There's this tom and jerry gba game, I believe it's called Infurnal escape and, well..The entire game is just disturbing and/or creepy, despite being based on an episode of the series. The fact that tom literally dies in the opening cutscene (I know this happened in the episode as well but they went all in here), the fact that Tom's damage icon slowly gets more miserable and eventually a skull, whenever you lose all lives tom is being literally dragged to hell while he tries to grasp back to the surface desperately, the fact you have to collect souls to gain back your lives (not to mention, those souls look creepy as hell, with wide (hypnotic?) eyes and a very wide smile), I dunno. This game made me unable to sleep for a while.
@@MissiGNO000 Yeah. While the game's quality can be debated, you can't really deny that the game was just kinda freaky in every way. I know the episode the game was based on was dark by itself but it's like they went absolutely all out freak factor with the game.
One of the biggest scares for me was when my brother was playing Sonic Heroes and was casually swinging across vines when Tails suddenly shouts “Giant alligator!” And this massive thing come jumping out of the water, easily 20x bigger than any alligator should be. He threw the controller down and began whimpering. He wanted me to beat it for him but I wasn’t touching that crap with a ten foot pole. Scared me too.
I always liked to think that they implied that Ecco didn't survive the time machine since it showed him spiraling into a black void. That could explain the retcon.
Or it spawns you back into the first game. I know it makes no sense but at least it lets me sleep at night knowing there will never be a conclusion LOL.
I mean he was pretty much just a dolphin. Maybe he didn't account for the changing position of earth and transported to when he wanted but into empty space somewhere in the Earth's orbit.
You should see how the Piglet game was on the GBA. I grew up on that version and it lowkey feels like a creepypasta game sometimes lol. Surprisingly charming at the same time.
There was also a GameCube Winnie the Pooh game. I don't think it was a port of the piglet game, though. The enemies in it were creepy. They made this awful noise when you beat them.
I always found the first pikmin game to be kind of unsettling, maybe it was the graphics or the feeling of isolation. The bad ending where olimar gets turned into a pikmin really creeped me out when I was young. Some of the enemies from this series have me questioning why they were put in a kids game, like the waterwraith and the fiery bulborb
Idk about the other people who played this game, but that part in the pokemon mystery dungeon explorers games where time is completely stopped was my first encounter with existential dread as a kid
What scared me the most about Mystery Dungeon was this one side story of an Armaldo being friends with baby pokemon and taking them around in dungeons💀
@SniperOnSunday I don't know why this reply was put on this comment. I was talking about Sonic CD Fun is infinite because someone brought up how creepy it was. I don't actually know why Wario land 4 sound room is so creepy
The most anxiety inducing parts of hitting the frog are: -Not knowing how much time you'll have to backtrack -Not knowing how long the detours you have to take because the switch blocks will close off the main path -Those levels where you're supposed to get the key AFTER starting the escape sequence and you don't know if you'll grab it and still have time to escape.
For me, it was the music on the endless staircase. That always freaked me out for some reason, even worse than waking up the killer piano for the first time. After that, if I didn't have 70 stars, I avoided the last door like the plague. So imagine my panic when I played the DS version, and dumbass me never thought they might've raised the star requirement like most of the doors...
I don't know if oddworld is family-friendly, but the bad ending in Munch's Odyssey is terrifying. Everything about it from the visuals to the dialog is horrific
U mean the one were abes creature dies and he looks sad then a flammble liquid leaking into the incratoer and you listen as some of abes friends scream in pain while dying
The death of your pet in the Gameboy Tamagotchi game. You hear a heart monitor get weaker and then flatline. Whoever put that in the game just wanted to mess some kids up.
The one thing that traumatized me when I was young was the PS1 Game Rugrats and the Search for Reptar. The most unnerving thing in that game was Mr.Friend & almost everything else in that game just scared me but that voice still puts me on edge...
Surpsingly never found much creepy in the game when you was younger till I was way older. Need to go back and replay it, I always thought super Dimentio was badass because of the whole Mr L bit.
@@jackminer2148 good point actually, my first time seeing Mimi made me freak out, and I'm fairly certain it gave me the most basic basic form of trauma. To this day, I freak out a little bit more when being chased by something unkillable in games.
The only thing I found creepy in non-horror game is phonecalls from Sims. Like, I remember that the phone rang in the middle of the night and saying creepy stuff
I listed it on a previous video, but Yoshi's Story used to freak me the hell out as a kid. So much of the game's artstyle and sound design is so uncanny. I used to never be able to get past the second page on my own because of how scared I was of the loud noises and creepy enemies in all the levels. But the giant eel in Lots 'o Jellyfish also stuck with me for a long time. Always hated invincible enemies, and this one took the cake for being such an oppressive force.
@@benamisai-kham5892 fr!! There was something so unnerving about watching all the Yoshi's disappear one by one, too. Seriously, what drugs were these devs on 😭
Those damn Attacky Sacks... Actually, most all of Baby Bowser's Castles were pretty bad, specifically the mecha one with the giant spikes that shoot out and instantly kill you.
@@swiftshock2615 I could not beat any of the Bowser's Castle levels except the first one as a kid. What the heck is with the sudden difficulty spike??
Apidya for the Amiga has some weird stuff in it, one of the weirdest being a naked doll boss that fights by detaching its hands and firing lasers from its eyes
I haven't personally experienced it, but there was a jumpscare in a flash Scooby-Doo game (Escape From the Smithsonian I think) that is genuinely frightening to an adult. I'm pretty sure it must have traumatized more than a few kids.
I don't know if anybody else feels the same way, but I always found Bowser's Inside Story to be a weirdly eerie game. Sure, all of the Mario & Luigi games have some creepy moments here and there (save for Paper Jam), and it's not as blatantly dark as Partners in Time, but something about Bowser's Inside Story always stuck out to me. I don't even know how to explain it, really. There's just a lot of stuff that seems... off. The Mushroom Kingdom is wrought with a fantastical plague, and warped by the rule of Fawful in rather bizarre ways (both silly and eerie). There's a dormant force of nature beneath the kingdom that can copy Bowser's DNA and make the Bros. gasp for air just by being near them. Bowser gets trapped or incapacitated almost constantly throughout the story, and the Bros. get their fair share of this too. Bowser's Body is a bizarre labyrinth of alien geometry and vaguely organic shapes, which isn't helped by it being more "realistic" than places like Yoob's Belly (though it's still cartoony and even unnatural at times, most of the environment is clearly innards of some description). I think what gets me the most is the music. While a lot of it is the usual Mario affair, there's quite a few tracks that make me really uneasy even now. Stuff like "Final Castle", "Fawful's Evil Plan", and "Dark Bowser" are intimidating and hopeless, "Deep Castle" is downright melancholic... but the one that gets me the most is "The Road Leading to the Secret", the song you will spend pretty much half the game listening to. It's just so eerie, especially the version heard inside Bowser. It makes you feel like you're hopelessly lost, and that you shouldn't be wherever it is you are. I'm willing to bet this one song is a big part of why I find this game to be so creepy.
God I love that game. Recently started replaying it but my ds is at the brink of it's death, so I had to start all over on pc again. What kind of adds to the creepy sense is the fact that you HAVE to "help" both sides. You're this beholder, overseeing all the situations the bros and bowser get themselves into, each one with a different goal in mind (although kinda same). The tutorial is beating bowser up, you get to play him a lot until suddenly you're not the one breathing fire and throwing punches, you're the one at the receiving end. That part scared me so bad as a kid haha. I honestly can't really remember much anymore as it's been some time, but partners in time was so much more scary for me, even though I only watched a let's play when the game came out
Huh, I never really considered Inside Story to be "creepy" but I definitely get what you mean by it being "off". A lot of messed up scenarios in that game for sure. It's still the only Mario RPG I've played (bought 2 during the Wii Eshop close and just haven't had time) and one of my favorite DS games of all time. But yeah I guess looking back some stuff weirded child me out pretty bad. The whole Sockop area was disturbing to me, and the Dark Star stuff at the end gets pretty dark (pun not intended)
So I left this comment on the last video but it was a little late, so I'll leave it here again. In the flash game poptropica, I experienced my first ever jumpscare in a game. In ghost story island, your character goes into this creepy old house and looks through a telescope. while you're distracted looking through it, someone, in your ear, says "looking for someone?" this wouldnt be such a big deal if it wasnt the ONLY example of spoken dialogue in all of poptropica. it scared ten year old me so badly, i wasnt expecting it at all. i replayed the game later and more recently, and it got me again.
Holy shit speaking of poptropica, the Jersey Devil section from cryptid island scared me as a kid, especially the scene where it’s staring at you from the window in the abandoned house.
THIS. Omg I had the same experience. I was alone and playing this. It was so quiet since this was before they added music so it was dead silent. The voice clip came from nowhere and made me fall out of my chair. No joke. Genuinely one of the biggest scares I’ve ever had in my life.
Can’t recall if you’ve touched on the Nancy Drew games yet, but Nancy Drew Shadow At The Water’s Edge is easily one of the scariest. The games are all supposed to be a little scary as mystery games often are, there were some pretty wild ones in that particular game. I remember there’s a mirror scare that’s pretty intense, and a puzzle that’s on a timer where you’ll drown if it’s not completed in time.
@@PixelRoserade Blackmoor Manor was all sorts of freaky. The disembodied voice calling her right at the beginning? Eugh. getting trapped in the sauna in White Wolf Of Icicle Creek used to stress me out so much. And while I’ve never seen it, there’s also another Easter egg dream sequence in White Wolf that you need to do a bunch of stuff to trigger that’s also pretty creepy.
The Wario Land 4 entry reminded me of this random DS platformer I got as a kid. I think it was called New Zealand Story. It was about these baby chicks getting abducted and you having to save them. I remember the game having a mostly cheery atmosphere, but something about it always made me a little uncomfortable. I remember the enemy/boss designs looking pretty strange as well as some of the levels creeping me out a little but I think what scared me the most was this unkillable reaper enemy that would hunt you down after a certain amount of time passed. Other than that, I remember the game being pretty challenging, and the levels weren't super linear, so I got lost often.
I was a victim of this Forestia game ^^ I remember playing it when I was a kid and coming to this nightmare sequence... I was so shocked of the sudden change of athmosphere that I only made like 2 or 3 steps into the level before quiting the game. I never played this game ever again XD
I'm the one that suggested he would look at the game, but for me, it would always appear at past the halfway point from what I can recall. It was probably a blessing in disguise. But the Mermaid sequence also freacked me out.
i remember stumbling upon footage of the nightmare sequence for forestia as a youngster, and for YEARS i was convinced it was a weird nightmare i had and not something that actually existed after struggling to find anything about it, i still remember being utterly shocked when i stumbled upon footage of it a few months ago and realizing it WAS real.
Yeah... that game really stuck with me when I was younger because of the nightmare sequence, even if I at some point forgot the name of the game. It was always between that and the mermaid sequence that freaked me out as a kid and could never complete it.
