10 Video Game Hallucinations That Melted Your Mind
1. Nightmare Alley - Silent Hill
The nature of the Silent Hill games is such that neither the protagonists nor the players themselves are ever quite sure what's real and what isn't.
This is terrifically crystallised in the opening 10 minutes of the first game, where the player is lured into a dark, winding alleyway and experiences a series of increasingly alarming sights: a bloody corpse on a hospital gurney, blood-stained walls, and finally, the eviscerated remains of someone hung up on a barbed wire fence.
Protagonist Harry is then attacked by a number of Silent Hill's deformed monsters, after which he "dies" and wakes up in the city's diner.
The initial implication is that it was all a dream, but of course, between the game's own slippery internal logic and the ambiguous interplay between the "normal" and nightmarish worlds of Silent Hill, the player can't ever be sure.
Either way, the scene was a bone-rattling statement of intent for the grotesque and surreal horrors fans would encounter throughout the entire series, while confirming that we're never really sure what can and cannot be trusted.
This was further emphasised in the brilliantly cerebral Silent Hill 2, but nothing quite tops the WTF factor of that traumatic opening "death" scene.