The Video Game Critic

Okay, so here's the deal: video games don't scare me. I've played some of the most famously scary games in the world, and didn't even get goosebumps. Resident Evil 4: dud. Silent Hill 1: nuthin'. Fatal Frame: meh. Dead Space: Nuh-uh. I even downloaded Outlast onto my PS4, and ended up laughing at how easy it was to dance around the bad guys. That's not to say I didn't enjoy them, but they didn't scare me. I want you guys to leave suggestions for the scariest games you know. The first one that actually manages to do it's job... I dunno. You want a free copy of one of my books? I can send you one of those. How's that for a prize?

Demon's Souls - Tower of Latria

Enjoy.

Already played that one, sorry!

Alien Isolation

Sweet home on the famicom? Translated into English years ago. Might be worth a look. Playing it myself right now. Fun game. Holds up very well as well.

Haunted house on the 2600 the original chiller.. I used to write stories about it and scare myself.

What I played of Rule of Rose made me extremely uncomfortable. Unfortunately, the game is quite expensive and I don't own a copy - hopefully one day it will be made available as a downloadable title.

I don't know what would work for you, though - the original Silent Hill was terrifying for me. Silent Hill 2 and 3 are better in a lot of ways (SH2 in particular has one of the best narratives in a game ever), but I'm not sure I've ever been more frightened than while playing the first game.

I'm surprised that neither Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem nor Amnesia: The Dark Descent, absolute icons of the genre, are in the OP, while the campy Resident Evil 4 is.

You could also play the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog and be chilled to your core for entirely different reasons.

Resident Evil 4 isn't all that scary aside from a couple moments here and there (not sure why it has the Terrifying icon on this site, honestly), but Resident Evil 7 is quite chilling in its first few hours. Once you get more weapons and start to understand the ins and outs of the game better, the scariness wanes a bit, but it still manages to throw a decent amount of nightmare fuel your way afterwards, particularly near the end.

Browsing through the horror section at HG101, I found a couple of promising games, Siren (PS2, 2004) and Soma (PC, 2015). I don't recommend reading the pages there, as they're very detailed and will probably dull the games' impressions, but the parts that I skimmed really piqued my interest. Siren also has an enhanced version on the PS3 that might be worth a look. It was only released here as an enormous download, but the Japanese disk version is region-free and fully translated.