You wanna talk obscure scary games; Sea Life Safari (I know I've commented this game previously, but he didn't see it before). It's an old PC game I played when I was little, which was basically Pokemon Snap, but underwater. It has a very similar vibe to that shark hunting game you've brought up a couple of times. The first level is a colorful coral reef with goofy clownfish and smiling turtles, but then every level afterwards is a dark abyss with much more vicious looking creatures. This game is pretty much entirely responsible for me being thalassophbic.
I hardly ever hear anyone talk about this, but the Big Octos from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker absolutely terrified me as a little kid (and even well into my teens). Everything about them was so scary to me: the way the music completely stops, a storm immediately starts no matter the weather condition beforehand, and you get stuck in a giant whirlpool before this huge squid with a bunch of giant glowing eyes slowly emerges from the center of the whirlpool combined with the intense music that plays as it fully appears. I genuinely had a panic attack when i encountered one of these things. I actually developed a genuine fear of these things, I had nightmares (as an adult, I STILL from time to time get a big octo nightmare) and was unable to beat the game for the longest time. Eventually I finally beat it a couple of years after the HD version came out (we had the gamecube version, but my older brothers never let me play it) after realizing i could just look up the big octo map and avoid them. But despite knowing that, the big octos very much made an impression on me and to this day they still give me goosebumps. Also, I love your videos a ton, keep them up!
I used to play World of Goo a lot when I was a tiny child. Plenty of its visuals come across as rather unsettling, which mostly comes down to the art style. It's definitely a cartoonish sort of creepy. One highlight is the level "Burning Man" in Chapter 3, Cog in the Machine. One of the set pieces in the level, which I suppose is the titular burning man, starts out on a platform of matches, which you have to burn away to get to the exit of the level. But when you do that, the burning man's eyes explode, leaving only empty (and possibly bleeding?) black sockets. Another level from the same chapter is called "You Have to Explode the Head" in which the objective is exactly what it sounds like, although the head does belong to a robot if that makes it any better. And in the level "Misty's Long Bony Road," the starting point is an eyeless, skeletal frog and you have to use skulls to cross a road of spikes. The final level of Chapter 4, "Deliverance," has you enter a recycling bin to undelete all the spam mail within. The depths of the recycling bin take on a completely black-and-bright-red color palette and at the very bottom, submerged in some kind of lava, is a massive, writhing red skeleton. Absolutely no idea why and there's no explanation for it. Oddly enough, this is the one that scared me the most when I was young. Pretty gnarly stuff for a family-friendly game!
I commented about this last time, but the creatures in the skybox of the Nightmare World in Tak 2- Staff of Dreams always creeped me out. The ambience of the level is very slimy feeling, and I once built up enough speed in one of the vehicles to fling myself toward the skybox- the creatures arent a flat texture, either! They're (very roughly) 3D mapped!
I remember being terrified by the sea monster from Jumpstart back in the day. I had a nightmare once where he was in my shower and my parents sacrificed me to him or something whack like that
The Undead themed Chapters from the first Skylanders game scared me pretty bad as a kid. The eerie music and dark levels set a creepy atmosphere but the enemies made it for me. The gargantulas and shadow knights are physicallt intimidating, being giant spiders and possessed suits of armour, but the zombie enemies would shamble towards you and can only be efficiently killed with fire. If you dont have a Fire Skylander, the only way to kill the main enemies in the chapter is to push them into the torches that you find in the dungeon. I remember finding myself scrambling through arenas looking for a torch with a crowd of them on my tail. The Wilikin Village from Skylanders Giants could be considered creepy with the living dolls and world changingbut I mostly found it more whimsical and goofy.
Oh my freaking gosh YES. OK so I have had an irrational phobia of zombies ever since I was little (no idea what triggered it but to this day I can handle a LOT of horror stuff, but throw a shambling corpse in and I'm OUTTA THERE-) I was also obsessed with the Skylanders franchise, kept up with it religiously until like game 5. NOTHING in Skylanders scared me like those invincible zombie enemies, not the final boss of game 3, not other Undead Element levels, nothing. I remember a part where you essentially grab an item and an entire horde breaks through a wall to chase you. We didn't have a Fire Element Skylander at first either (my poor mom went and bought me a used Ignitor just to help me out lol) and I literally made my baby sister play through the Undead levels on her own while I left the room... and I would do this EVERY time we wanted to replay through the game. Man what a nostalgia rush. I'm so glad someone else was as traumatized by that area as I was.
It isn’t a kids game, but I played Mass Effect as a kid. I got to the Overlord DLC and hooo boy was I not prepared to the weird sci fi horror show that was about to happen. When it got to the reveal of the dude connected to all those wires, especially the tubes going down his throat, I got so freaked out I immediately turned off the console. Ended up having to replay a bit because I lost progress from not saving before quitting, but I had such a knee jerk reaction that I had to turn it off lol
I was so happy to see Piglet’s Big Game on this list. I’ve always thought it had an eerie atmosphere, despite loving it, and played it a lot as a kid. There’s even a glitch where the brave face puppet show freezes , and you see piglet’s turned back for 15 seconds.
Mickey mouse and the magic mirror for the GameCube is one of the games that scared me the most as a kid. Mickey's model is just plain creepy, he nearly gets stabbed with a ghost sword, almost gets a chandelier dropped on him, and can be killed by a possessed rubber duck. Throughout the game you find items from or referencing mickeys friends but never find them, which creeped me out as a kid because i thought something bad happened to them. Also theres several creepy music tracks/areas and even a jumpscare in the basement.
I remember that game is it GameCube? I remember the empty feeling of traveling through worlds which was eerie not to mention the random statues. Still a cool game though.
@@grimphantom99insaneenderma85 I think you're thinking of another game, this game is a point and click game for the gamecube. You travel through what I think is a big mansion? (younger me always thought it was a museum for some reason)
That game used to scare the heck out of my GameCube was in my room it was my sisters game and every time she played it I ran out of my own room I was scared of that ghost in the game lol
In FF12, I went exploring in some caves in the desert, looking for a mark. I went too deep but figured I'd just keep going to explore since you can pretty easily avoid most enemies. As I got deeper, the map got static-y and disappeared. I eventually entered a room with a lavapit and some thing that looked like Chernobog popped out and wiped my party.
Ayyy you talked about the splatoon 2 and 3 bad endings! i suggested them and im not sure if it was MY comment that you saw but im happy to see them. They're so scary for no reason!
Bro I didn't see the 3rd games bad end until now, what the heck is that about And even though 2's cutscene isn't as theatrical, the in-universe consequences and buildup are horrifying. Like yeah "the city gets oozed" is already bad - but with the context of "an insane sentient telephone left by an extinct civilization has declared Inklings to be unworthy of life, and so is grinding down their "purest" specimens into ooze to eradicate the rest of the species and start evolution over"..... holy crap dude
@@drawingdragon agreed! I was absolutely SHOCKED first playing octo expansion and realizing how horrific the story was... for a funny brigt nintendo game about squids!
Great vid mr. Gambado! I have two suggestions for your "bad ending" segment. The first one is a bit of a stretch but in "juju densetsu" the ending made want to cry with her crying voice. The second one is "Rolo to the rescue"! This one surprised me the first time I got it because how sad and creepy it seemed.
There's this movie that I loved as a kid, Legends of the Owls: Guardians of Ga'hoole. Now that movie was a bit creepy on its own, with its character designs being pretty messed up in their own right, but the GAME has its moments. I remember playing it on my Xbox 360, and the night levels scared me so bad. But the worst part was the Hagsfiends, ESPECIALLY the Hagsfiend Queen boss. Genuinely scared the shit out of me, and I think I stopped playing for a long time because of how much that Queen scared me. If I remember correctly too, there were a ton of other levels that were a bit unsettling, like a bat boss thing that freaked me out, but the Hagsfiend levels in general were definitely the most unsettling for me. I can't remember if the music was creepy or not tbh, if I find the ost I'll take a listen and update :) Update: just listened to the ost and HOLY SHIT. I unlocked a memory listening to it and DAMN is the Hagsfiend (?) soundtrack STRESSFUL sounding. The song is "Nightmare" and DAMN does it actually kind of slap. But yeah, parred with the stress of the boss fight, the soundtrack definitely makes the game a whole lot more stressful and unsettling.
Thank you for including Forestia in this video! I’m happy that someone effectively talks about that, because I played it when i was something like 5 and it definitely scarred me as a child.
Rayman Origins (Technically a kids game...) had the most disturbing bosses of all time. After completing the first 5 worlds, you get revealed secondary worlds and its bosses (the 4 kings the nymphs {Characters that shouldn't be in a kids game that give you various abilities} told you about). and each of those bosses are equally disturbing. (except for the bird one) The magician who helped you learn the basics is found to be the villian of the game, scattering the enemies about. He probably turned the 4 kings into these creatures.
I have no idea if you covered this before since I haven't went through every video, but Insaniquarium's aliens and final boss were what creeped me out when I was young, they come in periodically to try and kill your fish, with a horn and some ominous music alerting you of one approaching, I found the robot and the squid in particular terrifying due to the sounds they make, the final boss makes it darker by trying to kill the pets you obtained throughout the game rather than the regular guppies you took care of, making this evil laugh when he appears, with the design even having his brains showing it may not scare me now, and it may not be as scary as some of the other stuff, but it sure did scare me back then
small side note: the ultravores were also quite creepy to me due to the red eyes, but not to the degree of the aliens since they were actually aggressive
A scary moment like this with a children's video game would be in Super Paper Mario, world 2-4 Mimi's mansion ,the basement, when you move through that world you discover Mimi's true identity and intentions, which leads to her transformation, where she literally breaks her neck, transforms into a spider and starts chasing you, at that very moment you discovers that she is invincible, so your only option is to flee, you have to go through the basement (which is a labyrinth) fleeing from an invincible bug that she can teleports next to you, I was always afraid of that level because the only thing I can do was running
I just got to say to my wife "Wake up honey, Gambado Gaming just dropped a new scary video." She was driving at the time, so a little confused, but it was still fun to say
So glad to see Forestia! It's not very well known but I've heard a story of it being given away to kindergarten kids in some schools here with it being edutainment lol I guess being educated on fear and horror is... Education too? Edit: I used to get scared by almost everything I played as a kid, maybe because when everyone was talking about ps3 I was still playing eerie ps1 games, but my worst experience must have been with crappy cheap games that were given away in cereal boxes especially because they would always clash with the antivirus! Nowadays those same eerie games feel so comforting
PS1 games had an eerie atmosphere that i miss very much. Heart of darkness was creepy, I remember the monsters kill the kid protagonist in pretty violent ways and the world has a very dark ominous vibe that modern games cant seem to recapture with their ultra 4k graphics and realism
There was a game called “Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure” that I played via a Shareware disk as a kid (yes I’m old), and the first (out of three) game ends with such a freaking jumpscare! At least for a kid who didn’t know there was a save feature so I played through it all the way, sweating so hard, to finally reach the end of the game. It scared me so freaking bad that I couldn’t even look at that game for years!
Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure mentioned!!! Condolences on your back and knee pain! I remember watching the demo where he's flying around on the little personal floating platform thing over and over, really wanting to see that level but being way too bad at the game to ever get to it, and also having absolutely no idea you could save. I always hated that one stage in the forest where there's a storm going on, and when the lightning flashes, you can see spooky eyes in a bunch of the busted up trees. I'd never actually seen the ending before, and I just looked it up. Maaaaan what the hell. Ecco the Dolphin levels of "out of left field terrifying bullshit slapped at the end of a mostly normal game". pre-2000s game devs were a different breed lmao, I'm so glad I never got that far
@@HotClown - Haha right?! I'm not insane in thinking that's a really scary ending to the game, right? Man, my mother had to make me promise to not play that game again because I was so scared that I couldn't sleep haha
As a kid two games really freaked me out. The shark in Banjo-Kazooie with the off-brand jaws music was really upsetting as a kid mostly because you couldn't fight back in the water only run. The other was in Gex 3 on the N64. There was a mystery level that after had taxidermied bears that at first look like they are part of the environment, but after you hit a switch to open a blocked way they spring to life. The worst part they had higher heath then some of the other enemies so I die to them a few times as a kid.
It seems that sharks in this game is terrifying to many people... But I'm very surprised to the fact that almost no one is frightened by Dragundas, the green monsters in Banjo Tooie that chews you with its razor sharp teeth and spits you out while laughing at you menacingly. This traumatizes me so much more, and I have no clue why to be honest
Not sure if this was covered in the previous videos but in Jak and Daxter, when you try to swim out of bounds, a heartbeat plays and gets faster and eventually a giant fish swallows you up. Frightened me as a kid. Or maybe in Sly Cooper 1, there's a section during the Bayou stage where Sly is getting chased by a giant swamp serpent. That imagery scared me shitless as a child that I just turned off my PS2 and haven't played the Sly Cooper series until I was much older lol
Ah, Lurker Shark... traumatizing Jak and Daxter kids beyond repair since forever. I never experienced Thalassophobia until I tried to swim to Misty Island without a boat.
I'm not sure if Robocop 2 on NES counts as family friendly, but its game over screen with broken down Murphy and his exposed terrifying face traumatized me as a kid
The mochi mayhem special event from pokemon scarlet/violet is definitely up there for creepy moments. seeing the characters get their bodies possessed and being forced to do that weird dance with the creepy music playing in the background will never not be terrifying, especially considering that the game never actually explains what pecharunt is or why it was possessing people in the first place
For sure, one of the most scary things in a game that came out of nowhere was the Tidal Wave boss of the Transformers PS2 game based on the Armada cartoon. The 4th level, Mid-Atlantic, has you glide aboard and navigate through a MASSIVE Decepticon aircraft carrier warship, where your objective is to reach the bridge/controls to disable the vessel. Once you reach the bridge though, a cutscene triggers with the warship transforming, and it is staged with heavy rain, freakishly intense music, lightning blasting every few seconds and at one point in the cutscene, you can even see your character running out of a doorway to escape the shifting parts of the massive robot for a sense of scale. The cutscene alone is terrifying if you're not expecting it, but the boss fight itself also qualifies, with Tidal Wave TOWERING over the rest of the map (The water is so deep that if you fall into it your character is practically a speck on the screen, but it barely makes it halfway up Tidal Wave's calves at BEST), compound that with really disturbing noises he makes when you shoot his head, and a creepy finger waggling gesture he does sometimes that I don't even know the trigger for, it's all REALLY unsettling. Even the boss music is deep and spooky compared to the high octane drums and wailing guitars of other boss themes. This is all made even WORSE if you pay attention during your time inside the warship where you can actually SEE his robot mode head through some windows if you know where to look, which would certainly be jarring if you didn't recognize Tidal Wave's alt mode!
Okay hear me out, the black holes from Mario galaxy idk why I’m afraid of them but seeing Mario just get dragging in while screaming scares me along with the sound it made when you got caught by them and especially just like the audio of them just existing
Here’s a couple from me, they aren’t really worth covering but I just want to share them: - Super Smash Bros. N64: I got this game from a garage sale in kindergarten, so everything was already unlocked. One day I was poking around in menus and because I had a kindergarten reading level, I didn’t know what I was doing and deleted all data. The unlockable characters became locked again. I was so traumatized by the “Warning! Challenger Approaching” screen unexpectedly appearing that it was my most prominent recurring nightmare for my entire childhood. - Super Mario Sunshine: for some reason certain parts of this game just make me incredibly nervous, and I never even had this game as a kid. In particular, the dark bottom of Noki Bay and the blue void when you clip out of bounds in Delfino Square. I also swear I accidentally triggered a glitch in Pianta Village where I somehow avoided the death plane and landed in the bottom of the black void and could walk around, but I’ve never seen any documentation of it.
Finally someone covered Forestia in this type of video!! Forestia was one of my childhood's favorite games, even when the nightmare stage terrified the shit out of me. But at the same time it was fascinating and worked kind of as a gateway to horror fiction, and nowadays I love horror as a genre.
Mushroom men the spore wars very obscure and trippy game with horrifying mutant dogs,racoons,moles,and rabbits with the most kid friendly gore scene in a kids game I’ve ever seen.
ALSO ALSO, Starshine Legacy 😂 Nobody recognizes this game by title, but it's a very short 3D game for girls where you play as a school girl with short red head who realizes she can understand horses, and there's an ill scared white horse who tells her he's in great danger and that she must save him, so you eventually sneak out at night to some corrupted shadow kidnapper base where you must rescue the horse, it was really wild for a kids game 😂 But the worst part to me was a night section in school, where you had to pass a janitor who was on patrol, he was a big burly man with a flashlight who hummed to himself some creepy tunes, that was basically my introduction to the "don't get spotted by the monster" horror game genre 😂 As well as gave me an irrational fear of janitors.
I don’t know if you’ve covered this yet, but the level Wilikin Village from Skylanders Giants freaked me out as a kid, and I remember skipping that level every time I would play the game. It doesn’t bother me that much now, but I feel like it would freak out anyone who’s afraid of puppets and uncanny speech / music.
Also, not sure if the Polish Scooby Doo games are popular in the states or not, but I'm telling you, they ALL had jumpscares 😂 Of course, it's Scooby Doo, but there's one game that I couldn't finish as a kid because close to the end you must choose the right gravestone and when you choose wrong the main villain pops up and scares the gang away from the graveyard. The heart attack wasn't worth it for little me 😂
In Elebits on the Wii, when you go to the amusement park level, there are statues all over the place of a pink rabbit mascot with what appears to be blood all over it's face. It's actually a direct reference to the character Robbie the Rabbit from Silent Hill, which some of the developers of Elebits worked on. The in game description for the statue says it's "ketchup" and not blood, but 10 year old me was not buying that shit and I'd pick the little fucker up and fling him halfway across the map. (I posted this in the last vid, but I gotta rep my boy Elebits)
I'm glad you touched on Ecco the Dolphin. I remember playing it, thinking it was just one of those collecting-stuff games on the Genesis, back when I was like 4, and then I encountered the aliens. Played it through the Sega Channel, while that was a thing, to give you an idea of how long ago that was. I remember being relieved when the games changed at the end of the week or month or whatever.
There are two levels that in Lego Indiana Jones 2 that could be worth talking about, first is the second level of crystal skull, doom town where you have to escape a nuke site, while you do escape the nuke, mannequins who are implied to be alive don't. The second level is the third level of the Last Crusade, Berlin Brawl, which is a recreation of an area in Nazi Germany, and the game usually cuts out any references to the Nazis or anything mature.
Batman Arkham City has a pretty creepy bad ending. In a Catwoman segment you can choose to help Batman or leave Arkham City with the money you just stole. If you choose to leave Arkham City, the credits roll, and an SOS from Barbra Gordon is heard, pleading for anyone to help with the (now invisible because Batman didn't stop him) Joker.
There's a game that perhaps only my fellow Italians will remember. It was called "Omnia Planet", and it was an educational game that taught you about various scientific topics, such as chemistry, geology, genetics etc. One of the subjects was paleontology. In one of the minigames you were put inside various dioramas and you had to click on one of the objects in it to progress through time. In one of those you were tasked with causing the extinction of dinosaurs, so obviously the object you had to click was a meteorite in the sky. Except one of the other things you could click on in the diorama was a Tyrannousaurus Rex. If you did, the voice of the guide said "Warning: this choice will result in YOUR extinction", followed by the T-rex coming to life and treating you to a POV shot of it eating you. That was in the first '00s and it was pretty much the first jumpscare I ever got, even before they started spreading on the Internet.
A lot of video games seem to add creatures into water specifically to prevent swimming out of bounds while keeping immersion intact. The Lurker Shark from Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy was my introduction to this, and thus cemented my fear for water in video games. Other good examples include Snacker the Shark in Banjo-Kazooie, alien fish in Ratchet & Clank, and the Kraken in Jak 3.
Ok I feel I can add on to the obscure games that traumatized me as a kid. Back when I was first getting into gaming I got 2 games for the Wii, “Scooby-Doo First Frights” and “Scooby-Doo and the Spooky Swamp”. First Frights had sectioned level areas and wider enemy variety. Some highlights that freaked me out as a kid were: the headless guy from the first area, the clowns from the second area, the sewer dolls from the second area (specifically when they made this really creepy groaning noise as they approached), the green tank robots from the second area that showed up in a very freaky level atmosphere imo (insane factory that had children’s aesthetics all over the place?), the giant divers from the third area (and subsequently the entire ghost ship segment), the lobster boss from the third area, and the entire final area and the reveal at the end that it was a real monster the whole time. In Spooky Swamp the enemies weren’t that scary but the game itself was. Instead of sectioned levels, it was basically open world, but there were NO NPCs besides the plot necessary ones, so any building you went into was empty and almost always silent. Partnered with the fact there was a ghost mechanic, and the ghosts would show up in the empty buildings, it unnerved little kid me quite a lot, looking back on it now, both games have areas that are old and empty that feel so liminal. I vividly remember the abandoned ski shop building in the snowy area of Spooky Swamp, and how it had only a few spiders, a ghost, and silence. Even though you had a COM second player (or a sibling or friend if you were lucky) you still felt so alone.
