I was super creeped out by the ratman easter eggs in Portal 2. There was a hidden room that you can get to via light bridges in one testing room, and once you got up into the hidden area really creepy music played. Then once you left the room the entrance disappeared and you couldn't get back in. It was really surrealistic the way they designed it, and it sends chills through me every time.
The Portal games are really unsettling despite how much they appeal to comedy. The cuteness is only skin-deep in that Portal/Half Life universe (remember how Portal 2 established that they take place in the same universe? So weird.), and all that cuteness is just a thin veil on top of a deep under-current of tragedy and desperation. When I think of how it makes me feel to be in the Half-Life/Portal universe it kind of reminds me of The Walking Dead mixed with Halo except it's much darker because it doesn't have any of the hope and spunk that Halo does. In Half Life 2/Portal the world has already been conquered, the whole human race is oppressed, and on top of that there's supernatural things like the Gman that have yet to be explained.. It's actually a pretty heavy and dark world they've built. And all of that says nothing of how traumatizing and super heavy the ending of HL2: Episode 2 is.
The rat hordes in Dishonored also scare me a lot. It's terrifying when a rat horde spots you and begins descending on you, leaving you frantically looking above you for some place to teleport to higher ground.
Morrowind was really scary to play because the first dozen hours or so is like a survival game. Just playing on easy or normal difficulty is still brutal because you start off the game with a super weak and slow moving character (due to low athletics skill, low skills across the board really). And you earn very little gold from quests and everything in the world is expensive. Health scrolls and potions are prohibitively costly and hard to find, and just exploring from point A to B is a gamble with your life. Morrowind was my first Elder Scrolls game so on top of how difficult the game is there was also that fact that everything was a mystery to me. Tons of systems and flexibilty I didn't understand, lots of nuance and freedom that was enticing but dangerous. The flying cliffracer enemies were the worst in the early game because you can't often see them, they just swoop in from nowhere to kill you in packs. I always ended up running back to town looking for shelter or trying to get guards to save me.
Half Life 2 is probably the most startling and creepy game I've ever played that isn't really meant to be a horror game. The design of the combat and the encounters with monsters is perfect at engaging my fight or flight response and getting under my skin.
Everybody knows that We Don't Go To Ravenholm is the horror level with all the zombies in the dark town, but most of that game is also pretty unsettling. In Highway 17 there are sections where you have to jump from rock to rock because if you touch the sand on the beach it will summon a bunch of ant lions to attack you. The level Highway 17 is outdoors and it's huge like a Halo 3 level, but there are a lot of little optional places to explore as you make your way through. When you're driving down the highway you can choose to stop at country houses right on the beach at your own peril. One of them is full of zombies but you won't know that until you're already deep into it and trapped. That's probably the most memorable section of the whole game for me. Highway 17 is fantastic.
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