8 Games That Scare You With Lies

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is hardly the first game to generate scares by screwing with the player's own sense of reality - Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem being the most notable early example - but it put one hell of a hard sell on the importance of its sanity meter mechanic.

Throughout the survival horror game, players need to manage protagonist Daniel's sanity meter, and allowing it to falter will result in him suffering visual hallucinations, such as being pursued by monsters, the implication being that enough neglect of Daniel's sanity can result in a Game Over.

Except, one of the game's designers, Thomas Grip, later admitted that they wildly oversold the impact of the sanity meter to "trick players into scaring themselves" because, as it turns out, there's no fail state directly tied to your sanity.

Or at least, there wasn't until a 2018 patch added a Hard Mode which actually caused players to die if their sanity reached zero. 

For the great many who played the base experience for eight years prior, though, the fear of the sanity meter torpedoing your playthrough was nifty psychological chicanery above all else.