As Halloween Approaches I Present: 3 Game Moments that Actually Scared Me

I don't scare too easily. I've seen a bunch of horror flicks and while the occasional sudden moment can make me jump, it doesn't freak me out and keep me up late at night. The only movie that ever really freaked me out was, randomly enough, "The Sixth Sense." I don't even believe in ghosts, but that movie was equally sad and scary. Anything else though with Freddy, Jason, Michael Meyers, Lepruchans, Candyman, serial killers, or such just entertains me. The same goes with games, although there have been three occasions that come to mind where a video-game legit scared me. The kind of fright where you stay up a little later thinking about how wild it was--that sort of scared.

1. The opening of, "Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain."

Toussaint Egan over at Polygon has made the same observation as me, the opening of Hideo Kojima's last MGS game is actually quite terrifying. Whether you know all the story reveals that come later in the game or are going in fresh, it is like a totally different title than the open-world military combat game it morphs into after the first couple hours. The game opens with Snake in the hospital, emaciated and weak from a coma, being stalked by a strange man on fire who seems dedicated to killing you. Players can't tell what is real, a hallucination, or if this is some version of Hell that Snake has ended up in. That fire-man coming at me was a surreal nightmare incarnate.

2. Finding Mia in, "Resident Evil VII: Biohazard."

I never found the, "Resident Evil," games scary. They had attempts at jump-scares with the Nemesis, but nothing that made me feel ill at ease until I dipped my toes into the seventh official game in the series. Perhaps because it switched to a first-person perspective that made everything feel more visceral, especially when you first locate your character's wife. You're playing at Ethan Summers and you find Mia early in the game, but something is really wrong with her. Some kind of infection has made her homicidal and by the time she shoots up a flight of stairs at the player and uses a chainsaw to cut one of our hands off I was quite alarmed. The whole game is pretty spooky, but Mia was what stuck with me.

3. The Floormasters in, "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time."

I don't know why, but as a kid, these things legit scared me. They would appear in certain dungeons by first manifesting as a shadow overhead that made a weird whistling howl as it grew bigger. Then, you'd be grabbed by the strange mysterious form and dragged to an earlier part of the dungeon. With some quick footwork, you could dodge what turned out to be a creepy-looking hand you had to attack. Once you hit the hand, however, it would break into three mini ones that would attempt either to choke you or reform the big hand. As a middle-school student these things just really struck me as spooky.