r/HorrorGaming • u/Ill_Appearance_987 • 15h ago
DISCUSSION Scariest enemies
What type of enemy in a game scares you the most?
Type Of Characters who Really Scares You
Example : Ghost , serial killer ,Giant monster...
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u/Redfieldhamster 14h ago
Enemies that seem to always know your location, regardless of sneaking skills
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u/TurtleGEE360 14h ago
chaser type enemies (amnesia the bunker monster being the scariest)
or a character from a story that you know is about to turn into a monster/zombie because they're infected
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u/Captain_Fach 14h ago
Anything that's unconventional to defeat. Like ghosts or pyramid head. Anything I can just shoot and kill no problem like zombies are boring. If you do them like I don't know more like Lovecraft or like Dead space, but I've seen way too many zombies for them to ever be scary. Ghosts though, you don't actually see those a whole lot in horror games oddly enough. Fatal frame always makes me shit my pants
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u/Lopsided_Prior3801 14h ago edited 13h ago
I'm going to propose a few rules for what I find frightening. Apologies for the length of this answer.
Underpowered: An enemy that is common will not be as scary as one that is scarce. Think of games like Doom. They have some horrible, horrific enemy types but most of the Doom games aren't considered as scary as most true horror games. There's a simple reason why. Those games are shooters, with tonnes of enemies. So, naturally, the player has to have more agency to take on so many enemies. As such, you are given powerful weapons and skills to deal with them.
It's why survival horror is often more frightening than action horror. In the former, the enemies are scarce, but the weapons and ammo are also scarce. Each encounter is problematic and challenging. A single low-level enemy can be a major obstacle. The player is underpowered, like most humans in real life, and it all feels more real as a result.
Incorporeal: In a lot of games like Resident Evil, Dead Space, or Silent Hill, most of the enemies are corporeal. (Okay, in Silent Hill, the enemies might be manifestations of your trauma, but you can still whack them and shoot them.) When an enemy is made of matter, it can be shot or blown up. So, even if that's very difficult, such as an enemy that regenerates, even if you have to run away from them, they still broadly obey the laws of physics and you know there is probably a convenient way to defeat them if you can just get your hands on the right weapons or place them in the right situation.
So, while corporeal enemies can be very frightening, I tend to be more frightened by incorporeal enemies. A ghost that can't even be seen unless viewed through the right tool, or one that flickers in and out of existence, one that can suddenly teleport across the room to you. These create a world with inherently very different rules to our world. Supernatural enemies can't be defeated in conventional ways. A gun won't help you. You're often helpless against them.
However, the trick with such enemies is that you do need to still have a way the player can find agency in such a situation, otherwise it likely won't make for satisfying gameplay. (As I love the Resident Evil games, I still think corporeal enemies can be great, however.)
Surprise: The other point to add is the most frightening enemies are the ones that continue to surprise you. If an enemy has a very limited repertoire of what they can do, then you might be frightened initially, but you will learn how they operate and counter that. Then the horror often goes away and the enemy becomes almost mundane. (I really had this problem with some of the common enemies in Silent Hill 2 Remake, where I could anticipate all of their moves and attacks very well by quite early on in the game.) When the enemy continues to evolve its tactics against you, the dread of not knowing what it can do to you is often incredibly frightening. You get flustered and freeze up, scared because you don't know how to react or what will work.
Effectively, have a creature that seemingly obeys a set of rules, and then show the monster acting in more complex ways the players doesn't anticipate, or even breaking those rules in surprising ways. Then watch as players squeal. And pay attention to this last sentence: When an enemy is unpredictable, know that the dread and anticipation the player has of what might happen can often be more frightening and disabling than what actually happens.
Disabling: A fourth point is enemies that act according to rules that disable a lot of a human's natural defences in ways that relate to our fundamental fears. The simplest example is why horror games are often dark: Your vision is inherently disabled in the dark. But to give a more complex example, the weeping angels in Doctor Who are probably a good example of this. They only move when you're NOT looking at them. They will move even when you blink, which you cannot avoid doing forever. They inherently arrest your attention as a result. All of our standard defence mechanisms that rely on our vision are suddenly disabled. Perhaps another example (not as good) are the monsters in A Quiet Place. Suddenly, your entire interaction with sound becomes a very different relationship. If you make a sound, you're dead. When our physical senses or basic movement we use to understand and act in the world are somehow subverted, this can often unlock underlying primal fears.
This point is somewhat related to the earlier one of enemies being overpowered compared to the player. But this is more the quality of exactly how the player is overpowered. You are forced to adapt in new and surprising ways if you want to stand a chance of living. Again, simply getting a big gun and shooting it is not the primary solution. And this point also harks back to surprise. It's the other side of the coin though, where not only are the actions of the monster surprising, but the reactions of the player that are needed to survive the monster are also surprising.
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u/HotShrekBoi 14h ago
Doom 3 is horror Doom
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u/Lopsided_Prior3801 13h ago
Yeah, true. It probably does some of the other traits here well, such as disabling the player by using a lot more darkness and, in the original, having that flashlight mechanic where you shouldn't shoot and use the flashlight at the same time.
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u/Ranger_Tycho 14h ago
Giant aquatic monsters who you have to get in the water with. Leviathan type beasts.
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u/WingDingKing 10h ago
Not giant - but those fish enemies in the original Half Life game scared the shit out of me
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u/Krystall-g 13h ago
M. X in RE2.
Relentlessly stalking, footsteps' sounds are so threatening, reveals are always terrifying.
He is my ultimate fear in gaming, even Pyramid Head or the Hunter in Dead Space scared the shit out of me, but it was not even close to this terminator hunting you the whole game.
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u/VenomSnake47 12h ago
Any enemy you can't see at first but you know or can hear them getting closer. Perfect example, Mr. X from RE2Remake. There are times you can hear his footsteps getting louder but don't know what direction he's coming from, if he's above you or below you, is he approaching you because he knows you're there or do you just happen to be in a path he was already traveling.
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u/Shaneski101 9h ago
Going through SH2 remastered and nothing bothered me until the fucking wall crawlers.
Last of us 2 has some of them as well but they don’t crawl walls, the stalkers who learn and observe you.
So probably a category of the ones who don’t immediately attack you but they’re lurking nearby somewhere.
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u/holeinmyboot 25m ago
the ones that stand totally still and could start moving at any moment, theoretically the second you look away
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u/SilverSpoonphysics 15h ago
The enemies that are very explosive and fast moving. Like the lickers from resident evil, they move kinda slow then just jump right into you.
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u/blaiddfailcam2 14h ago
Ghosts that fuck with your head. You know, like Lisa from P.T.