The scariest moment in a game is often the one nobody warned you about. Horror games at least have the decency to announce themselves. A fantasy RPG with a weird swamp in it makes no such promise, which may be why PlayStation Access's team went looking for the non-horror games that frightened them anyway.
Five members of the team each bring one pick. It's a lovely premise, and a good excuse to ask why some of gaming's most durable frights turned up in places they had no business being.
What follows is the team's list and reasoning, not ours. Spoilers are kept light, though a couple of these games are old enough to have grandchildren.
Five picks, five kinds of fear
The Witcher 3: the Crones. Chesca opens the list with the Crones of Velen, and the fear here comes from control more than combat: the sense that they hold the region in their grip and are always watching, along with their nightmarish design. Fear, in other words, as local government.
Uncharted 4: a scene with Elena. Dave's pick is the most personal, and we'll stay vague on the details. Dave's point is that attachment did the work. Caring enough about the characters meant believing the worst for a moment, and no monster was required.
Metal Gear Solid 2: the codec calls. Alex's pick is the strangest of the lot. Late in the game, the Colonel's calls start to go wrong, and the game seems to turn and speak past its hero to whoever is holding the controller. It's the kind of fear that comes from a machine behaving as if it has noticed you, and it still sounds unsettling all these years later.
Metal Gear Solid V: the hospital. Conner's choice is the opening of The Phantom Pain, a tense, horror-like prologue with the Man on Fire in it. What makes it work is the contrast, since it plays so differently from the rest of the game.
Final Fantasy VII: the Midgar Zolom. Rob closes the list with the giant snake in the marsh, first as a thing to run from and then as a body impaled on a tree. Plenty of players remember that second image. Rob reads it as a marvellously efficient bit of storytelling, telling you what Sephiroth can do before you've properly met him.
Why the unexpected ones stick
Lay those five side by side and a pattern turns up. Not one of them depends on a jump scare. The Crones are about being watched, Elena about losing someone, the codec calls about a game breaking its own rules, the hospital about a sudden change of tone, and the Zolom about implied power. Each one works because the game had taught you to expect something else.
That's the trick a dedicated horror game can't quite pull off. Once you've bought a game with a haunted house on the cover, you've agreed to be frightened. A fright in a game about something else arrives with your guard down.
The best of these moments last because nobody saw them coming. Which suggests the safest place in games was never really safe at all. It just hadn't got around to you yet.
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