10 Creepy Gaming Soundtracks Guaranteed To Fuel Your Nightmares

It’s that time of year again; the nights are drawing in, there’s a chill in the air, and of course, it’s the perfect time to start playing any video game that can be considered even remotely macabre.

But whilst story and concept design are undeniably a huge part of what makes a game scary, chances are that if you’ve ever had to stifle a scream, hide behind the sofa, or deal with the sensation of someone walking over your grave, it was thanks in no small part to the game's soundtrack.

Here are 10 instances where a game's soundtrack alone, is enough to fuel your nightmares.

Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills demo was everything you’d expect from a sentence containing that particular sequence of words – frightening, ambitious, intense and intricate. Kojima was able to do with one corridor what most developers could not achieve by the ending of a 35-hour feature length game, and as a result its cancellation was genuinely upsetting to gamers everywhere.

Part of P.T's success is how intricately the soundtrack is woven into the fabric of the game. The teaser relies more on sounds instead of music, such as the slamming of doors, the radio broadcasts, the footsteps of the player as they silently wander through the corridor, and of course that crying baby in the bathroom.

However, where the soundtrack really shines through is with the techniques it employs to make the player believe that they are wandering the corridors in a horror film. The use of ramp scenes containing strategically placed drone sounds are enough to create powerful adrenaline responses in the player. It is this use of the relationship between sound and psychology that make P.T's soundtrack pure nightmare fuel.