember actually scaring me is, ironically, Super Mario 64. Honestly.

[Insert raucous laughter]

The first time I played the game, I was probably five years old or so. By that point, I’d actually watched someone play through most of the game, but I had never played on my own from the beginning. I finally rented it, and had a pretty fun time running and bouncing about outside Princess Peach’s castle.

All that changed when I finally found the entrance. As the door slammed shut behind me, I was met with an unexpected burst of ominous music and a deep, demonic laugh. I suddenly felt very vulnerable, sitting in my basement by myself. I slapped the system off as fast as I could and ran outside with the rest of my family.

I finally summoned my bravery and played past that traumatizing introduction, but to this day I’ll never forget the first time I heard Bowser’s dark, resonating chortle.

Scott:

Game: Aliens Versus Predator (PC)

No doubt, one of my most frightening and memorable moments occurred in the original Aliens Versus Predator for PC. Playing as a marine, the ominous feeling of being stalked at all times was ever-present, to be sure. However, it wasn’t the threat of cloaked warriors or ravenous insects that really got under my skin. No, it was the Facehuggers. Unlike the most recent AvP game, where as long as the player’s health isn’t low than he can fight off the Facehugger, should it pounce, the PC game offered only instant death should one fall prey to the creature.

So there I am, walking slowly down a corridor in a once lively space ship, the low hum of the motion tracker my only accomplice. Boop… boop… boop… BEEP… BEEP… BEEP.The motion tracker had picked up movement, and the low hum become a sharp alarm. I hear a light hissing, and the panic begins to creep into my brain. I throw several flares around the ground, but I still can’t see a thing in the powerless frigate. The motion tracker still beckons my attention, with the display warning of the closing distance between me and the unknown. I see a flash of movement just ahead of me, and fire several rounds with my pulse rifle. No contact made.

Now I’m backpedaling as fast as I can, eyes trained forward for any more signs of movement. I can’t see a thing, and the motion tracker shows that I’m not getting any further from my assailant. Finally, I back up against a wall, and before I can even think to turn and run from where I came, I hear it launch itself into the air. The last thing I see is the underside of it as the screen grows black and an Alien embryo is implanted into my chest.

I’ve played a great deal of games, but I don’t know if any will ever top the feeling of dread and hopelessness I felt while playing the original AvP, particularly as the Marine.

John:

Game: Half-Life 2

I’m not a huge fan of scary games, so my experiences have been pretty tame. I once rented Resident Evil for the GameCube and ended up returning it without playing for more than like 20 minutes, if that’s any indication of my pansy status.

Therefore, even though it’s far from a horror game, playing Half-Life 2 is probably one of the creepier gaming experiences I’ve had. Particularly, the Ravenholm chapter was pretty unnerving to me. Headcrabs and zombies are one thing, but Ravenholm took things to a whole new level of nasty. Poison headcrabs (which will instantly bring you to 1 health if they manage to hit you) already made me uneasy, but there are few things more unsettling than watching a zombie that you’ve just lit on fire continue to lumber towards you and launch two or three of the the little bastards at you. And then there were the berserker zombies, whose arrival was usually preceded by a bloodcurdling howl. It didn’t help that you were usually fighting them on small platforms or in narrow passages where you didn’t have much room to maneuver.

I got through Ravenholm without any major freakouts, and I even received a shotgun for my efforts, but I can definitely see why the chapter was called “We don’t go to Ravenholm…”

Sage:

Game: Halo: Combat Evolved

I don’t tend to play “horror” games too often, but one particularly scary, frantic, and dreadfully intense moment I had while gaming involves two 6th grade nerds at 1 in the morning.

My friend and I decided that playing the original Halo on Legendary our first time through was a spectacularly great idea. We started the push through the campaign around 7 that evening, the room packed with as much junk food and soda as our poor asses could buy.

Of course, at the time, we hadn’t even heard a mention of the parasitic (and super-pesky) alien lifeform called The Flood, since rural Montana didn’t exactly have the greatest internet penetration at the time.

