10 Video Games That Made You Face Your Own Worst Nightmares

It’s not hard to scare someone. It doesn’t matter what they say or how much they protest, if you jump out from behind someone’s fridge, when they think they’re home alone and are fumbling about in the middle of the night for a glass of water, and scream into their sleepy face, you’re going to make them jump.

No, it’s not hard to scare someone, but that’s like saying it’s not hard to feed someone - whip a sandwich at their flapping jaws and you’re done. The thing is, like scares, the best meals aren’t quick little nibbles that physically satisfy, they’re long prepared, thoughtfully arranged, and stick with you way after you’ve finished picking the remaining slivers of fillet from between your teeth.

The best scares, then, aren’t fleeting moments, aren’t mere reflexes to sudden appearances or loud noises, they’re the stimulation of deep-set anxieties, fears you thought long since forgotten… No, the best scares come when you feel an icy hand reach into the pit of your stomach and pull on some nerve you didn’t even know existed.

With that in mind, here are 10 times when videogames made us face our deepest fears.

I can understand why you might balk at the appearance of the original Sonic the Hedgehog on this list. After all, he’s nothing more than a slick, blue anthropomorphic cartoon hedgehog. Have I included it for the zoophobes amongst us? The cyanophobes? For those of us who are still members of early nineties, middle-America PTAs?

Shockingly, no.

Sonic the Hedgehog isn’t inherently scary unless you’re a balloon, nor is his adventure chasing Dr Robotnik. It’s as family-friendly as it’s possible for a videogame to be, and doesn’t even contain any of the inter-species snogging that the series would go on to become derided for.

The reason Sonic the Hedgehog manages to raise your heartbeat is because of its bonus levels. After jumping through a giant ring at the end of a stage, you find yourself curled up into a ball in a constantly spinning room, surrounded by things that bounce and ping you from garishly coloured block to garishly coloured block. The thing is, you have no control over it that you understand and, though you know you’re supposed to try and get to the emerald in the middle, no matter how hard you try, you can never seem to get there.

As a child, these stages are frustrating annoyances that have you slamming the pad down in irritation, but as an adult they recall those dreams where you’re running as fast as you can but can’t seem to escape your tormentor, they remind you of all the times you couldn’t help but fail, even though you knew exactly what you had to do… Worst of all, as you fall through the dissolving floor and the television screams at you and the world rotates faster and faster as you’re kicked back to the regular level, you can’t help but wonder if they’re not emblematic of real life.

Terrifying.