20 Scariest Video Games Of All-Time

13. Condemned: Criminal Origins

Condemned: Criminal Origins generated a lot of buzz before its release, primarily due to the fact that its developers seemed to be boasting as to how scary it was, pretty much challenging gamers to take up a controller and see if they could hack it. Turns out many were up for the challenge, but not all of them could hack it.

As a crime scene investigator called Ethan Thomas, then, Condemned saw players searching for a serial killer in a grim city on the brink of madness, battling enemies with whatever weapons they could find. And in most cases, the tension and fear generated in Condemned stemmed from the fact that the game rarely allowed guns to be its main focus: players were forced, instead, to use random objects off the ground to take down their disturbed foes.

The environment, brilliantly rendered, was a source of major panic, as enemies would hide themselves away in secret, only to ambush you in the darkness of some abandoned service tunnel. Here's a game that really denied you a single solitary moment to relax... and then there were those freakin' mannequins, which we totally refuse to talk about.