When I was a kid I got very uncomfortable vibes from a level in Skylanders Spyro's adventure. The name of the level is Cadaverous Crypt and there are some unkillable zombie like enemies in it that make it even worse for the vibes cuz you are already in a crypt. Not to mention the creepy Ost in the background
2 IP based games come to mind when talking about this subject The first one is Bugs Bunny and Taz Time Busters. there was a whole level dedicated to spooky stuff called "Transylvanian Era" (You travel through time to different eras.) which made no sense as Transylvania is a place, not an era. The music at that level is quite ominous and depressing and you could literally transfer your brain with these colour-coordinated monsters to open areas. There was a haunted river where the water was pitch black and full of threats to avoid, things like swarms of bats, crocodiles, whirlpools and disembodied hands trying to grab you. With a giant whirlpool at the end which you had to escape. There was also a zoo you could visit called Zoovania. Upon entering, it was set in the daytime, and all the animals were normal. Monkeys and birds in cages, fish in pools and exotic plants on display. Your goal was to turn the giant clock to nighttime and then the animals would transform into beastly versions of themselves, attacking you if you got too close. The second game Sprung to mind when I saw the bad ending of Splatoon. In the game Hello Kitty Roller Rescue, the world is being invaded by aliens known as the Cube Batallion completely by accident. The ending had the leader go full gundam and make his way to a cannon that you had to power up before the leader reached it. If you failed then you saw the world turn into a cube and a shot of the leader laughing in victory. I assume all the characters died in that scene as they aren’t seen again. I do like that you can replay as Badtz-Maru who is generally quite rude to the people you talk to in the game, though.
i remember playing the echo the dolphin on the genesis and never realizing the game actually went on more because i would always just go to the very right and get stuck or i would quit because the intro always made me sad thinkiing about how lonely the dolphin was
The hidden ending of One Shot is what comes to mind with the "bad endings" segment. Before it got remade into a $10 Steam game, One Shot would kill off the main character if you closed the game before you finished it. You only have one shot, after all. You couldn't continue playing unless you deleted the game from your system and re-downloaded it. This ending was removed when One Shot got upgraded and cost actual money to play (since making a paid copy of a game no longer functional wasn't exactly a sell), but seeing the main character's abandoned scarf on the opening screen of the original got to me the first time I closed it without knowing any better. Loved this video, keep it up!
Man I LOVE these videos, something about little creepy things in games you don't expect, the fact this one little moment caused nightmares for someone just tickles me. Also if our suggestion was favorited in the past does that mean it'll be in a future video?
Can't remember if you've already mentioned it but Die Hard Trilogy on the PS1 had quite ominous atmosphere at times. The most memorable scary thing was in the 3rd person shooter portion of the game when you've cleared a floor and they send an armed bomb down the elevator. A very intense countdown music starts while you try to reach and disarm the bomb, in an often hard-to-navigate and dark map, in order to proceed to the next floor. EDIT: It's not a family friendly game but it would fit a non-horror game video ahah
The I Spy: Treasure Hunt PC game always unnerved me as a kid. I have a friend who also played it as a kid and they also found it creepy. It's strange because there is another game in the I Spy series, I Spy: Spooky Mansion, that is supposed to be creepy, but I was totally fine with that one. I think I would chock it up to certain areas in the game feeling like a liminal space. You're exploring this small town, and although there are a few people in it, they're completely motionless. It's like it's stuck in time. Plus there's the constant references to hanging throughout the game.
"Botanicula" has quite a lot of creepy/scary moments in it. The main villain literally sucks the life out of things, and there are some cut scenes of it killing living things and even ripping the head off of some insect creature. Most of the NPC's in the game are insects as well and they can seem creepy on their own. Certain areas of the game have very creepy atmospheres, like one that is deep underwater, and one that is in a section where the villain has sucked all the life out of the plants. The final area of the game is the scariest, with everything being mostly black and having some scary "bosses" to defeat. "Machinarium" has a bad ending where near the end of the game the main character is trying to diffuse a bomb, and if you fail you see the bomb explode and destroy the tower it's attached to, obviously killing the main character and another character who's up in that tower.
I have always been a fan of the MediEval games, specifically the first one. But I always needed to have my parents beat the bosses for me since they scared me too much. The first boss in particular still freaks me out to this day (It's a demon made of stained glass with a beating heart that you have to shoot at before it shoots back with glass shards and drains your health fast)
I keep waiting for someone to talk about this, but it seems like I was the only one who played Zelda Wind Waker is as kid. The Redeads in that game were horrifying... and the whole Earth Temple is scary enough as it is, but the redeads in it make it worse. The redeads were so scary that I'm still afraid of them to this day. They made me stop playing the game several times.
One of the things I remember from my childhood are the levels "Statue Park" and "Severnaya 2", from Goldeneye 64. Both happen during night, and because of the limitations from the hardware back then, the sky looks red-ish in both levels. Statue Park also has a lot of hiding spots your enemies use, so you never see them coming. However, Severnaya 2, being a snow level and a bigger one than the park, had fog everywhere, and you could only see a few feet in front of you, which meant constant jumpscares from the enemies. Also, Severnaya 2's music was one of the creepiest from the game.
I think any of the persona bad endings could fit into this classification. Just to name a few: -Persona 3 has a choice in the story where you choose to fight a force that will end the world or give up, if you choose the latter a cutscene plays of the characters hanging out seemingly unaware the world will end in mere seconds -In persona 4 near the end of the story the game's "TV World" starts leaking into the real world which fills the overworld with fog, removes npcs, and replaces the typical cheery music with chilling ambience. If you beat the game's final dungeon in time this is all reversed but if you miss the time limit you instead wake up one day to a phone call from another character telling you the monsters have started leaking into the real world before screaming and going silent. -In Persona 5 if you fail to finish the third dungeon in time you will have the police show up to your door to announce they found one of your friends dead in an alley There's plenty more of this too, in any modern persona game if you either choose the wrong dialogue choice near the end or miss an in-game time limit there's always some horrible cutscene.
I don't know if this'll make it in to one of your videos or even counts, but FNAF World had some insane stuff that would terrify kids. What set FNAF world from the rest of the Five Nights at Freddy's games is that it was suppose to be a cutesy child friendly RPG with no horror elements. However, Scott Cawthon couldn't help himself, so there are layers of just absolutely messed up stuff in this game if you go beneath the surface. For example, if you pick Fredbear (the yellow teddy who greets you at the start and talks to you throughout the game) as your party leader, you get a pretty disturbing cutscene of two Fredbears spazzing out before their heads explode, followed by a textbox saying "Two Fredbears can't exist in the same universe at the same time." I was playing the game with my younger brother when this happened and it freaked us both out. That's just scratching the surface, you could honestly make a whole video about scary things hidden in this family friendly game alone.
This might just be my massive thalasophobia talking, but the entire Deep Sea purple time rift in A Hat in Time creeps me the hell out. Something about the somber music, huge plants swaying in the distance, strange spike in difficulty from the entire rest of the game, and something else that I can't place my finger on, all just make me feel like I shouldn't be there.
not sure if this has alredy been covered or if someone else has mentioned it but there are a few other things in splatoon that are pretty creepy, I think one of the most well known ones being a weird creepy ghost face thing that can be spotted in the window in one of the building on the flounder heights stage in both splatoon 1 and 3. there was also statues in the splatoon 1 Museum d'Alfonsino stage which during splatfest will randomly laugh. the only other thing that stands out to me are some creepy noises in the story modes too. during splatoon 1 as you enter the boss room there are noises which some people like to interprare as screams and more recently, the bosses from the new side order DLC which play chopped up and distorted versions of some of the splatoon songs.
Every time I see a creepy video about old kids game its makes me want to make my own family friendly game and leave a 1 out of a 1000000 chance that theres like a body floating in a lake somewhere and once it shows up for you it never shows up again Something like that so when people start talking about it nobody believes them until years have passed and other people start mentioning they saw it too
I never really had an issue with Wario Land 4, and I loved playing it, even with the time limit parts, and usually I hate time limit segments in games. Only thing I wasn't as big on was the Big Board level, mainly because how you complete it is a little annoying, and the background with all the toys was fairly creepy.
I remember I loved the game Ratatouille for the GameCube as a kid, hell, I still love it! It’s surprisingly well made for a licensed game. However, the many Game Over screens always struck me as quite dark and eerie. They always showed a glimpse into Remy’s often times dark fates, all while the background was pitch black and ominous music played. Needless to say, I would usually try to skip these as fast as possible as a kid.
Bro I loved the Ratatouille game But I lived in primal terror of being caught by that wack-looking dog in the City of Lights level. You have to help all the rats sneak past him without being caught... Then there was being caught by the GIANT humans in the kitchen levels and having to shake the analog stick to get loose... Come to think of it Ratatouille was horrifying
There's this tom and jerry gba game, I believe it's called Infurnal escape and, well..The entire game is just disturbing and/or creepy, despite being based on an episode of the series. The fact that tom literally dies in the opening cutscene (I know this happened in the episode as well but they went all in here), the fact that Tom's damage icon slowly gets more miserable and eventually a skull, whenever you lose all lives tom is being literally dragged to hell while he tries to grasp back to the surface desperately, the fact you have to collect souls to gain back your lives (not to mention, those souls look creepy as hell, with wide (hypnotic?) eyes and a very wide smile), I dunno. This game made me unable to sleep for a while.
Oh somebody else played it
@@MissiGNO000 Yeah. While the game's quality can be debated, you can't really deny that the game was just kinda freaky in every way. I know the episode the game was based on was dark by itself but it's like they went absolutely all out freak factor with the game.
Sounds like an official creepypasta game damn
@@gizmoray721 Yeah. It's real though, search up Infurnal Escape GBA Gameover here on youtube. You'll see exactly what I'm talking about.
I just watched a olaythrough. The main thing I found unnerving were the cutscenes and the music
One of the biggest scares for me was when my brother was playing Sonic Heroes and was casually swinging across vines when Tails suddenly shouts “Giant alligator!” And this massive thing come jumping out of the water, easily 20x bigger than any alligator should be. He threw the controller down and began whimpering. He wanted me to beat it for him but I wasn’t touching that crap with a ten foot pole. Scared me too.
So were you the older brother?
@@EverydayWhitey Yeah. Not much of a help to him with this particular problem though.
THANK YOU! Its just out of nowhere! I was able to play manhunt anything but fuck that crocodile!
@@MasterPatrick I probably would’ve been so scared I would think the game was cursed.
that shit scared me so much it took me so long to beat the level lol
I always liked to think that they implied that Ecco didn't survive the time machine since it showed him spiraling into a black void. That could explain the retcon.
Or it spawns you back into the first game. I know it makes no sense but at least it lets me sleep at night knowing there will never be a conclusion LOL.
Lol bro got void
Nah I took it as he disappeared into the timestream, and ended up somewhere unknown.
@@Infindox yea that's what the end text implies
I mean he was pretty much just a dolphin. Maybe he didn't account for the changing position of earth and transported to when he wanted but into empty space somewhere in the Earth's orbit.
You should see how the Piglet game was on the GBA. I grew up on that version and it lowkey feels like a creepypasta game sometimes lol. Surprisingly charming at the same time.
There was also a GameCube Winnie the Pooh game. I don't think it was a port of the piglet game, though. The enemies in it were creepy. They made this awful noise when you beat them.
Rumbly rumbly adventure @@Mckenzie-sq6fw
I grew up playing the GBA port. I'd say the way it's presented makes it more fitting as a horror game. 10/10
@@zephyr1741 Thank you. I couldn't remember the name, for the life of me.
