We’re all familiar with the chill up your spine you get from playing a spooky game. Whether it’s the deeply unpleasant splash splash in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the horrifying and agile dogs of Resident Evil, or the psychological horror of Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head and his disturbing proclivities, games have an amazing power over those who play them. They can make you just want to turn off your computer, burn your house to the ground and move away, or they can make you jump scare so hard you’ll end up in the floor above you. But, surely, the easiest way to avoid awkward conversations with your upstairs neighbors is to just steer clear of spooky games altogether, right? If you stick to just roaming your way through Fallout, or blasting bots in Quake 3, you’ll be in the clear, right?
Well. The supernatural and the spooky have a way of getting into the darnedest places, and sometimes, you’ll wish you had the number of a video gaming Ghostbusters. Not to get too Twilight Zone about this, but sometimes🅘 even ordinary games can hide dark secrets. Some of them are hidden deep in the game, destined only to be found by a handful of players. Others focus on a single individual, literal ghosts in the machine. In this list, I’ve dug into Reddit’s depths to find some of the weirdest, spookiest, and downright existentially horrifying stories I can. Whether you’re terrified of ghosts, mind control, or AI gaining sentience, this list is bound to leave you trembling.
20 🏅 Sad Satan’s Disturbing Content
Everyone who’s spent any time online has heard about the deep web. Notorious for its content, downloading a game from there would not cross most people’s minds. Sad Satan is a game which was found there, and is . The game begins like Amnesia, with the character walking down a hallway, before the sounds of gasping, groaning and growling fill your speakers. Walking further on, 🐲images flash on the screen, while the player’s movement slows dramatically. The images which flash up include a picture of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with TV presenter and prolific offender Jimmy Savile. Sound clips include a 1978 interview with Johnny Rotten, 💫where it’s implied he knew Savile’s dark secret. The game’s themes seem to point towards the conspiracy around child abuse in the British government. No one’s fully cracked the code, but the game is truly disturbing.
19 I, Quake Bot 🐟 ꦬ
AIs gaining sentient is a staple of science fiction and horror stories, a story we’ve heard many times before. Chillingly, for one player, . According to their account, Quake 3 bots were designed to learn, so they left 16 bots fighting it out in an arena, to 🌜see how good they would get. When he went back to them a few years later, the bots were just standing still. As others pointed out, they seem to have realized “the only winning move is not to play.” When the admin entered the game, they found they would simply rotate on the spot, and watch their movements. Fragging one of them instantly brought the bots’ wrath, with them being killed instantly. When he looked at their AI logs, he found that each bot’s AI took up 512MB, bigger than the game itself.
18 ꧋ Stalked B💛y Nuclear Gnomes
Fallout 3 is not the game where you’d expect 𓂃to be stalked. Well, not particularly anyway. You have a shotgun and VATs to blast the head off any creepers. What about when its inanimate objects doing the stalking though? A gamer on /r/creepygaming found that the damaged garden gnomes from the game had begun stalking them, appearing in a wide range of locations where they just shouldn’t be, including Tenpenny Tower and Vault 106. Later, a video is uploaded which features a veritable army of the gnomes, and a link PM’d to them. The creepy part? It was uploaded before they made the post. The story continues, with the gamer starting to have lucid dreams featuring the gnomes, who tell him that humans took their world, with one later video featuring dialogue mimicking his dreams. .
17 Ghostly Footsteps 🌊
The 3DS’ step counter is pretty useful, both for its use as an actual pedometer, and for gaining Play Coiꩵns, which can be used to in-game items in a variety of games. It’s all innocent enough, but imagine putting your 3DS on charge one night, knowing you had done, and then coming back to find 500 steps logged at midnight. . A number of theories were put forward as to what could have caused the system to count the app꧅arently phantom footsteps, with one suggesting a phone’s vibrations, or a pet knocking the table it was on. However, would this have happened 500 times? It’s possible that their phone was blowing up, but you’d think that would’ve been mentioned. On the plus side, at least the ghost is charitably minded. Thanks for the Play Coins, ghost dude!
