Ah, video games. Endless worlds of lovable characters, heartwarming adventures, and sometimes, just sometimes, bowel emptying monsters from the depthless hell of someone’s imagination. This is an article about five of the scariest video game monsters ever.

**WARNING: Some of the videos contain spoilers and disturbing content. View at your own risk!

Out of This World- The Dark Beast

Oldies are goodies! In this 1991 SNES cult favorite, and one I played obsessively as a kid, Out of This World (also known as Another World) had you play as Lester Knight Chaykin, a physicist with a wicked name, who is teleported to an alien dimension by his particle accelerator. This 2D side scroller was merciless. You start off in a deep pit of water, if you don’t swim fast and get out fast enough, some tentacles grab you and drag you into the depths. Then among the poison scorpion slugs and hostile aliens, poor Lester meets the beast.

Unnamed and aggressive, this fanged thing chases you off of a cliff. If you miss the nearby vine, then your game is over within a measly minute.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42TupUcpxPw]

Half Life 2- Headcrabs

Half Life 2 is one of the most fun and awesome games in history. It also has one of the freakiest brand of enemies ever: the headcrab and its filthy brother, the poison headcrab. These alien brain suckers jumped straight at your face (and being first person, this was even scarier) and the poison ones were faster than their chubby brothers. Once a poison headcrab was biting your head, neurotoxins knocked your health down to one percent immediately while the game would announce: USER DEATH IMMINENT

Worse yet, these things always hid in shadowy corners, crying out hungry ululations for your delicious brains. The headcrab noises were so creepy that even Half Life 2 play testers went into desperate spasms of bullet wasting sprees.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J_6IPc2YFM]

Silent Hill- The Nurses

The Silent Hill game series introduced a ton of great monsters to the world of our nightmares. One of my favorites (and the creepiest) were the Nurses. First appearing in Silent Hill 2, they were so popular they made it into film adaptations as well as all the other games that came after.

These monstrous caregivers are faceless and wear revealing uniforms that show off their gray dead flesh. They carry around big needles and stand in groups in hallways and rooms, waiting. While most of the other enemies in the game series have to be outrun or killed, the player must creep past the Nurses at an agonizingly slow pace, which greatly increases the suspense factor. Any kind of noise will alert these creatures to your presence and they’ll descend upon you, stabbing you to death in mere seconds.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVtDhd26420]

Amnesia: The Dark Descent- The Gatherers

Amnesia: The Dark Descent was one of the most suspenseful and frightful games ever created. In this first person survival horror, you play as Daniel, a man who wakes up in this abandoned, cyclopean castle with no memory of how he got there or what horrors lie within. All manner of evil lurks in the shadows, which also helps drive down the sanity of poor Daniel as he travels through the halls, unravelling the secrets of his past.

The Gatherers are the main enemies of the game. They are the former servants of the castle who became deformed after drinking poisoned wine. They attack Daniel on sight and, since he is weaponless, the best the player can do is flee and try to hide. As soon as they see you, they let out a terrifying scream and start the chase. They cannot be killed. On top of this, if Daniel stares at them for more than a few seconds, then his sanity starts to crumble.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChpCk72yofM]

Silent Hill 2- Pyramid Head

First appearing in the survival horror Silent Hill 2, Pyramid Head (also known as the Red Pyramid Thing) also went on to star in all the movies as well. He is arguably the most recognizable monster of the whole series.

He is the physical representation of James Sunderland’s guilt over the death of his beloved wife. Pyramid Head is a tall, muscly butcher bearing the heavy and ugly pyramid cage as his head. He is armed with a huge sword, dragging it along the ground behind him in a skin crawling screech. You never know when he’ll appear and though he is slow, he is also unkillable so all you can do is run and hope.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zlo46noeBI]

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