- CapCom is remaking Resident Evil 3,
which is the Resident Evil game
where a big, melting Michael Chiklis
in cyber goth gear chases you the whole time.
The Nemesis is an unstoppable hunter.
It's the sole antagonist that pursues the hero
through their ordeal,
it's the Russian oligarch hunter
from The Most Dangerous Game,
it's The Terminator,
it's Anton Chigurh.
And when this archetype shows up in games,
it can be viscerally scary,
like the kinda scary that knots my guts up
and makes me feel physically bad.
Just about every game is chock full of monsters
that want to hurt you,
but these ones are worse,
because you can't hurt them back,
and they'll follow you wherever you go.
A load screen will not save you.
- [Man] Jesus Christ!
- But not all personifications of inevitable death
are created equally,
so here's a review
of all of the monsters who chased me before.
We'll be evaluating our monsters
based on three criteria
on a scale from one to five.
The first criteria is fear.
This is where we evaluate the monster
on pure horror aesthetics.
How do you feel when you look at the monster?
If the answer is pretty good,
then it's getting a low score on this one.
Danger is where we evaluate
how badly the monster can actually fuck you up.
Because a lot of times,
the things that scare us,
aren't the same things that can hurt us.
I've had a lot more nightmares
about giant lobsters than global warming,
and only one of those things is gonna kill me.
And finally,
persistence.
This isn't just about how often the monster
is on screen menacing you,
it's also about how much time they spend
living rent free in your head.
If you can tell that a hunter is only
going to be tailing you
for certain sections,
it's just not as scary.
A hunter that only shows up
when it's wanted
is a good person, but a bad monster.
There's some natural overlap with these criteria,
and we can see that in our first reviewee.
Sinistar is an asteroid-like space shooter
from 1983.
You fly around, you shoot other fighters,
you blow up space rocks to build new weapons,
and then you get chased by a living planetoid
who loved to scream.
(makes sound)
Sinistar scores above average
in both persistence and fear.
(makes sound)
Remember wasps?
Imagine a wasp doing that thing wasps love to do
where they fly to your face
over and over again,
except that wasp is screaming
with a voice of a fully grown human man.
Sinistar was one of the first video games
to feature real recorded human voices
and it was all extremely menacing.
- [Man] Run, coward.
- Sinistar scores pretty high on danger as well.
He's the most powerful enemy in the game
and while you can beat him,
he will reappear on the very next level.
Also, it's an arcade game
which means that if you get caught,
and you will get caught,
the game is fully over
unless you wanna pay more quarters
to get yelled at again.
- [Man] Beware, I live.
- Ubisoft's reboot of the Prince of Persia series
had the perfect tone
where it was Disney accessibility
with just a touch of spice.
And then they made a second one
with more sword and blood and babes
and metal thongs
and wet hair
and lots of gray
and one Godsmack song
that plays for the entire game,
the one that was also on the soundtrack
to the Scorpion King.
You remember it.
It also added the Dahaka,
a big, inky tentacle man
who chases you throughout the whole game.
Let's get fear out of the way
because the Dahaka is not scary.
Honestly, I think his buffness
undercuts the fear factor here
because it's just too funny.
Imagine being told to design
a physical manifestation of inevitability and fate
and then just immediately be like
oh yeah, we gotta give him some big fucking muscles, man,
just big huge pecs,
six-pack abs, big quads.
He's also not very dangerous.
His role in the gameplay is to put
a bit more pressure on you
during the platforming segments,
but this is a game where you can rewind time,
so it's pretty low stakes.
Then again, you do face a larger than average chance
of hearing Godsmack while he's around
so, I guess, that's a bit of a risk.
Old heavy D scores slightly above average in persistence
because he does chase you for the entire game,
culminating in a confrontation in the final act.
That's the platonic ideal.
The problem is the bits where he chases you
are too cut and dry.
Once you pass through a barrier of running water,
you know that you're safe
until the next time you hear Godsmack start playing.
(rock music)
Dead Space,
it was Resident Evil 4
in space.
You might not remember the hunter, though,
because the hunter wasn't that great.
It was teased in the game's fifth chapter
and didn't appear until the 10th.
It was pretty much a bigger, lumpier version
of the game's basic slasher enemies
except it couldn't die.
Hunter lands average scores in fear and danger
because it shambles at you in a nasty way
and if it catches you and chops you up,
you gotta all the way back
to the recent manual safe point.
It scores lower in persistence though
because even though it's unkillable,
it only hunts you for a single chapter of the game
until you cook it with an experimental jet engine.
That sounds familiar.
(rock music)
Oh, Pyramid Head,
the twisted Joker of game villains.
He's one of these video game characters
who spawned a weird cult of personality
in a cottage industry of people making video essays
that say things like,
"Pyramid Head is, without a doubt,
the most highly psychological villain
in all of gaming."
Fan theories positing that maybe he's actually
the good guy and essays delving into what makes him
so iconic and memorable.
Spoilers.
It's cause he's got a big pyramid on his hand.
He's kind of scary
but his incredibly slow animations
that in frequent, fully scripted appearances
mean he's not much of a threat.
Pyramid Head only really shows up
once in a blue moon to help the protagonist
confront repressed trauma or whatever.
Metroid Fusion put a fun spin
on the relentless pursuer archetype.
The intention of every other hunter on this list
is crystal clear,
but your time with the SA-X
begins as a bunch of mysterious, creepy near misses.
SA-X, who I'm just gonna call SAX from now on,
is a colony of parasites
that look just like you,
walking around in your stolen armor.
As the game progresses,
it becomes more and more aware of you
and its efforts to catch you ramp up.
And a few scripted sequences,
SAX chases you down corridors,
and eventually you fight it.
