Nothing Is Scarier / Video Games

Wait for it...

• Alien: Isolation uses a good amount of this.
  • The Xenomorph spends most of its time in the vents. You can't see it, but you can hear it creaking around, never knowing when it's going to emerge. It's even worse when the alien is out and about stalking you. Not knowing where the monster located is often a more frightening prospect than seeing it across the room. To make matters worse, when you can't see or hear the alien and its disappeared from your motion tracker, it doesn't mean you're safe. It means the the Xenomorph is up to something, which will likely result in your demise.
  • For the first few hours, the Xenomorph doesn't show up at all. The only indication that it's there is that you sometimes hear rumbling in the vents or a spine-chilling shriek in the distance. When it finally does show up, all you see is the tail impale someone and then leave. The next sequence has the player waiting for a tram that seems to take forever, in near total darkness, with the shrieking constantly being heard and the music building the tension. It's so effective that you might genuinely think that the Xenomorph could be virtually anything else if you didn't already know that this was an Alien game.
  • This trope even ties into the games’s mechanics. If you’re are particularly well hidden and well out of the sight, the Xenomorph’s AI will slowly but surely figure out your location as it will always be within a certain distance from you at all times and if you hide or wait for too long, it will find you. The utter dread of sneaking from location to location, often without seeing the alien but knowing that it is searching relentlessly for you is agonising.
• You just know the Ao Oni could pop up any minute with his Nightmare Face...
• Black Snow (Half-Life 2) takes this to extremes. A good deal of the game is spent trying to fight off the cold and scrounging for a way to get off the station. And your enemy? It might as well be the literal darkness, as it's a very aggressive form of fungus that looks like a malevolent shadow.
• Castlevania II: Simon's Quest does this, with Dracula's ruined castle and the preceeding bridge being devoid of enemies.
• Dead Island 2: The entire trip through the CDC tents and the Santa Monica pier is devoid of zombies, save for one encounter to get a key. However, there are a lot of corpses lying around, and zombies are known to play dead so the player will constantly be checking if there's any zombies in the room with them. Worst of all, it's dark and carnage in the CDC tents and pier build up the suspense that there is something vicious lurking around. While getting their blood drawn, and therefore extremely vulnerable, the slayer will keep checking behind them as they keep hearing things but ultimately nothing comes out to attack. While traveling through the pier you can hear something laugh and screech until you get on the ferris wheel, where the player will be ambushed by a butcher zombie trying to eviscerate them with nowhere to run.
• Easter: At some point, Easter is forced to tiptoe in the dark to evade the killer, only guided by the sounds of Totl and Mugwort's footsteps.
• Eternal Darkness is organized in chapters, during each of which the player controls a different character. Most of the characters go mad or die horribly at the end of their chapter. The story is tied together by the main character, who is reading their stories. Between each chapter she wanders around the Lovecraft Country house looking for the pages of the next chapter. Nothing happens to her until after the much later chapters, even after finding a weapon right at the beginning of the game, as well as several better weapons, and even playing a level in the same house she's wandering around. It doesn't help that there's a good chance that her Sanity Meter might be low just from reading a chapter, leading to Sanity Effects. It's almost a relief when she starts meeting things that can actually be killed...
  • The developers knew what they were about. The first screen of the game, even before the Nintendo and Sillicon Knights Vanity Plates, consists of an Edgar Allan Poe from The Raven^note (Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,\ Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before\ But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token\ And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, 'Lenore!'\ This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, 'Lenore!'\ Merely this and nothing more.), from its beginning through "doubting..." It even trails off into an ellipsis.
• Jurassic Park for the SNES. Not the whole game by any means, as most of it just involves walking around in a top-down view and blasting any dinosaur that gets in the way, but the indoor segments were a different story. Especially if you walked into one of those dark rooms without night vision equipped...
• Mass Effect:
  • Players of Mass Effect will quickly learn to cower at the sight of a stretch of empty terrain while exploring a planet in the Mako, as flat terrain surrounded by hills is a sign of a thresher maw nest. Only not every flat area is a nest. Which means that every time you are forced to drive over flat terrain, you will be on edge, waiting for the thresher to pop out.... This example actually fits into both the first and second categories, as sometimes the thresher will pop out and scare your pants off, and other times there really will be nothing there.
  • In Mass Effect 2, we get a side mission where we have to investigate an abandoned mine. We're treated to the standard zombie outbreak environment; ominous datapad logs, the shrieking of husks in the vents, and we even get to shoot a few husks. Then we reach the room we had to reach, and it's filled with dragon spikes, but barely any husks. Then we get to the exact spot in the room we need to be in and BAM! Husks come at us like locusts in a fucking swarm.
  • Mass Effect 3 features the Ardat-Yakshi Monastery. The first half are traversing suspiciously empty rooms, and the game even throws in a humourous Cat Scare where the player character gets alarmed at something falling over... followed by a squad member apologising for knocking over furniture. The last half sees you swarmed with nasty psychic vampire alien zombies with a horrific, gaunt appearance and the ability to One-Hit Kill you. Have fun!
• Pokémon Sun and Moon: At the end of Vast Poni Canyon, you walk into a deserted trial area. There is no trial captain, nor anyone else present, and the area has no soundtrack. You walk down a lengthy cave corridor towards the pedestal with the Z-Crystal on it, only interrupted by two scripted wild encounters, while getting an increasingly intense feeling that you're being fiercely stared at. It is only once you reach the pedestal at the end of the corridor that the Totem Pokémon jumps into view, roars at you and initiates the boss fight.
• Power Drill Massacre: One of the scariest parts of the game and what makes it so unique is that the killer is spawned at all times and is endlessly patrolling the factory, meaning he can be around the corner at literally any second.
• This trope is everywhere in the The 7th Guest, and all three seem to be in play. Any node you're in has a limited view of visibility, and areas only get brighter when you move to them. Navigating the second floor hallway can make you think something's going to happen... but most times it doesn't. You do catch glimpses of some of the other guests from time to time, but most of them actually seem friendly.
  • But what really runs this trope into the ground is the Basement Maze. There's never any way to tell which passage you've been down because every single one looks the same, and there's always the chance that you'll run straight into a dead end. And if you do, a Scare Chord hits you in the face, and Stauf utters, "Feeling...lonely?"
  • Ego even lampshades this trope just before entering.
    "I have a bad feeling about this..."
  • Subverted in the sequel, though, since Carl Denning happens to have a flashlight handy, so you'll always see whatever's in front of you.
• In The Ship: Murder Party, there is nothing more likely to crank a player's heart rate than another character walking nonchalantly past them in a wide hallway.
• The whole Silent Hill series uses this. All the time. Never before has radio static made your heart leap out of your mouth and go running for cover.
  • Even better is the fact that the monsters are attracted to light and sound, so you can either check out what's going on and at least have an advance warning, or avoid bringing attention to yourself as much as possible and risk an ambush.
  • One of the most terrifying scenes in Silent Hill is when you walk toward a door in the alternate hospital, on a narrow bridge of floor a few feet wide that is surrounded by a "moat" of endless void... and it's just another door leading to another hallway. One of the most effective uses of environment and camera in video game history.
  • Less powerful but still spook-worthy: empty rooms that dead-ended at a boarded-up window. Not joking. You turn to leave, and then comes a sudden crash of breaking glass, a couple of seconds after the third-person view shifts back towards the door. And if you were brave enough to go back into the rooms... they were still empty.
  • One instance where its the music is when you come out in the courtyard of the other world school, you come out side, and the music that starts up practically screams "SOMETHING'S COMING!" while the area is totally dark, it turns out to be completely empty.
  • In Silent Hill 2 at one point you were forced to stick your arm into a hole in the wall of a decrepit room, and the whole atmosphere of the place makes you watch in real dread... until nothing happens. This reaching into darkness is repeated a few other times in the game, but seldom more effectively than here.
    • This changes in Silent Hill: Homecoming, where there are a couple instances where you stick your arm into a hole and some unknown thing grabs hold of your arm. If you're not quick, you fall back with a bleeding stump where your arm used to be.
    • Played for laughs in a different Silent Hill game, if prompted, you almost stick your arm into a toilet, which builds up the tension, then has the heroine stop and reprimand you for making her attempt to stick her arm in a toilet.
  • There are also many strange rooms (such as the one with the butterflies or moths) with nothing in them at all despite them appearing clearly distinct from others, where the soundtrack just repeats ominous clanks and guttural buzzes that create far more unease than any of the monster-infested rooms.
  • Again in Silent Hill, the fourth floor of the alternate hospital. Your radio buzzes loudly, but there are no monsters.
  • Hell, the first twenty minutes or so of Silent Hill 2 is this trope. There are absolutely no monsters at all, but the entire atmosphere makes you feel like something is going to jump you at any second.
    • Just the first twenty minutes? Silent Hill 2 by far has the most examples of this trope! How about the glass shattering in one room of the Brookhaven Hospital, or the loud crash you hear in one of the Toluca Prison's restrooms after knocking on a locked bathroom stall?
    • If you go back, it's still locked and still no answer from the other side. Even if a Nurse popped out, the likes of which has only been seen also in the Silent Hill franchise, it wouldn't be as horrifying. We applaud you Team Silent, we applaud you.
    • Silent Hill 3 has a similar example. You start in the toilets of a shopping mall. If you knock on one of the stall doors, there'll be a knock in reply, prompting Heather to remark that it must be occupied. Shortly afterwards, you revisit the same stall in the Otherworld - if you knock again there will once again be a knock in reply, which freaks Heather out somewhat. When you go to leave, the stall door swings open revealing a bloodstained, but unoccupied, stall.
  • In Toluca Prison, there is a narrow hall of cells where some unseen prisoners make noises and a courtyard where you're surrounded by the sound of furiously galloping hooves. You will never see the source of either of these noises, and whatever's making them won't hurt you, but try not to spend three minutes standing on the gallows, psyching yourself up to sprint across the courtyard in the direction that you think the door is in.
    • Some of the scariest Background Music/noises are heard in empty or dead-end rooms. The prison morgue has the most pants-shitting sounds in the game, including a high-pitched siren-type noise when you jump down the hole, but nothing to hurt you. The dead end near where you find the Seductress tablet has an empty bloodstained cell with a creepy clock-like ambient noise.
    • There a hallway in the labyrinth that takes a noticeably long time to reach the end of. It starts out normal at first, and the further you move through it, the more the lighting turns red and creepy. At the end is a door, simply.
  • Shattered Memories has absolutely no monsters outside the nightmare world (except for a random shadow figure which doesn't harm you and really doesn't interact with you that much), but you still feel like you could be attacked at any moment. Everything is creepy, even though it seemingly does nothing to try to be creepy.
  • The mannequin room. You enter the room, and the only real object of interest seems to be the completed mannequin by the door. The room isn't that big, so the only thing to do before leaving is explore the other side, but all you can see is shelf upon shelf of mannequin parts — until you hear a brief scream accompanied by a vague chopping sound come from the side of the room you just got done poking around in. Returning to that side of the room reveals the mannequin you just saw not even five minutes ago, decapitated and stained with blood.
    • The use of mannequins as creepy factors in Silent Hill have been done later on (say, the second boss of Silent Hill: Homecoming, in which it says nothing- which is much creepier than the growls of the other enemies and sort of brings along this trope), but nothing compared to the Mannequin Room from SH3.
    • In the same game, you enter the hospital basement, hear a creaking noise, and round a corner to find an overturned wheelchair with its wheel still spinning, and the walls bloodstained and riddled with bullet holes, but no signs of life.
  • Approaching the apartments' third floor door in SH2, you hear a Sinister Scraping Sound that happens to be the same sound as Pyramid Head dragging his knife, although this is well before he is introduced. The music accompanying the sound is also hair raisingly terrifying as well.
  • One of the most disturbing encounters in SH2 is the "prisoners", these are entities that cannot hurt you and cannot be seen as they're just nebulous darkness in prison cells. It’s possible that you might pass them right by, unless you hear their moaning and muttering and take aim and realize James notices something in those cells, you can even kill the prisoners but you’ll just be murdering an empty hitbox.
  • While less liked than the previous three games, what Silent Hill 4: The Room undeniably did well was this trope. In the spirit of Hitchcock's Rear Window you’re just trapped inside one claustrophobic room, and can only glimpse the outside world where people either who want help you like Aileen or people who want to kill you like Walter. Worse still even when you do make it out of the room, you only meet the people Walter has killed and you can do nothing to prevent their deaths.
    • Getting chased by Walter is particularly horrifying not only because he’s as relentless as Pyramid Head but there's certain camera shots where you can see him just standing still and staring at you and Aileen.
  • P.T. the interactive trailer for the canceled Silent Hills is all over this trope. In practice literally all you’re doing is waking down a L-shaped corridor with only one adjoining bathroom. But there’s clearly something very, very wrong with the house and the limited space makes for great claustrophobia, worsened by the fact in true Silent Hill fashion the corridor repeats itself when you get the end of it. Not to mention while you don’t encounter anything in the first few times you progress, there’s the unshakeable feeling that you’re Being Watched. Then you encounter Lisa.
• In Swat 4, many levels will leave you in silence, attempting to clear large areas with your vulnerable four man team, in many cases only aware that there may be armed perpetrators. You don't know where, you don't know how many.

• In Terraria, after defeating the second-to-last group of bosses in the game the message "Impending doom approaches" appears on screen, and everything starts going dark. All remaining monsters flee, and the music, which in Terraria never stops even in the creepiest of occasions, grinds to a halt, leaving you with an almost completely black, empty, silent screen. This goes on for about a minute until the Moon Lord appears.

• No One Lives Forever: A Spy in Harm's Way contains a brilliant example in a level set in at an Antarctic base. The protagonist infiltrates a secret base with the sole occupant being one scientist in the beginning that promptly dies. The rest of the level has the player explore the base without running into anyone, gathering loose pieces of information and finding ways to advance, all the time while the game's signature swinging 60s is absent and the only background sound in the wind blowing outside. It all comes to an end when the player finds schematics to a new super-soldier, and just then, the silence is interrupted by the blood curdling, anguished screams of one prototype super-soldier, who promptly goes on to obliterate everything in its path trying to get to you.
• Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 is like this at times. Made especially scary by the fact that fast zombies may not attack for several minutes after they scream...
  • Made even more so by the fact that the standard zombies will often times lie dormant, sometimes hidden among the actual corpses, and only rise to attack after you have passed by them.
  • City 17 Underground. The battles with zombies are far more preferable to walking through almost complete darkness with the only sounds made by the player and Alyx.
    • One of those sounds, it should be pointed out, is Alyx making scary zombie growls. Alyx is lucky the player can't shoot her.
  • Episode Two has some of this. First, the beginning, where the player and Alyx find an old trainyard. You can hear the lurking Hunter moving around, but you don't see any more than an easily-missed glimpse of it, and one of its unfortunate victims until it impales Alyx and pins you under a pile of rubble. Also, the farmhouse after the radio tower battle.
  • The third-party modification Dear Esther features no action, no enemies, and no weapons. The only sounds are haunting music and narrated snippets of a letter written to some woman named "Esther" that are played out as your character walks a path around a deserted island. It gets very unnerving in places.
• The Dark Eye, which is based on several Edgar Allan Poe works, has some of the scariest moments just in roaming about the bare house where the framing story takes place. Nothing happens until you touch a single specific object to move the plot along, but it's disturbing as hell to be there alone.
• Doom³ had a level like this (Delta Labs Sector 1) about halfway through the game. You finally get to the place in the complex where the monster attacks are coming from... and for the first 10 minutes of the level, nothing. No combat whatsoever. With the announcer repeatedly jabbering about emergency power only, the hisses and screeches of various demons, and the frequent sight of Imps crawling on the windows, tension runs pretty high... but absolutely nothing attacks you. It all only comes back to normal after you go through a surprisingly lengthy jaunt to recover a Data Linker. It ends up being one of the scariest and most memorable sections of the game.
  • Aliens TC, an early and elaborate fan-made total conversion of the original Doom, also used this trope. The first level had no enemies at all, although there were several indications that something was amiss; acid holes in the floor, broken machinery, and the ticking sound of a motion tracker. For 1994 it was extremely effective and the author was apparently courted by several games development houses immediately thereafter.
• This trope is one of the reasons why Thief: Deadly Shadows' "Shalebridge Cradle" is one of the scariest video game levels of all time. The first part of the level has nothing in it whatsoever. It's just dark, and has freaky ambient noises. To get to the second half, you have to go down to the basement and and turn the generator on, which causes enough noise that you just KNOW will have alerted anything within a mile radius. It also turns most of the lights on, leaving little shadow to hide in.
  • This is used twice in the same level. At some point in the first empty part of the Cradle you hear the sound of something beating on a door, trying to get out. The ONLY way to proceed further in the level is to walk up several flights of stairs all the way to a single solitary door leading into the attic. Right outside the door the beating sounds are loud and frantic. Once you muster the courage to open the door you find... an empty room. For starters, at least.
• Zork: Some of the most chilling words ever to appear in any video game: "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."
  • Nicely one-upped by Zork: Grand Inquisitor: early in the game, you can only escape getting arrested by climbing down into a deep, dark well. Then you have a few minutes to catch your breath, look around the inside of the well, see nothing but blackness, try to take a step forward ... and then you hear a roar, and a chomping noise. Game over.
  • Though the grue disguise in Zork: The Undiscovered Underground, the Grue Repellent and Grue Convention of Zork III, and the Snavig spell (turns you into the target creature, i.e. "snavig grue") kind of ruin their scariness.
• F.E.A.R.
  • The first level has exactly zero enemies, just try not firing your weapon in it. There are lots of dark, creepy hallways in the rest of the game that would make great ambush points for enemy soldiers and psychic little girls... and most of them are completely empty and no less terrifying for it.
  • Later on in the game, while moving through the ATC headquarters' research division, there's a laboratory off to the side with a scientist who has been dragged halfway up into a vent, with his legs hanging out, and his body is still twitching violently as something is tearing at his upper body. Then, the corpse goes limp and falls back down. You have no idea what it was that killed him - which is a hell of a lot creepier than knowing what killed him.
  • Your first entrance to the ATC headquarters is like this; you get ambushed while your helicopter is dropping you off, you fight off a few Replica near the helipad, and then for the next ten minutes, they pull back and have invisible Assassins watching you. One of them tosses a body through a glass wall right in front of you. You'll be glad when they show themselves again.
  • And then, a few levels further in, you fall down into the infrastructure of the building. Seemingly endless maintenance corridores, air ducts and pipes. For quite some time, you just creep around the empty, silent halls, to the point that a ventilation fan turning on can make you jump. The Replica soldiers coming down in a lift at the end of the level are really a relief.
  • Before this, there's the sewage underground cooridor. Sudden scary "feeling", then all the rats haul ass from the opposite direction you HAVE to go, and the main character's breath suddenly increases as you proceed forward (along with your own).
  • The first level of Interval 7 is also devoid of enemies for the most part, with poltergeist activity being your only company, including the elevator inexplicably malfunctioning. One out-of-the-way office has blood dripping down the wall but otherwise nothing of interest.
• The Ocean House Hotel in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is a haunted hotel, naturally. While there are a smattering of scripted events, a great deal of it involves you just stumbling around in the dark, and only a complete nit of a gamer could ever seriously run the risk of dying within. It's still a terrifying experience.
  • To some, no other example shows the singular power of this trope. Your character is an immortal vampire and even though you've just been turned you can still take several shots to the face from a pistol and regenerate from it in a pretty short time. You might be able to turn invisible or run faster than a car or any other weird supernatural powers. But whatever you're facing is an unknown - and that's always more powerful than anything you know.
  • There is also the scene in the abandoned hospital, you see scripted events of people being dragged around corners to their death, then the friendly quest-giver NPC at the bottom mentions this trope: "Real terror is not the sight of death. It is the fear of death. What is the fear of death? Terror of the unknown."
  • The Nosferatu Warrens: no enemies to speak of, but still astoundingly creepy because of the fact that the place is almost deserted, and there's a mysterious whispering that follows you from the moment you enter the area. It turns out that most of the local Nosferatu have become invisible and are now stalking you, occasionally hissing in your ears, waiting patiently for you to make the wrong move. And then Gary leaps out of the darkness, yelling "BOOO!" and it's almost a relief to have a jagged-toothed sewer-dwelling monstrosity laughing at you.
  • The game also pulls this in the museum in an awesome manner. At the start of the museum, you're in a storage area, moving to the main building. The section consists of empty hallways and rooms filled with crates. Somewhat unnverving but at least it's well-lit. Then you open the door and come nose-to-nose with a velociraptor! Numerous players reported literally shrieking when that happened. And it gets worse: The velociraptor in question was a model. Yes. Big scary vampire almost had a heart attack (figuratively speaking, of course) from a model dinosaur.