It’s one of my most intense and chaotic gaming memories, but it made me realize just how immersion could be felt in video games. That is, until his parents flipped the light switch on and demanded to know who was being murdered, of course.

Beki:

Game: Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

My story is from a totally non-horror game. So when I was 12, I was given The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker for GameCube and I thought it was the best day ever. I stayed up way past my bedtime playing it, and an hour or so in, you find yourself at a place called the Forsaken Fortress — it’s dark and gloomy and you hear that this scary freakin’ bird dude called the Helmaroc King has made this Fortress his base for his evil birdy bidding. So here we go, approaching this place that, to my 12 year-old brain, seemed like the worst possible place to go. You can’t even say fuck it, because your sister went and got herself locked up in there, and you, with your tiny sword and honestly worse-than-average luck are the best bet to saving her.

The fortress itself is scary enough, but that’s not even the worst part. There are these guards everywhere, and I later heard that these are called “Moblins” but to me they just looked like grotesque piggish men. The game suggests that you should try to sneak around them, but if you walk too close or breathe too loudly then they turn and look straight at you and make THE WORST noise — a kind of grunt mixed with a snort whilst underwater — catch you, and throw you in jail. Link has his wily ways of escaping, but even then you must avoid even more of them — and they think you’re already in jail, so I can only imagine the punishments to be much worse.

It’s one of the first times I really noticed the impact of sounds in games. It was terrifying and still makes me reconsider before picking up Wind Waker today, 10 years later.

Rob T.:

Game: Silent Hill

To close these stories out, I’m going to have to return to where Rob R. started us off and bring it back to the foggy streets of Silent Hill.

It’s the fall of 1999. I’ve moved out of my family’s place and relocated to Connecticut to move in with my now-ex (Zuri, who you may know from our wonderful art team). Having only brought a couple of boxes of belongings with me, you’d best believe the PlayStation was in one of them. Many a night was passed with the two of us getting home from work, cooking dinner and flopping down on our nasty, orange, man-eating couch to cram in a few more hours of Silent Hill before bedtime. You also must keep in mind, for later in the story, that our apartment in particular (and our bedroom in specific) was directly over the top of the ancient boiler that heated our building. When this thing turned on, it banged and roared like a rocket taking off, shaking the floor below us for a few seconds before settling down.

So, back to the game. We’ve been playing for a couple of days and we’re now descending slowly through the Otherworld version of the Midwich Elementary school. We always played up the atmosphere, turning off the lights, turning up the volume on the TV and scooting the couch closer to our tiny, 13-inch set. We’re getting progressively more freaked out the further we go, as the awful sounds from the school’s basement furnace (and, presumably, what lived down there as well) got louder and louder and grew more and more unnerving. We would cuddle close and jump every time something would attack us. They’re memories we still reminisce about to this day.

We eventually make it to the bottom and find ourselves confronted with this awful, lizard-like boss monster. We managed to beat it, though we were shaking by the end of things. Considering it a job well done, we decided to call it a night and go to sleep.

We retire to our bed (a mattress on the floor of the bedroom – yay for broke twenty-somethings!) and try to relax enough to fall asleep, the memories of the boss fight and the increasingly freaky noises encountered during the descent into the bowels of the rusty hell-school still fresh in our minds. After a few minutes of nervous tension, the bedroom door (which we had to usually brace shut with a box, as the doorknob wouldn’t catch) creeeeeeaked slowly open, giving us a start. We laughed at our silliness and closed the door, remembering to brace it this time, before laying back down.

We had almost forgotten about the game and sleep loomed large, when suddenly….

*rrrrrrrRRrRRRRRrRUMmmMmMmMBLLlllLLEEE*

*BLAM!*

The boiler in the basement roars to life with a bang, sending us flying easily a foot straight in the air while still on our backs, scared utterly shitless. We laughed about it after the fact (and still do to this day), but I’ll be damned if we didn’t pick the totally wrong night to explore that school’s basement.