8 Games That Scare You With Lies
These games scared us all with bold-faced LIES.
The beauty of video games is that they can interface with players in creative and unexpected ways that other art forms like movies, books, and music simply cannot.
Their interactivity makes them wholly unique, and ensures that smart developers can make players feel more from a game than they can any other type of media.
The added level of immersion that comes with video games is especially great for ramping up the fear factor in horror and horror-adjacent games, but when conventional, in-your-face scares just aren't good enough, sometimes devs decide to get a little crafty with how they ratchet up the tension.
And so, these brilliant video games all scared the lot of us in the most unexpected way - by lying their asses off.
Only through subterfuge and deception did these games manage to leave us all quivering with fear, yet the end result is so paralysingly effective that it's tough to feel angry about it.
There's clear genius lying behind each of these feats of video game trickery, with those in charge often weaponising the player's own psyche against them to maximum effect...
8. Psycho Mantis Can "Read Your Mind" - Metal Gear Solid
The original Metal Gear Solid did a fantastic job of making players - especially young and impressionable ones - believe that Hideo Kojima, the madman himself, was capable of the literally impossible.
In an era where pulling back the curtain and peering from beyond the fourth wall was considerably less common in games, Kojima's stealth-action masterpiece got meta in ground-breakingly unsettling fashion.
One of the game's bosses, Psycho Mantis, is hyped up as an ultra-powerful psychic capable of reading Solid Snake's mind, and this is embodied in-game by Mantis' ability to not only read your controller inputs, but also access your PS1's memory card and comment on any other Konami games you've played.
It was genuinely terrifying stuff back in 1998, especially as the solution to overpowering Mantis' abilities - switching your controller to another port - wasn't immediately apparent.
At the time, the prospect of a game anticipating your every move was sublimely scary, even if the tech behind the illusion might seem relatively basic by modern standards. Bravo, Kojima, bravo.