Series with their own page
Individual examples:
- The Arise flash games. Just try to actually get scared from the randomly appearing Halloween masks and stock horror music. (That or just watch the Retsupuraes.)
- Horror, another laughably terrible Newgrounds game that has been retsupuraed.
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent: Alexander's face when you look at his portrait with the Sanity Meter below 50% is a legitimately horrifying sight... until you see how similar it looks to a Creeper's face.
- In Armory & Machine, all the Body Horror monsters in the Bio Swamp (Weeping Hunchback, Irradiated Sore, Vomiting Behemoth, Mound of Despair and the boss Writhing Mass) are intended to be frightening with horrifying attacks such as self-evisceration, sloughing their flesh off or writhing in agony. However, the lack of any images plus the frequency of the monsters using self-harm moves and doing absolutely nothing with their other movesnote takes away most of the horror and makes them seem like comically inept buffoons instead.
- Arthur's Nightmare suffers from this, though it's hard to tell whether or not it was intentional.note To start with, every enemy in the game uses a flat picture of themselves (most obvious with DW, who is prominent in every single room from the third level on). While Arthur and DW are altered enough from their original appearance to at least possibly be unnerving, their parents use barely-edited pictures of themselves with Tears of Blood poorly added (particularly non-scary since said trope is heavily frowned upon in creepypasta communities). Not helping is that their Jump Scares' audio, while certainly loud enough to be startling, is either a "HEY!" from the show's theme song or either parent yelling "ARTHUR!", neither of which is particularly frightening - it's along the lines of a YouTube Poop.
- Azrael from BlazBlue: Chronophantasma is so frighteningly badass that even Hakumen hauls ass in any opposite direction. However, he loses points for seeing a battle with Bang Shishigami as a friendly match as well as be captured twice by Kokonoe, once in the start of his story, the second at the end of his story.
- The Callisto Protocol: The Scrappy Mechanic of the fighting system has been considered to severely diminish the horror of the enconters with the monstrous enemies. If the player is fighting one-on-one, enemies are so easy that the fear factor vanishes. Meanwhile, fighting more than one, because of the limitations of the combat system, makes them frustrating instead.
- Clock Tower 3 establishes several of its villains by re-enacting some of their most brutal murders (one of which was done to a 12-year-old girl) in front of the player in a grotesque, stone-serious manner. Yet, many of the means to repel these killers consist of cartoonish and silly pratfalls, complete with wacky reaction shots. The fact that the creators tried to shoehorn humor into a game that otherwise is not presented as tongue-in-cheek spoils the horror they were hoping to foster, and the slapstick bits are made shockingly unfunny and inappropriate by the horrific violence that precedes them.
- The ClueFinders Reading Adventures Ages 9–12: Mystery of the Missing Amulet has one section in which you have to feed the stone head (speaking in a very slow, low pitched, and raspy voice) reading comprehension answers. Sure enough, if you give it the wrong answer, it'll sound like it's choking or throwing up, making it humorous.
- Deadly Premonition has Shadows as its main enemies. They are supposed to be creepy and scary, being a mixture of hallucinations and zombies in the Other World. Unfortunately, they are mostly gray models that walk a little doo-hickey funny and their garbled speech is not as frightening as was likely intended. The only thing about them that could be terrifying is the wide, black mouth of theirs, which isn't visible up close enough to honestly leave an impact.
- Diablo III: In Act III, Azmodan takes command of the forces invading Bastion's Keep, and several times gloats to the Nephalem and their allies about how hopeless the situation is for them. Unfortunately, his tendency to announce his exact tactics also makes it plainly obvious what needs to be done to thwart his next step. As a result, he sounds less like an intimidating general and more like a General Failure with a metaphorical "kick me" sign on his back. Then there's his boss fight, where he makes speeches about the gruesome things he intends to do to the "arrogant Nephalem"...except as he takes damage, he keeps interrupting his own speech to start a different line, so his boss fight in practice sounds something like "Arrogant Nephalem—ENOUGH!—Arrogant Nephalem—ENOUGH!", almost as if he's begging the player to stop.
- Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water had several critics note that they were incapable of feeling tense while playing this survival horror game because they kept focusing more on the voluptuous, wet female ghosts. The game's water-theme led to many clothes clinging to ghosts and player characters alike, including loose kimono
◊ giving several characters a Navel-Deep Neckline. - Half-Life 2 introduced the "fast zombies," truly terrifying monstrosities that looked like flayed, emaciated corpses, moved like wild baboons on speed and howled loudly in blood-curdling screams as they attacked you. Except one of the stock sound clips was taken from the title sequence of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters. The horrific screaming the headcrab zombies when they're set on fire is also hard to take as seriously when you look at one of many comments/videos on the internet about how it sounds like they're screaming "YABBA! MY ICING!" And it turns right back into Nightmare Fuel when someone else comments that they're screaming "OH GOD HELP ME" backwards. However, DasBoSchitt turns this Nightmare Fuel right back again into this on the third and sixth episodes of The Gmod Idiot Box.
- In Killer Instinct, there's Fulgore. He's a badass killer robot with long, sharp claws, glowing red eyes, and some of the goriest Finishing Moves in the game. He also makes elephant noises when you hit him.
- The first Kingdom Hearts game features a boss fight with giant Ursula. The setting is appropriately intimidating, being trapped underwater in a dark, swirling abyss with an enemy a great many times larger than you, but the fear factor is diminished somewhat by Ursula herself. Her eyes follow Sora as he swims around the arena, which is a good effect when it works, but she'll often go cross-eyed or look in two different directions at once when Sora gets close enough to attack. Some players like to take her repeated taunts of "This won't be pretty!" as a warning of incoming derp faces.
- In Left 4 Dead 2, on the Amusement Park of Doom, there are zombie clowns. Punch them in their faces, and their noses give off a hilarious little honk.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The stalchildren from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are skeletons that appear from the ground at Hyrule Field when the sun goes down, and immediately start going after Link. Scary, huh? Not very, actually. The stalchildren are ridiculously easy enemies that don't deal much damage, they are very slow, and they have high-pitched chattery giggles when they attempt to slap you. If you take a look at them, they even look ridiculously cute. The fact that they are defeated in just two hits and even may lose their heads in a comical way makes them even more un-frightening.
- Phantom Ganon in Ocarina of Time has a second phase where you're basically playing tennis with him. You can make the retardant factor even stronger by using a bottle instead of a sword.
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: In the 3DS remake and Hyrule Warriors, the moon's face's features were greatly exaggerated.◊ The intention was probably making it look more unsettling, but it ended up looking far too grotesque and over the top, to the point of looking more derpy and cartoony than scary.
- In The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons, the entrance to the final dungeon is a volcano with a mouth for an entrance (complete with teeth) and eyes that actually follow Link as he moves around the screen. Cool and intimidating - right up until you go to enter the dungeon and the volcano goes cross-eyed.
- The Imprisoned is a large, menacing monster that haunts Link's nightmares throughout the first part of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. But when you finally face the thing in battle, it may be hard not to crack up at its almost cutesy-looking feet with flabby "toes" and the fact that it looks like a giant man-eating pinecone.Dan Avidan: Oh God! He is so scary when you think he's a giant snake monster, and then so cute when you see his doopy Muppet feet!
- Also in Skyward Sword, the boss of the Sandship is Tentalus, a particularly ridiculous-looking Kraken/Medusa/Cyclops mishmash that looks like it got lost on its way to a Monsters, Inc. audition.
- The introduction of the Gekko in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is done like a horror movie, where they are heard in the distance by soldiers before showing up and effortlessly (and gorily) slaughtering the entire squad. Because the Gekko moo like cows, however, the scene fails to be even the least bit frightening or tense.
- The next to last foe faced in Metroid Fusion, the SA-X in a monstrous form, has a horrifying appearance, but its only attack is easy to avoid and it goes down in 3-4 hits, which limits the scariness it could have had. Its Core-X form afterwards is actually more dangerous than the monster itself.
- Monster Hunter 4:
- The Frenzy virus caused by the dreaded Gore Magala, which is stated to be a very major cause for concern for humans...but at best, it eventually grants buffs that increase Critical Hits if the infected overcomes it by attacking monsters enough, and at worst it stops their natural health regeneration for a few minutes and causes Frenzy pools to slowly sap their health, and even then it doesn't stop the afflicted hunter from just using instant-healing items like usual.
