10 Disturbing Video Game Characters We'll Never Forget

Ask any normal person to name a disturbing or horrific character, and they'll immediately go to Freddy Krueger, Jigsaw, or Annabelle from the world of cinema, and Pennywise or Annie Wilkes from their favourite horror novels.

Gamers, however, will give you a very different answer, as we have our own retinue of absolutely abhorrent creations to choose from.

As video games are edging ever closer to being considered an art form on the same level as cinema, the complexity of characters portrayed in modern day gaming goes far beyond the side scrolling, Princess-saving sprites of old.

Whilst gaming has given the world some truly iconic and memorable heroes like Mario or Lara Croft, it has also birthed some of the most nightmarish, villainous, and legitimately disturbing creations you'll ever see along the way.

The kind of characters you cannot bear to look at, instantly recoil from, or feel like there's just something 'not quite right 'about, are often the most memorable - for all the wrong reasons.

Not content with simply providing dog-through-window jump scares, these are characters who can send those familiar shivers of warning down your spine by doing nothing but turn up. By simply existing, these creatures haunt our nightmares as surely as they do our gaming sessions.

Here then are ten disturbing video game characters we'll never forget (despite how much we may want to).

While it's hardly a hot-take or a startling new 'revelation' (not sorry) to state here that the nurses in Silent Hill are as creepy as all hell, it is no less true for its widespread acceptance.

These blood drenched, disturbingly contorted, faceless but for exposed jaw and tooth creatures are a mainstay of the Silent Hill series.

Carrying dirty scalpels and convulsing in horribly inhuman ways, these bizarrely over-sexualised monsters are all cleavage and short skirts, representing the sexual insecurity and discomfort of those from whose minds these nightmare Nightingales sprung.

Second only to good old Pyramid Head, these practitioners of pain are as infamous as the series itself, and with good reason: they're absolutely horrendous.

In terms of their actual usage within their parent games, the nurses are not especially difficult to defeat in combat, even when there's a few of them at once.

It's not the challenge they present to the player, but the sheer dread and terror they incite which grants them their infamy.

Appearing in various guises in nearly every mainline Silent Hill title, and making a terrifying cameo in the grossly under-appreciated Silent Hill movie, it is very hard to forget these nightmare nurses once you've had the pleasure.