Ravenholm [Half-Life 2]
We couldn’t make a list and leave out the spooky crème-de-la-crème that is Ravenholm. Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 share plenty of horror elements. There are dark rooms, jump-scares, and monsters ready to bite your face off, but they’re decidedly low-intensity for the most part. Everyone remembers the action in Half-Life games! These are fast-paced shooting games!
Ravenholm is where resource management and scares burst into the forefront. The abandoned city is littered with alien headcrabs and their infested zombie forms — you’ll have to rely on you Gravity Gun instead of bullets, and you’ll encounter everyone’s most hated creature from HL2 — black headcrabs. The poison headcrab and his bullet-sponge zombie counterpart can drop your health down to 1 HP in a single bite. And we won’t soon forget the screams of the Fast Zombies as they climb up rattling rain pipes.
The Dream [Max Payne]
Max Payne is the definition of a shooter — when you’re not shooting, you’re shoot-dodging. This is a game built on blasting holes in fools. There’s no time for terror when you’re twin-fisting uzis into dozens of mafia hitmen.
That’s what I’d say if these games weren’t made by Remedy. The devs at Remedy tell weird stories, and shove in meta in-jokes, bizarre characters, and sudden shocks of horror. The drugged-out dream sequences Max Payne must endure multiple times throughout the story still give us nightmares.
For my money, the scariest sequence is when you must carefully balance on streaks of blood in a black void, while you hear a baby crying in the distance. You’re meant to feel Max Payne’s anxiety and trauma in these moments, and these dreams are certainly traumatic.
Gird your loins, and prepare for even more super scary moments from non-horror games on the next page.