Most of the monsters on this list
are scary because of their visual design
and because the way they move,
but SAX is scary because of what it is.
It's like seeing somebody else on Twitter
who's using your face as their profile picture.
The creepy doppelganger thing is effective
and hearing those intentional, heavy metallic footfalls
is some real nightmare shit,
so we're gonna give it a four for fear.
It's also pretty dangerous.
Once you make contact,
the SAX can kill you real good.
In persistence, SAX embodies both extremes.
Most of its appearances happen
during normal Metroid screen transitions,
so every time you bomb through a wall
or hop in an elevator,
you wonder if it'll be waiting for you
on the other side.
But since SAX doesn't usually show up unannounced,
once you're in a space,
you usually feel safe until the next transition.
Scissorman rules.
He put every single one of his points
into persistence and it is not paying off for him.
Scissorman is the sole antagonist
of the first two entries of Clock Tower,
a point and click adventure
that was hugely influential
in the genre of survival horror.
The thing is,
he's not very scary.
He's got the same energy as that toddler with a knife,
which is to say,
very worrying, but not particularly threatening.
He's like four feet tall,
he's got a huge set of scissors,
he pinches them closed every time he hops.
At one point,
he literally sends you a handwritten fax
that says,
"I'm comin' to get ya!"
He puts the apostrophe in there and everything.
Your player characters don't have access
to any real weapons,
but you do get a spray bottle,
so you can punish him like a bad little kitty.
Every single strategy for fighting back
is completely humiliating for this dude,
like the one where you just gently drape a bedsheet
over him and walk out of the room.
He's not very dangerous or scary,
but God, he's persistent.
He sticks around until the final moments
of the game where he gets sucked into a wall
for some reason.
R.I.P. to a short king.
SEGA and Creative Assembly
did an incredible job
capturing the look and feel
of Ridley Scott's original horrifying Alien film.
Hey, Charles.
Alien is a huge, intelligent,
but inscrutable hunter.
It's scary and dangerous.
It's faster than you and it can disappear into vents
and reappear where you least want it to.
Specifically the vent that you're in.
And, over the course of the game,
it learns new behaviors and techniques for hunting you.
Alien Isolation makes you do frustrating, menial tasks
while knowing that somewhere very nearby,
the Alien is making plans to eat your entire face.
Even saving is an exercise in fear.
You gotta jam your punch card into this time clock
and then wait for a count of 100.
It's the sci-fi horror equivalent
of the moment you hit play in your totally normal
work playlist then realize your headphones
aren't plugged in and then you accidentally
misclick and start an also start a very normal YouTube
video then missed the mute button
and hit the louder button?
That ever happened to you?
Gamers?
So tired.
Mr. X, also known as the Tyrant,
stalks you through the Raccoon City PD portion
of Resident Evil 2 remake,
and he's also the boss of Leon's campaign.
Some aspects of the Mr. X experience
are really scary.
Even when he's not on the screen,
you can hear him angrily stomping
around the police station.
That constant background presence
is super anxiety-inducing,
and then when the footsteps go away,
you start expecting something.
Oh shit!
Is that a,
is that a fedora?
He's imposing but in sort of a big, huge, dumb
bad guy from an action movie kind of way
rather than a nasty I got knife hands
and my brains on the outside kind of way,
like he stomps towards you and you're like
oh no, is he gonna lay eggs in my mouth
or melt my legs with acid?
And then he just sort of does a punch.
He's also really slow.
His brisk walk
is just a bit slower than your leisurely jog.
But, he's got the remarkable ability
to appear between you and a save point
when your inventory is full
of freshly gathered herbs,
rare ammunition, and precious, precious dongles.
And that's where you start getting scared again
because that stuff is hard to get,
and if this big ass Hulk catches you,
you lose it all
and then you have to go get it all again
or just give up.
Jack Baker is just dad bod Mr. X.
He gets an extra half point to fear
because you're always worried
that he's just maybe about to say something racist.
- [Man] You better start running!
Oh!
- Nemesis is like Mr. X
if he didn't set properly before baking.
He plays the same role as Mr. X too,
but he's even more central to the game and plot.
I mean, they named the game after him.
He's also way faster.
He can just break into a dead sprint
and it is fucking horrifying.
He can leap directly into your path.
If you think you're safe behind an obstacle,
he'll just yeet himself up into the air
and find another path to you.
He moves in more threatening ways
and he's also just a lot worse to look at.
Big, nasty lunch meat man
wrapped in trash bags.
So he's scoring really high
in all of our criteria.
But just how scary he is
really depends on how much you have to lose
when you see him.
And now that I think about it,
every unstoppable killer
is really only part of the scary equation.
When you strip away the horror aesthetics
and just look at them mechanically,
they're all just ways of putting
unavoidable pressure on the player
when they deal with the real horror.
Our bonus monster.
Scarcity.
The most effective uses of the unstoppable
hunter archetype represent a threat to your resources.
Like bullets or scrounged up medkits
or progress in the game.
Artificially imposed Scarcity
and intentionally archaic save systems
mean that when the inevitable threat
suddenly shows up,
there's no safety net.
You're fearing a backpack full of green herbs
and the Nemesis teleports in front of you
and suddenly you start thinking about
all the work you're going to have to do
to get back here.
Even though ostensibly
you're having fun,
the stress reaction
is really similar to that feeling you get
when you get a vet bill due
on the same day as rent
and you're afraid to check your bank balance.
I see this bloated Jason Statham on my screen
and I start looking around my apartment
for things to sell.
It's the feeling that one,
unavoidable setback could suddenly
make your life much much harder.
So that's why it's important
to focus on the things that you can control.
Like how much Godsmack you're listening to.
Turn that shit up, baby.
Scorpion King, music for and inspired by.
(rock music)