Often, survival horror games will employ puzzles in their mechanics as a way to further enrich
a player’s experience; it’s not just all running from monsters and witnessing gore
filled cut scenes.
While sometimes, the puzzles featured in horror games feel as if they’ve been plopped into
the title to break up the flow of the narrative (or rather, to give us a break from being
petrified), other times, the puzzles featured will feel ingrained in the story world, a
necessary means of survival, and compel us with their tension and overall fear factor.
So today, we’re counting down the top 10 scary video game puzzles
and breaking down 10 Resident Evil – The Bee Puzzle
Let’s start off our list with a classic horror game and one of its puzzles; Resident
Evil, and the Bee Puzzle.
Specifically, we’re looking at the remake of Resident Evil, whose graphics make those
bees look more realistic than they need to be.
Many consider the bee puzzle to be one of the most challenging of the series, and the
most fun.
But successfully completing the puzzle results in a jump scare of sorts; when you get the
wind crest, a bee decides to appear and attack you, with you shooting at it.
Compared to the atrocities you find throughout the rest of the game, a bee is definitely
no big deal, but it’s still a fun little jump scare nonetheless.
9 Home – All of it Home is an indie 8 bit side scroller game
that’s shrouded in mystery.
The whole premise of the game is that you wake up with a bummed leg in a house you don’t
recognize, and you need to work your way back home, with most of the game only illuminated
by the flashlight in your hands; it creates a pocket of light for you as you walk through
the otherwise completely dark levels.
The sound design is brilliant; for the most part, all you hear is your footsteps and a
few external sounds, some of which act as jump scares from time to time.
The entirety of home is a giant puzzle to figure out the series of events that left
you waking up in this mysterious house, and the way in which you perceive the story is
entirely based on what you find in each of the levels (which, might I add, can turn into
a bit of a maze, causing you to get lost every now and then).
What does the mystery entail?
Your wife is found dead, she may have been having an affair, there might be a serial
killer lurking in the woods killing young women, and something weird is up with your
old place of employment.
All in all, it’s one giant puzzle that ends up being more subjective than you think it
will be, causing many players to ponder what the truth really is, and if the character’s
desire for suicide is too extreme or not.
8 Wake Up Wake Up is a horror title that was whipped
up during a game jam, and cites inspirations like Twin Peaks and the Silent Hill series.
It’s a fixed camera horror that plays with the idea of repetitive loops, leading you
into a theatre
7 Silent Hill 2 – Free The Innocent Man There are a lot of memorable puzzles in Silent
Hill 2.
But one of the eeriest within the game is the Free the Innocent Man puzzle that occurs
near the end of the Labyrinth, and involves a ‘criminal’ who was wrongfully executed.
The puzzle consists of two identical rooms, minus one specific detail; one has six nooses
while the other has six corpses.
You need to figure out which criminal was the innocent one, and pull the correlating
noose in the opposite room to set him free.
If you choose the right criminal, you’ll get the key of the persecuted.
If you choose incorrectly, lying figures will appear in the hall waiting to attack you.
Of course, you’re given a clue in the form of a riddle in order to solve it.
6 Gone Home – Is it Haunted??
Gone Home is an indie title that everyone assumed was supposed to be scary, but wasn’t
at all.
But honestly, that was one of the factors that made playing Gone Home compelling; it
created a whole lot of tension, and the empty atmosphere made players think that perhaps
there might be something more sinister at work behind your sisters absence.
The game turns out to be a heartfelt tale of your little sister’s coming out story,
and reveals that she’s run away.
The game is one giant puzzle, unlocking each room to find out more about where your sister
Sam went via her journal entries written to you.
You eventually get up to the attic and discover a oujia board and a table covered in what
appears to be a satanic ritual, but it’s all just misdirection; a product of two teenagers
messing around that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the emotional story
underneath.
But regardless, navigating that big ol empty house and solving its mysteries left many
players thinking they might stumble upon a much scarier truth, and for that experience
alone, it made for a really nerve wracking title.
But also a really heart warming one.
5 Outlast – The Generators Nothing like generator puzzles to push you
over the edge and make you want to soil your pants.
