Dungeon Master Forum

This is a matter of opinion only!

The game I fear the most for DOS/Win95+ is Stonekeep.
The lack of strafing, the potential to be instakilled by certain things (cave in, rolling boulder), the creepy atmosphere/music, not to mention the opening cinematic.
If any one else would like to put in their five cents worth, then as far as I know using the in-site search, this is the place to put it.

Remember, this is only a matter of opinion, and if you don't want to give one, you don't have to.

I played Stonekeep and it's a fun game. The last couple of times I tried it I ended up getting stuck due to bugs for some reason, but the first playthrough back when the game came out went just fine (later run-throughs were with exactly the same game disc but via DOSBox rather than actual DOS). Never found the game "scary" or anything. I don't like scary games, though I've seen a few played through on YouTube (Outlast, Soma, the Five Nights ad Freddy's series). Sod playing them myself though :O.
Oh, actually, there was the 7th Guest. Played that back when it came out. It was one of the first games we got on our first PC in the mid-90s after the Atari. I think it had a 15-certificate (don't think it was an 18) and yet I would've been maybe eleven or twelve when I played it (and my sister is a coupld of years younger than me and also played it). But it's really a puzzle game with a scary house as the framing device, and the puzzles themselves aren't exactly terrifying (except for the maze, I suppose).

Really? I found myself in constant fear of a cave-in, having become the sole support between falling rubble and the floor once in sharga mines 1. I also remember waking up the ettin (apparently using a silence spell isn't enough if you walk into his space).

Another one that frightens me is Portal 1 (Turret Ambush and Boss Fight).

If you have any others you would like to share, do so if you wish to.

Zork Nemesis.
Definately sick.
A mostly buggy game asking for many restarts. An insane sick atmosphere.

Stonekeep, I enjoyed it, all over. I loved it.

Soma, Alien Isolation, Resident Evil 7.

Ohh wait, actually, I can think of a game that made me feel scared. Or at least, a bit of it. When I was a kid, one of the things I would sometimes worry about was that the house might someone set on fire while I was in bed, and then I'd be sitting there with smoke coming into my room and scary flames outside the door and stuff. Which meant that one particular part of the game Lands of Lore III was pretty scary for me - you go into a sort of "underworld" place where lots of ghosts and stuff live (the premise of the game is that it's a Fantasy world and some bad stuff has happened which has made all these rifts to other worlds open up and you have to go through each one into its world and try to close it). It's laid out as a haunted mansion with gardens and stuff and on the upstairs floor you hear a ghostly girl (actually I think there might be a couple of them, I think they were sisters or something) crying and screaming and saying stuff like "If only we'd doused the lamps!" Because one windy night they didn't empty the oil out of the lamps and one blew over and set fire to the place, resulting in the girl(s) burning to death. So while you're in one room working all this out, you hear the crakling of flames and suddenly fire is spreading all around you through the room and you have to jump out of a damaged/open window in order to escape down into the garden.
Freaked me out the first couple of times I played it :O.

Silent Hill 1 (if you beat it once, you get the option to play in first-person mode, so surely I'm allowed this...)

Ameena wrote: ↑Thu Aug 31, 2017 4:27 pm ...and then I'd be sitting there with smoke coming into my room and scary flames outside the door and stuff.

...so would also recommend to avoid Silent Hill 2, Ameena, where you get to see something similar for one of the NPCs there. (everyone else should go play it).
STALKER and System Shock 2 are also my scary cup-of-tea

Stonekeep is new to me: a google-search and that looks awesome! (saw a clip with an 80s ice-queen-type baddie and looked incredibly fun to play)

Yeah, Stonekeep was also made by FTL so it has a lot of similarities with DM, including grid-based movement (though you smoothly move from one tile to the next rather than just insta-moving the second you click). The ice-queen-type baddie was probably the appropriately-named Ice Queen . She's pretty far through the game. I'm sure you can hunt it down online somewhere and download it to run in DOSBox...okay yeah, I just checked a site called "Old Games" (old-games.com) and it looks like it's there for download, at least .

Generally I don't play horror games, like I mentioned above. Stonekeep is in no way a horror game, though, at least no more so than DM and CSB are .

Thanks for the pointer Ameena - have also seen Stonekeep on Steam: wonder if it is enhanced?

Ameena wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2017 3:31 pm Yeah, Stonekeep was also made by FTL

At the risk of being called a mansplainer: No it wasn't. Stonekeep was made by Interplay, a totally different and much, much larger company. FTL would never have been able to do something that large with their tiny team.

I know that this off-topic, coming from the initial poster, but wasn't DM2 - TLoS also helped out by Interplay?

Interplay was involved in the "western" versions of DM2 in 1995 thus covering PC-DOS, Amiga and Mac. Basically that means the cartoonish graphics + musics added to the original version.

Hmm, I'm sure I remember the 3D version of the FTL logo coming up at the beginning of Stonekeep (along with the Interplay logo). Maybe I'm getting mixed up with DM2, which definitely showed both logos. It's been a while since I played it .

This one doesn't strictly count, as it's third-person... but one that genuinely made me jump more than a few times was Manhunt, played in hardcore mode. The enemies don't show on the radar, so can genuinely surprise you. Add to this that they're scary-looking and the overall atmosphere is generally creepy.

Eh, it would be hypocritical for me to tell you off, Saumun. I have already broken the rules of a topic that I started!