    • You even find an angry note from a security guard who fell for the same thing.
• This trope is one of the reasons why System Shock 2 is consistently voted one of the scariest games of all time, even today. it's true that the monsters, unexpected computer voices, and explosions are frightening, but the true horror comes in once you've cleared an area out. You've been shattering hybrid skulls with precious ammunition and fighting tooth-and-nail for survival for 5 adrenaline pumping minutes, and suddenly, silence. They're gone. You'll be wired and jumpy and you'll be seeing unmistakable twitches out of the corner of the screen, but it's nothing. It's always nothing. Just your own footsteps and the sounds of the ship's autonomic systems, and that's when you realize there's nothing on this god-damn ship but you, a malevolently insane AI, and hordes of despairing abominations who could be RIGHT AROUND THAT CORNER.
  • And will be. You can clear out an area and make it safe to inhabit, but only for a while; the game is diabolically clever in this regard, and will spawn new enemies far away from your current location just so you get to hear them hunting you down. There's times in that game where it's awfully damn hard not to just cower in a dark corner and wait to be slaughtered.
  • The original has its moments too. Players who think they'd cleared out the maintenance level of Citadel Station are completely surprised when one of those invisible blobs wandered up and smacked them. A full clip of ammo was spent on it, just to make sure.
• Deadnaut manages to keep this going throughout its tense running time. While your crew is not under attack, the only sounds you hear are occasional pieces of electronic ambience, and very muffled screams from somewhere off in the distance. Even while being attacked, the gunfire seems too muffled to break this tension.
• In Gungrave, which is a game that is all about being the badass—just mowing through hordes and hordes of enemies easily through every level, the last level can be very unsettling because there are very little enemies and the music isn't the standard tune, it's quiet, with a few random screeches on a violin every once in a while.
  • In the sequel, there's a stretch of hallway just before your chosen character tackles the final boss. There's no music or hostile enemies, only the sound of machinery humming and your character's footsteps. You can shoot the test tubes full of those little seed parasite creatures to build up your Beat Meter/Demolition Gauge, which results in them letting out an ear-raping shriek.
• In Left 4 Dead, hearing a sobbing Witch and knowing she's close and you have to be careful or you'll startle her and she'll screech and try to rip you apart - and sometimes you just don't find her. This is enhanced when the game prevents common infected from spawning in these moments, so the player knows something's up...
  • This is even more scary in Left 4 Dead 2's infamous Hard Rain campaign. It isn't bad enough to have 20 Witches, it isn't bad enough to have them walk around, it isn't bad enough that all but three of the Special Infected can push you into one (and will appear absolutely out of nowhere), and it also isn't bad enough to have to fight Tanks during this, but they also had to throw in the sugar cane fields (where your vision is reduced to about 2 feet in front of you).
    • And then it gets even worse on the way back through! Whenever the storming starts up, all the Witches in the area will HOWL IN RAGE yet the odds of you actually running into one are pretty low. This continues right up until the finale, and you can never tell if that howl is on the other end of the level or just around that corner...
    • It doesn't help that the sounds made by the storm can resemble startled Witches.
  • Forget Witches, sometimes you hear a Special Infected or its musical cue long before you see it or you know it's around the corner but don't want to be the guinea pig. The worse still, is when the Tank music starts playing but takes its time finding you so players are left frantically trying to spot it whilst trying to stick together or rethink their plans.
  • Speaking of Tanks, they too are set to be idle until a survivor gets too close. Unlike with the Witch, they cannot be avoided, and do not play their music until they actually engage the player. Better open those doors with discretion...
  • The worst scares you can get in Left 4 Dead 2 is in the mutation The Last Man On Earth, where it's single-player with no bots, and no Common Infected. It can get very eerie walking through the level alone while hearing the growls of Special Infected sneaking up on you, and since you're alone they are far deadlier.
    • What's even worse than that is the fact that the single character's vocal script is unchanged, meaning that they talk to thin air - even taking to specific survivors who aren't there anymore. Not to mention the occasional "Hello?" or "Where you all at?".
• In the Quake III: Arena Mod "Dark Conjunction" almost every single part of the game that isn't a battle is like this. In one scene: You walk into a room with strange pillars, each pillar has a glass ball with a human head floating in it. After a while of complete silence, the eyes open up with a chilling sound and you are briefly teleported into a strange room with a great big Eldritch Abomination staring down at you. You can't move, so you just stare at this big horrible alien demon thing for ages... But nothing happens, and eventually you are transported back as if nothing happened, and the locked door you needed to open to get through opens by itself.
  • Similarly the whole series of They Hunger mods for Half-Life used this well, along with every zombie trope in the Wiki.
• The Siren Games are pretty bad for this. Often you'll be walking in a nearly pitch black house, village, whatever with no weapon and sight jack. You'll be able to see through the Shibito's eyes but you won't actually KNOW where they are visually until you hear them. This is bad because generally you're too afraid to go forward even though the Shibito are dumb as a pile of hammers and aren't likely to do much.
  • Also, there'll be no music or any indication anything's wrong when suddenly the screen will flash red and you'll hear a Shibito yell from near you providing a wonderful "omg wtf what that?!?!?!" moment complete with running in random directions and possibly pissing yourself.
• In Diablo, the dungeon levels are large and there can be quite a distance between the monsters, which only adds to the suspense and scariness of the game. Even more so because there are monsters that can turn invisible and sneak up on you, and others that charge you from far off-screen with a blood-curdling roar.
• Portal: After discovering the truth behind the cake, GLaDOS continues to talk at you as you make your way through the back end of the facility. Because many of her lines are threats against the player's life, going through the facility is hell - nothing ever happens, but you're constantly fearing that something might...
  • The effect of this level on players who rely heavily on hearing as a habit. In the final level, much like the rest of the game, there is total silence, punctuated very occasional by mechanical creaks and thumps. When you're going through the level searching for ANY sign of life, alive or otherwise, and you expect every door to try to kill you anyway, these little sounds can be terrifying.
    • And after walking along for ages you get to a place where you walk down a short hallway that is immediately, and silently, blocked off by some sort of pillar. You step into the next room and the floor slides out from under you, dropping you into a room full of turrets. It's scarier after the long silences.
  • From the very start of the game, the windows to the offices above you give you the eerie sensation that you are being watched. But when you see these windows from the other side, you realize there was no-one watching you, which in turn, raises a question: Where is everybody?
  • Really, the whole game is this. From the beginning, GlaDOS's vaguely sinister remarks, the occasional death-trap, and the fact that nothing has happened yet lead the player to think that surely something will in the next chamber... or the next... or the next...
  • GLaDOS herself is a tremendous case of this. You don't ever see her until the absolute final room of the game. You just hear her. And at first, you don't realize there's a "her" at all. The messages sound generic, automated, predetermined. But then they start glitching out. And, suddenly, something completely innocuous sounds like a death threat thanks to a missing word here or there. But slowly, surely, throughout the game, you start to realize that somewhere, someone or something is talking to you. Uniquely, specifically, to you. And those glitches were no glitches at all. But even after the revelation, you still never see her. The game doesn't even give you the tiniest, tiniest indication of who she is, where she is, what she is, what she looks like... All you know is that she can see everything you do, and she wants you dead. The moment before you finally lay eyes on her are far and away the most tense, terrifying, and utterly electric few seconds in the game.
• Portal 2 ups the paranoia with old Aperture. There are signs plastered everywhere telling you to stay out under all circumstances, and massive chambers that have been locked, locked again, then relocked for good measure that you obviously have to trek through to progress. You keep going through the place expecting something to happen but it never does.
  • There are signs that say that parts were vitrified. That means that they were cooled until their atoms formed a glass like grid, and it is done to nuclear waste to make it "less" deadly. And they did this to "miles" of underground test chambers. That means that Aperture Science was so afraid of whatever was in there they felt the need to TURN IT INTO GLASS! And you never find out what was in there! You get hints of course, with mentions of time travel, gamma radiation, and an army of Mantis Men but you never find out what it was exactly that was in there.
  • It should also be mentioned that one of GlaDOS' earlier lines involves an entire wing of the facility that was completely made of glass. Due to the accident, she had to pick up 15 acres of broken glass. This line can be either funny if thought of as one of her lies, or else terrifying if you think it's real.
• Dead Space is a fan of this, especially in the space walk segments, where you can't hear any noises except sounds from inside your suit and coming up from the ship, meaning you'll never know the necromorph is right behind you until you see him slashing you across the back.
  • Unfortunately, when inside the ship, unless you are in an area with lots of large machinery running, the Necromorphs often loudly announce their presence, which kinda kills the tension.
    • And of course, if you think that's bad, try turning off the music and wandering the Ishimura in silence. No stings, no problem, right? Wrong. Without the stings to warn you when something is just out of view, you get real paranoid real quick.
  • Perhaps best illustrated by the Hunter, an enemy that regenerates severed limbs and can shrug off any damage you throw at it. Actual combat with the Hunter isn't too scary, especially once you realize you can control it by cutting off its legs and/or freezing it, but the real terror comes from hearing the damn thing howl as it stalks you through the ventilation system, ready to strike the moment you let your guard down...
    • Brutes share a similar schtick; fights with them are more thrilling than scary. In cases where they don't suddenly jump out at you, on the other hand, the buildup to having to fight one can be terrifying, especially when that involves just hearing their roars coming out of the darkness (as is the case in Chapter 1, a full three chapters before you get to find out where those noises are coming from).
  • The mission on the habitation deck has this too. The first room in that area has plenty of dead bodies lying around, having been prepared for assimilation by the mad doctor. And yet, nothing happens. You keep expecting them to wake up and attack you, but they don't. For the whole level, which forces you to pass through that area a few times, that particular area remains completely dead, with nothing other than someone, somewhere, singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" in an immensely creepy way. In the end, when infectors do show up and start infecting the bodies, it's a very liberating experience to finally blow them away.
  • Done to great effect in Chapter 10 of the sequel, upon Isaac's return to the Ishimura. After slaughtering your way through nine chapters of Necromorph-stuffed corridors and hallways, you've started to get used to encountering them everywhere you go. So you would think that dozens of empty rooms and walkways would be a welcome change of pace, but if anything the quiet, empty corridors and constant expectation of attack that never come makes it one of the scariest portions of an already terrifying game
    • When you acess the shops, music stops playing. But some disturbing whispering can be heard if the volume is loud enough.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum features a showdown in Killer Croc's lair; an abandoned sewer beneath Arkham. Croc's just a stupid brute, right? You'll just have to trick him into running headlong into something or exploit his weak point, right? Nope, he spends most of the scene underwater, listening for you. If you move too fast, he'll figure out where you are and drag you down to your doom. So you have to move through the level gathering plot coupons at a glacial pace, with only the sound of Croc's breathing keeping you company. Unless he decides to come up and attack (and if he catches you, you're not getting away), which gets nerve wracking, really quick.
  • Unfortunately, you can destroy that by just crouch-walking, which is fairly quick, and using a quick batarang throw to knock him back into the water.
    • In other words, just crouch walk and keep your finger on the quick batarang. That can really kill the mood.
    • You can also use the line launcher to get around, which is quicker than crouch walking if you only need to travel in a straight line (and you can even use it as a shortcut in areas where there are gaps between planks that would otherwise require to go around) and since you're no longer walking on the planks Croc doesn't get alerted. He will still attack you randomly, but using the batarang subdues him as normal. The barriers that you have to climb over were probably put there by the developers to prevent this strategy from being too much of a Game-Breaker.
  • There's also an area that is used to house the criminally insane in group cells. If you're unfortunate enough to be using Detective Vision (which you will use all the damn time), all you see are hordes of red skeleton enemies before you even go through the door to the room. Then the door opens and reveals all the enemies are still securely locked up, and they are never freed the entire time you walk through the room. That happens later.
  • During the first Scarecrow nightmare, you end up entering a morgue that has nothing dangerous at all in it except for some body freezer doors opening and closing on their own and some creepy whispering. Then you leave through the same door you came in, except you can't, the door now opens into the exact same room you're trying to leave, only now there are three body bags containing Thomas Wayne, Martha Wayne, and Scarecrow respectively.
    • It gets worse when you realize the little puff of gas that makes Batman cough at certain points is fear toxin, meaning whatever you encounter in the upcoming rooms is going to be rough.
  • On the flipside, some of the most fun parts of the game are the Predator sections where you get to be the cause of this for a group of mooks. As you pick them off one-by-one, the remaining mooks become increasingly more terrified as they have no clue where you are, which one of them will be the next one you get, or what direction you'll come from when you do get them.
• Final Fantasy VII does this magnificently with the buildup to the Big Bad Sephiroth, you don’t physically see him in the flesh until Cloud’s Nibelheim Flash Back in Kalm, which is well after Midgar but the sheer ominous dread and fear in Cloud and Tifa’s words as they talk about him is very apparent. His first action in the story killing President Shinra and all the guards while the gang are imprisoned happens entirely off-screen and the entire sequence is the party following the trail of blood and finding the bodies he left behind (see the Nothing At All example below) giving validation to his power and his feared Fallen Hero reputation. When Sephiroth is properly introduced and later fought, all the buildup is well earned. The remake unfortunately ditches this trope due to the imprisonment sequence being Adapted Out and Sephiroth appearing more early and frequently throughout the game^note although to be fair he is one of the biggest selling points .
  • Remake does employ this with the Train Graveyard which has been expanded into a whole level. For the first part of it, Cloud, Aerith and Tifa are just travelling through an abandoned junk heap and crawling over and walking through broken train carts. No ghosts appear since it’s a non-combat segment but the whole place is very clearly haunted and ominous that even the heroes (particularly Tifa) are creeped out and reluctant to progress. When the ghosts do show up, it’s almost a relief.
• In Chrono Cross, the final battle against the game's Eldritch Abomination is the only battle in the game without any Background Music. All the soundtrack offers are distorted sounds like distant crashing waves, or a mournful wind. It does a good job of heightening the tension.
  • Chrono Trigger did this too in Magus's Castle — there's no Background Music when you first enter, which makes the hypnotized-seeming dialogue of the human servants who are actually demons and zombies in disguise all the more unnerving.
    • There's also a miniboss who takes the form of a bat and quietly flutters around you while you explore, making you increasingly frustrated, wondering when he will attack. But he won't do so until you've defeated his partner. So if you happen to choose the fork that leads to his boss room, you'll find it empty. Then you have to go all the way back.
    • There's no Background Music, but there is an unusually high-fidelity recording of children laughing in the distance. It's not quite silent, but definitely makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
• Ace Combat does this at least twice.
  • In Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, the briefing for the final mission, "Megalith" - it does admittedly make the mission's Ominous Latin Chanting that bit more startling, though.
  • In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War's Mission 12, after accomplishing the first objective, the screen flashes completely white, your HUD shows a missile warning for a few seconds, your wingman starts shooting at you, and the Background Music suddenly stops.
  • And how about your wingman yelling "The 8492nd squadron does not exist!" then the music stops and tons of enemies appear from nowhere.
  • Also in the mission right after that one, where you're flying around a volcanic island trying to ditch your pursuers. You can hear their radio chatter, and your wingmen sometimes talk to them and you, but your radar is on the fritz and you never get a good glimpse at the enemy. Unnerving at times.
• Halo:
  • In Halo: Combat Evolved, the first part of the level "343 Guilty Spark" is like this. After an initial bout of Covenant enemies, you spend the rest of the first half of the level wandering around in complete silence. There's also the one Marine who evidently saw the Flood, and was driven insane by it. When you find him, he starts screaming "The monsters are everywhere!", which only serves to ramp up the Paranoia Fuel up to eleven. Worse is the implications of things happening everywhere. You find broken barricades, shattered glass, bullet casings, hallways and floors absolutely covered in various kinds of alien blood. Sometimes you even find piles of corpses behind locked doors. All you have that you think could be behind this is a strange green sludge that's dripping from the ceiling in certain parts that you've never seen before.^note Somewhat undone by the Anniversary edition, where general consensus is the level does a disservice to the paranoia fuel by removing certain bloodstains, making the green sludge harder to see, and lighting the level up.
    • Especially when you realize that all the barricades and defenses that have been set up and positioned in such a way as to counter something trying to get out of the facility, rather than something trying to force its way in. And you are headed into the direction those defenses are set to defend from...
    • The most unsettling part? For the entire game you've been accompanied by a wise-cracking AI who tells you where to go and helps get you out of tough situations. This is the first of two levels where she isn't there, and without her there to explain things to you, the Flood is a much scarier foe.
  • Ditto for the first few minutes of Halo: Reach, which features an in-game homage to Aliens's famously tense motion sensor sequences.
  • A less telegraphed reference to the motion sensors in Aliens occurs in, once again, "343 Guilty Spark." Before the first of the Flood finally attack you, they have to spend a few moments breaking through the doors. Any player not already scared will almost certainly have a change of heart when they see that their motion tracker is suddenly swarming with red dots.
• The Godfather game is grounded in semi-reality and completely devoid of traditional supernatural horror elements. However, it does have the annoying tendency to have the music cut out completely at times. It's therefore much more startling if a hostile mobster starts shooting abruptly.
• In Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus there is an area with a massive gate outside it, allegedly to keep some horrible monster inside. The player wanders through the quiet, empty level for several minutes, constantly expecting the monster to appear and being severely creeped out when the reeds in the water beneath them move as if an animal is swimming right past you. After all of this excellently terrifying nothingness, the monster turns out to be a flamboyently-colored and cartoonish cobra thingy that moved so slowly you'd have to try to get caught by it.
• In Operation Flashpoint, you might be on patrol in a forest for ten minutes, encountering no enemies whatsoever and hearing nothing but the birds singing, when you walk right into an ambush and the scene explodes into a loud firefight. This being in stark contrast to a game like Call of Duty, where you're rarely not being shot at, the sudden transition is quite harrowing.
• The level Second Sun in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is like this. One minute, you and your squad are making a heroic last stand in and around a downed helicopter. The next, a nuke goes off over DC, and everything electronic shorts out. It's one minute of madness as planes and helicopters fall from the sky and come crashing down all around you, and the squad is running for cover in panic. And then, just silence. Then it starts to rain heavily as the last light of the day fades. Suddenly, in a flash of lighting, three enemies are spotted in front of you.
  • And then there's another encounter later in the level when the squad is sneaking through the ruins and the lighting reveals another squad crossing the street 20m ahead of you, completely oblivious to your team. Unsure of whether they're friend or foe, Sergeant Foley shouts the challenge "Star". They don't respond.
• In the space-sim Dark Star One, all the space systems happen to have every spaceborne object you need to view within a short distance of each other, with the exception of the system where the Big Bad once was. The distant-looking asteroid belt can actually be reached and mined for minerals, and nothing impedes you from going there... but there's minutes of flying, silently, to get there.
• In The Suffering, much of the navigational and informal help can be seen through watching the prison surveillance cameras. You click on the control panel to watch them, and the window then takes up the entire screen, they are also in real-time, so you'll be watching a security guard being torn to bits by shank-monsters while it happens. You can also gather that there's going to be monsters in that room when you come to it. This is more of a "warning" than it is a shock strategy. That is, until you watch a surveillance camera showing a guy watching a surveillance camera, and see a creature slowly walking towards him. You try and exit the screen as soon as possible, then turn around to see nothing at all.
• Irisu Syndrome!'s game folder, as you play the game, gets populated with text files containing character profiles. Irisu's profile, conspicuously, is just Visible Silence. There is a very good reason for this.
• Any moment of Minecraft that is spent in a dark place when you are not fighting monsters. Reason? In the dark, monsters spawn. Monsters spawn anywhere. Everywhere. If you've just opened up a hole into a cave system and hear growling, hissing, or clacking coming from it, you may be scared to venture into it, knowing a zombie, spider, or skeleton could be lurking around any corner. If you hear nothing, that's worse, because nothing is the sound that creepers make...
  • Endermen may creep some people out, but on the whole they aren't too scary in and of themselves. Once you set one off, however, and it teleports out of sight, the suspense of waiting for it to just go ahead and attack already is what makes fighting them such a trying experience.
  • There comes a moment while running around you hear one of the background sounds like lovely (terrifying) music but one of those sounds is very sinister. It's the same sound of an airplane flying over head, you look up to see it as a instinctual move and see... nothing. You are all alone. The sound can be heard here.
    • That is called an ambience, and it happens when you are near a dark area that's large enough, as a sort of indication or warning, even if that area is underound or behind a cliff face nearby and you actually can't see it. Nothing indeed.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. plays with that too. Every dungeon could easily "accommodate" for several dozen monsters, yet they usually hold only 2 or 3 monsters (which, to add insult to injury, are almost invisible). Most of the time is spent exploring dark, creepy old laboratories with plenty of pitch black rooms and scary noises, waiting for the moment "they" will appear. There are four main examples of this.
  • Your first encounter with a bloodsucker in the first underground section, you hear it screech, and since it's invisible, you only see its bright glowing eyes and perhaps its outline. When you go through the only way past the room it's in, it suddenly appears behind you and at close range. To add to that, there are a few human enemies in the room directly behind it, so you may be lucky enough to hear the bloodsucker find them first.
  • The second is the first encounter with a Controller. It's right at the end of an underground area, after you fight through human enemies and a few less lethal mutants, you think you're safe, and heading to the exit. You turn a corner and bam you get a Mind Rape, which in this game consists of the screen POV being pulled towards the monster, being twisted and manipulated and loud screeching.
  • The third is the Pseudogiant. As if the Poltergeists weren't bad enough, periodically you hear the footsteps of something very heavy, as in heavy enough to shake the ground, but at first that's all there is to it. And then you go down a staircase to the next level, to a suspiciously spacious area, and a hideously deformed former human comes running towards you, making the ground tremble with every step, snarling like a rabid animal.
  • The last is the Pyrogeist, in the first underground lab. You have to enter a locked door, all the while hearing something banging on the other side. You ready yourself for a fight, but nothing happens when you open the door. You spend most of the time in the lab in fear because you know this monster, that sounds like nothing you've encountered before, is going to come at you eventually.
  • Some of the ambient music can do this - shouts, roars, and distant gunfire pop up in the environment noise sometime, but there's no in-level source, so you never find out what happened.
  • The fight against two Burer mutants in Call of Pripyat. You won't see those scary little suckers for more than a few seconds during the whole fight, instead you will be sneaking through the surrounding rooms trying to figure out where they are while trying to avoid the objects they throw at you via telekinesis. Of course, it doesn't help that it all takes place in another dark underground structure.
  • In general, the Zone is mostly empty. Mostly. You can wander all the way from Agroprom to Dark Valley, seeing no other stalkers, nor any monsters. Try to relax, though, and get torn to shreds by pseudodogs or a rifle round through the head from a bandit looking for some loot. A successful play style can be doing this to Non Player Characters - taking out an enemy with a silenced sniper rifle from long range will visibly freak out his friends, but they won't be able to return fire.
• Mother 3: "Inside the mailbox was absolutely nothing. Nothing after nothing came bursting out."
• Yume Nikki is very good at this, but oddly enough, the best example wouldn't even be an example were it not for the fact that one of the game's secrets got out. See this◊? A little creepy, but not worth being the picture for the game's Nightmare Fuel page when there's entire worlds full of severed body parts, right? Thing is, if you want to see Uboa (which may well be why you're playing the game at all), you have to deal with a Random Drop mechanic: he only has a 1/64 chance of showing up, and then only under very specific circumstances. By the time you've spent ten minutes walking in and out of Poniko's house and flipping her lights off, Uboa's actual appearance and accompanying sound effects will make you jump about a foot.
  • And on a broader scale, the dream worlds are so big and have so much empty space that you never know when you're going to stumble onto something, and after you've found a few of the... weirder parts of Madotsuki's dreams, you realize that whatever it is, it's going to be deeply disturbing. But then, this is basically Earthbound meets Silent Hill...
  • Actually, for some, just the drastic change of the lights in Poniko's room turning on and off, without Uboa, is horror.
• Psychonauts: Although a quirky and humorous platformer for the most part, has an effective example of this in the Asylum upper floors. Having spent the majority of the game going through wacky levels where even the more sinister elements are offset by funny characters and dialogue, the abrupt shift to being all alone in an Abandoned Area that has a broken and twisted geometric design AND NO BACKGROUND MUSIC just the sounds of wind and metal creaking — is suffice to say is incredibly chilling. The only other character there, besides Raz and some attacking Confusion Rats is Shegor, who doesn’t hurt you (and turns out later is genuinely harmless), but the atmosphere is so unnerving the brief glimpses you catch of her staring at you are very alarming.
  • Milla's Dance Party surprisingly also has a example of this. While most of the Mental World is colourful, fun and groovy if you levitate over to an easily missable opening you find a conversely dark and creepy room, sparsely filled with children’s toys and a mental vault revealing Milla used to run an orphanage that accidentally burned down. Milla tells Raz it’s no fun in there, advises him to leave and definitely not to jump into the chest when it opens. Of course when the player naturally does exactly that, what they find next is the most infamous Nightmare Fuel in the game the burning nightmare souls of the orphans screaming at Milla in a hellish room.
• Of all places, it appears that Super Paper Mario invokes this trope. After Sammer's Kingdom gets destroyed by the Chaos Heart, Mario and friends return there to search for the Pure Heart. The previously colorful, vibrant kingdom of samurai has been replaced with... a gigantic white emptiness that you have to walk through for quite some time. It can be rather foreboding, especially with the music...until Mr. L shows up for a rematch, then the music takes an entirely different turn.
  • We can’t talk about SPM without mentioning River Twygz. Underwhere, where the river is located is already a creepy place since it’s an allegory for the Greek Underworld aka Hell but diving into the purple river and sinking lower and lower into darkness as the music goes from kid friendly to Nightmare Fuel is enough to put anyone on edge. Then you see the undead hands reaching for you.
• Myst? Where could nothingness ever be scary in that series? Try in Myst III: Exile, after you've seen the evidence of Saavedro's insanity and realize that you yourself are essentially trapped on those same worlds, with no humans and very little life save plants and a few animals, retracing Saavedro's footsteps as he desperately tried to find a way back home... And once you get to Narayan and meet Saavedro face to face and he locks himself in the bunker, you realize that he can get out to attack you at any time if he so feels like it, even though you can't get in. Saavedro never actually leaves the bunker until you solve a certain puzzle, and you're never actually in any danger (unless you don't solve the final puzzle correctly), but the loneliness of the ages and the sheer effect of nothing really going wrong up to that point is really creepy. Actually, the Myst series likes to use this trope quite a lot, come to think of it...
  • In the beginning of the game, Saavedro locks himself in the main J'nanin tusk and spends his time pacing around the room. When you first get in the elevator and raise it, he assumes that you're Atrus and calls out to you, but otherwise doesn't react. However, while he spends all his time pacing on the other side of the room from the elevator, that doesn't do anything to lessen the feeling that at any moment, he could walk right up to you...
  • Riven also uses this very effectively by leaving little hints around the game that Gehn is moving around the islands and aware of your presence. Knowing that he never catches you until fixed points in the game doesn't help much.
  • Likewise, if you don't know that you can't die (like I didn't), much of the Myst series is filled with the suspense of "Where did these skulls come from? What was that noise around the corner? Who closed that door; I know I left it open..." Nothing happens, but, like the trope suggests, nothing can be scarier than something.
  • What about Myst IV, where you know that there's someone sneaking around the place, but you never see more than a few seconds of him/her/it and you have even less idea what you're doing (in the other games at least you sort of knew where you were going) and around any corner this other person could be waiting for you. It doesn't help that early on a bridge collapses under you and you get knocked out. When you wake up, your best friend's daughter who you were looking after is gone. Creepy.
• Obduction has you hop around multiple alien worlds searching for why you just appeared on one. There is no one around except for a guy who holes himself up in his home. There is also a ton of stuff relating to what might have been an interstellar war between the four worlds you can explore, a possibility of a nuclear bomb being diverted at the last second, and ominous warnings about dodecahedrons. Hell, it's implied most of the puzzles you have to go through are defense systems left over from the war. Then you hit one world, and multiple things happen at once: a fight occurs and all you see is one of the allied races under a destroyed portion of wall even though you hear the gun blasts from it, he's making sure you can't leave until you see everyone hidden in cryostasis, and one of the dodecahedrons shows up. It's the only point in the game you can get a game over; just don't touch the dodecahedron. Notable because you don't actually see most of the action, but what faint glimpses you get of the after-action status and a rather large amount of the game's prior warnings coming into play almost at once makes it still a rather tense, disturbing moment for an adventure game with zero combat.
• Obsidian does this fantastically for its second dream world. You go in, having heard about Max's nightmare of a mechanical spider which he had to fix, and now this world puts you in his shoes for that same purpose. When you start, the spider is offline, and the whole place is a decrepit, nonfunctioning, but fairly well-lit factory, with some eerie Background Music for good measure. Not a single human is in this factory, no workers anywhere. Just you, the spider, and Max who wants you to open a grate that the spider is blocking with one of its feet. So your only option is to follow how the dream progressed and fix the spider. But as you go along, the spider shows more and more signs of life as you "fix the whole universe surrounding it". And by the time it's finished, the thing comes alive, and after smashing scaffolds and oil barrels and trying to gnaw on a lamp pole, it drops that and charges towards you instead. And there's nothing you can do except watch yourself get eaten — or rather, incinerated — alive. The only thing keeping you calm is the fact that, even when built by nanobots, it's still just a dream, backwards logic and all.
• An unintentional example lies in Star Wars Droidworks. After the 8 training missions are completed, you're assigned to 3 top-secret, "real-world" missions to test the skills you previously learned, but in each one, one of the imperial assassin droids that everyone fears so much is present. Worse, defense systems are not allowed for droids you build, and you can't save your progress. And each assassin has an equally terrifying encounter.
  • The Phrik Mine involves a simple repair job on the mine's Laser Powered Fusion Reactor. However, just as you think you're done, the lights go out, administrator F-TO tells you to check on it, and when you arrive, all three lasers have been sabotaged, where only one was before. Then, after you fix them, an assassin droid is right behind a door, laughing and spilling its bait plan while charging at you.
  • The Salvage Yard takes it lighter, where the droid is simply waiting around a corner in a yard, and you have to simply run across the yard and hope that falls down a crevice in the middle. The empty, dead ambience in the Salvage Yard itself still makes you feel on edge.
  • The Moisture Farm has to be the worst. After you've fixed the corrosion in the water tanks, the cowardly repair droid who was damaged by the assassin earlier, opens a door and ditches you, revealing the assassin standing right behind that door. But that's not all, you have to go behind the droid and through a series of cramped, flooded hallways with the hope that it didn't see you.
• AMBER: Journeys Beyond plays this amazingly well. You've arrived at a lakeside Haunted House in rural North Carolina, which, instead of looking decrepit, like most examples, looks recently cleaned and actually lived in. At the beginning, your car's crashed into the lake, leaving you stranded here. The house's owner, Roxy, is out cold in the garage and the power's out, with eerie red emergency lights to guide you to the main breaker. Things seem calm and quiet at first once you get the power back up, but after you activate Roxy's ghost-hunting equipment, the fear factor slowly escalates as the house's CCTV cameras pick up various apparitions one by one, relaying them to your handheld Pee K; from the ghost of Brice breaking into the kitchen and picking up a knife, to Margaret's bedroom oozing blood from its walls and filling up the space. Things get even more disturbing when Roxy calls you on the house phone and tells you what happened to her, after which her AMBER headset starts up, allowing you to wear it. With it on, you can hear distorted voices echoing in several places, including outside. And when you get close to one of those voices, the AMBER lets you venture into the mind of a ghost who's trapped there, through a chillingly bizarre out-of-body transition which ends with you staring back at the person who died in the past. And their ghost doesn't recognize a thing. Since it's up to you to help these spirits pass on, what happens to them depends on the person in question.
• Enemy Zero, an old first-person adventure game for the Sega Saturn. Picture this: you're on a spaceship out in the middle of nowhere, and a bunch of nasty aliens have come aboard and murdered everyone save you and a few others. Problem is, the aliens are completely invisible, and you get to roam the corridors of the ship, completely unable to see them. Your only way of knowing they're around is a sonar-ish device that starts pulsing louder and faster depending on how close the aliens are, all of which is absolutely nerve-wracking. The slightest peep will have you spooked, to say nothing when the aliens can be heard growling closeby. Bring My Brown Pants, please.
• Resident Evil does this as much as Silent Hill.
  • The Resident Evil Gamecube remake has one hallway lined with windows. When you walk through it, you hear a clink, as though one of the windows just cracked (if you're next to the window, you can actually see the glass cracking). Nothing else happens in that hallway, but it makes your blood freeze. The second time you pass through it though...
  • This was made specially for everyone who played the original. The dogs jumping through the windows scared most of us. Then we all played the remake, and were expecting the dogs again, but nothing happened.
  • The basement, particularly the filthy, dimly lit kitchen, has the same effect, aided by some really unnerving Background Music. Doubly so in the remake.
  • In fact, the vast majority of the Resident Evil franchise has this effect. Better rendered environments help with the atmosphere, of course, so the newer installments (REmake and Resident Evil 0 in particular) have more of this, but almost every game has several rooms where, even with all the enemies dead, the room itself will make your skin crawl. Notable examples are basement and parts of the lab from REmake, the dimly lit operating room and the winding Training Facility corridors from 0, and the Infirmary from Code: Veronica.
  • Aside from the sewers (which also uses this trope to great effect: setting up the Novistadors through terrifying ambient noises, their use of ambush tactics, and the fact that they're mostly invisible even as you fight them), one of the only really scary places in Resident Evil 4 is the operation room. You see the gray guy. You know he's going to attack you. And then he doesn't. And he keeps not doing it. He's just lying there, waiting for you to finish reading the text log describing how hard to kill he is. Then, when you finally get the card key and start to make your way back out, you hear him break out and, in all likelihood, try in vain to beat him before abandoning the fight and running away because he's almost invincible. But it doesn't end there. You escape him, and then get out into the hallway. Basically, your next experience should be "whew I escaped let's keep goiHOLYSHITANOTHERONE!"
    • Speaking of the Novistadors, there's the fight with the Colmillos in the hedge maze, which works very similarly. The maze keeps you from seeing very far ahead of you, and you know that one could suddenly come running around a corner or jump through a hedge wall at any moment. The near-constant, vicious growls keep you on your toes the entire time, and the only thing worse is when those growls shift into the sound of panting, because that means one of them is chasing you and you have only seconds to figure out where it is.
  • The buildup to the boss fight with Verdugo is one of the other examples. We've encountered it several times already in cutscenes, starting a chapter ago, but all we know about it is that it's far from human since we only glimpse its mandibles and glowing eyes peeking from within the hood of its cloak. Then it's built up through a cutscene from its point of view, stalking you as you make your way to the boss room, followed by a second one shortly after you enter the boss room in which it demonstrates its speed and power as it locks you in the room and you still can't see it. Once it finally does start attacking you, you only see its tail or, more rarely, a brief flash of its upper torso as it attacks from the ceiling and beneath the floor, growling and snarling from its unseen hiding spots at all other times. Following a long, very tense period after you call for the elevator in which nothing happens, he finally properly reveals himself and this trope lets up... though of course, the player quickly comes to fear him for an entirely different reason.
    • The first segment of the U-3 boss battle pulled a similar trick. The boss himself is more disgusting than scary, apart from moments where he can be hard to fight and the fact that he can't be killed until the second part of the fight. The part that grates on your nerves is whenever you damage him enough to make him hide, and no matter where you run you can still hear the sound of his guttural breathing as though he's right next to you, about to lunge... and then he does. (Also, its appearance is foreshadowed only by a single cutscene awhile before, in which Saddler merely refers to the creature as "it," keeping its identity a total mystery until the fight begins.)
  • The first encounter with a Licker in Resident Evil 2. You enter a room where there's no music playing, then you see something run across the window. Enter the next hallway, still no music, then the Licker drops down from the ceiling.
  • The interrogation room in Resident Evil 2, with the one-way window between the entrance and a file cabinet with an important object in it. You fully expect something to smash through the window as soon as you grab said object. Nothing does - they wait until after you've passed by the window a second time.
  • Any time a Nemesis attack is imminent in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. You know he's going to burst in on you, you just don't know when. The unbelievably tense music that plays during this time does not help.
  • Lampshaded and subverted in Resident Evil – Code: Veronica Flash Edition by LegendaryFrog based on the part where Claire walks down the area where dogs are hiding but let her past the first time and 3/4ths of the way back. "Something's going to jump out at me... something's going to jump out at me... phewwww". When she's gone, some zombies jump out and complain about being late and missing the chance to scare Claire because of decomposing bladder issues.
  • Resident Evil 4 has a couple notoriously subverted examples of this kind of jumpscare. The most famous of which occurs in the later parts of the game on the military island. At the beginning of a corridor lined with open cells, the ever-present breathing of a regenerator (which by this point in the game has established itself as an enemy guaranteed to make one shit their pants if it gets close). One would think that it's in one of the open cells you're dangerously close to... Nope. It's at the end of the hall right as you're about to turn, and worse, it has a habit of getting quiet when you get close to it.
  • Resident Evil 6 has some of this in the first level of Leon's campaign. You enter an eerily silent college campus, with signs of disaster everywhere. No power, debris on the floor, broken glass. Completely deserted and not a soul to be seen. Then you enter a large banquet hall, meals set up on the tables and everything. Completely silent and rather creepy. Then you catch a glimpse of a dark figure darting around the toward the exit. The silence is pretty scary on your first playthrough. Even your own characters will occasionally jump at lightning crashing outside or a ceiling tile falling to the floor for no apparent reason. Keep in mind throughout this entire scenario, there are no enemies whatsoever and nothing can hurt you.
    • And then Leon says, "They're scared..." It's never explained what he's referring to.
    • Leon actually refers to the rats that run around the kitchen after a piece of the ceiling falling down.
  • Resident Evil 7 brings the series back its original scary roots as you spend the first part of the game as Ethan the Player Character just heading towards the Baker estate (traveling through a scary swamp) and then exploring the creepy hillbilly house. Worse still when you find Mia (your missing wife) there's something off with her, then she just vanishes and when find her again her face becomes witch-like and she tries to kill you.
    • Arguably the most tense part of the RE7 comes after you’ve just had a delightful "dinner" with the Bakers and they just leave you lone with the creepy grandma. You’re free to explore the house, but as you go further into the building Jack appears and punishes you for not finishing your dinner. Even when you defeat Jack and burn him alive, the game becomes even more tense as having to traverse the residence knowing full well Jack will get back up and hunt you down.
    • Special mention to bit where you play as Mia and go though dark crawlspace while fleeing from Marguerite, you reach the end and can go no further and then it all goes black and then POW Marguerite is right up in your face.
  • You thought REmake was scary? Well RE2make is ready to put fans behind the sofa again. Firstly Raccoon City Police Station is now ten times creeper being more cramped and dead silent, it's clear something went down but you’re Late to the Party. The scariest bit is when Leon or Claire have to crawl under some shutters into a clearly very bloody and dark room and go down a darker hallway, hear some scuffling noises all while audibly trying to reassure himself/herself, and if even your badass player characters are nearly shitting themselves then you know This Is Gonna Suck. By the time the Zombies do show up, they crawl out of everywhere and there's no point wasting bullets it's literally Run or Die.
    • Claire‘s scenario has several of these moments. For example the cutscene of Claire finding Sherry was heartfelt in the original, but is instead terrifying in the remake as when Claire tells the little girl she’s here to help, Sherry just says "You need help... he’s behind you" and hearing footsteps and moaning Claire turns around to see the G-Creature attacking her. Or even more creepy is when Claire and Sherry are in a seemly empty carpark and Claire hears a scuttling noise making her look around but sees nothing. There's no indication whether it's a Zombie Dog, Licker or something worse. Then Claire and Sherry are ambushed but by Dirty Cop Chief Irons not a monster.
    • Speaking of Irons the bit where you play as Sherry invokes this. Unlike the gun and knife toting adult protagonists, you’re just a tiny unarmed 12 year old girl who can’t properly defend herself and are Alone with the Psycho in a creepy orphanage. You don’t actually encounter Irons until you go into his creepy operating room where he’s got the body of a dead woman on his table. The feelings of Adult Fear while sneaking around the unnerving environment as Sherry is extremely effective. Then Irons actually comes after you, with his face half burned by acid that Sherry threw at him.
    • In RE2make you have the option to barricade the windows to prevent zombies slipping into the corridors, but this if anything makes proceedings more unnerving as the sound of the ghouls beating upon the wood isn’t comforting in the slightest. Worse still is knowledge that they will inevitably eventually break through the barricades and crawl in to much on Leon and Claire, but not knowing when that could happen or how long it will take, is the scary part.
    • Mr X is now 10x more terrifying in the remake, as even when he is nowhere near Leon or Claire, you can still hear his massive footsteps crunching as he looks for you. Like the Alien: Isolation example not seeing Mr X is actually more scary because it means his AI is figuring out where you are and he can pop up almost anywhere without warning.
  • The RE3make while clearly a more Actionized Sequel (much like the original) has one big lull in the action when it comes to Raccoon General Hospital. Here the pace slows right down as you play as Carlos as he traverses the abandoned cramped halls looking for a vaccine for the infected Jill, there’s only handful of Zombies you encounter but the tension is high as ever as it’s clear there’s something else in the hospital judging by the claw marks visible on the walls. Once you get to a room on the upper floor and find it’s got nothing but a few bodies and turn to leave, the camera cuts to the POV of something that is rushing towards Carlos’s location. When you open the door to the hallway you are greeted by a Hunter Beta.
    • A similar moment with lesser effect happens in the sewer section with Jill just after she escapes from Nemesis. At first it’s a bit of a breather with Jill casually travelling through the underground and no Zombies are around to disrupt the calm and relaxing sound of water rushing, then as you go further on there’s an inhuman screeching noise in the distance, Jill who's mostly unshakable, vocalizes the player’s thoughts asking “What was that?”. This is soon answered as she’s introduced to the Hunter Gammas who slide out of the drain pipes to try and gobble her up.
    • Jill’s first PTSD fuelled Nightmare Sequence is just her wandering around her empty apartment, with the camera set in first person everything is black and white and blurry making for an unsettling experience. Things only get worse when Jill goes into her bathroom and a Mirror Scare happens before she wakes up.
• Alan Wake gets scary as hell thanks to this. It doesn't take much playtime for you to start whirling around at every little noise, and scanning around yourself constantly with the flashlight. You'll be sprinting for the Safe Havens in no time.
• In the final stage of Mega Man 2, there are no enemies (save for acid) or music until you enter the boss room.
• In Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, you return to the Fountain of Prayer to find that the music has stopped, then the first boss smashes through the wall.
• Parasite Eve has a few moments of this, particularly concerning the visions of Maya. Such as in the first level in Carnegie Hall when Aya is traveling through the sewer, there’s dead silence besides the sound of water and no enemies that appear, making Maya’s first Creepy Child appearance akin to The Shining as she appears to Aya before vanishing into thin air. A similar moment with more build up happens in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon Chrysler Building, as when Aya ascends to the top, the area is more and more covered in creepy bio-organic growth and sludge but there’s no enemies that spawn, once she gets to the 77 floor there’s a petal-like growth which opens to reveal... Maya or more accurately the Truebred Mitochondria Eve the true Final Boss of the game.
• Metroid:
  • Any time in the Metroid Prime Trilogy where you're going through either a large empty area, or a hallway surrounded by things that look like they ought to be gargantuan enemies (or Metroids) ready to come out and decimate you, only for absolutely nothing to happen. Yet.
  • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has several points, usually in Dark Aether where the landscape itself is so damn sinister and threatening to expect Ing to come at you all the time (making it all the worse when they eventually do) but the prime example is the Alpha Blog, the biggest aquatic monster you see in the game, who you've seen in the tank above where you get the mobility upgrade. Unlike every other boss fight though you get the upgrade before the boss fight, making the trek across the arena really jarring and unsettling.
  • There are a few instances where Dark Samus shows up but does nothing to you (at one point destroying a bridge after you receive an alternate way to cross the chasm). By the time you see her murdering space pirates in Sanctuary your guard is down, making the ensuing fight with her a sudden jolt.
  • Several times in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, you walk through various Metroid research facilities. Everything's okay, though you keep expecting something to come out and attack you. Players know what you'll have to eventually do...
  • Metroid II: Return of Samus was, by far, the king of this trope for the series, especially considering how many of the Metroid attacks would come out of freaking nowhere, and just about everything else was 99% empty.
  • The opening of Super Metroid, where the player investigates a distress signal from space station, only to find the facility eerily silent and empty... up until the ambush by Ridley. Later, it pulls off a nice example in Tourian, where several rooms occupied by Metroids and a pair of very large enemies aren't particularly scary. The next couple of rooms, however, contain no enemies at all - just the brittle, dessicated husks of enemies that became Metroid food (one of which is a Torizo, fought on two previous occasions as a boss).
  • The latter example is homaged in Corruption, to perhaps even greater effect, both because it takes place on a creepy, abandoned Galactic Federation starship and because the crumbling corpses are those of Federation Marines just like the ones you've previously fought alongside.
  • Metroid Prime also opens with Samus exploring an abandoned Space Pirate Frigate. The place is dead quiet, and the only sign of anything living are a few small creatures, until you open a door to a room full of escape pods, and notice a GIGANTIC Parasite Queen...corpse, lying on the ground. As you explore more and more of the facility, you find the bodies of Space Pirates who have died in horrible ways, along with more parasites, and that's when you realize that if the Parasite Queen in the escape pod room is dead, where are these babies coming from? You find out at the end of the level, although having an actual boss to fight is a relief compared to the silent exploration of the rest of the frigate.
  • Metroid Fusion has your first visit to Sector 6 (NOC). You're told ahead of time that there are Blue X in the sector, which are sub-zero cold and will do heavy damage if they touch you. There's no enemies except the Blue X and very dark backgrounds and scenery, as well as Blue X hiding in the various bits of destructible scenery. Couple the fear of the Blue X with the sector's eerie music, and you'll soon be jumping out of your skin every time you enter a new room.
  • Your next visit isn't much better, because A) you're searching for a boss you fought once before, who never attacks you until you alert it to your presence by trying to enter a restricted area, and B) you're also told to leave the sector as soon as said boss is dead, because the Nigh-Invulnerable SA-X is also tracking you.
  • For that matter, any scene involving the SA-X at least brushes this trope. Musical change, sometimes lighting shifts with a spotlight on the SA-X, all as a reminder that this thing can and WILL eat you alive. The scene where you KNOW it is waiting and you MUST fight past and escape to continue, that anticipation and knowing it is going to hurt...
  • Metroid Dread builds upon the SA-X aforementioned encounters with new enemies the E.M.M.I. who can fittingly make the player dread traversing through areas where one is active. Like the SA-X, you can’t kill them without special means and they will instakill Samus if they catch her, forcing you to sneak through areas of the map as quickly as you can but unfortunately every move you make signals to the E.M.M.I. that Samus is around and cause them to hunt relentlessly for her and you can always hear the E.M.M.I.‘s terrifying whistle-like beeping even if it’s nowhere near you.
  • Hell even getting the power to make yourself undetectable to the E.M.M.I.s with the Phantom Cloak just makes matters more tense, as if you move quickly while the E.M.M.I. is scanning it will immediately become alerted and kill you. Of course the vulnerability of standing still or moving slowly invisible as the E.M.M.I. looks all over for you, is where this trope fully comes in.
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent will invoke this trope to the point when you WANT monsters to show up, to relieve some of the tension.
  • Let's not forget that Daniel forgot everything on purpose, leaving you, present-time-Daniel, in the dark. In his letter to himself, past-Daniel says that he can't tell you why he chose to forget. This leaves the player wondering what the hell is so wrong with this place that the main character would willingly forget everything.
  • One of the measurements of your low sanity is simply "..."
• Chzo Mythos: 7 Days a Skeptic. At the end of the game, you are chased by John DeFoe. Sort of. In the original game, there was no way of telling when DeFoe would enter a room, or from where, which meant that in some cases, you could enter a room, wait a moment to regroup, and be instantly gored to death when DeFoe appears inside of you.
• XCOM: Do you know what is worse than detecting a snakeman battleship loaded with the Goddamned Chrysalid going straight toward your weaker base? Not detecting anything. You know they are there somewhere. You know it. But what are they up to? What is worse than seeing a Chrysalid rushing right toward your soldiers? Not seeing any enemies on a snakeman terror mission/alien base mission/UFO ground assault mission/UFO Crash recovery mission. They are already preparing an ambush.
  • Harbor missions at night in Terror From The Deep, as well as alien base assaults when Tentaculats are involved. Dark spaces, never knowing where the aliens might hide, outmatches troops is one half, the music does the rest.
• The Fallout: New Vegas DLC Dead Money evokes this. When you're getting swarmed by Ghosts, it's scary. When you've killed them all, the Villa gets really unnerving, really quickly. The dim lighting and constant haze limiting visibility doesn't help.
• The Dunwich building in Fallout 3. The Ghouls patter of footsteps and shrieking in the dark is bad enough, then there's the audio logs of an unfortunate wanderer who was unlucky enough to be entrapped there. But possibly the most unsettling part are the hints of the supernatural. Most of the game is an outlandish but clearly defined sci fi universe where even the most nightmarish enemies have some explanation. The Ghostly whispering, slamming doors and mysterious flashback however all leave the player in a constant state of terror that some sort of demon, ghost or vampire will lunge at them from the shadows at any moment. Added to that is that the building is a maze of corridors with blocked doors, cave-ins and missing floors, and objects that JUMP at you from nowhere.
  • Most locations contain enemies, but occasionally you'll run into an empty one, which can really get on your nerves. And sometimes there will be ambient sounds suggesting something is there, even though nothing is. Add to that a mazelike environment, and it soon becomes terrifying.
  • Vault 106, which is a Vault much like home in 101, but disordered and dirty, leaving you wonder what happened and if it's about to jump on you. And when you start to find out... "Breathe in the blue." Yes indeed, you suddenly can't trust your very own senses.
• The Dunwich company returns in Fallout 4 in the Dunwich Borers mine. No explanation is given for the flashbacks you begin encountering deeper in the mine, what exactly the Dunwich company was doing except that it involved an ancient altar that ghoulified its people before the Great War, or at the very end of it, the Obviously Evil sacrificial sword the Sole Survivor can pick up at an equally ominous altar.
• Lampshaded in the Dragon Age: Origins expansion Awakening, where one of your resident snarker companions comments on a particularly long and ominous hallway (leading to a major boss battle): "Ooh, the suspense is killing me!"
  • In the basic game, there's much darkness and horror, but only two scary segments: Haven (before the cult attacks you) and the buildup to the Broodmother. Both of these sections make very effective use of atmosphere.
  • There is also the Orphanage in the Elven Alienage in Denerim. There's a lot of blood on the floor, and a whole bunch of demons. Creepy enough, but not enough to get on this trope. But the creepiest part is the fact that you never meet who summoned the demons, and you have no idea why they were summoned. There literally is no cause for the slaughter, as far as you know. And you don't even know what happened to the person. They could still be out there...
    • In fact, the build-up in the orphanage is so creepy—tiny dimly-lit corridors with blood everywhere, screaming and crying voices, deranged spirits and weird chanting and that Photoshop Filter of Evil—that when the actual boss demon appears, it's almost a letdown: it looks exactly like the standard-issue rage demon the PC has faced countless times before in the Circle Tower. Nothing is scarier.
  • The chant of the ghost children in that sequence is incredibly creepy. More so than Haven, although not nearly as creepy as the Broodmother Chant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zZKkSfnd6k it's even creepier before, because you only hear bits and pieces of it, a line or two at a time.
• When exploring Tartarus in Persona 3 every so often you will enter a floor where there are no enemies at all. Fuuka (or Mitsuru, most likely Fuuka though) will comment that "something doesn't feel right". She's right, because this is one of the special floors of the game, the "Reaper Floor", where one of the Secret Bosses of the game (aptly named "The Reaper") spawns after a fixed 2 minutes, must we remind you that these floors tend to be excruciatingly long and be filled with items? And that, unless you're max level or is using the cheap Satan & Lucifer trick, he's most likely going to slaughter you? And the fact that there is a chain rustling sound in the background that only gets louder the closer he is? And that your analyzer (be it Mitsuru or Fuuka) tells you that he's spawned, but in a very indirect manner? (saying something along the lines of "I've got a bad feeling...")
• Both Condemned: Criminal Origins and its sequel Condemned 2: Bloodshot make use of this trope quite frequently. The example that comes to mind is the cabin level in Bloodshot, where you spend a good half of the stage waiting for something to jump out at you. It never does, which makes the moment you finally come face to face with the thing that left the bodies, completely unexpected.
• The Descent series likes to play with this trope, all three variants of it. All three games have at least one melee bot that makes little to no noise and prefers to hide in dark areas. There are several levels in each game where these robots are a common enemy. Those levels are usually very dark, and will often have areas where there is no noise whatsoever. Using the headlight may not be an option; it runs on energy, and a lot of dark levels have a rather precious supply. Sometimes said enemies are stealth-camouflaged, others randomly stalk you. The soundtrack is also sprinkled with sections where the music drops to near silence without warning. That's if you have the music turned on at all...
• Baten Kaitos Origins has the dungeon inside Seginus, an ancient magical puppet. The creepy music and surroundings only serve to remind you that you're walking inside its mind. At the end of the dungeon, when Seginus starts talking, there's a very good chance you'll jump out of your seat, just because it's such a nervewracking dungeon.
• Operation Flashpoint and ARMA. They're generally not scripted examples, but you're going to be extremely tense running across the open field, hoping that a sniper doesn't put a bullet in your brain before you even realize what just happened. Given that it's firmly on the realistic end of the Fackler Scale of FPS Realism, complete with most hits being One Hit Kills, and The All-Seeing A.I. doesn't have the visibility problems you do, you have every right to be paranoid until the mission's over.
• Scratches has nothing but the titular scratching noises, a flash of movement from a hidden room, and that creepy tribal mask. When the game cuts to a CGI cutscene of the actual creature plodding toward you, it just comes off as silly. This problem was somewhat fixed in "The Last Visit", where the same creature had different facial features.
• In Conker's Bad Fur Day, the mansion level has plenty of zombies in most areas, zombies which, incidentally, instakill you and run fast when they see you. Some big areas are just outright empty dead ends, which is way more scarier, especially because then the Background Music is very clear... With children chuckling, and a brilliant minimalistic style that just makes you expect something awful is going to happen.
• Slender. It's pitch dark, you're wandering around with just a tiny flashlight, your player character is slower than molasses flowing uphill in January, and you keep finding creepy sketches and notes taped up around the place. By the time Slender Man himself makes an appearance with accompanying static and Scare Chord, you'll probably be so worked up you scream and jump about a foot. Then for the rest of the game, you're wandering around knowing that thing is probably right behind you.
  "YOU F***ER YOU KNOW HE'S NOT THERE!"
  • A large part of what makes this so scary in Slender, in particular, is that this trope actually comprises the central gameplay mechanic. The Slender Man's scariness would quickly drop off as the game goes on if you were just allowed to take a good look at him - but your looking at him is how he kills you.
• Phobia: The Fear of the Darkness (which draws inspiration from Penumbra and Scratches) pulls this off extraordinarily as well as overlapping with Nothing At All. The setting is simple, you’re just a dude alone in a massive dark mansion with creaky floors, long corridors, empty rooms and one Creepy Basement but the sheer atmosphere is so pulse pounding scary that having to traverse the house is utterly nerve wrecking. Even in the early game, the scariest thing that happens is just a few doors opening by themselves and a sinister scraping noise that can be heard from the basement at night. By the time the monster does appear to roam the halls, you’re already prime to be terrified.
• Devil May Cry: After the lights go out in Mallet Island's castle, its entire geography changes. The Luminite serves as your main light source, but it's still limited because you can't see more than a few feet in front of you, and the ambience doesn't help either. The game subverts this trope by letting some enemies ambush you in the dark; the Plasmas are introduced by attacking Dante in the dimly-lit castle, and some Marionette-type demons await you in the tight hallways. Then again, this is a Hack and Slash game starring a badass Half-Human Hybrid packing more than enough to take on anything thrown at him, so the fear factor isn't that strong.
• Granblue Fantasy: Arcarum plays with this a bit, due to its reliance on Random Encounters suddenly appearing on seemingly-empty nodes (but generally leans on the third variation of this trope if lore is taken into consideration). Even in its mechanic of presenting an unexplored map, the player never knows where the enemies would pop out. In Extreme difficulty, there are also tougher enemies that sometimes appear only when all other enemies are defeated. Lastly, the dialogue between Lyria and Vyrn while the player moves to new nodes is basically them worrying if something or someone is watching from behind. The final stages of the expeditions reveal that there are indeed others following them, the Oracles who will also run away once Lyria and Vyrn notice their presence.
• Dark Souls (in contrast to its predecessor ''Demon's Souls") utilizes atmosphere through this way throughout most of the game. For example: Anor Londo is one of the most beautiful areas in the game, but its lack of enemies keeps you on edge; this is reinforced by the silence, because among the enemies present only the Batwing Demons make any noise when they are in combat. It gets worse if you end up killing a certain fake goddess. The sun sets, most all enemies disappear, and all life fades from Anor Londo. Everything you fought up until this point is an illusion, and arguably wasn't really there.
• The "Gamer" minigame from Game & Wario plays this trope well. The objective of the minigame is to hide from 9-Volt's mom, 5-Volt, while trying to complete a certain number of WarioWare microgames. 5-Volt can bust 9-Volt by opening the door, opening the bedroom window, or coming through the TV. 5-Volt's entrance is usually foreshadowed by "Psycho" Strings, although they can just as easily be building up to a Cat Scare (9-Volt's cat coming through the door, a balding man opening the window and flashing a peace sign, a silhouette of a hand making shadow puppets appearing on the TV, etc.) What's worse, sometimes 5-Volt will appear with little to no build-up, doing things like sprinting to 9-Volt's door or shattering his window. The third mission culminates in 5-Volt diving headfirst out of the TV, pacing around the room, running up to 9-Volt's bed and standing mere inches from him, all accompanied by Ominous Latin Chanting and "Psycho" Strings.
• The Wii U version of Super Smash Bros. features a stage based on this minigamethe Gamer mode from Game & Wario, featuring almost all of 5-Volt's entrances and fake-outs, along with a few new ones. If you start a match on the stage and notice a strange-looking platform or background prop (an easel with pictures of WarioWare characters on it, the handheld game 9-Volt was playing in the original minigame, etc), there's a large chance 5-Volt will somehow appear from it. One of the music tracks for this stage is complete silence, heightening the tension even more.
• Some might say that the online point-and-click game Daymare Town is this. The lack of audio and stationary, colorless, environment. Lampshaded when you're forced to go into the pitch black cellar of the lowest floor of the library to obtain an item; the game refers to the cellar as "scary," and labels the exit as "get out!"
• Covert Front features dark stone areas that look like agents from the Empire could pop out of at any second. And in The Fog Fall, the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust is made deathly apparent by the lack of people and stark environments.
• Submachine features very creepy sound effects and soundtracks, with only vague hints about where you are and what has happened. And when you first start Submachine 2, there is a record player providing background noise of chirping crickets and other peaceful woodsy sounds. When you turn it off, the actual soundtrack kicks in, which begins with a near-Scare Chord and is full of creaking and electronic distortion sounds. Nothing horrific happens, but you might spend a good few minutes waiting for it anyway.
• The Last of Us has one great point early on in the game. The protagonists decide to cut through a half fallen skyscraper in the midst of a torrential downpour. After finding a few corpses of some unlucky soldiers. You open a door and suddenly there's a Clicker on top of you.
• Subverted in Vietcong. Granted, this is Vietnam, where the NVA/VCs could be hiding everywhere in the jungles, ready to ambush any unwitting patrols. Fortunately, the pointman can give away their positions, slightly nullifying this trope.
• One of the most stressful levels in Mass Effect 2 is the seemingly deserted Collector ship. Previously, waist-high walls in the middle of a room have been the number one indicator that you are going to have a firefight, but on this mission, whenever you find them, nothing happens - until you reach your objective and spring the trap, anyway.
• Dormant F.O.E.s in the Etrian Odyssey series, especially those that turn into mundane obstacles when not awake.
  • Etrian Odyssey: Boulder Boars and Medusa Trees in the Millennium Girl remake are major offenders, forcing you to look funny at all the rocks in the Emerald Grove and dead trees in the Sandy Barrens (and there are a lot of dead trees in the latter).
  • Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan: Cruel Slayers, which reside in Echoing Library, first appear as panther-like statues. You just know when you spot the first one that it's going to attack you, but you have to walk past it anyway. And it... does nothing. They don't activate until you're spotted by an entirely different FOE, at which point every Cruel Slayer in the area will wake up at once and chase you down at double speed.
• Banjo-Tooie: You explore Terrydactyland, a dinosaur-themed world. Like most of the game, it's bright and cheerful, with cartoony characters. But then you climb to the highest point of the level, and find a place called the Stomping Grounds. When you first enter, the Background Music stops as you look around—it's a wide open space hemmed in by walls. Sure, the colors are a little drabber, and that silence is getting deafening, but how bad could it be? Then you take a few steps forward...and a GIANT DINOSAUR FOOT EMERGES FROM THE SKY, TRYING TO CRUSH YOU, as the game's ominous boss music abruptly starts up, punctuated by a horrific-sounding roar. Banjo and Kazooie are about as big as one of the claws on the dinosaur's toes, and to make matters worse, you never see the entire thing—just its foot. Somehow, imagining the rest of the Stompadon is a thousand times scarier than any depiction could be.
• Among the Sleep provides a very effective example of this, as you play as a toddler and seeing the world through the eyes of someone who can't understand it. After spending the beginning of the game in your beloved mommy's loving care, the night comes and you are left alone in a frightening nightmare world with nothing but your talking teddy for company as some dark monsters hunt your little toddler self down. The payoff with the ending twist, completely recontextualizes the proceeding horror, but manages to be very sad as well.
  • Overlaps with Nothing At All, but a lot of the areas are barren such as the "Playground", "Home" and "Into The Closet" there's no enemies, a few items, puzzles and some jump scares but nothing can hurt you. Although the terrifying surroundings and scary noises put you on edge for the possibility that something will attack you and as a little toddler you are defenseless.
  • Played with during the tutorial as teddy tells you go to inside the closest to teach you that he can act as a flashlight by hugging him, the closet is strangely massive and there's creepy black big coats in there. Once you reach the end, you and teddy hear something coming, only for the door to open to reveal its just your mother who comforts you and tucks you into bed ^note  although her line, "You've got to stop hiding from mommy" becomes Fridge Horror later on.
• The Deep Sleep Trilogy has a very oppressive atmosphere as you wander around abandoned dark buildings with a flashlight. Then you pick up that one final key item, a menacing tune starts playing and a monster starts making its slow way towards you. The second and third games upped the ante by adding long corridors with key items at the end, where this does not happen.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV:
  • The game has several areas where there is minimal or no music and no NPCs, but enemy encounters. Examples include the Shinjuku Staton west passage, the Counter-Demon Force base in Kasumigaseki, and Camp Ichigaya in Blasted Tokyo.
  • The Fiends. To encounter one, you need to look for a very specific spot, and from there you have a 1/256 chance of running into them at that spot every time you enter the area, heralded by Burroughs warning you of "a very dangerous demon" nearby and urging you to get out. On top of that, several Fiends appear in spots that are devoid of activity: An otherwise empty room in a Kasumigaseki shelter that requires 100 Luck to enter, in the middle of the abandoned Toyosu shelter, a seemingly innocent 'X' pattern in the road in Kicchigiorgi forest, just to name a few examples. In other words, it's the aforemetnioned Yume Nikki Uboa event, but replace Uboa with one of several bosses ready to paint the ground with your blood.
• Much of the pacing of Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion runs on this, since for a good portion of the game, there is nothing that can really harm you. In the themed areas, you have to explore an area that is usually themed after a certain kind of horror. For the majority of it, there is really nothing threatening, aside from maybe some Apocalyptic Log, but at the tail-end of each of these segments, the Specimen of the area spawns and chases you for several rooms. If you haven't looked at the CAT_DOS computers, you will have no idea what these monsters will look like. Oh, and after each segment you encounter a new Specimen, there is a random chance they can chase you again later in the game, making even the normal stretches of the game a mix between this and the "Nothing at All" variety. Even once you can recognize the periods you're in an almost completely safe area, the accompanying forewarning will maintain the pressure to analyze every new quirk of architecture for when you'll need to navigate by instinct, as well as studying the shifting soundscape so you'll pick up instantly on the intrusion of another presence.
• Dark Forces provides a number of instances proving how effective the limited gaming technology of an earlier era can be, whether then or now.
  • Because it was one of the first generation of 3D first-person shooters (mid-1990s), there are no Random Encounters in Dark Forces – only enemies (although this isn’t the case in the sequel, Jedi Knight). The results can be incredibly surreal if you’re supposed to be in a densely populated area. You’ll be traversing alleys and byways in the “Vertical City” of Nar Shaddaa or exploring plazas at Imperial Center in Coruscant...and sooner or later notice that there are absolutely no people around. For context, these are two of the most massive cities in the entire Galactic Empire, home to literally billions of residents, and yet there are no civilians on the streets. Nar Shaddaa thus comes across as some sort of post-apocalyptic Hong Kong, and Imperial Center gives the strong impression of a police state where everyone is staying at home behind locked doors, absolutely terrified. Even worse, the fact that you are all alone out there means that the Imperial stormtroopers, bounty hunters and gangsters tracking you do not have to pick you out from huge, teeming crowds, so they often don’t even bother pursuing you; they just hide in the shadows, waiting for you to blunder past them. In the later levels especially, you also have to be wary of very large doors: they always lead to vast open areas with deadly opponents waiting somewhere around the corner. In one particularly scary instance, the door locks behind you right after you pass through, leaving you a sitting duck. (The game designers recommend that you open the door, stand in the doorway for a moment before ducking back, and then open fire at anything that approaches you before the door closes again, at which point you repeat the process. And in those cases where there’s something right inside the doorway, the best tactic is to open the door and immediately jump back, then retreat as far as possible, leaving a claymore mine in your wake so that the enemy gets blown up chasing you if you don’t manage to kill him yourself.)
  • The Jabba the Hutt level opens with a scene that's guaranteed to terrify you. Jabba, who's upset that you've been gunning down dozens of bounty hunters who usually work for the Hutt and are being "borrowed" by the Imperials to smuggle the Dark Trooper robotics and weapons, addresses you via holocam as two of his Gamorrean guards stand around you, saying that as punishment for meddling in his affairs you're about to be fed to a gigantic Kell dragon, and that his only regret is that he won't be there personally to watch you get eaten. A few seconds later, the guards shove you into the pit...and as the level begins, you find yourself in a dark and shadowy but surprisingly open area that looks sinister but doesn't seem at all dangerous. Where is the scary man-eating dragon? It's still locked inside its pen, and the pen's door doesn't open until you walk toward it.
• The opening of Cold Fear give you tons of jump scares... all of which end up being something completely innocent like a chain rattling or a lantern falling off a counter. You know there are monsters in the game, and the developers took full advantage of this to scare the shit out of you with absolutely nothing for as long as they could. It's close to a half hour into the game before you finally encounter your first monster.
• Much of Neverending Nightmares has the player walking through empty rooms (most of which doesn't serve any purpose) and hallways and... not much more than that. This makes the anticipation of the game's later jump scares and Gorn much more nerve-racking.
• The Final Trial stage from the first Pikmin game certainly tried to invoke this. The stage has a grand total of one (1) enemy in it, the game's final boss. However, the rest of the stage appears to be calm and peaceful (aside from the fire geysers which are just there for the sake of a Red Pikmin puzzle). There are many obstacles in the way to the Bulblax's lair which might take an average player roughly an in-game day on their first try. This entire time, they will also be hearing very unnerving Background Music which gives the vibe that there is something sinister hiding in this peaceful setting with them. When they finally reach the Emperor Bulblax's lair, the creature is camouflaged to resemble mossy rock with some plant life on it which might give a small jump scare to less genre savvy players when they approach it.
  • The Submerged Castle from Pikmin 2 plays with this. Though there are multiple enemies in the cavern, after a suprise encounter on the very first floor, the player will be utterly terrified about the temporary absence of one specific enemy, the Waterwraith. After its jump scare appearance on the first floor, followed by the player being mercilessly stalked by an invincible monster which can literally steamroll over your entire army in seconds, players will spend the remainder of the dungeon dreading the moment that the Waterwraith decides to show up again to break up the relatively quiet exploration of the cavern.
  • The most recent game, Pikmin 3, has a version which crosses over with Fridge Horror: the game starts with the S.S. Drake crashing on PNF-404, with no one quite sure as to what caused the accident. Genre savvy players might be inclined to think the final boss would turn out to be responsible. The final boss, as it turns out, is the mysterious Plasm Wraith, apparently a more powerful version of the aforementioned Waterwraith, and by far the most powerful enemy the series has featured thus far; surely it must be responsible, right? Wrong! The Plasm Wraith only starts attacking you when it thinks you're threatening Olimar (whom it seems to view as its child), and the game ends with narration stating that the crew are no closer to figuring out what really caused the crash.
• Until Dawn: While the game has plenty of jump scares and right up in your face horror, there’s also a fair amount of disquieting tension. From the start before anything actually scary happens we the player see that some just out of frame figure is watching the protagonists while breathing heavily. There’s also multiple times where the characters are traversing the bowels of the Washington lodge, going through the woods, exploring the asylum or the mining cave where the enveloping atmosphere is completely chilling; despite there being no immediate danger.
  • The bit between Samantha and Josh in the boiler room has a couple of effective moments of this, first they’re just chatting idly with light flirtation, but if Sam inquires jokingly over a baseball bat she finds Josh muses that he used to play with his family including -Beat- (with a sound effect) his late sisters who died one year ago. After fixing the boiler he and Sam joyfully high five and hearing a noise Sam turns her back on him, at which the smile vanishes from Josh's face replaced with an eerie look as he watches her. Which all gives the subtle impression there's something not quite right with Josh long before he turns out to be The Psycho.
  • Mike and Jess's journey through the woods to a separate cabin to engage in some sexapades is full of this. At first nothing is really amiss, until they have to go through a mine and as Mike jumps down there's a silhouette of a person behind him, confirming someone is following them. On their expedition they find all sorts of weird trinkets such as dreamcatchers, deer skulls and a stubbed out cigar, implying someone was living there until recently. Before reaching the cabin, Mike and Jess encounter a wounded stag on the path, which gets pulled away by someone they can't see. Upon getting inside the cabin, Mike lampshades this trope while looking around as he freaks himself out just pulling open the bathtub curtain as he gets tangled in it, there's nobody behind it and Mike wonders to himself what did he expect to find behind there. Jess then realizes she's dropped her phone and frets but after forgetting about it and getting cozy with Mike, they hear a crash from the bathroom and investigating Mike finds Jess's phone thrown through the window by someone. Thinking it's just their friends pranking them, Jess goes out to yell into the woods as we cut to Impending Doom P.O.V. before she comes back inside the cabin... moments before something breaks the window behind Jess and yanks her through it.
• Anatomy has the player exploring an empty house and picking up cassette tapes, which has a voice telling them that a house is very much alike that of a human being. The game combines the subtle threat looming over that the house is haunted with limited vision to add tension to each room the player enters.
• The Chinese Emperor in Crusader Kings 2 has no traits, and all his stats are listed as "?".^note For comparison, every other character in the game, up to and including Saint Peter and the Prophet Mohammed in the chronicles, is represented with fleshed-out traits and stats.Interactions with the Emperor are also limited to paying tribute or requesting favors. You can go decades, maybe even centuries ignoring China; not bothering to stay in their good graces...and then suddenly there are a kajillion elite Chinese troops at your doorstep, ready for a very one-sided war.
  • For bonus points, you never hear any dialogue from him. All proclamations from the Emperor are delivered by characters bearing messages from him, or the in-game narration. Really, the Emperor is as close as the game gets to a Humanoid Abomination without invoking any supernatural elements.
• Any map involving Fog of War in the Nintendo Wars series. You inch along the map slowly, taking cover in woods as much as humanly possible, and though you can hear the enemy's troops shuffling around on their turn, they remain out of sight day after agonizing day. Even when you finally do get within vision range of the enemy, there's no telling what you'll find. Will that brave Recon stumble upon a relatively harmless Infantry unit, or will it reveal a deadly Bomber than can blow your hapless Recon to kingdom come on its next turn?
• The Metal Slug series (especially the third and seventh games), when you thought you have reached a safe zone at the end of a mission, the boss arrives (occasionally from behind you) without warning.
• Mr. Hopp's Playhouse: You never know when Mr. Hopp will appear due to him often hiding behind walls.
• From Next Door is a chillingly effective example of this overlapping with Monster Delay. The heroine Namie has just moved into a new house, after the previous tenet moved out without explanation. Nothing seems off-putting at first... except the one locked room which has a boarded up window facing the house next door... whose sole window is facing Namie’s house. The player painfully has no choice but to unlock that room and open that window even though unlike the unsuspecting Namie they know full well what horror will come of it. Considering the game was heavily inspired by a Junji Ito story, this is par for the course.
• Armored Core: A few missions of the original game take place in poorly-lit, occasionally abandoned underground facilities with no Background Music. Due to the game's limitations at the time, the game would render the corridors and rooms maybe just outside the range of your weaponry; the rest of the screen would be pitch-black. In addition, one or two locations have a recurring clip of what sounds like a general advisement message that hiccups and skips back to the beginning at random intervals. And woe be to you if you don't bother putting a radar in your three-story mecha. Partially subverted by the fact that the enemy units in these missions tend to be relatively weak, but they are so few and far between in these areas that it can make you jump when you get shot walking around a corner.
  • The missions with the biological weapons (creatures which shoot bullets out of their mouths, kind of look like large ants) can be especially unnerving. If they haven't invaded a facility, you're erradicating their underground nests. Again, no Background Music; instead, you can hear them scratching on the floor as you explore, and you are only likely to hear this if you're in an adjacent corridor/tunnel. Becomes worse when you're clearing out a nest, because queens don't make a sound until they have you in their sights. Can be partially subverted by equipping a radar with a bio sensor, but then, a queen still only appears as a small, red dot on radar...
• Kona has player Carl Faubert wandering a backwoods town of Quebec, Canada in the middle of a blizzard. The town is empty, there's signs of a murder, and even the supernatural, but nothing comes at you directly. Until...
  Narrator: Carl felt like he was being watched... (cue invulnerable spirit wolf popping up behind you)
• String Tyrant has a trap which is a large poorly lit room, you cross it wondering when the enemies will appear. You grab the plot item and suddenly the room is swarming with enemies which use a unique mechanic from other encounters.
• The Binding of Isaac: Repentance: Getting Knife Piece 2 involves going down a long series of empty, dimly-lit rooms where most of the player character's items are taken away from them. It is not until picking up Knife Piece 2 at the end of the rooms that the proper horror shows up: Mother's Shadow, a red and black, invincible phantom image of Mom's Nightmare Face.
• Friday Night Funkin' Vs Starecrown: For the first two minutes of his song, Starecrown does not sing at all during his turn, all he does is just motionlessly STARE at you. Which makes it much scarier when he finally does start out with an eldritch scream.
• At one point in the short horror game Water Womb World, the lights on the protagonist's submersible go out after they the cry of an impossibly large "whale," leaving them to fumble around in the dark on the ocean floor. They eventually stumble into an "angel" that looks more like a giant squid who beseeches them to "join God in full-flesh."
• INFRA: You solve the puzzle to unlock door B2 in Bergmann Water Tunnel 1, then find yourself in a pitch-black corridor. After walking through the darkness a while, you hear a monstrous groan followed by ambient Drone of Dread and increasingly loud Vader Breath, which spurs you to run, only to be blocked by another locked door, then turn around to see the White Mask of Doom of Mörkö the Boogeyman. Cue Smash to Black followed by waking up in a storage closet in Tunnel 3.

Nothing At All

• Alan Wake II:
  • The basement of Valhalla Nursing Home is dark, claustrophobic, flooded and has a dead body. The route through it is winding and creates lots of blind corners. It's the perfect spot for an ambush. It contains no enemies, just water and suspicious sounds.
  • At the hotel where Saga and Casey have set up their headquarters, if you walk down the hallway where their rooms are, you'll find a woman knocking on a door apparently trying to contact someone inside. Later on, after the Cult of the Tree assaults the hotel, if you go back to that hallways, you find the same woman banging on the same door, but this time she is extremely agitated and desperate to get in. You never find out why she is banging on that door.
• Alien vs. Predator:
  • This is present in the Marine's first level of Aliens versus Predator (1999). The first time your motion sensor goes beep it's just an automatic elevator activating, but after several long minutes of increasing tension in deserted corridors, dark corners, hissing steam vents, and flickering lights you will empty the magazine in its general direction. The game's designers know full well that the motion sensor is more effective as a tension builder than a tracking device.
  • The tradition continues in the game's sequel. The first Marine mission takes you across a barren planet and deserted installation, where nothing more than a string of Cat Scares occur (such as a hissing pipe shaped like a xenomorph's head bursting from the ceiling). You're constantly in anticipation of of an all-out attack, so you are completely alert. But it doesn't come until about half an hour into the game, by which time you've probably decided nothing is coming and are skipping through the empty halls, at which point the aliens appear and rip your face off.
    beep beep beep
• Amnesia:
  • Frictional Games' Amnesia: The Dark Descent is replete with this. The monsters are scarce enough to keep them from being a source of frustration, but frequent enough to ramp up the fear. Add to that ambient sounds that, at times, sound like footsteps and groaning, and you'll be cowering in a corner for fear of a monster you haven't even seen yet. One of the key elements of keeping the monsters continuously frightening throughout the game is that you can't even look at them without taking a severe hit to your Sanity Meter. If you do attempt to just look square-on at them there's an Interface Screw that blurs your vision: you never really get a good look at them unless you go on a panic-induced suicide spree, never mind that their models on their own are grotesque enough. The most one can catch safely during gameplay is perhaps their toes.
  • The game's sequel, A Machine For Pigs, manages to do this in its teaser trailer. We hear a high-pitched, unearthly squeal as a monster bursts down a door, out of view of the camera. Just as it's about the round the corner and come into view, the screen fades to black. This being a horror game, you expect some kind of Jump Scare in the final few seconds of the trailer. Nothing happens.
• Antichamber is this trope taken to its extreme. There are absolutely no antagonists, no way for the player to die, not even so much as a plot, but its bizarre nature, even more bizarre ending, and the fact that parts of the map subtly change can make the game quite creepy.
• In the classic Balance of Power, if things got bad enough for World War III to break out, the game would cut to a blank page that simply read: "You have ignited a(n accidental) nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure." This, naturally, made the horror that much worse.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum uses this well after you left some areas. The Medical Facility and The Visitors Center are good (and terrifying) examples of this. The former, after you defeat Bane, you can enter and explore it on full... except that it has no enemies, and everything its just empty, except for a few doctors, that are of course just waiting for everything to chill out, and you can still go further and further on the medical levels, down and down below the elevator, and explore the chilling interiors of the facility. If it builds a lot of agoraphobia inside you, congratulations, it's working. For the Visitors Center... it's even worse, as its the only building that forces you into a first person view, and it's just a corridor with a lot of windows and chairs, and the only thing beside you in the building is a mannequin of The Joker, with a TV on his head, that talks to you like a doctor to a patient, and nothing else.
• It isn't shown what happens to Henry in Bendy and the Ink Machine if Bendy catches him as the screen cuts to black. But given the gurgling sounds Henry makes, it's probably better that way.
• BioShock uses this trope like it's going out of style. And it's really good at it. Especially Fort Frolic. It gets worse once you're able to access the basement of it.
• The final chapter of Bug Fables combines the "never get a clear look at things" version with a good deal of Backstory Horror. In order to keep the Wasp King from getting the Everlasting Sapling, the heroes must follow him into the Giant's Lair — which the "Eliascope" in the Bee Kingdom Hive shows is a normal human house. Inside the Giant's Lair (also known as the Dead Lands) are creatures known as Dead Landers, freakishly shaped and freakishly strong enemies that aren't clearly bug, plant, fungus, or anything. The worst of them is the Dead Lander Omega — only part of its huge body is seen, but what is depicted is a Giant Eye of Doom looming from the shadows and dark, bony hands that drop the smaller Dead Landers to attack intruders. And if you use the aforementioned Eliascope and look carefully at the top right corner of that screen, you'll see an Early-Bird Cameo of Omega's hazy silhouette lurking in the tall grass, and it's almost as tall as the house. Now, the Lore Books note that the land was once inhabited by Giants whose artifacts and structures (like the Giant's Lair) can now be found everywhere, but they suddenly disappeared before the "Day of Awakening" that gave bugs sapience. Roach legends tell of a fiery cataclysm that supposedly ravaged the earth and destroyed all the Giants, but the lore researcher retelling this notes that there's no physical evidence of this and speculates that one of many different things could have happened to the Giants instead. All that's clear, based on the various lore and the state of the Giant's Lair, is that something terrible happened — and something terrible was left behind.
• The setting of The Cabinets of Doctor Arcana can instill a sense of dread in the player. You are trapped inside a beautiful Gothic manor, spectacularly furnished and full of curious objects and artwork, whose rooms you must unlock and search for clues, puzzles, and a set of keys that will allow you to escape. The emptiness of the house may make you feel like it's setting you up for attack, or at the very least a Jump Scare. But no... you are the only one in the house, and the game's introduction makes it clear that no one else has been there in a very, very long time.
• Castlevania
  • The Room of Clocks in Castlevania 64 and its remake Legacy of Darkness combines this with Suspicious Videogame Generosity. It's got a save point, food, and your pick of subweapons. The only Background Music is the ticking of the clocks. The Room of Clocks is still one of the most unsettling and nightmarish places in the game.
  • The chair room in Castlevania: Curse of Darkness. It serves for nothing, other than just, well, sitting in everything you see. From a rocking chair, to the electric chair (that does nothing), and even the cannon, all settled in a simple and placid background of a sunny meadow. It's interesting at first, then later rather boring... but stay just a few minutes more, and you'll start wondering what the hell is that room doing there, what purpose does it have, and why anything is happening there.
  • Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance does this at the VERY BEGINNING and through the game. A colossal armor comes to life BEFORE you enter the castle and you can't kill it, an indestructible great armor that you destroy by sending it to be crushed by gears, a mysterious creature you must sacrifice in order for its blood to fill the room and elevate the platform you're on... Oh, and Legion (Corpse) room.
    • There's a vacant room that you fill with furniture you find through the castle. Curse of Darkness above borrowed this and made the Chair Room.
• The Hellion-based instances in City of Heroes are creepiest when the map is largely cleared, and all you can hear are the eerie sound and music effects around the glowing mystic artifacts, bloody symbols, and candlelight. For those that are brand new to the game and unaware which game objects react to you and which don't, it's especially bad, as you keep expecting the symbols to do something.
• In Clock Tower, while Jennifer roams around the huge mansion, there is absolutely no music playing. For the most part, the only sounds you'll hear will be your own footsteps and the occasional interaction with some background objects... until Scissorman pops out, that is.
• This is probably the only "good" part of The Crystal Key, although it only kicks in during the second half of the game. In the beginning, you're in a Beautiful Void, and while the lighting and music are pretty dang creepy, it's not so bad because you have no reason to believe there's anything out to get you. When a soldier appears out of nowhere, shoots you, and dumps you in a prison cell, it's a bit jarring, but still not that bad. When you break out, however, you get to watch a Darth Vader ripoff force-choking a guard. And then he rushes out of the room and heads straight your way, and you have only a few seconds to get into a side corridor. After that, even the rest of the Beautiful Void segments become horror as you wait to see what will come for you next.
• Dark Fall:
  • The Journal uses this method of horror almost exclusively. It's not possible to actually die at any point in those games, but they do their damnedest to help you forget that.
  • Lost Souls makes similar use of this trope, although it has a lot more in-your-face horror than the original too.
• Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder has a good deal of exploration of an abandoned mansion. It's dark and not entirely finished, and creepy music plays through the entire thing, but it takes ages for anything to happen. At least until you rappel down that pit in the basement...
• Dead Rising:
  • In either version of Dead Rising after special forces have apparently taken out the zombies, those zombies all just lie on the ground. It is quite disturbing in the first play through.
  • Played with in Dead Rising 2 where "jumpers" (just zombies that decide they need to lie down on the ground for a nap or wait around a corner, or worse inside a toilet stall and eat you if you pass by) who, first time around, scare the shi'ite out of you, but the thing that makes it scary is, that you never know where they will hide, until you go there. They spawn randomly too.
• Deus Ex Universe:
  • Deus Ex uses this with a little of the classic version in the underwater laboratory. Eerie music, no apparent enemies, ominous logs and corpses spread around, flat out informing you of every enemy you will face. The music and locations all build up towards something but that something never occurs.
  • Deus Ex: Invisible War does this with the abandoned Antarctic base. Parts of the level have only a few guards and penguins, the music is just this ambient wind, and inside is dead silent. Scattered throughout the level are datapads that serve as the diary of a researcher long dead, adding to the creepiness. Lastly you have to fight mutagenic creatures that have escaped into the base, and it is nearly a relief towards the end when you finally run into a few humans.
  • Deus Ex: Human Revolution uses this trope on three occasions:
    • Near the end of the FEMA camp, you have to go through one otherwise empty warehouse room with shelves stocked with hundreds of huge boxes. After a couple seconds you recognize them as something you first saw earlier in the level: each and every one is the compact form of a car-sized killer robot that can be activated at any time, and the emptiness continuing for the next couple rooms highlights how completely screwed you'd be if they were.
    • During your initial wanderings through the Picus building it starts out completely empty, with little to no Background Music, but on it's very clear something bad has happened by all the locked fire-escapes and signs of a hasty evacuation. You'll be overjoyed when the bad guys come out of the woodwork - at least then you'll have something to hit.
    • Panchaea starts of with you walking around a deserted, ruined ocean facility in the middle of the Arctic. The only hazards are electrified water on the floor, the occasional loose wire, and a few mines. It's made scarier by the fact that you know that there are augmented people driven murderously insane hanging around somewhere but you're not sure where.
• Disco Elysium: You can potentially arrest a young drug addict who turns out to have been a corporate spy. She's desperate to not be caught, always alluding to atrocities and crimes; it's implied she's a drug addict because of what she'd seen and done, and the corporate goons trying to find her are just as capable of doing the horrific. Nonetheless, you can arrest her anyway. If you have a specific skill that allows the player to tune into various scenes of the city, and her corporate pursuers open her cell, and... it cuts to a description of the city's river flowing nearby.
• The first level of the original Alien TC for Doom. No enemies. None. Just fifteen minutes of slowly freaking out, searching every corner twice, thrice, four times, because for God's sake, this is Doom! Where are they?
• Dragon Age:
  • Used occasionally in Dragon Age: Origins. During the Dalish Elf origin, a companion notes that there are no sounds of wildlife, no wind in the trees... And of course, there's what happens if you decide to abandon Redcliffe to its fate and come back later...
  • Dragon Age II: The Primeval Thaig. Totally empty aside from the Rockwraiths haunting the place... and this one weird idol, glowing ominously red. What lore notes we have on the place make it even creepier; it was once a center of Lyrium production, but one day they just shut their doors, refusing entrance to even Paragons. After a while, the doors opened again... and everyone was gone. No signs of a struggle, no indication of what happened during the isolated period except for the glowing red idol. This spooked the dwarves so badly they re-sealed the Thaig and erased it from history in the hopes that it would remain forever forgotten. And it was, until Hawke came along...
• Elden Ring: How does the Dung Eater defile his victims? From what little we know (it leaves them with a bloody crotch, an item called a 'Seedbed Curse' spawns on the body, watching the process traumatized Big Boggart, its victims are Barred from the Afterlife), we can deduce that we should be very glad we don't know more.
• While Eternal Darkness is better known for the classic example above, there is one Sanity effect that deserves mention here: Sometimes, when you enter a small room with no other exit than the door you came in through, you might go back through the door only to find that it is locked. Usually this happens when something really weird is about to happen, like your character sinking into the floor... but sometimes nothing happens, not even a flash of light or a cry of "This isn't really happening!"
• Eversion:
  • World X-7 replaces the stage music with a heartbeat.
  • One of the randomly-selected "READY!" screens in World X-6 to X-8 is a completely blank screen.
  • In World X-8, all foreground objects (except you, the enemies, and the red liquid) are black and textureless.
• The save room in The Evil Within is completely devoid of enemies and the only people in it are you, the creepy nurse and the guy in the cell next to yours. That doesn't stop it from being the scariest place in the game, especially when the painting shows up or the nurse disappears.
• In The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, the player never gets to see the true form of the mysterious pagan god Abraxas Rex. They only get to hear the rather creepy growls and sounds it makes as it rewakens in the game's climax, and see the Player Character, Thomasina Bateman, regard it in utter wide-eyed horror as it looms over her from off-screen. In the aftermath, Thomasina declines to detail what she saw in her account of the events, noting that "How does one even attempt describe the indescribable? The vision before me defied all logical explanation."
• Fallout:
  • Fallout likes this as well. There are several locations, mostly abandoned military research installations or something like that where you're all alone. Which makes it really unsettling.
  • The loneliness is also brought out into Fallout 3 if you use the Animal Friend perk level 2. If you experience nothing, see a green blip indicating an ally, and find out it isn't human, but just another Mole Rat, then you know what it is like to be truly alone. This in turn can be completely removed by gaining an ally.
• In Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water, there's a ghost of an inhumanly tall woman who wears a feathered sunhat and a white dress. She is easily one of the most recognisable, memorable and iconic ghosts in the game. So, what's her name? How did she die? How did she get so damn tall? And why the fuck is she smiling like that!? No-one knows. The database only lists her as "Tall Woman" and that's all we ever learn about her. She has a few spoken lines, but they only serve to make her even scarier since the one thing they reveal is that she's an Outside-Context Problem who wasn't dragged into Ouse Kurosawa's grudge against her will or is only reacting to your presence like almost all other ghosts are, instead she is a malevolent presence in her own right and she's actively hunting you down.^note As the wiki suggests, the Tall Woman seems to be an adaptation of a Japanese Creepypasta or urban legend character called Hachishaku-sama/Hasshaku-sama (or "Miss Eight Foot Tall"), a creepily tall woman in a white dress and sunhat who kidnaps children.
• Probably the scariest and most tense part of Final Fantasy VII is after Shrina imprisons The Team, Cloud wakes up in his cell while Tifa is asleep and discovers the door is open, and sees the bodies of the guards down the corridor. Worse still you just have to follow the trail of blood while disturbing music plays keying you into the fact something is terribly wrong, not helped by Red XII’s comment “Nothing human could’ve done this”. Oh and you don’t even encounter any Shinra troops, because everyone is dead and ex-President Shinra has a familiar Masamune stabbed into his back.
  • The weirdest part about JENOVA? You see and fight her scattered limbs, you see her severely-downsized form, you see her reborn form... but you never see the planet-destroying original.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is a much Lighter and Softer game than the previous entries in the series — but in spite of this, it does feature one particularly horrifying moment about two thirds of the way into the game. The game's map sprites depict a woman walking to Orson, but her portrait is never shown. Something important to note: Orson's wife is dead. By the time Monica is encountered by Ephraim and Eirika, she interacts with them: By saying nothing but "Darling!" over and over again. Her portrait is still never shown, and all you see are Eirika horrified at this and Ephraim who, while unnerved, explains this is a reanimated corpse. The player is free to imagine just what Monica looks like at this point. While Orson's wife is not encountered until then in Ephraim's route, Ephraim had earlier fought Vigarde, who is also a reanimated corpse by the time of the game. The fact that the game showed Vigarde's portrait, which looks completely normal, but refused to show Monica's, makes the moment even eerier. This is also made even more scary if the player had gone through blind and chose Eirika's route, first. It is still unnerving as Ephraim (because of the aforementioned horror) but the fact that the player had never experienced this before adds shock to it.
  • Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest: At one point, Hans executes Scarlet off-screen. We're never shown what exactly he did, but it was apparently so brutal and horrific that Camilla, a Blood Knight who's been Conditioned to Accept Horror and able to casually threaten people with death and dismemberment with a smile on her face, is shocked speechless.
• The Game Over shots from Five Nights at Freddy's and the sequel show what happens to you if you get caught. What does the Game Over screen in Five Nights at Freddy's 3 show if Springtrap gets you? Nothing but a black screen and the words Game Over written in red neon. Considering who is inside the suit, maybe it's best that we don't know what happened.
• Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, taking place after a series of natural catastrophes and an experiment gone wrong that leaves humans on the brink of extinction, is made of this. The player explores the crumbling ruins of subways, an underground shopping mall, a theme park, a hotel, and a laboratory, and it's usually pitch dark outside of the area your flashlight illuminates. There isn't something trying to kill you in every room or corridor, but when you're approaching an enemy, you hear the ominous music before you see it and have to move forward.
• In God of War (PS4), the game leaves unanswered what exactly killed all the frost giants in Jotunheim. At first it appears Odin did, but seeing the sheer number of hoops that Kratos and Atreus had to go through to get there and only with the guidance of a giant and an all-knowing ally that they succeed, it seems unlikely that Odin did. Which leaves the question of who did kill the giants after they locked themselves away and for what reason? And are they still out there?
• An unexpected (and possibly unintended) example shows up in Grand Theft Auto IV. There's an apartment across the street from one of your safehouses with a door which can be opened. Usually buildings with a door you can push open serve some purpose or another (be it part of a mission, the location of a collectible item, or even the site of an Easter Egg), this place serves no purpose. Even weirder, every other apartment building in the game contains people hanging around the halls. This one is completely empty, although there is a photo of a police officer in there, which implies that the house was owned by a police officer or his family, who had to leave their apartment (or were killed). It is very creepy.
• Haunting Ground, as a survival horror, makes full use of this. Creepy music is played as you walk round a castle that is yours In Name Only, where you know you are being hunted by an enemy you cannot kill, having no weapons or defense of any kind apart from that afforded by your large White German Shepherd (the dog). When your pursuer draws near (not that you can tell) the creepy music... stops. But then this trope is subverted - there is something scarier than no music: your dog growling at something he can smell and you can't see. Start running, and hope you pick the right direction.
  • Haunting Ground psychological’s horror elements also take full advantage of this trope, with many cutscenes that don’t involve any direct horror but are often so full of creepy and awful implications that they are scary regardless. Case in point, when first meeting Richardo he is playing a piano out of view and tells Fiona to uncover an object hidden by a sheet that he made for her, she does so and finds a woodcut statue of a pregnant woman. He doesn’t even have to specify his desire, for the scene to be disturbing as hell.
  • There’s a similar moment if you look though a keyhole of a particular door a secret cutscene will activate of Richardo interrogating Emotionless Girl Daniella and smacking her face. After he’s done, Daniella will turn (blood on her mouth) to look at Fiona through the keyhole... and smile freaking the latter out.
• Similarly, in the first arc of Higurashi: When They Cry, there's a scene in which a character responds to the perspective character's inquiry about murders by saying that she hasn't heard anything about something like that. Her facial expression doesn't change and she doesn't appear alarming or show any signs of lying, but holycrapthemusicjuststopped! It's almost an inverted Scare Chord. In fact, the fact that your first clue that something strange is going on is something that doesn't happen in-universe is the first hint that this arc is Through the Eyes of Madness.
• The Janitors in Hotline Miami do this in the "Clean Hit" chapter; when Jacket is walking to his car during the intro scene, he sees the blonde one ominously smirking at him. Then, in the actual level itself, Jacket has the option to shimmy across a window ledge to ambush several enemies. As he is shimmying, he passes another window, through which he sees the brown-haired janitor also smirking at him. These two characters are never seen again in Jacket's storyline.
• In Huntsman: The Orphanage, your only source of light is a small phone that occasionally comes to life whenever a ghost feels like communicating with you, you have no idea what your ultimate goal is for the first hour or so of the game, and the only thing that is certain is that a big creepy Slender Man with spider legs is stalking you while you explore. Yeah, the same one that killed all those poor orphan children. The phone light also only shines a few feet in front of you, so you usually find yourself looking straight into complete and utter darkness. The Huntsman could be right in front of you, and you wouldn't have a clue until you were too close for comfort.
• Ib: You're just wandering in a cursed art gallery trying to get back to the real world for most of the time and barely anything will pop up to scare you out of scripted events, but the ominous music itself is enough to drive you so suspenseful that the biggest fear is expecting something to happen while they don't.
• I Can't Escape is taking place in constantly changing dungeon with many underground levels (each one is darker than the other), creepy environments, eerie sounds... and absolutely no enemies.
• Jim's Computer uses this as its main source of horror, having creepy noises play and hints of a looming threat, yet no actual monster. The moments where Jim opens closets are timed just right to make the audience dread what may be inside even for half a second, despite the fact that each time, nothing is found.
• JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island's labyrinth combines this and the first example of this trope, although that is randomized. Everywhere else, you hear the wind blowing and hear your shoes tapping on the ground whenever you move. When you're in the labyrinth? You don't even hear those. To make matters worse, Repsac can jump you in the labyrinth.
• In Just More Doors, if opening door after door to find dozens of square rooms with only furniture and more doors isn't enough, the areas that are not basic square rooms very often qualify. Sudden drop in lighting? Ominous sounds? Corners where something could be waiting for you? The game has it all.
• Kairo in general takes this route as a Minimalist Puzzle Platformer. The most noise you can expect to hear while playing is the whirring of mechanisms operating, the footsteps of the player character, the static of the occasional monitor/screen you come across, and the sudden and rather loud gong noise that sounds when you solve a puzzle.
• Layers of Fear is full of this. While there are, of course, plenty of rooms where things do happen (things melting, rearranging, jumping out at you, etc), sometimes there are long stretches that are just ominous atmosphere (and creepy-looking corrupted imagery) but no actual activity.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: In the Disk System version, for the Game Over there's just a black screen and a digitized roar. Nothing else.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
    • While the Shadow Temple is sometimes nicknamed "the Silent Hill level", this trope is the reason so many people find the Forest Temple utterly terrifying. Rather than a dark crypt like the Shadow Temple or an extension of the Lost Woods like one might imagine a scary temple being, the Forest Temple largely resembles a large mansion that hasn't been lived in for centuries. The rooms are humongous, dimly lit, and often...completely devoid of life. The temple has incredibly creepy background music that plays as you slowly make your way through one dim, empty space after another, almost wishing for an enemy to come out and break up the silence and stillness. There are places it plays much like a normal temple, but when you first begin to explore, it is one of the most unnerving experiences the game has thrown your way thus far. And then you get introduced to the Wallmasters. And the Forest Temple's haunted - the minibosses are four ghosts that vanish from portraits and cackle at you.
    • Also, the first time you encounter the Redeads. They're underneath a tomb, way in the back of Kakariko Village Graveyard, in a big, open room full of thin walkways and channels of water. And they're just... standing there. Every other monster in the game moves at least a little bit, even the ones that are fixed in one place, but the Redeads are absolutely still. So you carefully start sneaking across the room, heart in your mouth because of these freaky things and music that sounds straight out of Silent Hill, and then you get halfway across the room and SCREEECH! You turn around, and... none of them have moved.
  • An after-case, if possible: if you arrive at the Romani Ranch on the third day in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, you'll notice that the entire field, inhabitants included, are severely quiet. Not that there's that many people living on the ranch, mind you, but the effects are still felt. The problem is that alien-ghost creatures invaded the ranch just last night, and abducted the livestock and the owner's little sister. And when you talk to the younger girl on the farm, you'll notice what looks suspiciously like a lobotomy. For experienced players who knew about this, it's just a tiny bit creepy. But for those new to the area/game, it's deeply unsettling.
• Little Nightmares:
  • The exact nature of the Maw and the world it exists in is left mostly unexplained. Even the supplementary materials don't expand much on it. No one in-game ever speaks and no documents explain things.
  • The shoe pit has an unseen monster digging its way through all the thousands of shoes and luggage dropped there. Why it is there and for what purpose is unclear.
  • The Hanged Man is encountered early in the game who has appeared to have committed suicide. But if one looks carefully, his chair isn't kicked over and his hands appeared bound behind his back...
  • In the final stage, the Lady's Quarters, Six must sneak past the Lady and break open a pot to get a key to a locked door. The Lady's humming stops, and one would expect to have to run and/or hide from the Lady, but she never comes into the room. And when you creep out past where the Lady was, she's just gone, not reappearing until the next segment of the level just when you're about to let your guard down.
• In a meta-sense, the series Manhunt is horrifically violent and contains realistic violence and sounds. However, there is cut content from the second game which includes plenty of executions that didn't make it in. Some of these executions were never animated, but had audio recordings. Listen to this, and try to imagine what Daniel or Leo could possibly be doing to the poor saps who come in their way.
• Mass Effect:
  • Invoked by Tali in the first game, who mentions several times that the relative silence of the Normandy's engine compared to the quarian ships she grew up on unnerves her. Generally speaking, those quarian ships creak and groan and make all sorts of noise due to their age and the huge number of times they've been repaired or altered... if there's dead silence on a quarian ship, it means something has gone catastrophically wrong and the life support is probably off-line.
  • In Mass Effect 2:
    • When you board a Collector Ship and for the first half, you find absolutely nothing. It's pretty damn unsettling as you—and your characters—wonder where the Collectors are. This example is particularly unsettling because of all the chest-high walls. Players have generally come to assume that chest-high walls equals imminent fight. So they're REALLY expecting something to come out.
