Alien vs Predator! The campaign with marines. I still hate this sound of the motion detector!
I agree, that motion detector is probably the best thing of the Alien franchise and one of the most efficient instruments to tension. The guy who designed it is a genius.
I like how novelist Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game) explained fear in his intro to his Maps in a Mirros horror tales collection. There are 3 types of fear: terror, horror and fright. Fright is the worst one:
- Terror is when the scary thing happens making you jump and want to run away.
- Horror is when you see the consecuencies of the happening, like in The Ring.
- Fright is everything that scares you and has you in tension before it really happens, scalating your fear as seconds pass. (i.e Alien, Scream (maybe I was just young) and most notably The Shining)
In my memory, Doom is the game that most scared me, but I was probably too young when I played it (EDIT: it was the first game that I played with a soundcard too and that counts. Yeah young TPUers, there was a time when all the sound that came from most PCs was from the internal speakers, bip, bip). Quake was scary too. And Clive Barker's Undying had some jumpy moments and some tension too.
But I think those
are scary in my mind mostly because I was young,
objectively the scariest ones, because of the aforementioned fright, Alien vs Predator's Marine campaing, Doom3 (I never hit F5 so much as in this game) and first levels of FEAR are also really scary. Sadly FEAR stops being scary soon in the game, because they committed a terrible mistake (in white):
most of the scariest moments are with Alma, they rely on Alma to scare you, but NEVER happens anything!! Soon you learn that those moments of tension will finish with a jumpy scene, but there will be no consecuences. You soon discover she will not harm you.
If I didnt look would she still have been there.. ?