I always found the first pikmin game to be kind of unsettling, maybe it was the graphics or the feeling of isolation. The bad ending where olimar gets turned into a pikmin really creeped me out when I was young. Some of the enemies from this series have me questioning why they were put in a kids game, like the waterwraith and the fiery bulborb
Idk about the other people who played this game, but that part in the pokemon mystery dungeon explorers games where time is completely stopped was my first encounter with existential dread as a kid
The entire segment as you’re running from the sableye felt so tense for me as a kid, I feel ya
What scared me the most about Mystery Dungeon was this one side story of an Armaldo being friends with baby pokemon and taking them around in dungeons💀
I loved this game but I definitely remember being filled with dread as that happened, yeah.
@@queendiamond770 i dont remember that
The Wario Land 4 hurry up music never bothered me, but the weird-ass Sound Room was horrifying to me as a child
@@Dovah_SlayerSo it's a Sonic CD type situation?
@SniperOnSunday I don't know why this reply was put on this comment. I was talking about Sonic CD Fun is infinite because someone brought up how creepy it was. I don't actually know why Wario land 4 sound room is so creepy
HURRY UP!
The most anxiety inducing parts of hitting the frog are:
-Not knowing how much time you'll have to backtrack
-Not knowing how long the detours you have to take because the switch blocks will close off the main path
-Those levels where you're supposed to get the key AFTER starting the escape sequence and you don't know if you'll grab it and still have time to escape.
@@Zorothegallade-rpg and the music keeping you grooving
Honestly giant jellyfish in the sky with tentacles coming down to get you is a pretty unnerving thought lol.
The bowser laugh from SM64 still gives me a fear reaction in my mid 20s....
I remember turning my TV down as a kid until after I got into the castle 😂
@@benamisai-kham5892 Ughhh but anytime you died
For me, it was the music on the endless staircase. That always freaked me out for some reason, even worse than waking up the killer piano for the first time. After that, if I didn't have 70 stars, I avoided the last door like the plague. So imagine my panic when I played the DS version, and dumbass me never thought they might've raised the star requirement like most of the doors...
Oh, and the giant fish. Any enemy that ate the character just freaked me out, but only if it was an insta-kill.
I freaking love that laugh lol
I don't know if oddworld is family-friendly, but the bad ending in Munch's Odyssey is terrifying. Everything about it from the visuals to the dialog is horrific
U mean the one were abes creature dies and he looks sad then a flammble liquid leaking into the incratoer and you listen as some of abes friends scream in pain while dying
I legitimately was afraid to play that game as a kid, something about the character design really unhinged me for some reason.
@@Randoomly-1That's the most recent game but yeah that one by far is the darkest.
I don't think it's meant to be family friendly, but it sure didn't stop kids from playing it.
When your monster got injured during battle then died in monster rancher was pretty traumatic. Not very graphical but very dark
The death of your pet in the Gameboy Tamagotchi game. You hear a heart monitor get weaker and then flatline. Whoever put that in the game just wanted to mess some kids up.
The one thing that traumatized me when I was young was the PS1 Game Rugrats and the Search for Reptar.
The most unnerving thing in that game was Mr.Friend & almost everything else in that game just scared me but that voice still puts me on edge...
3:24 Um, that's not an elephant. That is a heffalump.
Mr. L from Paper Mario used to freak me out, specifically Super Dimentio, its lanky neck and how it moved around always scared me as a kid
Surpsingly never found much creepy in the game when you was younger till I was way older. Need to go back and replay it, I always thought super Dimentio was badass because of the whole Mr L bit.
Laughs in Mimi
@@jackminer2148 good point actually, my first time seeing Mimi made me freak out, and I'm fairly certain it gave me the most basic basic form of trauma. To this day, I freak out a little bit more when being chased by something unkillable in games.
The only thing I found creepy in non-horror game is phonecalls from Sims. Like, I remember that the phone rang in the middle of the night and saying creepy stuff
I listed it on a previous video, but Yoshi's Story used to freak me the hell out as a kid. So much of the game's artstyle and sound design is so uncanny. I used to never be able to get past the second page on my own because of how scared I was of the loud noises and creepy enemies in all the levels.
But the giant eel in Lots 'o Jellyfish also stuck with me for a long time. Always hated invincible enemies, and this one took the cake for being such an oppressive force.
Absolutely same, I could not beat the game as a kid cause it was so scary to me 😭 I hated the game over scene so much
@@benamisai-kham5892 fr!! There was something so unnerving about watching all the Yoshi's disappear one by one, too.
Seriously, what drugs were these devs on 😭
Those damn Attacky Sacks...
Actually, most all of Baby Bowser's Castles were pretty bad, specifically the mecha one with the giant spikes that shoot out and instantly kill you.
@@swiftshock2615 I could not beat any of the Bowser's Castle levels except the first one as a kid. What the heck is with the sudden difficulty spike??
This game was adorable tho, how tf did it scare you?
Apidya for the Amiga has some weird stuff in it, one of the weirdest being a naked doll boss that fights by detaching its hands and firing lasers from its eyes
I forgot about the projectile vomit attack
a lot of old "space shooters" fit into that kind of horror, apidya isnt even close to the darkest
Not to mention it, a rotten dead rat with maggots out... Yuck 🤮
I haven't personally experienced it, but there was a jumpscare in a flash Scooby-Doo game (Escape From the Smithsonian I think) that is genuinely frightening to an adult. I'm pretty sure it must have traumatized more than a few kids.
I don't know if anybody else feels the same way, but I always found Bowser's Inside Story to be a weirdly eerie game. Sure, all of the Mario & Luigi games have some creepy moments here and there (save for Paper Jam), and it's not as blatantly dark as Partners in Time, but something about Bowser's Inside Story always stuck out to me. I don't even know how to explain it, really.
There's just a lot of stuff that seems... off. The Mushroom Kingdom is wrought with a fantastical plague, and warped by the rule of Fawful in rather bizarre ways (both silly and eerie). There's a dormant force of nature beneath the kingdom that can copy Bowser's DNA and make the Bros. gasp for air just by being near them. Bowser gets trapped or incapacitated almost constantly throughout the story, and the Bros. get their fair share of this too. Bowser's Body is a bizarre labyrinth of alien geometry and vaguely organic shapes, which isn't helped by it being more "realistic" than places like Yoob's Belly (though it's still cartoony and even unnatural at times, most of the environment is clearly innards of some description).
I think what gets me the most is the music. While a lot of it is the usual Mario affair, there's quite a few tracks that make me really uneasy even now. Stuff like "Final Castle", "Fawful's Evil Plan", and "Dark Bowser" are intimidating and hopeless, "Deep Castle" is downright melancholic... but the one that gets me the most is "The Road Leading to the Secret", the song you will spend pretty much half the game listening to. It's just so eerie, especially the version heard inside Bowser. It makes you feel like you're hopelessly lost, and that you shouldn't be wherever it is you are. I'm willing to bet this one song is a big part of why I find this game to be so creepy.
God I love that game. Recently started replaying it but my ds is at the brink of it's death, so I had to start all over on pc again. What kind of adds to the creepy sense is the fact that you HAVE to "help" both sides. You're this beholder, overseeing all the situations the bros and bowser get themselves into, each one with a different goal in mind (although kinda same). The tutorial is beating bowser up, you get to play him a lot until suddenly you're not the one breathing fire and throwing punches, you're the one at the receiving end. That part scared me so bad as a kid haha. I honestly can't really remember much anymore as it's been some time, but partners in time was so much more scary for me, even though I only watched a let's play when the game came out
Huh, I never really considered Inside Story to be "creepy" but I definitely get what you mean by it being "off". A lot of messed up scenarios in that game for sure. It's still the only Mario RPG I've played (bought 2 during the Wii Eshop close and just haven't had time) and one of my favorite DS games of all time.
But yeah I guess looking back some stuff weirded child me out pretty bad. The whole Sockop area was disturbing to me, and the Dark Star stuff at the end gets pretty dark (pun not intended)
So I left this comment on the last video but it was a little late, so I'll leave it here again.
In the flash game poptropica, I experienced my first ever jumpscare in a game. In ghost story island, your character goes into this creepy old house and looks through a telescope. while you're distracted looking through it, someone, in your ear, says "looking for someone?"
this wouldnt be such a big deal if it wasnt the ONLY example of spoken dialogue in all of poptropica. it scared ten year old me so badly, i wasnt expecting it at all. i replayed the game later and more recently, and it got me again.
Holy shit speaking of poptropica, the Jersey Devil section from cryptid island scared me as a kid, especially the scene where it’s staring at you from the window in the abandoned house.
THIS. Omg I had the same experience. I was alone and playing this. It was so quiet since this was before they added music so it was dead silent. The voice clip came from nowhere and made me fall out of my chair. No joke. Genuinely one of the biggest scares I’ve ever had in my life.
Can’t recall if you’ve touched on the Nancy Drew games yet, but Nancy Drew Shadow At The Water’s Edge is easily one of the scariest. The games are all supposed to be a little scary as mystery games often are, there were some pretty wild ones in that particular game. I remember there’s a mirror scare that’s pretty intense, and a puzzle that’s on a timer where you’ll drown if it’s not completed in time.
Hear me out: the nightmare scene in Curse of Blackmoor Manor. That scared the shit out of me as a kid.
@@PixelRoserade Blackmoor Manor was all sorts of freaky. The disembodied voice calling her right at the beginning? Eugh. getting trapped in the sauna in White Wolf Of Icicle Creek used to stress me out so much. And while I’ve never seen it, there’s also another Easter egg dream sequence in White Wolf that you need to do a bunch of stuff to trigger that’s also pretty creepy.
The Wario Land 4 entry reminded me of this random DS platformer I got as a kid. I think it was called New Zealand Story. It was about these baby chicks getting abducted and you having to save them. I remember the game having a mostly cheery atmosphere, but something about it always made me a little uncomfortable. I remember the enemy/boss designs looking pretty strange as well as some of the levels creeping me out a little but I think what scared me the most was this unkillable reaper enemy that would hunt you down after a certain amount of time passed. Other than that, I remember the game being pretty challenging, and the levels weren't super linear, so I got lost often.
I was a victim of this Forestia game ^^
I remember playing it when I was a kid and coming to this nightmare sequence... I was so shocked of the sudden change of athmosphere that I only made like 2 or 3 steps into the level before quiting the game. I never played this game ever again XD
I'm the one that suggested he would look at the game, but for me, it would always appear at past the halfway point from what I can recall. It was probably a blessing in disguise. But the Mermaid sequence also freacked me out.
i remember stumbling upon footage of the nightmare sequence for forestia as a youngster, and for YEARS i was convinced it was a weird nightmare i had and not something that actually existed after struggling to find anything about it, i still remember being utterly shocked when i stumbled upon footage of it a few months ago and realizing it WAS real.
Yeah... that game really stuck with me when I was younger because of the nightmare sequence, even if I at some point forgot the name of the game. It was always between that and the mermaid sequence that freaked me out as a kid and could never complete it.
You wanna talk obscure scary games; Sea Life Safari (I know I've commented this game previously, but he didn't see it before).
