10 Most Effective Jump Scares In Sci-Fi Video Games
7. Mass Effect 2 - David's Screams
Mass Effect is certainly no stranger to horror - literally one of the first things the series shows you is innocent colonists being impaled on spires and having their corpses converted into zombie cyborgs - but Mass Effect 2's Overlord DLC ratchets up the cruelty to uncomfortable levels.
Throughout the DLC, the player is periodically subjected to what the game's subtitles describe as an "unintelligible shriek". Said shriek is utterly horrifying, as a garbled, distorted scream of pure agony - like a sentient roomba being fed into a wood-chipper- is blasted into the player's ears with no warning.
The scream reoccurs several times throughout the level, and it never stops being unsettling. Of course, the reason for that is made clear at the end of the DLC, as the "machine" turns out to be an autistic man named David, strapped up to a truly terrifying mechanical apparatus by his scientist brother.
Said brother's justification - David's autism apparently made him the perfect candidate for a sordid experiment in AI communications - is so staggeringly insulting that many gamers wondered why the DLC didn't just end with Commander Shepard repeatedly shooting the evil little man over and over.