[Franky Family]

My mind sort of drifted a bit earlier, and for some reason I was randomly thinking about Mother 2 aka EarthBound. There's a certain track that plays, often during underground portions of the game, and there was this one tunnel underground beneath an Onett citizen's house where this suspicious fellow had found an ancient idol of some sort from what I remember. The entire game had this very unique sense of adventure and mystery to it. The same for the Final Fantasy games I've played too, especially with Final Fantasy VII, the sense of mystery was very strong in that game

What games have you guys played that have that feeling where you know something big is in store for the game's story? The games that play out and you know something aint right, aint right at all and you can feel it in the game as you play because the developers did an excellent job of conveying that something very sinister and kind of unpredictable is at play. Which games gave you that sort of feeling? I'll make a list of mine

Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy IX
EarthBound
Resident Evil
Resident Evil 4
Majora's Mask

 

[Bullet Club]

Silent Hill
Resident Evil 2
State Of Decay
Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Spoiler

BOO!

 

[HE1NZ]

Pentiment. Whole game has a foreboding feel to it, with hints of events happening behind the scenes that you must figure out eventually. The fact that the game take place over 30 years adds to it.

 

[GreyHorace]

The Witcher 3 unsurprisingly, has plenty of moments that deal with mystery and evil. Particularly when you first enter Crookback Bog and encounter The Crones of Velen. Some really freaky dark fairy tale stuff there that gets under your skin.

Then there's the Hearts of Stone expansion with it's main antagonist Gaunter O'Dinn. CDPR really do good job of hinting that Gaunter is much more terrifying than his charming and affable personality would have you believe.

In other games though, I'd mention the first Dragon Age game Origins. Before the series went to shit, Bioware did a fantastic job with portraying what an evil and foreboding threat the Darkspawn were. Especially in the Deep Roads, which leads to your first terrifying encounter with the Broodmother.

Red Dead Redemption 2 also has a great nightmare inducing location with the Lemoyne swamps. I actually found the scary atmosphere here to be superior to that of The Witcher 3, particularly when the Night Folk are introduced.

 

[DonDonDonPata]

One of the best shooters I've played in recent memory. The story is told through environmental clues and a few scrawled notes left around the level. The player is not given a big baddie. You're not Leon Kennedy on a mission. You're not told anything about the cult straightaway. So you have this growing sense of evil but no King Demon or Crazy Cult Leader to fixate your goals upon.

Feels like you are trespassing on Evil's turf.

 

[Asmonius]

• Return of the Obra Dinn - Basically a series of brief scenes where you need to use context clues to discover what happened to every character on an abandoned ship. Really cleverly put together and considering there were a ton of people onboard, it's a challenge to find the fate of every single crewmate.
• The Wolf Among Us - Seems like a fairly standard murder mystery, but the nature of the characters makes this one fascinating from start to finish. Just a shame the sequel seems cursed to never happen.
• Grim Fandango - One of the most polished point & click adventure games ever, with a really solid underlying conspiracy you need to unravel. Takes a lot from classic noire movies, but the setting and cast give it a really unique charm.
• Condemned: Criminal Origins - Starts off as an enjoyable first-person homeless fighting sim, but increasingly turns into a David Lynch story the closer you get to the ending. Its sequel is also good but never quite tops the original's atmosphere and creepiness.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream - Based on one of the most disturbing short stories, they got the original author heavily involved in shaping the backstory of the last humans left alive in a horrific dystopia created by a sentient supercomputer. Definitely need to be in the right head space to appreciate this one, since it's properly depressing.

 

[Noided]

The mere existence of Dustborn is mysterious and evil

 

[Zeta Dragoon]

F.E.A.R - You are the pointman, a supersolder who can react so fast he can bullet-time and part of a special forces unit tasked with handling weird shit, like taking down an out of control experiment of psychic supersolder clones led by a psychotic cannibal.
Then things get superfucked when people start exploding, phone recordings and logs start mentioning a Project Origin, and you start seeing a nightmarish visage out of the corner of your vision that you eventually realize is following you.

