Eerie Feelings

King of Posters
#22

La La Land

http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/la-la-land-series

3 Likes
#23

Bugs Bunny Lost In Time. I grew up playing this game and it is unwholesome and terrifying. That fucking intro level.

5 Likes
#24

This reminds me of a PS1 Powerpuff Girls game I played as a kid that was super unpolished and generally really shitty and had little sound design. There was basically no dialogue or interactions between levels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pJHgBs3cVc

#25
2 Likes
#26

why is the atmosphere of the first level so menacing??

#27

My favorite thing is from the first game, returning to the island from the start of the game near the end and having to walk into some corner for no reason to activate the final boss. The whole series is like the bedroom early-teen game dev who makes you press the Action Button fifty times in a row in front of a bookcase to access a secret boss except it’s for a mainstream game and that inscrutable bullshit is just a part of the standard design decisions

3 Likes
#28

You’re gonna fit right in, considering that’s been (mostly) SB consensus for a long time. Possibly Insert Credit consensus? I remember years ago reading Tim’s article on that exact concept.

1 Like
#29

has anyone hacked ecco to make it easier

1 Like
#30
1 Like
#31

M2

#32

Lemmings always felt like this to me. Must have been a mix of the blank backgrounds, surreal environments that didn’t really match the subject matter and the hypnotic animation of the lemmings and background elements. The maddening elevator music probably helped too

1 Like
#33

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

1 Like
#34

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.

8 Likes
#35

which emulator has this feature

4 Likes
#36

It’s called Ecco Jr. and it blows

#37

It’s a hack but I didn’t know it when I played as a kid

#38

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)

#39

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.

#40

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.

2 Likes
#41

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.

2 Likes