Unexplained creepy things you found in non-horror games

[Bunny Tracks]

I was playing Harvest Moon: Magical Melody the other day, and I unlocked this character named Meryl who for some fucking reason has a lot of creepy, and disturbing dialogue. Keep in mind, Meryl is a little girl, and this is a Harvest Moon game. Here are just some of the examples.

"I don't want to die. It's scary. Why... do people die? "

"Hard times... Painful times... I hate them all..."

"I planted...some flowers. While...planting, I forgot about many things."

"Everyone's a liar. They say that growing up isn't scary."

There is no in-game explanation for this, and the most I found online were people just speculating that Meryl is referring to her past, and about her parents who are nowhere in the game, and are never mentioned. Still, she's the only character in the game that has such unsettling dialogue, and the fact that's it's coming from such a small child in a Harvest Moon game of all places is what really makes it so strange, and disturbing.

In addition to confusing, and creeping the hell out of me, it got me wondering about all the other examples like this happening in other games. Unexplained disturbing dialogue, characters, scenes, models, items, random events, areas, music, glitches, etc. So I thought I'd make a thread on it here, and see if I could learn about other such things, and possibly get some answers.

 

[CivilianOfTheFandomWars]

In Pokémon Black and White, N’s room stood out in just how well it told a story without words. It’s basically a giant playroom full of kids toys, and we suddenly learn just how insane N’s life is and why he became the way he is.
I thought it was pretty well done, especially for Pokémon.

 

[Tim Buckley]

There's an entire popular YT channel about this stuff.

 

[I Love Beef]

The word text in early Mana games. I don't know why but it helps add on to how there's something dark going on behind all of the colorful graphics and exemplars of bravery and heroics you're doing. It kind of fits too seeing how Secret of Mana has you traverse through black magic human sacrifice cult temples made available to the public, Trials of Mana allows you to class change into bloodthirsty murderers and killers if you pick the darkest class routes, and later games let you know that there's an underworld to the entire universe of the Mana series, with an active Satan or Izanami like being trying to pull off what Ganondorf has been doing in Legend of Zelda.

Back to Harvest Moon, I remember picking up I believe the second or third game of Rune Factory. Sure, single parents and people without apparent family are common, but Rune Factory just opens up my morbid curiosity considering how this was the start of a series where you can get a game over. Like, how many of their parents or relatives were adventurers or were just frolicking out in the wild before some tribe of incomprehensible anthropomorphs hunted them like sport or a pack of monsters ate them and they just went missing for several days until some gruesome form of remains were found? I'm sure I found the reason why they'd not talk about that, but you can also find human skulls as crafting materials in the games. Not beast skulls, animal skulls, or orc skulls, I mean legit human skulls you can pack into your cupboards and give to people as gifts.

Then probably to fantasy games in general where you have people like sentient monster tribes that actively hunt humans. To me, human cannibals? Creepy, but been there, done that. The orcs, goblins, and the beastpeople however, I don't think you can scare them into submission to have them relinquish their man eating. Makes me wonder what the fuck their kitchens and mess halls are like. Hell, Secret of Mana had you be almost stew for goblins. Then Tales of the Abyss had this fucking swamp area in world where these pupilless erratic dancing boar people where they wielded bones for weapons are enemies you can face. I would hate to know what they did to people when they hunted them.

 

[MediocreMilt]

Cubone wears its mom's skull.

All Cubones do this. The Pokedex says so.

And even if it's just the one Cubone whose mom is the ghost Marowak in Lavender Tower, where do all the other Cubones get their skulls then? Why do we never see a bare-headed Cubone?

Weird.

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

While they are explained, I found The Dead Sea/Chronopolis/Dinopolis in Chrono Cross very unsettling, and the half-ogre island in Arcanum was horrifying.

 

[Lunete]

Does the ghost chick in GTA V count? I know everybody knows about it now but she creeped me out when I first saw it.

 

[Dom Cruise]

That book hidden behind a door you can't open in one of Super Mario Sunshine's bonus levels, what the hell was up with that?