Outlast, a horror survival game that first released for the PC in 2013 and on other consoles
in the following two years, takes place at a remote psychiatric hospital called Mount
Massive Asylum.
It’s filled to the brim with out of control patients who want to kill you.
Fun stuff.
Early on in the title, there’s a level where you have to turn on a series of generators
in order to progress.
It’s really your first interaction with deadly inmates, insane patients who want to
kill you senselessly and mercilessly.
For the most part, it’s a combination of finding the generators, turning them on, then
hiding from the two potential threats lurking in that basement level.
Each time a generator goes on, one of those patients comes looking for you, meaning you
need to find a place in the darkness to hide, sometimes in a locker, sometimes under a bed,
you name it.
All of it is incredibly frightening and tense.
Without the added fear factor though, it’s a fairly straight forward puzzle, to be perfectly
honest.
4 Slender The Arrival – Stage 3 Into the Abyss
There are multiple puzzles in Slender the Arrival, all of which are fear inducing, but
perhaps the worst of the worst is the generator mission in Stage 3, also known as Into the
Abyss.
It’s a stage that we’ve talked quite a bit about on our channel, and it is one of
the most nerve wracking sections of the game.
So, you find yourself at the beginning of this stage waking up in an idyllic park, which
contains a building that isn’t dissimilar looking to a mine.
When you enter, its dark, its grim, and quickly, you’ll discover the only way to get out
is by starting up a series of generators.
But here’s the thing; as you navigate this creepy underground complex, you learn that
you’re not alone.
The level is filled with a bunch of the children who were victims of Slenderman; hoodie-wearing,
pale vicious little f*cks that are determined to pounce on you at terrifying speeds and
kill you.
And all you can do is stun them with your flashlight.
To make matters worse, Slender man is kicking around too, and you’ve gotta avoid him.
After running around for god knows how long, you’ll eventually find all of the generators,
and then comes the hard part; getting back to the service elevator to get the hell out
of there.
3 Inside – Flooded Basement The flooded basement level of Inside is one
that requires great patience, great timing, and a whole lot of confidence cause it’s
scary as hell.
Inside, often considered the spiritual successor of Limbo (and made by the same people) is
a puzzle platformer where you explore a surreal and monochromatic environment.
One puzzle in particular is quite bone chilling, typically referred to as the flooded basement.
Upon diving into the water filled area, at first, you notice the figure of what appears
to be another person, floating, surrounded by a thick fog of hair.
As you swim away from it, it begins to move, and it becomes apparent that its coming after
you.
In order to get across the level, you need to trick the water creature and move quickly;
it moves faster than you do in the water, so where you dive into the water, and from
where you dive from, can make a whole lot of difference if you plan on making through
the level
in one piece.
1 Limbo – The Spider Limbo is a puzzle platformer from developer
Playdead that was released in 2010 to rave reviews.
You play as a nameless boy travelling through dangerous environments on a mission to find
his sister, and the puzzles throughout the game were created by the devs with the intention
of players failing their first attempt at it; gruesome imagery is used for the boy’s
death, and at times it gets pretty darn grim.
Perhaps one of the scariest puzzles in the game though comes right at its start, establishing
the tone of what players have gotten themselves into.
Early on in the forest, you encounter a large spider who tries to impale you with its legs.
You have to trick it into aiming for you and stomping on the ground twice in order to shake
a large trap out of a tree.
Once the trap is free, you need to drag it over to the spider, place it under its legs,
and one by one, trick it into stomping onto the ground and right into the trap.
Once you’ve done this three times, the spider will retreat up a tree, leaving you to go
further into the dark abyss through what appears to be a cave of sorts.
By the time you realize you’re in the Spider’s den, it tries to kill you, picking you up,
winding you into a web cocoon where you’re forced to wiggle free and maneuver through
the next chunk of the level by merely hopping while the spider slowly tracks you.
There we have it friends!
Now it’s your turn to tell us – what puzzles have freaked you out the most?
Which ones gave you an unexpected scare?
Let us know in those comments below.
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