Happy Halloween! Carve that pumpkin and get dressed up in your most frightening of outfits for some trick or treating fun. Some of us, notably gamers, will be staying in during the festivities to play the stacks of new releases that have come upon us. Thankfully, there’s plenty of horror to be found in the back catalogues of consoles gone by and some significant new experiences to found on next generation hardware. The following is in no particular order, just ten of our favourite scary moments here at Thunderbolt.

Dino Crisis

A research facility run amok with dinosaurs. You’ve just entered a room looking for refuge after an attack by three Raptors in the preceding corridor. On the other side of the room is a cabinet, so you make your way across, looking into the wall-sized mirror on the right. There’s nothing of note, so you make your way back towards the door.

Suddenly, a massive T-Rex puts its head through the mirrored window and gobbles you down for breakfast. It comes out of nowhere, there’s no scary music or any indication as to what’s to happen. Picked yourself up off the floor yet?

BioShock

This is a game full of tension and surprises, so we won’t spoil much by highlighting an event right at the beginning. You’ve had a few skirmishes with some splicers, and that rusty old handgun and pipe wrench are making hard work of it. Trudging gingerly into the next room you spot a shotgun with some shells laying on the floor. A quick check to make sure the coast is clear, and you move over towards it.

Upon picking it up and cocking it, the lights go out. Cackling screams and squeals can be heard along wish rushing footsteps. You can’t see anything, and yet they feel so near. Then there’s the flashlights darting about.

If you haven’t had a heart attack yet, you’ll be crouching next to a wall ready to pump lead into anything that comes towards you. Eventually, after a few deaths, the lights come back on, and you’re left to scavenge off your dead foes. That was a close one.

Condemned

The Mannequin store. That’s all you’ve got to say to anyone who’s played Condemned. You’re in an ‘abandoned’ mall, littered with mannequins, you’re on the edge of your seat, you just know that a mannequin’s going to jump at you with a wrench at some point, but no-matter what you do; you can’t prepare yourself for the pant-filling terror when an apparent doll suddenly cracks you on the back on the head from behind.

F.E.A.R.

Mixing chilling horror with adrenaline fuelled action, F.E.A.R. was the ultimate thriller experience. Like a blockbuster movie, its action sequences were just insane, but it was main antagonist Alma that stole the show. A ghost child with long black hair is quite the cliche in the world of horror, but it works because it is scary. Appearing at moments when you least expect it, she’d make the hairs on the back of you neck stand on end, truly terrifying. Memorable moments include her sudden presence in the confines of a ventilation shaft, and a typically unreliable elevator. Chilling stuff, but done to perfection.

One of the game’s most talked about moments however, is ironically enough not exactly scary, and missing the appearance of Alma. It’s just an incredible snippet of action that makes you jump like nothing before has. You’re walking through an office complex, nothing has happened for a fair while so the tension is constantly building. You start to hear some noises that keep you on your toes. You slowly walk around the corner of one of the many corridors, and then BAM! - out of nowhere this guard is thrown through a glass wall right in front of you. The sudden noise hits you like a dagger and you jump through the roof. When it’s 2AM and you’ve got headphones on, you’ll never forget anything like it.

Resident Evil (PSX)

Resident Evil is known for its zombies. You run around a mansion looking for random artefacts and in the meantime you either run around zombies or drop a magnum round into their head. For the most part they’re harmless, and although you may find them creepy they become nothing more dangerous than a Goomba in Super Mario Bros.

An hour or so into the mansion you’re all set to start heading east of the main lobby. You’ve had a few run ins with the walking dead and you’re ready for anything. You’ve got a pistol, maybe a couple of emblems, hell maybe even a bazooka if you’re lucky and then there’s that hallway. A perfectly empty hallway with some paintings and a bit of furniture along one wall, mirrored by a series of windows looking into the night on the other. It might normally been considered a nice hallway, almost peaceful, but far too peaceful for a new area in Resident Evil. As you make your way down the hallway you’ll start to feel confident, nothing has happened and you’re getting closer to the bend in the hall. That of course is when they get you, the clues were there but you still weren’t prepared. The windows shatter as a couple of Cerberus break into the hallway. The sound is what gets you at first, its sudden and before you can process it you have two fast enemies on you and all of your zombie tactics have gone out the window.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

On the cynically horrifying side, Eternal Darkness has great “Sanity effects” never before seen in gaming. Once a character is sufficiently frightened, their sanity visibly slips as Murphy’s law gets some play: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way. Try to save and you’ll be given two options: either to delete all of your files on the memory card, or to continue without saving. Either way the game tells you that all the data on the memory card is deleted. There are messages regarding the controller being unplugged when encountering a hoard of living dead. All things in Sanity’s Requiem are up in the air. Rather than providing selective and scripted events involving angry zombies or pure darkness, the Sanity meter will play with all our every emotion and spit us into the fray as though none of this ever happened.