- The Zamtrios is this. It's a great white shark in every sense of the word, but with developed limbs and the ability to crawl out of the sea in the frozen tundra. It can also swim through the ice and snow if it so pleases and can freeze you. If that isn't terrifying enough, it'll eventually generate ice that makes it more powerful and much more terrifying, making it a very intimidating boss. Fight him enough and he powers up again... by inflating like a balloon and bouncing and rolling around like one. One of the coolest, most badass and terrifying looking monsters to the most hilarious thing you've ever seen. Especially when you inflict enough damage for it to leave that phase, at which point it helplessly deflates like a cartoon character.
- Mother 3 has The Pigmask attacking Saturn Valley and intimidating Mr. Saturns with a Frightbot, which tells scary stories such as a Pants-wettingly scary story. A bloodcurdling story. A story so scary you want to cover your ears. A story so scary you'll never go to the bathroom at night again. A bone-chillingly scary story. A story so incredibly scary that your teeth won't stop chattering. A spine-tingling story. A story so scary you couldn't help but laugh. A scary story with some deep, touching moments mixed in, and also might accidentally tell a cute, funny story. Not only do they do nothing on your characters, the Frightbot itself looks goofy.
- Nightmare Doors is a satirical example of horror filled with this.
- An intentional example - The video game Night Trap was an FMV Game in the 90s where the filmers tried to invoke this trope. In fact, one of them even admitted that in one of the times you see the characters die, the augers take out a device that's so unrealistic and over the top that there's no way kids would ever try to replicate it. One of the directors even said that there were people laughing on the stage.
- In Chapter 4 of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, there's a whole bunch of hype leading up to the chapter's villain. When you first arrive, you learn that he had cursed the bell to turn Twilight Town's residents into pigs whenever it tolls. Even the mayor falls victim to the curse! When you venture into the forest to get to this monster, you come upon a very creepy church-like steeple. You fight through it to eventually reach the top... Only to find that the "monster" that was causing all this trouble is a Bedsheet Ghost wearing a party hat and bowtie... Yeah, people laughed. However, he IS a real threat in that chapter and even becomes a recurring villain, as he somehow switches bodies with Mario and steals his identity, trapping Mario inside the solid purple body, unable to say his name.
- Parasite Eve 2: A relatively early cutscene shows a young woman transforming into a monster, which Aya must fight. However, many people agree that the creature's roar at the end sounds so much like a horse's neighing that it ruins the scariness of the scene.
- A lot of Pokémon can come off as creepy or at least something you would not want to mess with (most legendary Pokemon fitting the bill). This is doubly so in Pokémon Sun and Moon where the Ultra Beasts are nightmarish looking Pokemon that are stated to be extremely dangerous. The scare factors completely go out the window when you realize that you can pet them and feed them like any other Pokemon and they'll grow happier and more fond of you as well.
- Magrunner: Dark Pulse is a Portal-esque puzzle game where the protagonist Dax auditions for the Gruckezber Corporation using their latest scientific invention, when suddenly monsters from the Cthulhu Mythos invade the facility. The one who summoned them there turns out to be Xander, a scrawny, stereotypical nerd responsible for designing the facility. And even after turning into a corrupted Humanoid Abomination hellbent on sacrificing Dax to unleash Cthulhu on the world, he's still a scrawny, stereotypical nerd and hardly intimidating at all. The fact that the Final Boss battle against him amounts to the two of you chucking boxes at each other doesn't help matters, either.
- Portal 2 has Wheatley tell a ghost story as you follow him over a conveyor belt full of mangled and crushed robot parts. Of course, Wheatley being Wheatley, it doesn't have quite the impact he intended it to have. There is a grain of truth in his story though. There is a room in Aperture, completely filled with screaming robots. GLaDOS built it for shits and giggles. She contemplates sending Wheatley there for ten years after he's taken over her facility and stuffed her in a potato.Wheatley: They say the old caretaker of this place went absolutely crazy. Chopped up his entire staff... of robots. All of them robots. They say at night you can still hear the screams... of their replicas. All of them functionally indistinguishable from the originals. No memory of the incident. Nobody knows what they're screaming about. Absolutely terrifying. Though obviously not paranormal in any meaningful way.
