10 Video Games That Are Far Creepier Than They Look

Final Fantasy VIII, as any series fan will tell you, is something of a controversial entry. As well-regarded as the PlayStation and Playstation 2 era of Final Fantasy is, Squall Leonheart’s grand adventure is a real anomaly.

With its Junction system, its magic spells limited by numbered uses rather than MP, and so forth, the developers certainly switching things up with this one. The plot, too, takes some singularly strange and even distinctly chilling turns.

To close out disk one (as players of the original PlayStation version will remember it), Squall and his team engage in their first battle against Sorceress Edea. Their mission is a failure, their target very much not assassinated, and she skewers Squall with her ultimate magical attack Ice Strike into the bargain.

Though this occurs in a cutscene and our hero is captured by Galbadian forces but very much alive, this raises one major question: How was Squall not killed? There’s a theory that he may have been, and the fleeting sight of the ‘faceless Squall’ in a cutscene much later lent a lot of fuel to this fanciful fire.

What with that, eerie locales like the Centra Ruins and the dark and frightening themes of time compression and harrowing memories, there’s a lot of creepiness below the surface in Final Fantasy VIII.