5 Video Game Enemies From Non-Horror Games That Give Me The Willies

It's 2015, and while we've just got the tip in and its not complaining, let's start as we mean to go on and talk about fear. Because there're twelve gruesome months stretching out ahead of us with nothing good in them but The Witcher 3, possible entry into D'n'D and drugs. And if that isn't scary, I'm not every kind of screwed up and also Pope Beneficent I.

Horror-flavoured video games don't tend to make much sense. Here's why; I play games for, among other things, a sense of empowerment. The kind of control you don't get in life, unless you're a practicing psychopath. So when the barista at Cafe Nero is curt with me, I don't sneak into the back room and lift the day's take from a strongbox with my mad lockpicking skills, slit the guy up from taint to throat and warm my penis in the wound. I go home and play a game where I can do that.

But horror games should be about making you feel helpless and confused in the face of a nebulous, insidious force you don't fully understand, because that's what fear is made of. 

People like Capcom and the makers of films and video games too numerous to mention do not understand this. Because when you introduce zombies as a unhealthy thing to be around, putting a shotgun in the players' hands is only going to undermine that sense of threat. And restricting the amount of ammo you're going to find for it just makes ordinance accountancy the more significant worry. 

Massive, slack-jawed lad holding a tree, right in front of you: The new face of fear.

When your bullet savings account is more concerning than a crazed, chainsaw-wielding murderer with a prolapse for a face, I would say that's a failure at horror.

So I'm not the kind of person thats plays horror games. But it's not like I'm the kind of person that plays games where everything is sunshine and jewels and cartoon pigs and some kind of clash of multiple clans, because that wouldn't make me a person, but an infinitesimal fraction of a dollar sign in the eye of a publisher while he's masturbating to demographic figures.  

Anyway, these are antagonists in games that don't identify as horror, but make me experience fear in a life where I get enough of that at the thought of leaving the house for coffee. 

As seen in Far Cry 3 and 4:

The Far Cry series never really got into its stride until number 3. And then number 4 was just exactly the same game but in the Himalayas. So also good, I guess? It's around this time that the franchise became more about stealthy jungle-Rambo massacres and less GI dog-mutant or Red Cross with guns. And the right kind of stealth too. The kind where if you play your cards right, you are the scariest thing on the island.

When I'm playing this game and you see this man, you are half a second from a lung-full of jungle knife. 

It was the pirates or mercenaries lying awake at night dreading the entitled SoCal douchebag at the other end of the machete rather than the other way around. And these games give you plenty of opportunities to give some South Pacific meth addict a good reason to regret at least one decision he made recently, but is only really half of what the games are about.

The Far Cry worlds are lousy with enemy outposts, drug farms and fortresses but no matter how crammed with ornery dudes and assault rifles, these bits are civilisation compared to the thousands of lethal acres the developers built around them. These are games where you can get your shit wrecked crossing the road. Amongst many, many other things:

And that's one of the main things that makes them so awesome. Because the minute you leave the road and delve into the jungle, the tables turn. You may be the predator in a military base full of heavily armed guards, but out in the wild, you're nothing but six feet of Asian-American meat feast and it never feels fair.

In an autumn forest full of very well-rendered trees, spotting a clouded leopard before it spots you is like trying to find your keys in another pair of jeans in another room in the dark and your keys have teeth. And if you're more than ten strokes out in open water, there is never not a shark behind you.

Tigers are by far the worst though, my (entirely rational) real-life terror of sharks notwithstanding. You can avoid water. But you can't avoid something that may well have been tracking you the second you left your quadbike and is easily more dangerous than a soldier with three foot of body armour in every direction and a flamethrower and is also basically fucking invisible.

Make no mistake: Far Cry is Darwinism in action. Try disagreeing while you're being pooped out the back of a tiger. Doesn't work.

As seen in several Final Fantasy: 

The Japanese don't experience irony like the rest of us, so when we hear of a monster called a 'malboro' they don't understand how we can be surprised that it's not just a cloud of smoke spraying out of a footballer's wife. Oh, wait it's Marlboro? Sorry, I take it back, Japan. I can see how you missed that.

