Horror games are usually signed-up-for experiences. If people are looking to have themselves scared witless, they would go and get a horror game. This is especially true for the faint of heart who try to avoid everything that’s considered horror for the sake of their sanity and a good night’s sleep.
That’s why it’s such a big deal when completely non-horror games suddenly change their tunes and become virtual nightmares: gamers were completely blindsided when the developers decided to graft into these completely non-horror games petrifying scenes that could easily trump some horror efforts out on the market.
Here are some of the titles (and accompanying scenes) that you should make you really think twice about your cardiovascular health before jumping into.
Max Payne is the classic shoot-em-up with bullet time and action-packed sequences. The marketing’s all about killing droves of bad guys in the most bad-ass manner possible. Of course, we were all made aware of the character’s backstory, but I don’t think anyone of us thought that the developers would take story-telling to such a gruesome height with the hallway hallucination scene. This is evidenced by how many gamers felt sick while playing through this segment and reported that they had to put the controller down for a while before finding the willpower to move on.
In this segment, the game will gives you a front row seat to the moment Max witnessed his wife and child murdered in cold blood right in front of him. While the game spends a good portion of its plot on the hardship and affliction in Max’s life with a series of nightmares and drug-induced hallucinations, the hallway scene is far beyond what anyone could ever expect from an action game.
Walking down the blood-soaked hall, you can hear the pained agony of his wife and child in the background in their last moments. The game also forces you to follow the blood trail of your family drawn on the ground in complete darkness that will eventually lead to the horrific scene.