Sometimes the character’s head falls off and if picked up, recites Act III, Scene I of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“To be, or not to be…”) with great dramatic convention. It’s fitting enough in a game which begins with a powerful quotation from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven and is loosely based upon the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. As the first M rated title Published by Nintendo, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is a thoroughly frightening and psychologically intriguing work of art in which the scares are not limited to a single instance of fear, but are extended throughout the entire game, covering the in game character’s range of emotional swings as well as your own. Try finding another game which makes an earnest attempt to convince you that the console has just been turned off and all of your progress, lost.

Ravenholm

What makes a nightmare? Is it zombies, werewolves, psychopathic killers, moonless nights and strange noises? Or is there something deeper, something beyond scary creatures and blind corners, something for which these common stereotypes are merely stand-ins, simplifications meant to simplify emotions which are hard to evoke and difficult to describe? And if they are merely stand-ins, a cosmos of common myths all conjured in the chase of an uncommon feeling, then where can real fear be found?

I don’t know where to find an answer to that question, but if I had to choose a place to begin, I can think of few places better than Ravenholm. Given the direction that Valve took with Half-Life 2, its easy to forget that the original Half-Life was one of the first first-person thrillers ever made. Most of today’s action-horror games owe a large debt to the influence Half-Life had in establishing what it meant to create frightening creatures and effective pre-scripted sequences, and Ravenholm proved that when it came to old-fashion, scare-you-shitless thrills, Valve still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve.

At its face, Ravenholm seems a fairly typical spook-town, filled with zombies, monsters, and darken corners. But the devil is in the details. The zombies - by far the least horrific creatures to call Ravenholm home - may be slow, but the lack of ammo combined with their ability to live through incredible punishment makes them a frightfully tenacious opponent. Far more unsettling are the headcrabs, some of which are as fast as lightening, resistant to everything, and difficult to see. Then, just as escape looks possible, you meet the skeleton-zombies, monsters that move like chaos and hit like a freight train. And the sounds! The dying moans made by burning zombies remains, even after playing the level four or five times through, are unquestionably bone-chilling. The head-crabs chirp and scream as they attack by flinging themselves at your head, and then there are the battle-cries of the skeleton zombies, which sound less like a monster and more like a man thrown down an elevator shaft.

Does Ravenholm inspire real fear? Maybe not. It is, after all, a fictional town in a video game, and the zombies are never going to spring from our TV-screens. But that said, there is no doubt that Ravenholm came closer to inspiring my fear than any other game, movie, or book. No other level has ever made me feel the same desperate need to turn around and run like hell, but I hope that one someday will.

Silent Hill

The start of a franchise, Silent Hill’s school set the tone of the series. Descending the clock tower and arriving back to where you started, a huge demonic symbol has appeared on the ground. Night time has arrived, and now the school is smeared with blood and guts. Not content with this? How about the little zombie babies hacking at your kneecaps as you explore? No thanks.

Silent Hill 2

In the early stages of the game while you’re still trying to get used to everything and get your head around it all, Pyramid Head’s underplayed and wonderfully unsettling ‘introduction’ is all the more powerful for the way it is presented.

Running around the apartment blocks with constant reference to the map, you come around a corner and as you approach the rusty iron gates, you notice someone - or something - standing behind them. Moving closer with more curiosity than fear, you move the camera and try to see it more clearly. Running back and forth in front of the bars and watching the shadows from your flashlight dance over its body, the curiosity fades and is quickly overcome by boredom, and you go back a little way to your original destination to solve a brief puzzle.

Coming out of the room a few minutes later, your flashlight shining up the corridor reveals the space behind the bars is now vacant. Running closer, with a cold chill coursing up your spine, you hope the creature will return, that it will still be behind the bars, where it can’t reach you. But it doesn’t, and what follows are some utterly unsettling moments whilst you expect it to jump out at you. But it never does, and this is what Team Silent were so good at.

Dead Space

USG Ishimura is full of dark corridors that hide scary secrets - and the music doesn’t help either. One of the scariest sequences sees Isaac walking through a seemingly safe part of the ship, only for the lights to flicker. Seconds later, the music is jumping and a giant arm is dragging you towards a hole at the end of the corridor. Only by shooting the glowing orange nerve on the limb will you survive, otherwise it’s into the hole and a certain horrible death. This entire experience lasts mere seconds, and will leave you breathing hard with the hairs stood up on the back of your neck.

Space exploration is fun, am I right?