I played the first Harry Potter game for PC for hours and hours. It’s a 3d “puzzle” “platform” game with very light challenges. I didn’t have a lot of other 3d games though and it held a pretty powerful emotional hold on me. I was a sensitive kid and got freaked out by simple things so it was plenty challenging for me. The enemies were few in number and not especially threatening - they’re all smaller than you, only hurt you by making your character grunt and stumble back, and when you defeat them they simply give up and leave you alone. Nevertheless. The gnomes scared the SHIT out of me, absolutely the number one thing from any children’s work that made me uncomfortable.
The first time you see them they’re loose in this furnished chamber that looks like a living room. Upholstery, fireplace burning etc. And a bunch of little gnomes hidden behind couches, waiting for you. There was just something UNSPEAKABLY AWFUL about the whole experience. Little muttering sounds as they scamper at you. “He he hoo hoo he!!” Holding out their tiny arms and scurrying really quickly as you desperately try to position yourself with tank controls. It’s a total resident evil survival horror feeling as you pilot this logy kid around an opulent, lifeless boudoir, dodging bolted-down knee-high furniture and spinning the camera around.
Later on you find them hidden in tiny recesses in walls, like Doom monster closets, so you’ll come to some empty arena in the castle to do some block-moving and know they’re going to creep out at you as soon as you trip some switches, because you can hear them gibbering to themselves inside the walls. I found those puzzles pretty stressful but not as uncanny as the first room you find them in.
Also the entire game was filled with ENORMOUS GAPING BLACK PITS as the main way to die. Sometimes they’re in absolutely awful places, like, okay it makes sense you’d have small pits in a dingy dungeon basement, no problem, but when you go outside and somehow there’s this colossal lightless abyss with the bright blue sky above it, it’s just horrible. When I was a kid I found it mildly scary, not too much to keep me from beating it, but somehow it got worse and worse and now I can’t even look at the game anymore without it bothering me.
(20 minutes in they reach the outdoor pit that I didn’t like.)
I even found the cheats unpleasant. One was a command that would make you do a huge jump, allowing you to get yourself on top of weird things and go over transition boundaries and such. That one was scary because if you did it outside you would go up over the edge of trees that carefully blocks the empty area outside the world, and you’d see endless miles of black abyss surrounding you. (I don’t even like looking over the edge of levels in Mario 64)
My absolute worst memory of that game was turning on the no-clipping. I walked through some stairs without thinking clearly and found myself below the level geometry, with everything visible above me and black beneath, without expecting it. I can deal I know that’s going to happen but if I see that without preparation my heart drops. I used to think falling out of levels was interesting and not scary, then scary but interesting, and now finally I just can’t handle it anymore.
The HP game itself is actually pretty good, there are a lot of pleasant enclosed environments. It’s just when it tries to fill in bigger spaces that things get highly unpleasant.