It's an old PC game I played when I was little, which was basically Pokemon Snap, but underwater. It has a very similar vibe to that shark hunting game you've brought up a couple of times. The first level is a colorful coral reef with goofy clownfish and smiling turtles, but then every level afterwards is a dark abyss with much more vicious looking creatures. This game is pretty much entirely responsible for me being thalassophbic.
I hardly ever hear anyone talk about this, but the Big Octos from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker absolutely terrified me as a little kid (and even well into my teens). Everything about them was so scary to me: the way the music completely stops, a storm immediately starts no matter the weather condition beforehand, and you get stuck in a giant whirlpool before this huge squid with a bunch of giant glowing eyes slowly emerges from the center of the whirlpool combined with the intense music that plays as it fully appears. I genuinely had a panic attack when i encountered one of these things. I actually developed a genuine fear of these things, I had nightmares (as an adult, I STILL from time to time get a big octo nightmare) and was unable to beat the game for the longest time. Eventually I finally beat it a couple of years after the HD version came out (we had the gamecube version, but my older brothers never let me play it) after realizing i could just look up the big octo map and avoid them. But despite knowing that, the big octos very much made an impression on me and to this day they still give me goosebumps.
Also, I love your videos a ton, keep them up!
Yeah, those creeped me out as a kid. Those as well as that ghost ship.
I used to play World of Goo a lot when I was a tiny child. Plenty of its visuals come across as rather unsettling, which mostly comes down to the art style. It's definitely a cartoonish sort of creepy.
One highlight is the level "Burning Man" in Chapter 3, Cog in the Machine. One of the set pieces in the level, which I suppose is the titular burning man, starts out on a platform of matches, which you have to burn away to get to the exit of the level. But when you do that, the burning man's eyes explode, leaving only empty (and possibly bleeding?) black sockets.
Another level from the same chapter is called "You Have to Explode the Head" in which the objective is exactly what it sounds like, although the head does belong to a robot if that makes it any better. And in the level "Misty's Long Bony Road," the starting point is an eyeless, skeletal frog and you have to use skulls to cross a road of spikes.
The final level of Chapter 4, "Deliverance," has you enter a recycling bin to undelete all the spam mail within. The depths of the recycling bin take on a completely black-and-bright-red color palette and at the very bottom, submerged in some kind of lava, is a massive, writhing red skeleton. Absolutely no idea why and there's no explanation for it. Oddly enough, this is the one that scared me the most when I was young.
Pretty gnarly stuff for a family-friendly game!
I commented about this last time, but the creatures in the skybox of the Nightmare World in Tak 2- Staff of Dreams always creeped me out. The ambience of the level is very slimy feeling, and I once built up enough speed in one of the vehicles to fling myself toward the skybox- the creatures arent a flat texture, either! They're (very roughly) 3D mapped!
Oh god I loved the Tak games! Tak 2 was very weirdly slimy in it's aesthetic, though, you're right
@@punchyroux the level variety in it is top tier, I miss the art style tremendously!
I remember being terrified by the sea monster from Jumpstart back in the day. I had a nightmare once where he was in my shower and my parents sacrificed me to him or something whack like that
Do you still have the pc you played it on?
@@zixea3318 probably not, I don’t even think I have the cds for the jumpstart games either unfortunately.
The Undead themed Chapters from the first Skylanders game scared me pretty bad as a kid. The eerie music and dark levels set a creepy atmosphere but the enemies made it for me. The gargantulas and shadow knights are physicallt intimidating, being giant spiders and possessed suits of armour, but the zombie enemies would shamble towards you and can only be efficiently killed with fire. If you dont have a Fire Skylander, the only way to kill the main enemies in the chapter is to push them into the torches that you find in the dungeon. I remember finding myself scrambling through arenas looking for a torch with a crowd of them on my tail. The Wilikin Village from Skylanders Giants could be considered creepy with the living dolls and world changingbut I mostly found it more whimsical and goofy.
Nah man, Wilikin land was definitely creepy as fuck, I always got bad vibes playing that section of the game
Oh my freaking gosh YES.
OK so I have had an irrational phobia of zombies ever since I was little (no idea what triggered it but to this day I can handle a LOT of horror stuff, but throw a shambling corpse in and I'm OUTTA THERE-)
I was also obsessed with the Skylanders franchise, kept up with it religiously until like game 5. NOTHING in Skylanders scared me like those invincible zombie enemies, not the final boss of game 3, not other Undead Element levels, nothing. I remember a part where you essentially grab an item and an entire horde breaks through a wall to chase you.
We didn't have a Fire Element Skylander at first either (my poor mom went and bought me a used Ignitor just to help me out lol) and I literally made my baby sister play through the Undead levels on her own while I left the room... and I would do this EVERY time we wanted to replay through the game.
Man what a nostalgia rush. I'm so glad someone else was as traumatized by that area as I was.
It isn’t a kids game, but I played Mass Effect as a kid. I got to the Overlord DLC and hooo boy was I not prepared to the weird sci fi horror show that was about to happen. When it got to the reveal of the dude connected to all those wires, especially the tubes going down his throat, I got so freaked out I immediately turned off the console. Ended up having to replay a bit because I lost progress from not saving before quitting, but I had such a knee jerk reaction that I had to turn it off lol
I was so happy to see Piglet’s Big Game on this list. I’ve always thought it had an eerie atmosphere, despite loving it, and played it a lot as a kid.
There’s even a glitch where the brave face puppet show freezes , and you see piglet’s turned back for 15 seconds.
Mickey mouse and the magic mirror for the GameCube is one of the games that scared me the most as a kid. Mickey's model is just plain creepy, he nearly gets stabbed with a ghost sword, almost gets a chandelier dropped on him, and can be killed by a possessed rubber duck.
Throughout the game you find items from or referencing mickeys friends but never find them, which creeped me out as a kid because i thought something bad happened to them. Also theres several creepy music tracks/areas and even a jumpscare in the basement.
I remember that game is it GameCube? I remember the empty feeling of traveling through worlds which was eerie not to mention the random statues. Still a cool game though.
@@grimphantom99insaneenderma85 I think you're thinking of another game, this game is a point and click game for the gamecube. You travel through what I think is a big mansion? (younger me always thought it was a museum for some reason)
@@quackshley woops sorry it's been a long time ago. I do remember a Micky game on GameCube I got to remember. 😅
That game used to scare the heck out of my GameCube was in my room it was my sisters game and every time she played it I ran out of my own room I was scared of that ghost in the game lol
In FF12, I went exploring in some caves in the desert, looking for a mark. I went too deep but figured I'd just keep going to explore since you can pretty easily avoid most enemies. As I got deeper, the map got static-y and disappeared. I eventually entered a room with a lavapit and some thing that looked like Chernobog popped out and wiped my party.
Ayyy you talked about the splatoon 2 and 3 bad endings! i suggested them and im not sure if it was MY comment that you saw but im happy to see them. They're so scary for no reason!
Bro I didn't see the 3rd games bad end until now, what the heck is that about
And even though 2's cutscene isn't as theatrical, the in-universe consequences and buildup are horrifying. Like yeah "the city gets oozed" is already bad - but with the context of "an insane sentient telephone left by an extinct civilization has declared Inklings to be unworthy of life, and so is grinding down their "purest" specimens into ooze to eradicate the rest of the species and start evolution over"..... holy crap dude
@@drawingdragon agreed! I was absolutely SHOCKED first playing octo expansion and realizing how horrific the story was... for a funny brigt nintendo game about squids!
Great vid mr. Gambado!
I have two suggestions for your "bad ending" segment.
The first one is a bit of a stretch but in "juju densetsu" the ending made want to cry with her crying voice.
The second one is "Rolo to the rescue"! This one surprised me the first time I got it because how sad and creepy it seemed.
There's this movie that I loved as a kid, Legends of the Owls: Guardians of Ga'hoole. Now that movie was a bit creepy on its own, with its character designs being pretty messed up in their own right, but the GAME has its moments. I remember playing it on my Xbox 360, and the night levels scared me so bad. But the worst part was the Hagsfiends, ESPECIALLY the Hagsfiend Queen boss. Genuinely scared the shit out of me, and I think I stopped playing for a long time because of how much that Queen scared me.
If I remember correctly too, there were a ton of other levels that were a bit unsettling, like a bat boss thing that freaked me out, but the Hagsfiend levels in general were definitely the most unsettling for me. I can't remember if the music was creepy or not tbh, if I find the ost I'll take a listen and update :)
Update: just listened to the ost and HOLY SHIT. I unlocked a memory listening to it and DAMN is the Hagsfiend (?) soundtrack STRESSFUL sounding. The song is "Nightmare" and DAMN does it actually kind of slap. But yeah, parred with the stress of the boss fight, the soundtrack definitely makes the game a whole lot more stressful and unsettling.
Wasnt expecting someone to be Gahoole posting
Thank you for including Forestia in this video! I’m happy that someone effectively talks about that, because I played it when i was something like 5 and it definitely scarred me as a child.
Rayman Origins (Technically a kids game...) had the most disturbing bosses of all time.
After completing the first 5 worlds, you get revealed secondary worlds and its bosses (the 4 kings the nymphs {Characters that shouldn't be in a kids game that give you various abilities} told you about). and each of those bosses are equally disturbing. (except for the bird one) The magician who helped you learn the basics is found to be the villian of the game, scattering the enemies about. He probably turned the 4 kings into these creatures.
Respectfully disagree about the nymphs not being in the game
I have no idea if you covered this before since I haven't went through every video, but Insaniquarium's aliens and final boss were what creeped me out when I was young, they come in periodically to try and kill your fish, with a horn and some ominous music alerting you of one approaching, I found the robot and the squid in particular terrifying due to the sounds they make, the final boss makes it darker by trying to kill the pets you obtained throughout the game rather than the regular guppies you took care of, making this evil laugh when he appears, with the design even having his brains showing
it may not scare me now, and it may not be as scary as some of the other stuff, but it sure did scare me back then
small side note: the ultravores were also quite creepy to me due to the red eyes, but not to the degree of the aliens since they were actually aggressive
A scary moment like this with a children's video game would be in Super Paper Mario, world 2-4 Mimi's mansion ,the basement, when you move through that world you discover Mimi's true identity and intentions, which leads to her transformation, where she literally breaks her neck, transforms into a spider and starts chasing you, at that very moment you discovers that she is invincible, so your only option is to flee, you have to go through the basement (which is a labyrinth) fleeing from an invincible bug that she can teleports next to you, I was always afraid of that level because the only thing I can do was running
I just got to say to my wife "Wake up honey, Gambado Gaming just dropped a new scary video."
She was driving at the time, so a little confused, but it was still fun to say
So glad to see Forestia! It's not very well known but I've heard a story of it being given away to kindergarten kids in some schools here with it being edutainment lol I guess being educated on fear and horror is... Education too?