 

[Varg Did Nothing Wrong]

A couple of the SWAT 4 levels are pretty creepy, but it's perfectly explained. The creepiest one is the cult headquarters you raid in an apartment building where they're building bombs and shit - when you clear the basement, you see a bunch of fresh graves with children's toys and stuff laying on them, all the headstones say stuff like "they're with him in the stars now" or something of that nature.

 

[Red Hood]

As lolcow emeritus The Spoony One pointed out in the Ultima games, Lord British was up to all kinds of shady shit. For a "good king" he keeps a dungeon with torture chambers and manages to piss tons of people off.

Of course, he's never an out and out thief and snake oil salesman like the actual Richard Garriott.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

UT2004 iirc had a novel mechanic for the time where you'd die and the camera would go third person and follow your body. If it got gibbed the head would be followed instead. One of the arenas had a big, deep pit full of spinning blades, getting knocked into it would give you a third person cam of you being fully gibbed and pinballing around until you respawned. Given the ingame lore of UT being a spectator sport this arena had bleachers around it with a lot of low poly fans jumping up and down excitedly. The pit, though - down at the very bottom was a little glassed-over alcove with one single guy in it who was able to see nothing but the shower of gore from the blades. I want to say he was constantly doing the jumping animation too, but it's been a decade. That guy creeped me out to no end as a kid, far more than the dismemberment.

The word text in early Mana games. I don't know why but it helps add on to how there's something dark going on behind all of the colorful graphics and exemplars of bravery and heroics you're doing.

There's also a temple in SoM where you can hear old radio/tv broadcasts from the apocalypse, right before the world ended due to the mana fortress revival. I'm not sure if you even need to go there for plot reasons at any point, but I'm glad they left it in instead of cutting it with the rest of the content that got purged when they moved the game from CD back to the SNES.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

There's an entire popular YT channel about this stuff.

Stumbled upon this dude's channel a few days ago. I like how a lot of the videos come down to devs having fun and knowing it'll fuck with people, but that one rat tower girl fucked me up. Okay, maybe a bugged character model used for a corpse somewhere. A place-holder for the ghosts that only appear when you shine the light on? But why the fuck are her arms so long and her face burned? They were eaten by rats, not put on fire and deformed.

Cubone wears its mom's skull.

All Cubones do this. The Pokedex says so.

And even if it's just the one Cubone whose mom is the ghost Marowak in Lavender Tower, where do all the other Cubones get their skulls then? Why do we never see a bare-headed Cubone?

Weird.

They address this in the literal first scene of Detective Pikachu. Dude straight up goes "miss your mom?" when a Cubone is standing out in a field crying.

Referring to that YouTube channel in the first quote, there's a lot of even more sinister shit. Random dead girls and a gym teacher losing her mother mid-game and ending up talking to her at the graveyard. On one hand, kids can handle "scary" things way better than adults, in that they just go "oh her mom is gone but she keeps talking with her, that's nice " whereas we start rationalizing why the fuck this is in a kids game.

I feel a lot of scary things in games come from being playground rumors and undocumentable. Today, everything is a glitch or an attempt at creepy pasta. The most scary games were on the PSX when you couldn't tell what the fuck you were looking at. Now, in Resident Evil 2 remake, you can see every beautiful crevice of that meaty monster, and you just go "that's some nice graphics ". It's a bit of a shame.

 

[Bunny Tracks]

Ghost chick in Red Dead 2 is found in the bayou at night, which was way scarier.

Speaking of RDR2, the sheer number of dead NPCs you can find in the overworld.

The dead children at Clawson's Rest, the crashed hearse with the opened coffin, and the hanged man next to it, the dead cultists in the desert, the Donkey Lady skeleton, the crashed circus wagon with the two headed skeleton in one of them, the deformed man in the swamps, the giant dead snake in the tree-just fucking hell, is there a lot of random corpses everywhere. There's dozens more than the ones I just listed.

Also the (possibly) time-traveling rapist, and the creepy talking parrot found in the game's unused files.

 

[DampSoggyPanties]

You guys have no doubt played Starfox 64. Something always bugged me about the Sector X level. I've only ever triggered it once when I was a kid, but Peppy Hare comments "Where is the secret weapon?" with a rather odd cadence to his voice. I know the acting is pretty hammy in the original, but it's always struck me as weird, considering that the boss of that level, Spyborg, asks "Where is the creator?" a somewhat similar style?

The line in question is right at the end of the video. It's not as striking to me now than I was a kid. But it used to really put me in a tinfoil hat kind of vibe whenever I used to overthink it as a kid.

For reference, here's Spyborg's line/s:

Maybe it was just me being a stupid kid. But it really used to rattle me.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Stumbled upon this dude's channel a few days ago. I like how a lot of the videos come down to devs having fun and knowing it'll fuck with people, but that one rat tower girl fucked me up. Okay, maybe a bugged character model used for a corpse somewhere. A place-holder for the ghosts that only appear when you shine the light on? But why the fuck are her arms so long and her face burned? They were eaten by rats, not put on fire and deformed.

Looks like an otherwise unused model for one of the creepy wood carved idols for the Ladies of the Wood repurposed for a subtle scare to me.

 

[Sir Wesley Tailpipe]

The creepiest thing in games would have to be euphoric Nintendo fans.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

There was a DOS adventure game way back that had some digitized video, not really full motion, with digitized audio. This meant full speech but more of a Terry Gilliam type of animation of the mouth and eyes when talking. That animation was synched to the sound output somehow and my friend probably fucked up some of the IRQ/DMA settings, so when talking to characters they opened their mouth and screeched like a banshee. It was really unnerving to walk in on him playing it and hearing/seeing that for the first time. "It's just like that" he said, reading the subtitles and continuing to play that absolute nightmare with the speakers on because every other type of sound worked.

 

[Francis E. Dec Esc.]

The cemetery ghost from the old Sierra adventure game The Colonel's Bequest scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.

 

[I Love Beef]

The cemetery ghost from the old Sierra adventure game The Colonel's Bequest scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.

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Old Sierra games were awesome for having off feeling vibes to them. Space Quest is a big one for me.

Since Resident Evil 3's coming out soon as a remake, I discovered something about the original game. If you go into the option menu, the backdrop isn't just white. It's a sickly pinkish white with weird squiggling shapes.... and then it hits you that this is a microscopic look at the T-Virus incubating itself into a cell in real time. How everything moves jankily and squirms, and how the options screen uses soothing background music doesn't help either. It's like it was meant to cause a deliberate feeling of mood contrast and whiplash to tell you that even starting this game up, you will always will be under pressure get out of Raccoon City and get cured, and that there is a very real threat that you are never safe from, even in safe rooms and sanctuaries that you cannot be attacked from. Just thinking about it gets my stomach to churn and my head to spin, because of both how disgusting and threatening it is. That's true horror right there.

 

[MightyBiteySnake]

In Pokémon Black and White, N’s room stood out in just how well it told a story without words. It’s basically a giant playroom full of kids toys, and we suddenly learn just how insane N’s life is and why he became the way he is.
I thought it was pretty well done, especially for Pokémon.

Man GF really did "peak" so to speak on BW and BW2. I try not to hate on current mons too much but they just went so above and beyond for those games.

Reminds me of how you can find Guzmas house in SM/USUM and his parents still live there. In one of the rooms there's a golf bag and the description says "some of the clubs are bent out of shape". Never really did dig the implications of that.

Now for my contribution:

Spoiler: Mother 3 Spoilers

There's a lot of emotionally disturbing and moving content in Mother 3, but in particular there's a segment of the game where your players are tripping on shrooms and see common enemies and their loved ones approaching them before attacking. It's a very powerful moment because it gives some insight into the main characters' fears; in particular Lucas's father approaches the party and yells "COME HERE BOY! DADDYS GONNA BEAT YA NOW!" or something to that effect. It's particularly effective because we don't really see Lucas and his father interact on screen in game so we're left wondering how accurate this is