I actually think a small-town GTA would be a good idea, which is why I suggested Texas, as it has a lot of small towns that lie between DFW, Houston, and San Antonio/Austin. In the 2000s on 1UP, I wrote a blog about a GTA set in Texas, where I proposed that the main character be a home meth cook. This was written right before Breaking Bad premiered on TV, too. That would be a period piece, since nowadays home meth labs have been replaced with meth superlabs run by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels that regularly produce meth of the same purity as Walt was able to produce, and if they're cut with anything, it's fentanyl.
Stage Select:
1. Vault 87 in Fallout 3. It's connected to the children's settlement by tunnels full of hissing ghouls leading up to one of the most fucked up areas in the entire game, where Super Mutants are kidnapping humans to turn them into more Super Mutants. The holotapes of the last colonists to live there add to the atmosphere.
2. The opening village areas of Resident Evil 4, where you're being chased by zombified villagers who honestly probably weren't much changed from their basic personalities by the Los Plagas virus. And then the chainsaw dudes start coming after you.
3. When I was a kid, I had a Donkey Kong-esque platformer game called Miner 2049er, which is going to be released next month as part of the Atari 50th Anniversary Collection for Switch, PS, and Xbox. In this game, you had to "mine" ores from the floors while avoiding radioactive monsters and hazards. In one level, right above the starting point, I jumped up to get a power-up and died the radiation death because I failed to notice that the power-up had glowing parts, which in that game meant radioactive, and it made me distrustful of power-ups from that point forward in the game. What made it scary is that when you touch a radioactive creature, the game makes a lot of loud digital screeching noises and your character rapidly expands and shrinks before collapsing into a puddle of goo, and it's often rather unexpected. I know that's probably not what you were looking for, but I was 9 years old and that scared the crap out of me. My fears as an adult are of a more existential nature, so if we were going with that, my scariest game would be Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life when you're dying of old age, and years of doing hospice work have kind of taken the edge off of that fear. Zombies, vampires, and the like just aren't as scary as they were when I was watching them with my dad.
Cage Match:
Much as nubile CG ladies wrestling in lingerie is entertaining, I'm going with Rule of Rose. The scariest thing about it is the price you'll have to pay to buy it off of eBay. That's why I've never actually played it. Hopefully Sega will consider remastering it for current consoles.
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