10 Unbelievably Scary Video Game Locations Discovered By Hackers
Creepy levels you weren't supposed to see.
Creating a truly scary video game relies on so many things - namely fantastic level and creature design, and ominous atmosphere by way of unnerving art direction and creepy music.
But sometimes the most horrifying levels aren't even officially in the game itself, cloistered away in the game code because you weren't actually supposed to see them.
These 10 levels, whether incomplete areas or mere surreal testing grounds for developers to experiment with their most off-the-wall ideas, represent the creepiest environments their respective games offered up.
And yet, the only way to access them is by either digging into the game's code or glitching your way there. In both instances you can only reach these locales against the devs' own wishes, despite how wonderfully, artfully unsettling they all are.
While on one hand they're a testament to the fascinating, well-formed content that gets cleaved away during development, their hidden, often unexplained nature really only heightens their creepiness, in turn transforming them into something mythic in their own right.
Above all else, they make you think about all those other secret horror-show locations that remain undiscovered and nestled within video games, simply waiting to be found...
10. Silent Hill - P.T.
P.T. remains one of the most talked-about video games of the last decade, originally intended to serve as a prelude to Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro's Silent Hills as it was.
Enthusiasts have spent years tinkering around with P.T., and back in 2019 YouTuber Lance McDonald modded the game so that he could explore the exterior world of Silent Hill briefly glimpsed in P.T.'s in-engine final cutscene.
Because the game was coded to trigger a Game Over sequence if you managed to glitch outside the central haunted house location, McDonald had to elevate the player slightly off the ground to make exploration possible.
The results are terrifying and add further fuel to the fire that Silent Hills would've been a masterpiece of atmospheric game design.
Though the environments are obviously incomplete given that we weren't ever supposed to see them in detail, the lighting effects in particular paint an oppressively bleak vibe that improbably makes P.T. even scarier than it already is.