Resident Evil isn't scary anymore. The only scary thing in Silent Hill is that freaking everything is locked. Zombies aren't scary. We had fun with all of these games, of course, but they weren't scary. Of the 19 horror games we played as part of Eric Vs. 365 for October, the only one that was actually legitimately scary was today's game - Fatal Frame 2. There's just something about it that hits all the right marks, man. Click to read more and watch spooky creepy gameplay video.
I originally played Fatal Frame 2 for the OG Xbox and didn't get especially far. We got further than I did for this video, but not much. We got to the famous "Broken Neck Woman" that is one of the most infamous ghosts in this game and quit a little bit after. We didn't quit because we were too scared or it was too difficult or anything. We just stopped playing and never really went back to it. Some games are just like that.
Anyway, the thing I remember most about that experience of playing Fatal Frame 2 on OG Xbox was that the hardware would spoil the scares ahead of time. The Xbox DVD drive would audibly chug and churn to read the disc whenever something in the game was changing - I.E. something spooky was going to happen - so we always knew when a jump scare was coming. It kind of took the tension out of things. Just a bit.
For this video I played the PS2 version via an emulator so I'm not sure if the OG PS2 had the same problem of spoiling the scary stuff. My laptop running the game certainly didn't give any hints. It was probably because of that reason that the game was so effectively spooky this time when I played it for the video. The sound was great, the ghosts were scary, and the subtle spooky stuff happening all over was crystal clear and laser focused.
It spooked me. It really spooked me. I almost spooked in my pants.