Edit: I used to get scared by almost everything I played as a kid, maybe because when everyone was talking about ps3 I was still playing eerie ps1 games, but my worst experience must have been with crappy cheap games that were given away in cereal boxes especially because they would always clash with the antivirus! Nowadays those same eerie games feel so comforting
PS1 games had an eerie atmosphere that i miss very much. Heart of darkness was creepy, I remember the monsters kill the kid protagonist in pretty violent ways and the world has a very dark ominous vibe that modern games cant seem to recapture with their ultra 4k graphics and realism
the original ending for Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter (ds) messed me up so bad lol
The car accident one? ._.
@@somacruz7759 YEAH!
@@CelestialRaposa That was fucked up :(
There was a game called “Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure” that I played via a Shareware disk as a kid (yes I’m old), and the first (out of three) game ends with such a freaking jumpscare! At least for a kid who didn’t know there was a save feature so I played through it all the way, sweating so hard, to finally reach the end of the game. It scared me so freaking bad that I couldn’t even look at that game for years!
Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure mentioned!!! Condolences on your back and knee pain!
I remember watching the demo where he's flying around on the little personal floating platform thing over and over, really wanting to see that level but being way too bad at the game to ever get to it, and also having absolutely no idea you could save. I always hated that one stage in the forest where there's a storm going on, and when the lightning flashes, you can see spooky eyes in a bunch of the busted up trees.
I'd never actually seen the ending before, and I just looked it up. Maaaaan what the hell. Ecco the Dolphin levels of "out of left field terrifying bullshit slapped at the end of a mostly normal game". pre-2000s game devs were a different breed lmao, I'm so glad I never got that far
Was it the snake one?
@@HopePapernacky - I think it's a huge dragon, but could be mistaken for a snake yes!
@@HotClown - Haha right?! I'm not insane in thinking that's a really scary ending to the game, right? Man, my mother had to make me promise to not play that game again because I was so scared that I couldn't sleep haha
As a kid two games really freaked me out.
The shark in Banjo-Kazooie with the off-brand jaws music was really upsetting as a kid mostly because you couldn't fight back in the water only run.
The other was in Gex 3 on the N64. There was a mystery level that after had taxidermied bears that at first look like they are part of the environment, but after you hit a switch to open a blocked way they spring to life. The worst part they had higher heath then some of the other enemies so I die to them a few times as a kid.
It seems that sharks in this game is terrifying to many people... But I'm very surprised to the fact that almost no one is frightened by Dragundas, the green monsters in Banjo Tooie that chews you with its razor sharp teeth and spits you out while laughing at you menacingly. This traumatizes me so much more, and I have no clue why to be honest
Not sure if this was covered in the previous videos but in Jak and Daxter, when you try to swim out of bounds, a heartbeat plays and gets faster and eventually a giant fish swallows you up. Frightened me as a kid.
Or maybe in Sly Cooper 1, there's a section during the Bayou stage where Sly is getting chased by a giant swamp serpent. That imagery scared me shitless as a child that I just turned off my PS2 and haven't played the Sly Cooper series until I was much older lol
Ah, Lurker Shark... traumatizing Jak and Daxter kids beyond repair since forever.
I never experienced Thalassophobia until I tried to swim to Misty Island without a boat.
I'm not sure if Robocop 2 on NES counts as family friendly, but its game over screen with broken down Murphy and his exposed terrifying face traumatized me as a kid
The mochi mayhem special event from pokemon scarlet/violet is definitely up there for creepy moments. seeing the characters get their bodies possessed and being forced to do that weird dance with the creepy music playing in the background will never not be terrifying, especially considering that the game never actually explains what pecharunt is or why it was possessing people in the first place
Love your profile pic. Mephiles is awesome.
it techncially does explain, you just have to pay attention and go look for the knowledge
@@sakura368 where does it say it though
@@purpleprawler9286 around the place in the teal mask, ogerpon and pecharunt are related
Lmao that you actually use the word 'terrifying" here, it's genuinely pathetic
you know i always thought I was the only one who was scared of that piglet game when I was younger, I'm glad I'm not alone
For sure, one of the most scary things in a game that came out of nowhere was the Tidal Wave boss of the Transformers PS2 game based on the Armada cartoon. The 4th level, Mid-Atlantic, has you glide aboard and navigate through a MASSIVE Decepticon aircraft carrier warship, where your objective is to reach the bridge/controls to disable the vessel. Once you reach the bridge though, a cutscene triggers with the warship transforming, and it is staged with heavy rain, freakishly intense music, lightning blasting every few seconds and at one point in the cutscene, you can even see your character running out of a doorway to escape the shifting parts of the massive robot for a sense of scale. The cutscene alone is terrifying if you're not expecting it, but the boss fight itself also qualifies, with Tidal Wave TOWERING over the rest of the map (The water is so deep that if you fall into it your character is practically a speck on the screen, but it barely makes it halfway up Tidal Wave's calves at BEST), compound that with really disturbing noises he makes when you shoot his head, and a creepy finger waggling gesture he does sometimes that I don't even know the trigger for, it's all REALLY unsettling. Even the boss music is deep and spooky compared to the high octane drums and wailing guitars of other boss themes. This is all made even WORSE if you pay attention during your time inside the warship where you can actually SEE his robot mode head through some windows if you know where to look, which would certainly be jarring if you didn't recognize Tidal Wave's alt mode!
Okay hear me out, the black holes from Mario galaxy idk why I’m afraid of them but seeing Mario just get dragging in while screaming scares me along with the sound it made when you got caught by them and especially just like the audio of them just existing
Here’s a couple from me, they aren’t really worth covering but I just want to share them:
- Super Smash Bros. N64: I got this game from a garage sale in kindergarten, so everything was already unlocked. One day I was poking around in menus and because I had a kindergarten reading level, I didn’t know what I was doing and deleted all data. The unlockable characters became locked again. I was so traumatized by the “Warning! Challenger Approaching” screen unexpectedly appearing that it was my most prominent recurring nightmare for my entire childhood.
- Super Mario Sunshine: for some reason certain parts of this game just make me incredibly nervous, and I never even had this game as a kid. In particular, the dark bottom of Noki Bay and the blue void when you clip out of bounds in Delfino Square. I also swear I accidentally triggered a glitch in Pianta Village where I somehow avoided the death plane and landed in the bottom of the black void and could walk around, but I’ve never seen any documentation of it.
Finally someone covered Forestia in this type of video!!
Forestia was one of my childhood's favorite games, even when the nightmare stage terrified the shit out of me. But at the same time it was fascinating and worked kind of as a gateway to horror fiction, and nowadays I love horror as a genre.
Mushroom men the spore wars very obscure and trippy game with horrifying mutant dogs,racoons,moles,and rabbits with the most kid friendly gore scene in a kids game I’ve ever seen.
ALSO ALSO, Starshine Legacy 😂 Nobody recognizes this game by title, but it's a very short 3D game for girls where you play as a school girl with short red head who realizes she can understand horses, and there's an ill scared white horse who tells her he's in great danger and that she must save him, so you eventually sneak out at night to some corrupted shadow kidnapper base where you must rescue the horse, it was really wild for a kids game 😂 But the worst part to me was a night section in school, where you had to pass a janitor who was on patrol, he was a big burly man with a flashlight who hummed to himself some creepy tunes, that was basically my introduction to the "don't get spotted by the monster" horror game genre 😂 As well as gave me an irrational fear of janitors.
I don’t know if you’ve covered this yet, but the level Wilikin Village from Skylanders Giants freaked me out as a kid, and I remember skipping that level every time I would play the game. It doesn’t bother me that much now, but I feel like it would freak out anyone who’s afraid of puppets and uncanny speech / music.
It was definitely unsettling.
Also, not sure if the Polish Scooby Doo games are popular in the states or not, but I'm telling you, they ALL had jumpscares 😂 Of course, it's Scooby Doo, but there's one game that I couldn't finish as a kid because close to the end you must choose the right gravestone and when you choose wrong the main villain pops up and scares the gang away from the graveyard. The heart attack wasn't worth it for little me 😂
In Elebits on the Wii, when you go to the amusement park level, there are statues all over the place of a pink rabbit mascot with what appears to be blood all over it's face. It's actually a direct reference to the character Robbie the Rabbit from Silent Hill, which some of the developers of Elebits worked on. The in game description for the statue says it's "ketchup" and not blood, but 10 year old me was not buying that shit and I'd pick the little fucker up and fling him halfway across the map.
(I posted this in the last vid, but I gotta rep my boy Elebits)
I'm glad you touched on Ecco the Dolphin. I remember playing it, thinking it was just one of those collecting-stuff games on the Genesis, back when I was like 4, and then I encountered the aliens. Played it through the Sega Channel, while that was a thing, to give you an idea of how long ago that was. I remember being relieved when the games changed at the end of the week or month or whatever.
let's go, gambado video out just in time for my morning nap
Yo! Great work man!
Let it be known that my man right here talked about Piglet's big game being silent hill-esque before everyone else did
There are two levels that in Lego Indiana Jones 2 that could be worth talking about, first is the second level of crystal skull, doom town where you have to escape a nuke site, while you do escape the nuke, mannequins who are implied to be alive don't. The second level is the third level of the Last Crusade, Berlin Brawl, which is a recreation of an area in Nazi Germany, and the game usually cuts out any references to the Nazis or anything mature.
Batman Arkham City has a pretty creepy bad ending. In a Catwoman segment you can choose to help Batman or leave Arkham City with the money you just stole. If you choose to leave Arkham City, the credits roll, and an SOS from Barbra Gordon is heard, pleading for anyone to help with the (now invisible because Batman didn't stop him) Joker.
yay new video about my favourtie topic. love your channel
There's a game that perhaps only my fellow Italians will remember.
It was called "Omnia Planet", and it was an educational game that taught you about various scientific topics, such as chemistry, geology, genetics etc. One of the subjects was paleontology.
In one of the minigames you were put inside various dioramas and you had to click on one of the objects in it to progress through time. In one of those you were tasked with causing the extinction of dinosaurs, so obviously the object you had to click was a meteorite in the sky.
Except one of the other things you could click on in the diorama was a Tyrannousaurus Rex. If you did, the voice of the guide said "Warning: this choice will result in YOUR extinction", followed by the T-rex coming to life and treating you to a POV shot of it eating you.
That was in the first '00s and it was pretty much the first jumpscare I ever got, even before they started spreading on the Internet.
A lot of video games seem to add creatures into water specifically to prevent swimming out of bounds while keeping immersion intact. The Lurker Shark from Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy was my introduction to this, and thus cemented my fear for water in video games. Other good examples include Snacker the Shark in Banjo-Kazooie, alien fish in Ratchet & Clank, and the Kraken in Jak 3.
Snacker the Shark may be scary but... Have you ever played Banjo Tooie and fell in the quicksands? If not, I'd suggest you not to look it up...
Yooo man, want me to join ya in a future video for 1-2 entries? Got a few personal stories I would like to talk about 👀
Ok I feel I can add on to the obscure games that traumatized me as a kid.
Back when I was first getting into gaming I got 2 games for the Wii, “Scooby-Doo First Frights” and “Scooby-Doo and the Spooky Swamp”. First Frights had sectioned level areas and wider enemy variety. Some highlights that freaked me out as a kid were: the headless guy from the first area, the clowns from the second area, the sewer dolls from the second area (specifically when they made this really creepy groaning noise as they approached), the green tank robots from the second area that showed up in a very freaky level atmosphere imo (insane factory that had children’s aesthetics all over the place?), the giant divers from the third area (and subsequently the entire ghost ship segment), the lobster boss from the third area, and the entire final area and the reveal at the end that it was a real monster the whole time.
In Spooky Swamp the enemies weren’t that scary but the game itself was. Instead of sectioned levels, it was basically open world, but there were NO NPCs besides the plot necessary ones, so any building you went into was empty and almost always silent. Partnered with the fact there was a ghost mechanic, and the ghosts would show up in the empty buildings, it unnerved little kid me quite a lot, looking back on it now, both games have areas that are old and empty that feel so liminal. I vividly remember the abandoned ski shop building in the snowy area of Spooky Swamp, and how it had only a few spiders, a ghost, and silence. Even though you had a COM second player (or a sibling or friend if you were lucky) you still felt so alone.
And now we got Winnie the Pooh horror films, oh bother.
When I was a kid I got very uncomfortable vibes from a level in Skylanders Spyro's adventure. The name of the level is Cadaverous Crypt and there are some unkillable zombie like enemies in it that make it even worse for the vibes cuz you are already in a crypt. Not to mention the creepy Ost in the background
Oh yeah I remember that level. It was scary
2 IP based games come to mind when talking about this subject
The first one is Bugs Bunny and Taz Time Busters. there was a whole level dedicated to spooky stuff called "Transylvanian Era" (You travel through time to different eras.) which made no sense as Transylvania is a place, not an era. The music at that level is quite ominous and depressing and you could literally transfer your brain with these colour-coordinated monsters to open areas.
There was a haunted river where the water was pitch black and full of threats to avoid, things like swarms of bats, crocodiles, whirlpools and disembodied hands trying to grab you. With a giant whirlpool at the end which you had to escape.
There was also a zoo you could visit called Zoovania. Upon entering, it was set in the daytime, and all the animals were normal. Monkeys and birds in cages, fish in pools and exotic plants on display. Your goal was to turn the giant clock to nighttime and then the animals would transform into beastly versions of themselves, attacking you if you got too close.
The second game Sprung to mind when I saw the bad ending of Splatoon. In the game Hello Kitty Roller Rescue, the world is being invaded by aliens known as the Cube Batallion completely by accident. The ending had the leader go full gundam and make his way to a cannon that you had to power up before the leader reached it. If you failed then you saw the world turn into a cube and a shot of the leader laughing in victory. I assume all the characters died in that scene as they aren’t seen again.
I do like that you can replay as Badtz-Maru who is generally quite rude to the people you talk to in the game, though.
The worst ending I ever got for DK64, was finding out that my younger brother had unintentionally deleted my save file.
Does Anyone Remember Mickey Mouse Magical Mirror?, That game was creepy when I played it when I was in middle school.
Yesss! That game has that liminal feeling, it creeps me out when I was a kid
@ Agree With You 100%
i remember playing the echo the dolphin on the genesis and never realizing the game actually went on more because i would always just go to the very right and get stuck or i would quit because the intro always made me sad thinkiing about how lonely the dolphin was
The hidden ending of One Shot is what comes to mind with the "bad endings" segment. Before it got remade into a $10 Steam game, One Shot would kill off the main character if you closed the game before you finished it. You only have one shot, after all. You couldn't continue playing unless you deleted the game from your system and re-downloaded it. This ending was removed when One Shot got upgraded and cost actual money to play (since making a paid copy of a game no longer functional wasn't exactly a sell), but seeing the main character's abandoned scarf on the opening screen of the original got to me the first time I closed it without knowing any better. Loved this video, keep it up!
Man I LOVE these videos, something about little creepy things in games you don't expect, the fact this one little moment caused nightmares for someone just tickles me.
Also if our suggestion was favorited in the past does that mean it'll be in a future video?
Love how Forestia just took the Twilight Zone approach of "wouldn't that be messed up? ...anyway"
Can't remember if you've already mentioned it but Die Hard Trilogy on the PS1 had quite ominous atmosphere at times. The most memorable scary thing was in the 3rd person shooter portion of the game when you've cleared a floor and they send an armed bomb down the elevator. A very intense countdown music starts while you try to reach and disarm the bomb, in an often hard-to-navigate and dark map, in order to proceed to the next floor.
EDIT: It's not a family friendly game but it would fit a non-horror game video ahah
The I Spy: Treasure Hunt PC game always unnerved me as a kid. I have a friend who also played it as a kid and they also found it creepy. It's strange because there is another game in the I Spy series, I Spy: Spooky Mansion, that is supposed to be creepy, but I was totally fine with that one. I think I would chock it up to certain areas in the game feeling like a liminal space. You're exploring this small town, and although there are a few people in it, they're completely motionless. It's like it's stuck in time.
Plus there's the constant references to hanging throughout the game.
"Botanicula" has quite a lot of creepy/scary moments in it. The main villain literally sucks the life out of things, and there are some cut scenes of it killing living things and even ripping the head off of some insect creature. Most of the NPC's in the game are insects as well and they can seem creepy on their own. Certain areas of the game have very creepy atmospheres, like one that is deep underwater, and one that is in a section where the villain has sucked all the life out of the plants. The final area of the game is the scariest, with everything being mostly black and having some scary "bosses" to defeat.
"Machinarium" has a bad ending where near the end of the game the main character is trying to diffuse a bomb, and if you fail you see the bomb explode and destroy the tower it's attached to, obviously killing the main character and another character who's up in that tower.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who's freaked out by mirror mazes
Bad burger king nuggets nightmare sequence is crazy 😂
I have always been a fan of the MediEval games, specifically the first one. But I always needed to have my parents beat the bosses for me since they scared me too much. The first boss in particular still freaks me out to this day (It's a demon made of stained glass with a beating heart that you have to shoot at before it shoots back with glass shards and drains your health fast)
Thank GOD someone is talking about Forestia. That shit traumatized me as a child and to this day no one I ever talked to has ever heard about it
I keep waiting for someone to talk about this, but it seems like I was the only one who played Zelda Wind Waker is as kid. The Redeads in that game were horrifying... and the whole Earth Temple is scary enough as it is, but the redeads in it make it worse. The redeads were so scary that I'm still afraid of them to this day. They made me stop playing the game several times.
One of the things I remember from my childhood are the levels "Statue Park" and "Severnaya 2", from Goldeneye 64. Both happen during night, and because of the limitations from the hardware back then, the sky looks red-ish in both levels. Statue Park also has a lot of hiding spots your enemies use, so you never see them coming. However, Severnaya 2, being a snow level and a bigger one than the park, had fog everywhere, and you could only see a few feet in front of you, which meant constant jumpscares from the enemies.
Also, Severnaya 2's music was one of the creepiest from the game.
Commenting to remind myself to recommend a specific scene in the game “life signs” for the ds
I’m about to pass out
had to double check the upload date when you talked about piglet's big game, insane lmfao
I think any of the persona bad endings could fit into this classification. Just to name a few:
-Persona 3 has a choice in the story where you choose to fight a force that will end the world or give up, if you choose the latter a cutscene plays of the characters hanging out seemingly unaware the world will end in mere seconds
-In persona 4 near the end of the story the game's "TV World" starts leaking into the real world which fills the overworld with fog, removes npcs, and replaces the typical cheery music with chilling ambience. If you beat the game's final dungeon in time this is all reversed but if you miss the time limit you instead wake up one day to a phone call from another character telling you the monsters have started leaking into the real world before screaming and going silent.
-In Persona 5 if you fail to finish the third dungeon in time you will have the police show up to your door to announce they found one of your friends dead in an alley
There's plenty more of this too, in any modern persona game if you either choose the wrong dialogue choice near the end or miss an in-game time limit there's always some horrible cutscene.
I mean Persona isn’t a family friendly game
I don't know if this'll make it in to one of your videos or even counts, but FNAF World had some insane stuff that would terrify kids. What set FNAF world from the rest of the Five Nights at Freddy's games is that it was suppose to be a cutesy child friendly RPG with no horror elements. However, Scott Cawthon couldn't help himself, so there are layers of just absolutely messed up stuff in this game if you go beneath the surface.
For example, if you pick Fredbear (the yellow teddy who greets you at the start and talks to you throughout the game) as your party leader, you get a pretty disturbing cutscene of two Fredbears spazzing out before their heads explode, followed by a textbox saying "Two Fredbears can't exist in the same universe at the same time." I was playing the game with my younger brother when this happened and it freaked us both out.
That's just scratching the surface, you could honestly make a whole video about scary things hidden in this family friendly game alone.
This might just be my massive thalasophobia talking, but the entire Deep Sea purple time rift in A Hat in Time creeps me the hell out. Something about the somber music, huge plants swaying in the distance, strange spike in difficulty from the entire rest of the game, and something else that I can't place my finger on, all just make me feel like I shouldn't be there.
Damn I remember forestia traumatizing me when I was 6
not sure if this has alredy been covered or if someone else has mentioned it but there are a few other things in splatoon that are pretty creepy, I think one of the most well known ones being a weird creepy ghost face thing that can be spotted in the window in one of the building on the flounder heights stage in both splatoon 1 and 3. there was also statues in the splatoon 1 Museum d'Alfonsino stage which during splatfest will randomly laugh. the only other thing that stands out to me are some creepy noises in the story modes too. during splatoon 1 as you enter the boss room there are noises which some people like to interprare as screams and more recently, the bosses from the new side order DLC which play chopped up and distorted versions of some of the splatoon songs.
Every time I see a creepy video about old kids game its makes me want to make my own family friendly game and leave a 1 out of a 1000000 chance that theres like a body floating in a lake somewhere and once it shows up for you it never shows up again
Something like that so when people start talking about it nobody believes them until years have passed and other people start mentioning they saw it too
I never really had an issue with Wario Land 4, and I loved playing it, even with the time limit parts, and usually I hate time limit segments in games. Only thing I wasn't as big on was the Big Board level, mainly because how you complete it is a little annoying, and the background with all the toys was fairly creepy.
I love your videos so much! Thank you for everything you do, it helps me both be entertained and sleep❤❤
Thank you for watching!
I remember I loved the game Ratatouille for the GameCube as a kid, hell, I still love it! It’s surprisingly well made for a licensed game. However, the many Game Over screens always struck me as quite dark and eerie. They always showed a glimpse into Remy’s often times dark fates, all while the background was pitch black and ominous music played. Needless to say, I would usually try to skip these as fast as possible as a kid.
Bro I loved the Ratatouille game
But I lived in primal terror of being caught by that wack-looking dog in the City of Lights level. You have to help all the rats sneak past him without being caught...
Then there was being caught by the GIANT humans in the kitchen levels and having to shake the analog stick to get loose...
Come to think of it Ratatouille was horrifying
The don't rock the boat mini game on the webkinz flash game scared me stupid. I cried for an hour when the ghost popped up.