Besides looking like a Sarlacc-squid hybrid, malboros feature all over the Final Fantasy spectrum of games as shitty enemies whose halitosis causes a noxious spray of status effects. To those of you who don't play RPGs because you're too busy having sex and finding closure from life's challenges, a status effect is much like an STI. And getting caught short by a Great Malboro means you're getting blasted with basically every STI known to science at once. So at this point, everyone knows what to do: Scream for a doctor and hope your last fevered words aren't too stupid.

Damn. And it really doesn't look any better post-3D graphics engines. 

As seen in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim:

Skyrim was a masterclass in open-world design. It was also buggy as all hell: riddled with bad writing and acting, technical faults, pointlessly obtuse difficulty spikes and spiders. But, again, totally awesome. It is possibly the ultimate flawed gem. Because for every shopkeeper that floated into the air and got stuck halfway through a wall without shutting up about her goddamn wares, there were hours of organic adventuring fun stretching out as far as the mediocre draw distance could cope with. 

Much like Far Cry, the land of Skyrim was also stuffed with assholes that wanted nothing but your precious Khajiit coat or gold or just didn't like your face or whatever. So you got killed pretty often. Some of the things that killed you were probably just folk trying to feed the families; pretty much everything else that did was ripped off from Tolkien and understandably upset about it. But did they really have to take it out on your sensitive elf skin?

Eh?

So there are trolls and giants and orcs and goblin-flavoured, subterranean terrors and all the rest of it. But there are also monsters copied from other works of fiction! Like spriggans. And dragons obviously. Which for supposedly extinct creatures are worryingly pest-like. 

Hagravens are one of the most dangerous denizens of Skyrim and actually not from Tolkien or Medieval mythology. Because they're Greek. The treacherous sirens are half-woman, half-bird creatures and while they're fairly sexy, mostly, hagravens will have much the same effect on your turgid, fantasy erection as your character: withering magic death and avian ticks. These things are seriously unsexy. Perhaps dangerously so. 

And speaking of dangerous, this is a world where 'dragon' is basically a form of weather. Wait hang on, that might be the best idea I've ever had. Can you imagine the weatherman coming on and saying that? Well you don't need to. And also it's Prince Charles doing it.  

As seen in Mass Effect 3:

If you don't play games, you may be beginning to notice that the creators of some of these beloved products haven't gotten over Tolkien. And you'd be right. Because no-one has. This is why.

The twisted face of evil in the Lord of the Rings is probably the generic orc, because Sauron doesn't have a face. He's a floating eye made of fire. Tolkien knew, that to make something truly awful, you should make it good first. The orcs were elves once, as we all well know if we spent the noughties obsessing over culture instead of socialising. Tortured and mutilated yada yada. Elves are your perfect lifeform: wise, long-lived and suspiciously fey but if you submit them to suffering, become the absolute worst.

This idea, that even the best of us can become savages so easily, is one of the fundamental horror themes. It's why we used to fear zombies. Because they showed us the beast within and how close we are to savagery. Obviously they're not now, because they're everywhere. Today, zombies're just an easy representation of how much we hate each other as humans in an easy, lumbering, mindless package we don't have to feel bad about slaughtering with cricket bats.

The Mass Effect series spent two games building up to one final, desperate struggle against an ancient machine race with a hard-on for the extermination of all sentient life in the galaxy. And the seemingly insurmountable 'Reapers' pull a total Sauron on everyone and mutilate the various alien species into horrible, piping-covered techno monsters. And in equally Tolkienian form, the most intelligent and advanced race become the most awful enemies in the game. And the fact that that race is made up entirely of sexy ladies with a penchant for space stripping is somehow just bacon bits on the terror salad.

Did I mention that they're also magic and bi and a few other things that nerds long for?

As seen in every platform game since 1981 & change:

Bottomless and spiked pits have claimed more gamers' lives than diabetes. If every loss to the diabolical pits was given a funeral, it would take more material than there is in the universe just to make the ink to write GAME OVER on all the gravestones. So many virginities were sacrificed to Super Mario that Nintendo video game landfill sites are haunted and you can't even access them unless you're twice-certified as a necromancer.

My point is, these fucking holes have caused me more problems than, well, regular holes. And if that isn't scary, then I don't know what is. Apart from the obvious: