In any media, jump scares are an easy horror trope to implement and extraordinarily difficult to implement well. At best, jump scares instill anxiety in the audience and immerse them in horror. At worst, jump scares are cheap and annoying attempts to keep an audience interested in a dull horror story.
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Horror video games feature as many jump scares as most horror movies. Horror gamers expect jump scares, so it takes some clever thinking on the part of the developer to execute them well. By playing with game mechanics and subverting player expectations, developers of horror games can still deliver a shock.
10 Dark Souls Mimics Are Infuriating
No matter how experienced with Dungeons and Dragons a first-time Dark Souls player may be, there is no way they will be expecting their first encounter with a mimic. Up until the first encounter with a mimic, Dark Souls may seem incredibly unfair already, but it has at least allowed the player to take their rewards from treasure chests without issue.
That all changes with the introduction of mimics. When a player opens a chest that is actually a mimic, the chest sprouts teeth and arms, grabs the player character, and stuffs them into its mouth. It's such a mean, shocking trick that most players have to laugh at the audacity of it.
9 Resident Evil 7 Is Scariest At Its Quietest
Resident Evil 7 brought horror back to the RE franchise with a vengeance when it was released in 2017. Unlike the action-heavy, third-person military-versus-monsters shooters that comprised most of the later RE installments, Resident Evil 7 was a claustrophobic, unsettling horror game that took inspiration from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Saw, and The Thing.
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RE7 loses its creepiness as it progresses since most of the supernatural elements are explained away as more Umbrella Corps bioengineering shenanigans. However, the scariest sequence in the game is never rationalized. The player has to crawl through a dark maze of a bedroom while a ghost girl torments them. The best jump scare comes from a simple inflated ball.
8 Bioshock Makes Dentists Even Scarier
The 2007 classic Bioshock may not be as filled with horror as its predecessor, the System Shock series, but it still pulls off several brilliant moments. As the player explores the ruins of the underwater city of Rapture, they are constantly stalked and attacked by the chaotic splicers.
The best jump scare in the game arrives without fanfare, which makes it even more startling. The player enters an abandoned dentist's office and spots some pickups on a desk. They approach the desk, grab the goods, then turn around to leave. The dentist is standing directly behind them, not saying a word.
7 Condemned: Criminal Origins Spooks Players With A Locker
Condemned: Criminal Origins came out in 2006, but it's just as scary today as it was when it was first released. The main character, an FBI agent, descends into the depths of the city of Metro to investigate a murder, encountering supernatural beings and insane denizens on his journey.
Condemned: Criminal Origins involves forensic investigation sequences where the player must take photos of evidence and send them back to HQ. These sequences feel far safer than the rest of the game, at least until the player has to investigate a corpse stuffed in a locker. HQ tells the player to take a picture of the corpse's face. Needless to say, this does not go well.
Though it's based on one of the greatest horror film series of all time, Evil Dead: The Game isn't particularly scary, nor is it trying to be. It's a fun, fast-paced asymmetrical game where four survivors race to destroy the Necronomicon while a demon lays traps and possesses enemies to stop them.
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However, Evil Dead: The Game deserves praise for its brilliant use of jump scares as a game mechanic. The demon player can charge up a "rush" attack while they invisibly circle the survivors. If they land the rush attack, the survivor's player gets a jump scare in the form of the demon popping up on the screen, raising the character's fear level and spooking the player at the same time.
5 Amnesia: The Dark Descent Has A Late-Game Shock
Amnesia: The Dark Descent was a game-changing horror game when it was released in 2010. The game stripped the player of weapons or any means of self-defense, forcing them to either hide or flee from the monsters stalking the halls of Brennenburg Castle.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is extremely scary, but it's scary due to its oppressive atmosphere and the player's sense of powerlessness, not jump scares. However, when the player finds an iron maiden very late in the game, the developers spring a sudden, shocking jump scare. The game waits a long time to add a jump scare, which makes its arrival even more terrifying.
4 Iron Lung Terrifies With A Single Photo
David Szymanski's brilliant horror game Iron Lung takes less than an hour to finish, but it is scarier than most triple-A horror titles. The player takes control of a convict forced into a tiny submarine with which they must explore an ocean of blood on an alien planet.
The player can only see the outside of the submarine by taking photos, which take a few seconds to develop, then pop up in black-and-white on a monitor. The photos grow more sinister as Iron Lung progresses, culminating in a jump scare involving a giant eye that reveals that the player is not alone in this ocean.
3 Dead Space 2's Biggest Scare Goes Against Its Aesthetic
Dead Space 2 improved on its predecessor in almost every way, with better action, a better story, and more engaging characters. However, the high-energy opening led some players to worry that the game would lose some of the creeping tension of Dead Space.
Players need not have worried. Dead Space 2 delivers horror in spades when the player reaches the daycare center. The contrast between the area's friendly, colorful decor and the horrible monsters and wreckage that fill it makes for the creepiest level in the series. And the biggest jump scare arrives in the form of a friendly sun with a big smile.
2 Prey Turns A Coffee Break Into A Nightmare
The 2017 game Prey received widespread praise for bringing attention to detail, player freedom, and environment interactivity back to the immersive sim genre. It's also a solid sci-fi horror game with an isolated setting reminiscent of Alien.
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The opening of Prey is a fairly standard one for this type of role-playing game. The player arrives on their first day on the job, just as they do in the tutorials for System Shock 2, Deus Ex, and Half-Life. However, what starts as an unremarkable employee orientation turns into a nightmare when the scientist running the training suddenly notices an extra cup of coffee on his table. This gives the player a jump scare that also introduces them to the main enemy, the shape-shifting Typhon aliens.
1 Devotion Has A Birthday Surprise
Devotion is one of the greatest horror games ever made. Still, its brilliance is sadly overshadowed by its long-delayed release, the result of review-bombing and censorship by the Chinese government. Fortunately, interested gamers can finally buy the game directly from the developer's website and experience this masterpiece for themselves.
Devotion has its share of jump scares, and the best one is all the scarier for how reserved it is. The player solves a puzzle in one of the game's many surreal apartment settings by placing a small ballerina figure on a birthday cake. The figure twists and distorts in ghostly ways. Then, for the first time in the game, a human being besides the player appears onscreen. It's quiet and innocuous, and it's incredibly spooky.
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