- How do you apply this to a Nightmare Sequence setpiece where you're locked inside an asylum/prison cell, while the ceiling and the walls move to make the space smaller and smaller, forcing you to stay close to the door, where the Big Bad known for an In-Universe instant liquefaction touch is watching you? As F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point shows us, wait for the collision physics to wonk up and glitch you through one of said moving walls.
- Resident Evil: The "Mansion Basement" theme from the soundtrack for the DualShock version of the first game tries to sound ominous, but instead sounds like someone playing a trombone while drunk.
- Silent Hill:
- In Silent Hill: Origins, you are able to control the transition from the fog world to the nightmarish otherworld by touching a mirror. It significantly lessens the power of being transported to a nightmarish industrial Hell if you do it willfully and deliberately (or worse, go back and forth between worlds trying to figure out what to do next).
- Mind you, that at least feels congruous with the story there. It's not as bad as the Patients from Silent Hill 4: The Room. They could have been scary, but due to the noise, they make when hit, well... Nothing like a monster that BELCHES when hit to derail the scary, folks!
- The Greedy Worms (also from 4) skirt the line between this and the other trope. They're huge and very gross looking (not to mention unkillable), but they also never attack Henry, meaning they're basically just glorified punching bags. Have fun letting off steam endlessly hitting them with a stick.
- The indie horror game Forest, being similar to Slender, does have a generally creepy atmosphere but if you get caught by the ghost girl, you see she has the face of the Overly Attached Girlfriend.
- While the Nightmare Face in the Japanese Slender-style horror game Death Forest is genuinely terrifying on its own, the fact that it's just a 2D floating head using billboarding to constantly face the player sort of ruins the impact.
- Alf-Layla-Wa-Layla from Sonic and the Secret Rings may look scary (his transformation isn't particularly pleasant to watch either), but the voice work for him just kills the scare factor. It tries to make him sound booming and powerful, but it just sounds like he inhaled a tank of helium, which has the unintended effect of making him sound like a petulant man child. Just try to listen to him say "The stories of this world are MINE!" without laughing.
- In Sonic the Hedgehog CD, the Bad Futures are exactly that: Eggman has taken over, and everything has either become mechanical, is in some state of decay, or both. Each Bad Future also looks appropriately bleak and depressing, with muted grays, browns, and olive-greens. However, nearly every enemy in a Bad Future is equally worn down, oftentimes comically so. For instance, a Tentou will normally chug along to the right, dropping explosive mines. A Tentou in a Bad Future will move a little bit slower, cannot drop mines, and looks tired out. A Sasori rolls around and will shoot at Sonic from its stinger tail, but in a Bad Future, Sasori will just sit in front of Sonic and wiggle up and down.
- Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion plays with this extensively. The villain's main motivation for collecting horrors is that she wanted to (innocently) scare people, but was too cute to do so. While several of the monsters that appear in the game are scary, the overall setting is deliberately not, and the ending likewise balances the two against each other.
- Until Dawn: The Wendigo are meant to be absolutely terrifying, but can easily fall into this. The Wendigo is a creature that occurs when a human commits cannibalism; eating human flesh transforms them into a giant, creepy thing that has no lips or toes and the skin is pulled away from the teeth. Sounds utterly dreadful, but the Wendigo in this game don't come across like that. Mostly because they stumble and squirm around by walking on all fours and looking like clumsy spiders. There's also the case of Wendigo Hannah still walking around with underwear on.
- Game & Wario: In the "Gamer" stage, 9-Volt's mom goes all horror movie on her son, doing stuff like punching his windows open, emerging through his TV, and flailing on his bedroom floor to scare him. Much of the mood is caused by the eerily quiet atmosphere until she suddenly bursts in. However, you are also simultaneously playing loud and silly-looking games on the Wii U GamePad involving stuff like flattening dough or picking noses.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2: After defeating solo Malos in Chapter 7, the subsequent cutscene shows Nia throwing him off a cliff by forcing the cells in his body to replicate extremely quickly. While the scene was intended to showcase the more disturbing aspects of Nia's abilities as a healing Blade, a number of fans instead found it silly thanks to the Fridge Logic of her essentially giving Malos cancer, something that has long been the subject of sophomoric jokes online (e.g. "your post gave me cancer" or "get cancer and die"). Consequently, bringing up the scene with fans will lead to more than a few jokes about Nia having "super cancer" powers.
