I was also terrified by a Bugs Bunny game as a kid, Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle on gameboy.
I guess this is something everybody goes through
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This sort of thing is why I still play videogames.
One of the ages in the Path of the Shell expansion for Uru has at least three good stomach-drop moments in it. It’s the one where you start off on an island with a bunch of crabs.
[spoiler]If you chase all the crabs off the island and reload the level you end up on a blasted version of the island where all the water is gone and there are blue crystal pillars sticking up everywhere. Destroying all the pillars and reloading (which is really tedious by the way and involves running around the island counter-clockwise and warping to a hallway with a linking book back to the island) puts you an a similarly shaped island/asteroid floating in outer space. So that’s eerie.
But then if you do a lot of Myst-puzzling involving switching back and forth between the three island states (agony) you can turn off the water current in the first island and swim off into the distance where you find that the billboard islands in the distance are diegetic billboards and these are Truman show domes you’ve been in. You swim outside the dome into the boiler room area, do a bunch more switching back and forth, and find yourself, perhaps even unexpectedly if you’ve been brute-forcing the puzzles as I had, in a fourth unfinished dome containing a huge statue surrounded by scaffolding. [/spoiler] It is the best and the worst Myst age at the same time.
Besides that, Pathologic is good for this. Also Kairo, STALKER, Kitty Horrorshow’s games, seconding La La Land, and Metroid 2 on an original gameboy when you’re in the hospital having almost died from a ruptured appendix.
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which emulator has this feature
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It’s called Ecco Jr. and it blows
It’s a hack but I didn’t know it when I played as a kid
what’s another game i can think of that’s like this, huh
to a certain extent, dynasty warriors on the ps2 was a lot like this. the early installments had hideously low draw distance and low resolution textures. despite the fact that you were fighting armies most of the game took place wandering an ugly hellscape looking for men to Sword.
just from the stuff on youtube that’s popped up there’s some things on the amiga that are like this - just enourmous lifeless 2D worlds with very little in regards to sound design or character
this seems to be a thing that’s a hallmark of both early 3D games and early 2D games. there are of course a lot of indie games that are like this - but those are trying to create that feeling completely intentionally. while that’s cool and a neat aesthetic, it’s also fundamentally different from the ways this feeling is found when you don’t expect to (like in mickey’s castle of illusion)
Yeah I’d say a lot of the examples mentioned are definitely intentionally eerie. I would add the first few Tomb Raider games, the beginning of an RTS game like Age of Empires (with the fog of war etc), playing Wii Sports by yourself in the dark with the sound turned off.
Sneaking King.
Even when just watching a speedrun, it’s just … creepy. Job well done, I guess?
some parts of the first Zettai Zetsumei game (a.k.a SOS The Final Rescue) really feel eerie when you know that something will happen, but you just cannot put your finger on it, or prepare … which is the very point the game is trying to make, so that’s also well executed, I’d say.
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Mostly PS1 games, but in particular:
King’s Field
Armored Core
Tomb Raider
Tomb Raider is eerie because of the sparing use of music in the game. I find that just having sound effects really builds a lot of tension as it conveys a sense of ominous danger. When ever I hear a bear/dog/whatever I shit myself. Then there’s the act of killing such things that ADDS to the tension.
The sequels never really captured this again.
Armored Core develops a sense of isolation and conspiracy as you progress further into the missions. Then there’s that immaculately crafted scenario with Nine-ball e-mailing you through out the last remaining missions that elevates the eeriness to dread. Great stuff.
King’s Field is simply King’s Field. If you don’t know what I mean, play the game to find out.
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King’s Field (2 technically) is actually one of my favorite games, partly for this reason. There are too many things I love about the game to express in one post, but it instills a genuine sense of fear through tasks that, by standards of more modern games, would seem mundane, and I love that. I probably actually screamed the first time a skeleton popped out of a chest and murdered me. Nowadays that sort of thing feels super basic in a fantasy setting, but I feel like KF proves that you don’t need graphical fidelity or fantastic sound design to make a game incredibly tense and threatening.
Also, I had a lot of recurring dreams from playing Tomb Raider as a kid because of the discomfort caused through the low draw distance and complete lack of dialogue. Killing animals in that game also terrified me so that probably helped. Tomb Raider 3 actually gave me this same feeling, though. One of the earlier levels starts off with a downhill slope ending in a spike pit (which you had to slide down and jump over by timing correctly) and of course being a seven year old who was awful at video games I completely misunderstood what I was meant to do, so the image of Lara impaled on some spike without any sort of music playing imprinted itself on me. I might actually be misremembering Tomb Raider 2 but they all give me the same feeling to some extent.
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these are good
There’s an unreleased open-world PSX game about investigating a city that has some creepy music and a church reminiscent of the one in Pathologic
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Virtual Boy games have an eeriness to them, especially Wario Land and Mario Tennis. They’re both painted with a very light hand, i.e. much of the screen is just pure black. Combined with the fact that you’re sticking your face into a red and black isolation machine, and it’s a really weird effect.
Actually almost all of the VB games have some creepiness to them. Teleroboxer has this secret final boss - you have to beat every other enemy totally undefeated to see it. After the last fight, you’re presented with a totally silent, empty stage. Suddenly a big cat robot drops into your screen and totally fucks you up.
If you lose, you cannot fight this boss again and have to start a whole new file.
It’s incredible.
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I picked up a Virtual Boy when it was on clearance and I couldn’t afford a home console (I desperately wanted longform SNES games). $30 for the system and $10 for each game was something I could swing with lawncutting money.
Mario Clash (a remake of Mario Bros. arcade) was terrifying because of the metaphysical implications of the tower. I had very few expectations going in so I expected a stage-based Mario game instead of an arcade game with tile/rule swaps ever ten levels. The idea that Mario would perpetually climb this tower into the heavens, getting ever-deadlier and nastier – I just wanted to reach a grassy field and run.
Red Alert is Star Fox if every level were a delving. The expected face boss is all the scarier for the ominous driving music and the low-health alarm is almost as urgent as Metroid II’s. It’s got the same deep horror as Metroid II; you can’t get your bearings, you don’t have enough environmental context to understand where you are, and it only gets darker and dimmer.
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Isn’t that game actually called Red Alarm?
I played it a handful of times for like a total of probably less than an hour on my buddy’s VB back when it was contemporary, and I still think about it sometimes. Evocative.
and I seem to double-fake myself out every time because I know I shouldn’t confuse it with Command & Conquer’s title but
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holy fuck this looks amazing
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It’s great! you can download it and play it on an emulator today!
a fried passed it to me on a CD-R with a hastily-scrawled title in marker: “GERMS”
It’s my second-most-desired translated PSX game (after Mizzurna Falls (okay maybe also Boko no Natsuyasumi))
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Resident KH1-2 nerd here, it’s not for no reason, it’s the place where the door to the heart of the world was at the beginning of the game.
EDIT: That being said KH has lots of very eerie things. I remember palette swaps of FF characters as NPCs, the whole thing about it maybe being Sora’s dream or pretend play (like when he’s in his room being called by his mom). Heck, the whole first part of KH2 is strange.
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I just fucked around with that Germs PSX game Astromech was talking about and WOW. I really wish this was translated. I have no idea what’s going on in it, but just wandering around is a real experience. It’s peak eerie PSX aesthetic. It’s like someone made a survival horror sequel to LSD Dream Emulator.
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i’m watching a playthrough of Germs and I love this
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