Mass Effect - Archeological records showing 50,000 year gaps in galactic civilization and their collapse/disappearance, planets and moons that once supported life now barren, pocketmarked by obvious orbital bombardment. Relics that unfortunate spacers, colonies and reseachers sometimes uncover, that drive everyone insane and turn them into techo-organic horrors.

Dead Space with everything, and the nature of the markers, and everything with the black marker on Earth thats only addressed in a tie-in book.

Also Dead Space is Mass Effect, but without the Star Trek influenced 70s/80s/90s science fiction that trended towards optimism and allied alien species to help drive back whats out there.

Dragon Age Origins, everything about the blight, and going into the deep roads. The fade, and what happens when a sloth demon overpowers a circle of magi, you get Dead Space tier shit.

 

[Noided]

As an actual, non-shitpost answer: Cruelty Squad. Every aspect of that game seems to be keyed for maximum "Unsettling"

 

[Sean Mirrsen]

In a very minor way, which is still sort of impressive for an RTS, Homeworld: Cataclysm. The "mysterious evil" doesn't stay mysterious for very long, but the actual extent of its evil continues to provide tension as the story goes on, and having to fight it is unsettling enough to where a "normal" space battle against a stupidly powerful enemy fleet and its space base feels like a welcome reprieve.

 

[Spiders]

My answer sucks after some great replies, but I think Final Fantasy VIII did a great job with the setting, vibe and the god-tier OST, even if it was ultimately a letdown unless you subscribe to the R=U theory.

 

[Tapped]

Go in blind knowing as little as possible about the game beforehand for the best effect.

 

[regawdless]

Dark Souls was like the Dark Souls of mystery and a sense of evil for me.

 

[zero]

Eternal Darkness - The insanity effects and the cool and creepy voices you hear when you use magic
Fear Effect
Silent Hill
The Sexy Brutale - The whole game has a macabre vibe to it
Beyond Good and Evil - Has you investigating something that feels unsettling throughout the whole game
13 Sentinels - The story always gives you the sense that something not right is going on, but you're not sure what it is.
Nier Automata
Until Dawn
Dredge
Blasphemous
Subnautica
SOMA
Primal
Tomb Raider
Zelda II
Super Castlevania IV - Largely due to the soundtrack
Unbound: Worlds Apart - Opening portals to who knows what or where is a regular part of gameplay

 

[SirKicksalot]

Undying is the definition of this. Best thing Clive Barker ever did. Third best thing is Jericho. And yet both games have some of the most creative weapons and intense action in the FPS genre. Somehow, Undying is pants-shittingly terrifying while you blow up Neanderthals like it's Bulletstorm.

 

[Asmonius]

Eternal Darkness - The insanity effects and the cool and creepy voices you hear when you use magic
Fear Effect
Silent Hill
The Sexy Brutale - The whole game has a macabre vibe to it
Beyond Good and Evil - Has you investigating something that feels unsettling throughout the whole game
13 Sentinels - The story always gives you the sense that something not right is going on, but you're not sure what it is.
Nier Automata
Until Dawn
Dredge
Blasphemous
Subnautica
SOMA
Primal
Tomb Raider
Zelda II
Super Castlevania IV - Largely due to the soundtrack
Unbound: Worlds Apart - Opening portals to who knows what or where is a regular part of gameplay

Can't believe I forgot to mention Eternal Darkness and the Blasphemous games, probably the best foreboding atmosphere in any games. Automata is also a great call when you come to understand what's happened to the world.

Also including L.A. Noire. Go in blind if at all possible, but the way certain cases are connected was surprisingly dark.
There's also a moment I won't spoil in Dragon Age 2 that's genuinely stomach-turning, was amazed how well it was set up given how rushed the game was.