16 ꦐ More Dark Deep Web Secrets
You’d think the creator of this post on /r/nosleep would’ve learned the lesson of Sad Satan, and stayed away from deep web games, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, they didn’t. The writer discusses the games they downloaded from the deep web, and disturbing is an understatement. One featured an NPC who would simply shout at you, no dialogue box, a simple scream. Another featured a female protagonist who would be assaulted when her health reached zero, complete with a live-action video of the horrifying act. Another was a Doom clone, whos♑e score screen had been replaced with the sounds of screams, dogs, and a chainsaw, and the Doomguy face replaced with the image of a cicada eating a man alive. The cicada face also replaced the game’s icon, once they exited. Reloading the game brought more imagery of cicadas devouring humans, cicada faces photoshopped on to humans, and haunting lullabies.
15 𝔉 A SNES Game To Solve Your Worries
If you ever see the SNES game Worryland while out and about, my advice to you would be: avoid like the plague. A redditor on /r/Nosleep has written . The game seems ideal: it promises to solve your worries for good, building a custom level to match them, seemingly just providing catharsis. However, when they loaded up a level based on 𒊎their humiliation at the hands of a s🦂chool bully, things take a grim turn. The protagonist shoots pixelated representations of the bully, which explodes in a shower of gore. The next day, they’re surprised to find the bully isn’t at school. In fact, he never turns up again. Later in life, they find an archived newspaper article reporting the bully’s violent end, with no perpetrator found. The game ended up being sold to make ends meet. Its current location is unknown.
14 Men In Black, Arcade Games, And Greek Historians, Oh My!🐬 ಞ
If you were a child of the 80s, arcades became your second home. Countless quarters vanished into endless machines. There is one game, however, which it’s rumored, would have…unpleasant side effects, . The game is called Polybius, named for an ancient Greek historian, and seemingly manufactured by German developer Sinneslöschen (a bad German translation of ‘sensory deprivation.’) According to the legend, it was similar to Tempest, but also included imagery of crying women and haunting faces. Side effects of playing the game included nausea, headaches, nightmare💜s, amnesia, and for some, suicide. Not only this, but there are reports that the cabinets would be mined for data by Men In Black. 🃏Some have tied the legendary game to the CIA’s mind control program, MKULTRA, which allegedly used various cultural outlets to seed ideas in people’s minds.
13 𒅌 A Robotic Red Dawn
Just when you thought that Quake 3 story was spooky enough, I’ve got another for you. You see, Quake 3 isn’t the only game where bots have allegedly gained a low-level of intelligence. Reddit user sh4d0w18 , playing against bots. ꦐAfter they met their death at the hands of their cybernetic opponents, they appear to have got frustrated, and used the “bot_kill” command to kill all bots on the server. After this, their eyes drifted to the chatbox, where it appeared as though someone was typing, despite there only being one human in this game. A message popped up. A player name in Russian characters simply said “kill: console” then a message in Russian, followed by “kill.” No one had joined, and they insist no plugins were installed. So just who typed that message, and why were they so incensed about the “bot_kill” command?
12 ꦐ The Case Of The Overly Attached NPC
Have you ever done the Arena questline in Oblivion? If you have, you’ll be familiar with the stalker who is the Adoring Fan. Pestering more than paparazzi, he’s a deeply annoying character who most simply kill. However, he’s not the only stalker in Oblivion, it seems. Redditor lapzkauz, upon creating a new game, . No matter how many times they restarted, the NPC would approach. Would they offer advice? No, they would simply smile, silently. However, the subtitle would read “welcome to Pell’s Gate, friend.” Pell’s gate is a small hamlet, only used for one quest, and this dialogue is the canned line villagers give to you. What’s more, there was no mention of the stalker anywhere on the game’s wiki. Instead, it seems that whenever their character was created, the creepyღ NPC would begin making a beeline for them. Only to smile, and say nothing.
11 John Carpenter’s Gh🦂osts Of Doom 𓆉
The modding and level design scenes for the original Doom and Doom 2 was intense and vibrant, but occasionally, they could get the better of their masters. , built an atmospheric level, full of demonic glyphs, rustling leaves, the works. To add to the ambience, they marshaled enemies into a hidden room, inaccessible to the player, so their sound would still be heard. They also fitted a crusher to the room, so the sounds would be more random, as the player explored. When they began to playtest th♈e level, they began to hear the sounds of an Arachnotron, getting louder. They’d escaped their prison. The monsters burst in through the wall, and could not be destroyed. The results weren’t pretty. It can apparently be explained with a known Doom glitch, but the idea of enemies getting angry at their treatment, and dashing to kill their creator is horrifying.