    • Another is when you board the Derelict Reaper, and go through the first few minutes with no enemies while watching creepy vids which reveal that "even dead gods can still dream." This one gets creepy before you ever get there. You're going into a millions of years old corpse of a super-advanced species whose only goal, as far as you know, is to kill every single sentient creature in the galaxy, previously studied by a group of scientists that Cerberus has lost all communication with. Then once you get there, you find nothing but empty rooms, leftover supplies, and creepy recordings of the scientists slowly going crazy. And if you've paid any attention at all in the games up to that point, you know exactly what is doing it to them. The husks attacking are practically a relief! The fact that your soon-to-be party member isn't making a scene at all doesn't help. At one point you hear husks roaring, then a couple of shots shoot past you along with several dead husks, then one of your current party members says "Wait, what was that?"
    • A third takes place on a side mission, a derelict ship that has lots of puzzles but absolutely no enemies — and not many more lights.
    • In another optional mission, you're on a crashed ship hanging off of a cliff. There are no enemies and you can't bring any party members. There's also no music and the only sounds you'll hear are the creaking of the ship as it starts to slip off the edge (Which gets worse the farther you get into it) and the occasional crash of a piece of metal falling. It becomes less scary once you've played it a few times and realized that all the creaking, crashing, and falling objects are scripted and no matter how fast you move the ship will never fall over the cliff until you reach the end.
    • The Normandy crash site. Just you, alone at the wreck of the ship, wandering around the ice, looking for dog tags and remembering the past, while in the background, something's howling... but nothing appears.
  • Mass Effect 3 has the Ardat-Yakshi monastery. Right after you drop, you find a shuttle with its engines still warm, with one of your squadmates noting that there may be a visitor. Then you enter the damn place, and the elevator isn't working. So you go down by ladder, and the large hall you enter is huge and completely dark. The only thing lighting it is your flashlight, while you hear ear-piercing screeches in the background - as James notes, "Like nails on a chalkboard... and it's calling its friends." As you explore the room, you hear several noises of something moving, and when you get close to the exit, you find a few dead Cannibals on the ground. The large room is, in fact, completely empty, and the Banshees don't attack until you're in a well-lit area, which is why this is an example of the second kind of this trope, not the first.
• In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Snake and Otacon return to a now deserted Shadow Moses Island. Despite knowing that all the soldiers are gone, and that nothing lurks around the corner, you still feel a sense of discomfort as you traverse the empty halls. This is especially prominent during the flashback at slaughter hallway, where you hear the agonizing screams of soldiers being sliced apart. There's no one there, and the screams eventually fade away, but you're left with a lingering feeling of unease.
• Metro 2033:
  • Irradiated areas when your mask is running low. The deep breathing, the rising geiger counter and just nothing else.
  • One of the creepiest levels is Ghosts. There is not a single enemy.
• In Might and Magic VIII, the Plane of Air is just an empty blue-white void during the day, and a pitch-black void at night.
• My House has an Alien Geometries maze inspired by House of Leaves that the player has a chance of entering from the master bedroom closet. The maze is entirely pitch black and lacks music, and though a monstrous groan is occasionally heard, no monsters are encountered here.
• In the original Myst:
  • Three of the four Ages you visit were once inhabited, but are now empty, the inhabitants having been murdered previously (the fourth was always empty). Add to that the presence of rooms full of furniture and the library on Myst Island, and the overall feeling is that of a series of places where the residents have been gone for a while, but could come back at any moment...
  • It doesn't help that in three of said Ages, Achenar's rooms are full of weapons and torture devices. You can't interact with them and nobody is there to use them on you, but that doesn't make them any less disturbing.
  • The Stoneship Age has the compass room. It's a giant compass surrounded by tens of buttons, and if you press any button except the correct one, the power goes out and a loud alarm starts blaring. Given that (as previously mentioned) the inhabitants have been murdered, there's no other consequences, but that doesn't stop the feeling that someone's coming for you.
• Octopath Traveler: Wispermill, the last town in Ophelia's story. It has a creepy atmosphere, heightened because none of the people will talk to you. They have no items to buy or steal, and they can't be Guided, Allured, Challenged, or Provoked. You can Scrutinize or Inquire, but the only information you'll get is that the townsfolk "very pious"; anything more than that is described as beyond your party's ability to figure out.
• In the game The Outsider, it's extremely silent and dark throughout the entire game. In several rooms, it's so dark that you expect something to jump out at you. It never happens.
• The Path has no enemies, no jump scares, nothing. It's just you, walking almost alone in the forest, listening to the calming songs and sounds of the forest, and yet you feel worked up, knowing that, since the game is a remake of the story of Little Red, there is a wolf out there, watching you...
• The Penumbra series makes really good use of this trope as well. The tech demo (that started it all) has only 2 encounters throughout the entire thing, yet throughout the game you're terrified in case you find something around the next corner. The trope is also present in the series proper (Overture, Black Plague and Requiem), owing to their focus on Psychological Horror - and when we say they offer this in spades, we really mean it. The whole damn series is a rich source of pure Paranoia Fuel in video game form...
• Towards the end of Persona in the SEBEC quest, the school in alternate world is suddenly devoid of life. There's nobody around at all and there's absolutely no traces of them anywhere. Even your friends aren't sure what happened to everybody. In actuality, Aki being absorbed by Pandora caused all the people in Aki's side of town to disappear since they were a part of her creation.
• The protagonist in Planescape: Torment committed a sin so vile that the planes themselves condemned him for it. His sin was so unforgivable that a thousand lifetimes of penance could not come close to make up for it. And no, we never find out what he did.
• Pokémon has quite a lot of this, for such a generally lighthearted series there’s a disturbing amount of creepy material that’s never fully explained.
  • A lot of the creepy Ghost and Psychic Pokémon Pokédex entries and data invoke invoke Nothing At All to the extent they come off as Creepypasta.
    • Haunter’s Pokédex spells it out “If you get the feeling of being watched in darkness when nobody is around, Haunter is there”.
    • Drifloon and Drifblim carry children and people off, where to? Nobody knows. Although Pokémon Sun and Moon clarifies in Drifloon‘s case it takes children to the afterlife.
    • Hypono (who evolves from the already creepy as sin Drowzee) has been known hypnotise children and try and kidnap them, no reason is given for why they do so but the minds of older players will reel with the dark implications.
    • Mimikyu is already a Nightmare Fuel incarnate Pokémon with it’s crudely drawn Pikachu mask similar to a Sackhead Slasher. Worst still is the knowledge that whatever is beneath that Paper-Thin Disguise apparently scared a scholar to death when he saw it.
  • Lavender Town. Besides the Pokémon Tower where Pokémon are buried, nothing on the surface is overtly disturbing about the place as it appears as friendly as the rest of the Kanto towns. Except the kid friendly tone takes a sharp left turn as the player learns Pokémon die and the music that plays is so spine chilling it has an urban legend behind it.
  • The pale girl/Psychic Trainer encounter from Pokémon X and Y strongly invokes this. Upon entering the second floor of a certain building in Lumiose City, the music stops, the lights flash and a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl appears behind you gliding towards the bottom of the screen in a frozen walking animation and saying cryptically "No, you're not the one" before leaving the frame and disappearing. She can appear later on in a bedroom standing creepily by the wall and says “Don’t talk to me... If you do, I won’t... hear the elevator...”. Absolutely no explanation is offered in the game to exactly who or what the hell she is. Some speculate she’s an inter-dimensional traveler or a ghost, the most likely explanation is that she’s a spooky Easter Egg left by the developers.
  • Another bizarre Easter Egg in Lumiose City is an ominous message scribbled on the back of one of the time tables at the train station that simply reads "I'm going to go for help. Wait in the usual place." No context is ever given.
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon has a mysterious force to keep you from stalling on one floor of a dungeon for too long, eventually blowing you away in a gust of wind should you not reach the stairs to the next floor in time. It does give you multiple warnings but never explains what's actually happening. It's even scarier in the future world.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet
    • The mysterious thing lurking in the very bottom of Area Zero. While you can find a book with a description of... whatever it is, its name is never given, and the player never gets to see it face to face, so it's a complete mystery as to how accurate the book is. All that's known about it is that it's huge, disk-shaped, and somewhere deep in a place that's already an Eldritch Location.
    • The Great Crater and the entire buildup to it are a great example of this. The second you get your map, you can see this gigantic, whited-out zone in the middle of Paldea, much bigger than any city in the region and with a rim that towers over everything but the highest mountains. You hear a lot of strange legends about the place, and all the adults warn you it's strictly off-limits, but once you upgrade your dragon to climb cliffs, you can reach the top of the crater's edge, only to find yourself in total silence on a narrow ridge, staring down into a chasm so deep, a layer of clouds blocks its bottom from view, with nothing else up there except the occasional high-level Pokémon flying around. Once the game actually does allow you to enter it for real, it only gets creepier. You find the research station at the crater's edge silent and abandoned, your Box Legendary is terrified by the idea of going down there, and once you do, it spends most of the chapter hiding in its Pokéball. The crater's interior is a massive complex of rock and land strips that almost seem to defy gravity, and all else that's down there is wild Pokémon and a few abandoned and silent research buildings, and things only keep getting weirder and more foreboding as you keep descending. The entire game builds up a sense of dread about the place, and it ends up being one of the creepiest locations in the entire series.
    • At one point, Arven tells you the full story of what happened to his Mabosstiff. He tried to enter the Great Crater to find his mother or father (which professor it is depends on the version), only to be attacked by a creature he describes as being so alien that he questioned if it was even a Pokémon at all, which beat his Mabosstiff nearly to death when it tried to defend him. We never find out what did it; the Paradox Pokémon and the disk-shaped creature from are certainly strange, but Arven never identifies any of them as being the culprit, and the base game ends with the implication that there may still be something else dangerous on the loose down there.
• In Portal 2, there's always someone talking to you. Whether it is The Announcer (who mostly says funny nonsense), GLaDOS (who does nothing but make petty insults towards you) or Wheatley (who tries to help but is very bad at it), there is always someone there to keep you company. However, this is thrown out the window completely at the start of Chapter 6, which is also the lowest point in the game (literally and figuratively). You've just had freedom ripped away from you at the last moment. Wheatley is Drunk with Power and has turned on you. GLaDOS is trapped in a potato and while she keeps you company for the starting cutscene, she immediately gets kidnapped by a bird. You're in an old, run-down part of the facility, everything is rusted and broken down, things are on fire, and there are hazard signs everywhere. And there's no-one there. That feeling of complete and utter loneliness even after hearing Cave Johnson for the first time makes this one of the creepiest parts in the entire game, and lasts throughout the entire chapter.
• Rayman 2: The Great Escape/Revolution/DS has the Cave of Bad Dreams, which is too over-the-top to scare anyone... except for the threat of a cyclopean demon attacking you if you take too long to complete the level.
• The Stranger in Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II. The first game already left a lot of questions about him open - who is he, what is he and why he is so interested in John's morality. Despite having only a cameo in II, it raises even more questions as it's confirmed he is real and his interactions with John are special enough to warrant him a warning from the blind seer. Note that he does not showcase this kind of interest with almost anyone else, with Herbert Moon being the exception. Even Arthur does not learn of his existence, as the only reference to him Arthur can find is a half-finished painting.
• Resident Evil:
  • What's scarier in Resident Evil than when the monster crashes through a window? When that same corpse that's been slumped in the corner of that room you've passed through a handful of times over the course of the entire game... just never gets up. Worse still, there are a couple of corpses that you don't see get up: you come through the hallway, the corpse is just gone, and you never find out where it went.
  • Resident Evil 2, safe rooms. Keep in mind that these are places explicitly named such that nothing will jump out at you, so you can save your game and stuff. Then the rooms themselves are creepy as hell and they play this. Shudder. Then, in the A side story, there's a door in one of these safe rooms. Normal enough, and maybe something interesting behind it. But then there are zombies in the loading screen. Suddenly the safe room is not so safe anymore. And it leaves the creeping worry... will it happen again?
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis has a similar creepy save room theme, as well as an even scarier empty room music. The game also features a corpse in the hospital that, when examined, reads "His neck has been devoured from the inside-out." Surely this means you'll encounter a parasitic creature akin to the G from Resident Evil 2 that bursts from the bodies of its victims, right? You never do, but something in that city is infesting people and eating its way out of them, and it could be anywhere...
  • The Remake of RE1 does this so well whether it be going though the dog hallway and nothing happens but a tiny clink of glass, going down into a creepy stone staircase into presently empty chamber or when you clear a floor of zombies and you have to move around the big empty mansion full of anxiety.
  • The first part of Resident Evil 5: Lost In Nightmares. The first time you go through it (and subsequent times on Amateur), there are absolutely no enemies to be found, but the ambiance is downright terrifying. The later parts of the chapter follow the classic version of the trope.
  • The "Before Kitchen" demo of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard features really grotesque imagery and a lot of noises from nowhere, but the most the player will ever encounter is a Cat Scare after picking up certain items while wandering through the house. The most tense parts of RE7 are wandering around the Baker house alone even when Jack is dead, the Molded will spawn inside the house eventually putting you on edge at all times.
  • The aforementioned remake of RE2 has already mastered this trope, probably thanks to using the same engine as RE7 to make environments as creepy as possible. In both Leon and Claire's scenarios you spend the first few minutes just walking around the cramped and creepily silent police station, it's especially scary when you enter the Licker corridor and unlike the original game find nothing but a disfigured corpse and some more bodies hanging from the ceiling. At one point in Claire's scenario (after losing Sherry) you have to go through Chief Irons's creepy taxidermy-filled office alone, and it's very unnerving as no zombies or Irons himself appear to break the tension.
• Rule of Rose gives even Silent Hill a run for its money with how masterfully it does this trope.
  • There’s many, many areas in the game (especially the orphanage at nighttime during the opening), that are creepy as hell but there’s nothing there to hurt Jennifer, yet the atmosphere is so chilling and the non-player characters with only a few exceptions are so disturbing in their own right.
  • One of the most skin-crawling scenes in the game is when elderly and predatory headmaster Hoffman demands the eldest orphan Clara come into a room with him. When Jennifer looks through the keyhole, she can see Clara scrubbing the floor while Hoffman stands near her face. Nothing explicit or sinister is shown but the awful implications will sicken most player’s minds.
• Schizm takes the concept of Beautiful Voids and runs with it. You were sent on a starship to provide supplies to scientists studying a Ghost Planet where all the inhabitants mysteriously vanished—meals left uneaten, work begun but unfinished, that sort of thing. All the scientists are gone, too, and their audio logs speak of them vanishing one by one. They speculate at some length as to what's happening, but none of them can figure it out—so you have no idea where not to go or what buttons not to push.
• Scratches also relies heavily on this for 90% of the game, noteworthy examples are the effect the first time you enter the basement of the mansion, the music makes you think something is gonna jump at you from the shadows at any moment, also near the end, when you finish crafting the sacred totem and you are on your way to confront the cursed mask, creepy laughs and whispers haunt you all the time on your way to it.
• While Shadow of the Colossus has the scary titular Colossus, you know about those ahead of time and each one gets a cutscene entrance. What's really eerie are the Forbidden Lands you travel across to reach them. They're these expansive areas almost completely devoid of life except for some small birds and lizards and a lot of inexplicable ruins. There's no ambient music music either. Clearly something big used to be there a long time ago but the game tells you nothing, and your video game brain is telling you the developers wouldn't make an area this big and put nothing in it, but they did.
• Shin Megami Tensei I has Random Encounters everywhere. In every town, every building— even places where it's decidedly unfair, like right outside shops and places to heal. When there aren't, you know there's something deeply wrong.
  • Example: The seemingly utopian town of Roppongi. Everyone seems to be at peace, and there are no demons around. Then you find out they're all zombies, reanimated by Belial and Nebiros in order to keep Alice company. Then there's the dungeon you navigate to get to the three of them—no encounters again, but instead, poison floors and exploding chests everywhere.
  • The game and its sequel represent the death of all humans in your party by having the screen immediately cut to black.
• Shivers (1995) has you walking around a haunted museum of weirdness. Alone. With evil spirits hiding in inconspicuous objects, just waiting to suck out your soul.
• It can't be stressed enough how masterfully Silent Hill does the fear of nothing. The scariest moments in the first four games is simply travelling alone with nothing appearing to attack you. Places like Woodside Apartment in Silent Hill 2 or the chained-up bedroom in Silent Hill 4 are especially horrifying because the atmosphere envelops you. Although enemies don’t always show up, a Scare Chord and other ambient noises will appear in the already-unnerving music just to make you jump over nothing.
  • Silent Hill even subverts the comfort of having a companion, as seen in the second game when you travel with Maria through the Brookhaven Hospital. It’s nerve wracking as Maria will always be hidden in the darkness or standing stock still in corners until your flashlight reveals her. It’s especially scary as Maria isn’t a threat, but she’s so phantom-like she can give you a worse Jump Scare than the monsters.
• Most character profiles in Skullgirls give thorough and comprehensive lists of things each character loves and hates, and helps build characterisation and establish an image of them. When it comes to emotionless, shapeshifting Eldritch Abomination Double, though, the profile simply reads "Likes: Nothing. Dislikes: Nothing". This is not fully accurate, though, since Double very clearly does not like the sight of Eliza.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In the Hub World of Sonic Generations, there's always music playing, whether it be a remix of the track belonging to the level you're standing in front of or one of the shop-themes. However, after finding the seventh Chaos Emerald and beating the Egg Dragoon, you go into the next area and the music stops completely. There's no noise as you insert the Emeralds into a set of giant gears, except for Sonic's footsteps. Even after you fix everything, the only sound is the rumbling of the gears and the ticking of a clock. Considering the fact that by activating the gears, you open the gate to the Time Eater-fight, this silence is pretty appropriate.
  • Sonic Frontiers takes this even further. Its main villain, The End, is an Eldrich Abomination that destroys worlds. The kicker of this is that it does not have a concrete form, but rather, many, many incarnations. Its truest form varies between person to person, as it is a projection of their eventual death.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:
  • There's the Wild Territory, a location usually bustling with mutants, anomalies and NPCs. Then there's a house which contains a stash that is completely empty, except for a few bushes which add to the "there's gotta be something hiding here"-feeling.
  • The horror of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series revolves entirely on this trope; there are pretty much no jumpscares (unless you're unlucky enough to run into a bloodsucker nest or run into a Controller), but it has an incredibly creepy atmosphere with dread seeping from every nook and cranny.
• Star Control:
  • The Orz, a strangely cute alien race from an alien dimension, don't really fit this trope, as the whole game is set into a non horrific, rather comedic atmosphere. However in a different setting, their uncanny, overly energetic friendliness, combined with their almost incomprehensible way to talk in strange pictures, which however allows many fearsome interpretations about their true, hidden nature and desires, as well as the fact that they seemingly just eradicated a whole human subspecies from existence, without leaving any witnesses of what exactly happened and them becoming instantly hostile to anyone asking to many questions about that, the diplomatic intercourse with them would fall into this trope, as dealing with them is dealing with a danger of unfathomable nature.
  • The beautiful thing is that there is nothing in the game that will corroborate anything about the Orz. There's no proof, just conjecture. The Arilou are no help, because they're even more evasive about this than normal (amplifying the effect tremendously), and the Androsynth computers never give any specifics either. Also, the creators were very careful not to say anything else about the Orz in conversations with the fans.
  • Parodied by the Spathi and their belief in THE ULTIMATE EVIL, a terrifying force of evil that is the greatest threat in the known universe. The Spathi have never found any kind of physical evidence that THE ULTIMATE EVIL exists... which obviously means it is hiding itself just beyond the range of their sensors, which is proof that it is evil.
• Super Mario 64:
  • The Endless Staircase is downright creepy, especially if you don't have the prerequisite 70 Power Stars to reach the top (if you don't, it's impossible, unless you can use a glitch only found in the N64 and Virtual Console version). While there's nothing that can hurt Mario, the eerie music combined with a dark staircase that seems to go on forever can be unnerving.
  • In the DS version, there's an extra locked door in the castle that can only be opened with the key you get from catching all the shining rabbits. If you do, your character comes back out with one of the castle's secret Power Stars. If you go in again after that, the music stops, the Boo laughing sound plays, and your character emerges (unharmed) making the 'taken damage' sound effect.
  • The romhack B3313:
    • Surprisingly for a creepypasta-themed game, there are few Jump Scare scenes and not many overt horror elements that weren't already native to Super Mario 64. Instead, the Castle's confusing architecture, signs of desrepair, red mist in certain areas, creepy messages from NPCs, and off-key music make for an unsettling and lonely atmosphere even when nothing is actually threatening the player.
