Until that game, I’d spent years telling people that the scariest game I’d ever played was 2003’s Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly for the PS2. I will probably always be there, because I can’t imagine ever playing Outlast ever again. I made a pact with my wife to only play it when she was in the room, but as it turned out, the game creeped her out as well so I am currently trapped in an asylums basement, in the dark, with something horrible creeping around. might have finished me off if it had lasted just a minute longer, but it was Red Barrels’ Outlast that saw me shrieking like a squirrel in a bonfire. The first few hours of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard ran me close and the playable Silent Hills demo P.T. The closest a video game has ever come to breaking me was 2013’s Outlast. READ MORE: A case against the most overused of all the horror game tropes: the jumpscare.I’ve been looking for video games to scare me in new and innovative ways in all the years that have followed. Then, in 1996, I played Resident Evil on the original PlayStation for the very first time and the deal was done. I vividly recall standing in an electronics shop as a child, watching a rolling demo of the pioneering survival horror title Alone In The Dark and feeling an excitement I’d just never felt for Mario or Sonic.
I love being scared – within video games at least.