 

[HE1NZ]

Undying is the definition of this. Best thing Clive Barker ever did. Third best thing is Jericho. And yet both games have some of the most creative weapons and intense action in the FPS genre. Somehow, Undying is pants-shittingly terrifying while you blow up Neanderthals like it's Bulletstorm.

I forgot about this game. Gonna add it to my backlog.

 

[HellforLeather]

Dead Space. The remake is fantastic too.

 

[DragonsBen]

Deadly Premonition - One of my favorite "so janky it's great" games
Alan Wake 1 & 2
Control
Until Dawn
Subnautica
Detroit Become Human
Hollow Knight

 

[Zeta Dragoon]

Path of Exile
Diablo II
Grim Dawn

 

[ExpandKong]

My answer sucks after some great replies, but I think Final Fantasy VIII did a great job with the setting, vibe and the god-tier OST, even if it was ultimately a letdown unless you subscribe to the R=U theory.

R=U theory is as wack and gay as Squall is Dead theory and I make sure to tell everyone on the FF8 Facebook fan page nine or ten times a day.

I do like FF8 in this topic though. I always thought there was something vaguely but not quite maybe eldritch about the whole thing with sorceress power passing down through the ages (the way past sorceresses appear more and more beastly as you fight through them in time compression) and that scene where you zoom in on the surface of the moon and just see swarms of monsters. There's some good stuff here with some potential but SE would rather make fifteen more FF7 games instead I guess.

 

[Spiders]

R=U theory is as wack and gay as Squall is Dead theory and I make sure to tell everyone on the FF8 Facebook fan page nine or ten times a day.

I do like FF8 in this topic though. I always thought there was something vaguely but not quite maybe eldritch about the whole thing with sorceress power passing down through the ages (the way past sorceresses appear more and more beastly as you fight through them in time compression) and that scene where you zoom in on the surface of the moon and just see swarms of monsters. There's some good stuff here with some potential but SE would rather make fifteen more FF7 games instead I guess.

Squall is Dead is pretty dumb, but I like R=U. It saves a lot of that era's final act bedshitting and makes Ultimecia and Time Compression way more interesting.

 

[zero]

On the topic of Final Fantasy, some of them are super dark. I always loved how Final Fantasy VI had a post apocalyptic world for you to play through after the heroes essentially shit the bed and failed to save the world. Like halfway through the game the story is like, "Welp, y'all fucked up. Now watch the world die"

FF X also has the religious concept of sin embodied as an actual monster coming to kill everyone for their transgressions. The only way to appease it is through human sacrifice of a young girl and even then it still comes back. The world of Spira is in a perpetual state of waiting for death.

Lightning Returns takes place in a dying world with only 13 days of existence left after time itself came to an end in Final Fantasy XIII-2. The human race is also dying off because no one can have children anymore. Human aging has also stopped. Basically the cycle of death and rebirth that is life itself has come to an end. There's a dark vibe hanging over the whole game. It feels like it's the end of everything

 

[Epic Nemesis]

Majors"s Mask is the one that jumps out the most to me because it's just such a tonal departure from the series.

 

[Chozofication]

Majora's mask is the answer. The stone tower area alone could be expanded to a full game.

Game leaves a lot of questions.

 

[Erdrick]

Dragon Quest has a ton of this stuff.

1 - When you finally meet the Dragonlord. Thr whole trek there is oppressive and heavy. Not to mention when you make it to a certain town, likely happy to recover and then realize that everyone is dead and the town is in ruins.

2 - The beginning of the game, where you see Moonbrooke get sacked and all killed. More chilling when you get there yourself and see the remains...

Malroth and his cultists. Hell, Hargon himself is pretty crazy and it's very unnerving right before you fight Malroth himself.

3 - The ominous crack in the earth by Baramos' lair. Ortega's fate... Some of the final areas are so dark and foreboding.

4 - The mining town where everyone is slowly dying and you're going deeper and deeper underground... When you find out why... It's... Haunting.

Just some examples. DQ looks super cheery and all that on the surface but it can get surprisingly dark may times.