    • One path into the Funhouse is a small room with its wall texture, a pipe and a sign reading "FUNHOUSE". Another has a Bob-omb ominously wondering just what the player can find on the other side of the door. The Funhouse itself is a maze of corridors only made unsettling by how wide and empty it is, not to mention the three exits are hidden in certain walls to make the player feel trapped inside.
    • There is at least one sudden dialogue box that comes out blank, referencing how certain pre-release footage of Super Mario 64 skips whatever was said in it.
• When the player finally goes to Rena in Tales of Arise, what greets them is... nothing. The world itself has been long long dead, sucked of its astral energy by the Great Astral Spirit of Rena. The player can see buildings and structures poking out of an ocean... except that ocean isn't just any ocean. It's a silvery liquid that, as the player had learned early on, is what remains of living beings who were drained of their astral energy. And it's covering the entirety of the remnants of Rena.
• Unlike the game it was obviously inspired by, Tattletail is a bit of a slow burn. Right off the bat the game warns you that running makes noise, and gives you an icon on the HUD that shows when you're audible, so you assume you're expected to keep quiet, probably so you don't wake your mother. There's even a prompt for knocking on her door just so you can not do it. Then you pick up the eponymous chatterbox itself, and it won't. Shut. Up. You have no idea how much noise is too much noise, except that Tattletail is definitely making more noise than you're comfortable with. It's a red herring; your mother can't wake up until the very end of the game, and even then only if you got all the eggs. And then on night two, the actual horror starts when you discover the Tattletail can somehow get out of the box on its own. This, too, is a red herring — it's not this one you should be worried about. There's no way to get a game over on the first two nights, but it doesn't stop you from being constantly on edge.
• In the Tomb Raider series, this trope is invoked quite a lot as Lara is frequently exploring places no-one has entered in thousands of years.
  • The level from Tomb Raider: Legend, which has Lara exploring King Arthur's tomb, features a section where Lara must swim across a vast body of water. As she swims, the camera pulls out showing just how vast the water is and how little Lara is...and you wonder if something is going to come up from underneath...
  • Another particular example is in Temple of Xian in Tomb Raider 2 when you enter a cave full of small and Giant Spiders you find a massive chamber with a huge egg cocoon; the level design makes you platform almost right next to it, but it never opens...
    • This trope is also used throughout the series with Lara exploring places no-one has entered for thousands of years, and you're never sure what might be waiting around the next corner...
  • The Temple of Doom in the second level of TR 3 has a room with a pair of corpses suspended in mid-air, with no indication of what killed them. Also, the hangar in Area 51.
  • This is used particularly cleverly in Tomb Raider: Anniversary. While a lot of the enemy encounters in the game are kept relatively true to the original, of particular note is the almost complete absence of crocodiles. Having dealt with fleeing from these in almost every Greek and Egyptian level of the original, every time you get in the water you find yourself anxiously waiting for one...
  • Similarly, many of the optional tombs in Rise of the Tomb Raider are eerily dark and empty, with several having large bodies of murky water to traverse. One of these tombs is in a Greek bath house, where dozens of bodies are floating in the bloody water. It's pure Paranoia Fuel, and you keep expecting something to drag you under, but nothing ever does.
  • In Tomb Raider (2013) there’s a bit early on after you get the bow in the Coastal Forest where you have go into a dark bunker to progress knowing full well there’s dangerous men on this island. There’s nobody inside the bunker, but there’s skulls and rotting meat strewn all around the place with the clear implication that was somebody unsavoury was living there, Lara is noticeably freaked out as you explore the place even though you encounter no threat whatsoever.
• Touhou Project:
  • Fujiwara no Mokou mentions this after the heroines note a distinct lack of opponents at the end of the extra stage. Very much subverted, in that while it is almost outright mentioned in one stage, that happens to be the one in which you play the ghosts.
  • Mentioned again in Undefined Fantastic Object in one of Reimu's routes right before the final boss (although said final boss turns out to be not very horrifying at all).
    Reimu: I can't sense anything at all, but... Anyways, what's with this world? All that ominous atmosphere from before is completely gone... ...It's just creepy in the opposite way.
• The second volume of Twilight Syndrome has "The Telephone Call", a Bottle Episode where Yukari hangs up on a mysterious caller. When she later mentions this to her friends, Chisato fears that unless she can make contact again and figure out what's going on, whatever made the call might end up trying to come to her through more direct means. The effect of dread is deepened by the phenomenon causing Yukari to start experiencing similarly strange but unrelated calls, including one where her attempt to call the automated clock service results in her hearing the five-second chimes that indicate the time is about to hit exactly midnight several times in a row. Incidentally, midnight is the deadline in which she is expecting to receive another call from the mysterious perpetrator that she cannot afford to miss, giving her a very tight window of time in which to figure out what she can even do about it. However, the ending reveals that the party behind the call, while supernatural, was tragic and well-intentioned, and unaware of the danger Yukari was being dragged into.
• At one point in the first Umineko: When They Cry Visual Novel, the music abruptly switches from a fairly elaborate orchestrated piece to a much more stripped-down version of the same. Guess which one is scarier. Of course, it doesn't help that the bass line for the latter version sounds like footsteps creeping around...
• In Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Drake gets stuck in the Rub'Al Khali desert and has to wander through dunes upon dunes of sand for a long time with only an empty well to encounter. The player controls Drake as he goes through all this, so the horror Drake gets from seeing nothing but sand for a while is a shared experience.
• The second world of Under Hero is closer to Big Boo's Haunt than anything truly scary. The exception is a single optional room within the manor. It's just a long empty hallway with no music, hazards, or lighting of any kind. After walking to the right for a while, you'll notice a mirrored, transparent copy of yourself overlayed atop the right side of the screen, which slowly drifts towards you when you walk towards it, and vice versa. The effect overall makes it seem like a weird camera gimmick or reflection, rather than another masked kid. But when it inevitably reaches you, you're suddenly thrown into a Mirror Match. The Nothing at all part comes in when you win and collect the treasure at the end of the hall: Your party then comments on how weird it was that nothing attacked you on the way there. This incident is never explained or mentioned again for the rest of the game.
• In Undertale, there is a recurring phrase: "But nobody came."
  • In the Pacifist run, it appears in a terrifying abandoned lab when you try certain Act options to emphasize that nobody will save you from these tragic abominations: "you cried for help, but nobody came. You screamed as loud as you could. But nobody came." (For bonus points, the Player Character is a preteen child.)
  • In the same lab, one room has a shower curtain with... something moving behind it, getting faster and faster as you approach. You open the curtain... and there's nothing there except one of the keys you need to progress.
  • Another instance in the same lab combines this with "wait for it..."; in one room that contains several refrigerators^note You need to turn on the fans in another room to see properly in the refrigerator room, one of the refrigerators is shaking, and keeps doing so after you examine it. But when you examine it, it's empty. One of the other refrigerators in the room turns out to be an amalgamate in disguise, but even once you deal with that, the empty fridge in the middle of the room continues to shake disturbingly....
  • At the end of the Neutral run, you fight against Photoshop Flowey. After he fully restores his HP, he dares you to call for help.
    "Call for help. I dare you. Cry into the darkness! 'Mommy! Daddy!' 'Somebody help!' See what good it does you!
    [You called for help.]
    But nobody came. Boy! What a shame! Nobody else... is gonna get to see you DIE!!!"
  • The phrase occurs very often in a Genocide run. After you deplete all the monsters in an area, you will still trigger random encounters. But when the battle screen opens, it's empty, and simply says "But nobody came." In smaller-point font just to emphasize the point. Additionally, the music is replaced with Flowey's theme, "Your Best Friend", except 12 times slower as a low, eerie hum. Everything is dead. The terror is you.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has had plenty of classic examples.
  • A full-blown example can be found in the Skyline Apartment building: given the keening whine of the music and the subdued lighting, you'd expect that something threatening would be waiting for you. Instead, after poking around in the shadows of almost every single room in the building, you find a frightened TV host, a vaguely ominous message on an answering machine, a fresh corpse, and a dying prostitute. The place brightens up when Prince Lacroix gives you an apartment there, but considering that almost every single resident has died for one reason or another, the eeriness never quite dies away.
  • Check the basement. The guards were spying on the tenants. "Were". As in, they're gone. What happened to them? Never explained. They were most likely fired by the owner due to the Prince's influence; living in a building with overly curious creepy janitor is actually not very Masquerade-conscious.
  • There is also the character of the Sheriff. He is of no recognizable clan, bloodline, ethnicity or cultural origin. Nothing about his past, powers or abilities is known. It is never stated how he came to LA and started working for the Prince, and only comes out of the woodwork when someone needs to die. Players and player characters alike are scared shitless of him.
• In Warframe, during the "Octavia's Anthem" quest, when Ordis gets himself taken over by Hunhow trying to save Suda at the end of the third mission, the remainder is completely silent, without Ordis or the Lotus telling you to head for extraction. Afterwards, Ordis won't speak in the orbiter and Suda is similarly silent when you interact with her until you free the two Cephalons.
• the white chamber has the eyeball hallway, easily the scariest part of the game. After the player gets dragged into the nightmarish, Silent Hill-esque Dark World, they're railroaded into a nearby repeating hallway, with the music getting more and more tense with each screen transition as one of the walls opens up to reveal a gigantic twitching eyeball as the player goes. What happens at the end? Absolutely nothing. But dammit if the game doesn't convince you that something absolutely horrible is going to happen to you any moment now.
• An interesting example in World of Warcraft. In the Southern Barrens, a dwarf tells Alliance players that they Dug Too Deep and found... something. She doesn't say what they found, but they found something. She then mentions that the Cataclysm caused the cave where whatever it was is to cave in and tells you to pray that it was enough to keep it down.
• The unknown sectors in the X-Universe series straddle the line between this and type three. Head into one, get a fair distance from the gate, and just look at how empty it is in there. Think about all the things in the universe, mundane things like Space Pirates, or insane terraforming robots or a Horde of Alien Locusts with point to point jumpdrives that could be jumping in right out of scanner range ... hey, why are you running for the gate?
• Whereas the Dream Land of Yume Nikki falls under the Classic Variation (as noted above), the door in Madotsuki's (normal) room qualifies as this. Every time the player tries to enter the door, Madotsuki would nod her head and refuse to leave her room. What could be on the other side of the door that has her too afraid to leave, especially since she enters the door to her nightmarish Dream Land throughout the game? Whatever it is, she would literally rather die than confront it.

There all along!

• In Batman: Arkham Asylum, the implication at the end that the Joker was with you all the time in front of you, when you visited the Visitor Center. It gets worse when you realize that the mannequin is posed differently everytime you go into that room, and that after you "speak" with the Joker and walk a certain distance away before quickly turning around, the damn thing's posed differently.
  • Also, although you were attacked several times earlier in the game by Scarecrow, if you find his secret lair, it is almost completely covered in pictures of you. Since they're polaroids, and due to the nature of Scarecrow's attacks, it's safe to assume that he has been stalking you since you arrived at the Asylum, and probably followed you around every other time you went there. *Brr...*
• Cave Story Usually has more than one instance where the music stops. One of the earlier ones occurs inside one of the warehouses of Grass Town, where everything is quiet, the cheery music from the level is gone and is replaced with a small room, the only things to interact are the chimney and a treasure chest, the chimney has nothing on it (Or does it?) and interacting with it will only get you a comment about the breeze. While you could just walk out and leave, the chest contains a missile expansion, which is very helpful for later bosses, however if you do an enraged mimiga will come out of the supposedly empty chimney and immediately attack you as the boss theme stars playing, in a twist, it actually has low health, and once he loses enough exp he drops to the floor dead, as the cold silence returns to the room, interacting with the chimney again will confirm that there is nothing else there. There is no happy victory jingle like other bosses, there is no reward other than the chest you just took, you just entered into an abandoned warehouse, killed a thing, then got out. You may notice the bed is full of red petals, just like Arthur's house, and if you've talked with some of the local NPCs, the more you continue the story, the darker the implications of that encounter will become.
• Until Dawn has several moments of this.
  • The Reveal of the game that the unexplained enity who took or killed Jessica and has been tormenting Matt and Emily has actually got nothing to do with The Pyscho aka Josh at all but is actually The Wendigo who infest the mountain is made all the more effective, when you realise they've been around since the start of the game. You can even catch glimpses of the Wendigo as early as Chapter 2 while Mike and Jess go through the mine and later if the player fails to slide under a door forcing Mike to go through a dark passage, his lighter goes out and in the moments before he flicks it back on you can see Wendigo Hannah staring at Mike through slats in the wood. Yet Mike himself doesn't even notice.
  • There's also an easily missable moment during the bit where Chris, Ashely and Josh are playing the Ouija Board, the usual spirit board scares happen as the trio try and contact a ghost and seemingly talk to Hannah or Beth's spirit much to Josh's distress and anger. What the characters don't notice is the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl hanging out in the background.
  • The intervals with Dr. Hill build up this, as its set entirely in first person and you are unsure who you are currently playing as while the psychiatrist gives you questions and choices. Until chapter five where the camera is focused on Dr Hill looking out a window before he turns around and The Pyscho is there, revealing you've been playing as him during these sessions the entire time.
• One room in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow appears to be empty until Soma or Julius walk in front of the large mirror in the center of the room, revealing the aptly named boss, Paranoia, hiding in the character's reflection.
• The whole Oldest House where the Federal Bureau of Control works can be interpreted as this: to newcomers, it is an Expy of the SCP Foundation where some corrupted item freed a mysterious energy called the Hiss plans to invade the Bureau, and maybe the entire world. Because of the simultaneous invasions of the Hiss, the Moss (both of them transform their victims into zombies), the Clog, the Astral Plane and Emil Hartman, you can be sure you won't have a moment of peace. The floating corpses coupled with the aseptized conception of the Bureau make these sensations even worse.
  • The Oceanview Motel mixes this with "Nothing at all...": you can't use your powers or your service weapon, something that can be reassuring or worrisome depending on your point of view. The only Jump Scare can come from one sequence where you open the door only to fall on Clog. However, you can always hear someone scream and you can't do anything to make it stop...
  • The Mirror World combines this with "Wait for it...": it is a dark place where your character speaks backwards and where "something" lives, probably to escape its world. It appears three times on glasses, mirroring you, then taunting you and finally breaking the glasses to fight you, supposedly to take your place.
• In the Dark Souls games, there's a spell fittingly called "Chameleon" that turns the player into a certain piece of scenery. Enemy players you invade (or who invade you) will see absolutely no difference between real scenery and someone using this spell, save for there being an object where previously there was none... Since it's so rare in general PVP, most people don't even pay attention to it. Doing so would still be difficult as some of the possible forms include chairs, vases, statues and other minor things that are nigh impossible to keep track of. In the right spot and form, players will simply be unable to find you. In fact, it's not at all uncommon for (especially new, oblivious) players to walk by you plenty of times, even as you move up behind them. The games are already nerve-racking without this level of terror and poor new players may suffer heart attacks when that barrel they walked past five times suddenly turns into the red spectral form of their imprending death.
  • Also possible without the spell by simply murdering enemies and taking their place.
• In The World Ends with You, Mitsuki Konishi, the game master, was there the whole time in your shadow during the third game.
• Devil May Cry:
  • There's a giant statue of a male, three-eyed angel facing the entrance of Mallet Island's castle. Examining it prompts Dante to speculate that it depicts the God that the Castellans worship. Later, after the castle becomes dimly-lit, it disappears. Guess what Mundus looks like once we finally see him? The same statue, but now on a different place. This creates the retroactive implication that the statue is alive and has been watching Dante in the beginning.
  • Yet another example when Mallet Island's castle becomes dark on your return to it; the arena where Dante first met Phantom seemingly became empty, but the game hints that there's something you must do there because of the existence of some switches. Interacting with the strange puddle on the floor reveals that it's actually Nightmare, the Blob Monster servant of Mundus.
• In the Game Boy Advance version of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, There's this secret in White Mountains's Edge where you find some loot, but the soldier next to where you find the secret warns you that the goblins doesn't leave their treasure unguarded for too long...
• At one point in Imscared the sky is white instead of the usual Always Night black sky. Except that once you get to a certain point, the sky becomes black again and White face can be seen there. Implying it's been staring at you from the sky all along.
• I See You: Its implied that you're being watched the entire time you're playing although nothing happens until later on in the game.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim likes to do this now and again with Giant Frostbite Spiders hiding in the ceiling, and despite how unimpressive they are in combat, being ambushed by one from above will still make you crap yourself every time. Ironically, it's scarier when you're also sneaking, because if you're just running around openly, it will probably notice you and drop in front of you as soon as you enter the room. If you're sneaking, it probably won't notice you until you're directly underneath it — and neither will you notice it.
• In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, there's a section where Nate has to climb up the wall of a mountain cave. During this section the camera slowly pans back to include some cliffs in the foreground, but you're so preoccupied with the platforming that you won't notice the Yeti on those cliffs until it growls and starts moving when you get to the top.
• Friday the 13th: The Game mixes this with the Wait for It variant. The game's use of scare chords and the unsettling atmosphere provides a constant reminder that Jason Voorhees is somewhere in the camp trying to hunt you down. However after hearing his 4th and final "Ki ki ki! Ma ma ma!" this jumps up to 11 as Jason now has his Stalk ability which allows him to shut off the chase music that plays when he's in close proximity of the player and sneak up on them without any warning.
• The infamous "HellValleySkyTree◊" figures from the Shiverburn Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy 2. They aren't enemies you fight, they are just seen in the background if you look closely...and all they do is watch you. They don't move, they don't do anything except watch. Aside from their file names, we don't know anything else about them, and it is terrifying.
• Etrian Odyssey normally contents itself with frightening you with the already-mentioned FOEs... but in the remake of Etrian Odyssey 2, a particularly vicious monster is hidden in a special way. While traversing Ginnungagap B3, you are walking through an empty corridor when suddenly the "FOE has noticed you" bell sounds. But there's nothing there. Nothing... until you take you eyes off the wall in front of you. The damn monster hides as part of the walls.
• Considering you play a tiny bug exploring an abandoned kingdom underground, Hollow Knight could count as a whole, but the examples below are the more blatant examples:
  • The Stone Sanctuary is a pitch-black (unless you have the Lumafly Lantern) hall with no enemies or music, just a large stone statue with empty eye sockets, and a series of platforms that lead to a Mask Fragment. Return to the statue with the Dream Nail, however, and you will be treated to a fight with the Dream Warrior "No Eyes", possibly the game's creepiest boss.
  • The Deepnest combines this with "Wait for it...". While the game has a lot of dark places, this one requires a lamp to progress: otherwise, your screen will only show a pitch black. However, having this item is only the start of your problems: after that, you can see the shadows of spider-like creatures walking in the first plan of the screen who can show out to attack your character.
  • The worst offender combines "There all Along!" with "Nothing at all": the Abyss below the Ancient Basin, the deepest place in the game. While the original place is already this trope once you collect the Monarch Wings, the only sounds being the Knight's movement and the scuttling of the enemies, this specific location takes this up to eleven: only some normal enemies live here while the others are some kind of ghosts made in a dark substance and tentacles that are hopefully restrained to black lakes. Once you obtain the Void Heart, these enemies don't attack you anymore: while it can be a reassurance that you've been accepted as one of them, the feeling of loneliness is still disturbing.
• An audible version for Timesplitters. Due to enemies not using any voice clips except for pain and death, zombies fit the bill in this series. Since there are also no footstep sounds, a zombie can easily sneak up from behind, and will get into your face!
• In Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, triggering the Optional Boss battle against Ermac in the garden reveals that the real Ermac was disguised as his own statue the whole time.
• Superliminal: One sequence takes place in a dark and bloody version of the hotel, with stacked boxes of DIE(t) soda propping doors open, other doors with bloody hand prints suddenly closing and locking before you can interact with them, and a knife that disappears if you interact with the flashlight casting light on it. However, nothing in the game is actually capable of harming the player. And then you reach the restaurant at the front and you discover that all of the 'blood' you saw was actually just paint spilled during an exceptionally messy redecoration.
• Tales of Graces eventually takes the player to the world of Fodra, a much bigger planet that is outside the world the player had explored previously. The world itself is primarily red and looks almost, well, dead. It's not completely devoid of life, as there are no shortage of monsters around. Then the player discovers that Fodra was once a thriving technological society that has long been After the End - and the world the players were on? Yeah - that was made to act as a seal for the Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds Lambda. Just what caused the destruction of Fodra anyway? Oh yeah... you'll see them in the Lineage arc...

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Go back to Nothing Is Scarier before your video game consoles are a source of this.

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