I’ve been a fan of scaring the shit out of myself for years. When I was seven years old, a friend and her older sister were having a joint sleepover party. Her sister’s friends were big cool ten-year-olds and decided we should watch Stephen King’s “It”. I laughed throughout the entire movie while the other girls shrieked and hid under pillows—I thought I was a certifiable bad ass– but when it came time to sleep, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get the images of blood bubbling out of bathroom sinks or murderous clowns holding paper sailboats in storm drains out of my head. I didn’t have a good night’s sleep for weeks.
When I became one of the big cool ten-year-olds, I found a few volumes of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series in my fifth grade classroom and became a little obsessed. The pictures gave me nightmares, but that didn’t deter me from seeking out all the scariest stories I could find. I’d sit up in bed at night, restless, on constant look-out for all sorts of horrible creatures that I’d read about, but the lack of sleep wasn’t enough to keep me from wanting more.
The next logical progression was video games, of course, but that didn’t come ‘till much later. At the age of ten, the scariest games in my possession were Ecco the Dolphin (which is way creepy, so don’t judge) and Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Games like Clocktower 3 and Fatal Frame taunted me as I perused the game aisles of Blockbuster, but I wasn’t allowed to rent them. When I finally got my hands on an actual horror game—Silent Hill 4—I figured I’d devour it and worry about sleep deprivation later. I never finished it. In fact, I haven’t been able to finish a single horror game since.
The culprit is obvious: the interactivity of horror games makes them more relatable. Instead of jumping up and shouting “THE KILLER IS BEHIND THE DOOR YOU UNBELIEVABLE ASSHOLE” at your television screen, you are the unbelievable asshole who doesn’t realize that the killer is behind the door. You don’t have the safety net of peeking out at the screen between fingers or obscuring your vision with a knitted blanket, obviously, since you need your hands and eyes to be able to play. You’re in a rather vulnerable position, sitting there, both sweaty hands positioned firmly on your controller, your back to the rest of the room and god-knows-what else. Unless someone else is in the room, conjuring up the courage to continue is the only way to progress—and you want to find out what happens next, don’t you?
The fear—and I mean the genuine, lingering fear, not the initial flinch or scream—that comes from watching a really scary movie or reading a creepy story haunts you long after the fact. You might feel it when you go to sleep that night, a little anxious over the inevitability of nightmares.
Video games are an altogether different sensation—the paralyzing anxiety over what’s about to come around the corner, or if you’re hidden well enough in the shadows from the curious eyes of some hideous cryptid. It’s the sort of deer-in-the-headlights effect that causes you to yell “NOPENOPENOPENOPENOPE” and involuntarily throw the controller across the room… if you’re me. To be fair, I might be alone in that.
Somehow though, I’ve never learned to stay away. I can’t say no to a good horror game. So when my fiancé decided that I was going to finish Thief: Deadly Shadow’s infamous Shalebridge Cradle level for him, I leapt at the opportunity. Seriously, how bad could it be? To my knowledge, Thief 3 was not a horror game.
So we waited ‘till it was dark, readied the popcorn and drinks and fired up the Xbox. I’ll admit, it wasn’t long before the anxiety took hold. The elements of my utter ignorance of the level and my fiancé’s hyping me up for it combined to form the compound “ipeedmyselfium”, and quite possibly resulted in the perfect horror game experience.
I feel like I should break from my story at this point to set the scene—Shalebridge Cradle is a level designed for the stealth game Thief: Deadly Shadows by a person who decided that it wasn’t enough for a place to be an abandoned orphanage or insane asylum. No, it had to be both, because the only thing more terrifying than the undead criminally insane is undead children… but I digress.
I spent a good twenty minutes in the entrance of The Cradle. I was hardly able to sneak down a narrow hallway without pleading with my fiancé to tell me if “there’s a guy down there”. I had no idea what to expect, only that there was something to expect…except there wasn’t. Shalebridge Cradle’s first area was like a really pleasant case of blue balls. It was all there—the creaks, the muffled voices, the all-too-convenient dark corners—everything but the jump-scares I’d been anticipating. I relaxed. I advanced past a loading screen into the next area. I’d be fine.
Significantly more cocksure, I quickly whipped around a couple of corners in the next area without hesitation. Stopping at a set of stairs to determine my next course of action, I heard a noise. The lights in the hall began to flicker, and I absolutely froze. My hair stood on end, as if having some ridiculous meta real-life paranormal experience. A contorted figure paced its way towards me. My first thought was to hide in the shadows—you know, being Garrett and all—but it was too late. The mental patient did not give any fucks who I was as it descended upon me, prompting me to screech like a banshee and throw the controller towards my fiancé. He managed to finish the level on his own.
I never did, and I probably never will. For all my enthusiasm for the horror genre—I’ll never turn down a good scare on paper or film—I have never been able to finish a horror game. I’ve never even come close.
There’s a lot to be said for scary storytelling across all mediums, and I’m certainly not looking to make the argument over which is “best”—but there’s definitely something to be said about a storytelling medium that can so effectively put you in the position of the protagonist and the intense, paralyzing fear that comes with that.
(Ed: For more scares, read about the Best Horror Games on the PC of All Time.)
