Due to the inherent immersion of the video game medium, developers can have a lot of fun creating horror games that can easily scare players. Especially in first-person titles, jump scares, eerie atmospheres, and the power to command where players go combine to make some truly terrifying moments.

In true horror games, you could look at the dogs coming through the window in Resident Evil, your first sighting of Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2, nighttime Volatile chases in Dying Light, and countless corridor excursions in the first two Dead Space games. Here, however, we’re paying tribute to some of the terrifying and absurdly tense moments that catch us even more off guard for being in games that simply aren’t meant to be that scary.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Sure, the fantasy landscape of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is fraught with danger and perils, and you expect the odd demonic entity or great beast to try to stop you in your tracks, but a couple of anomalies in the game make even the more rudimentary quests nerve-racking.

One of these comes after you’ve discovered the infamous Giant Launch bug. While CyberGhost highlights the occurrence among the funniest of gaming bugs, it also makes a battle with a giant or a giant’s camp far tenser than it would have been. Now, you try to evade every club swing through fear of being shot into orbit. One false step could end you there and bump you back to your last save.

Another occasion in Skyrim, which is far scarier than it should be, is while sneaking into Dwemer ruins. Now inhabited by the blind, accursed creatures known as the Falmer, the sneaky and strangely powerful residents are quite easy to sneak around. However, when you get quiet enough, you can accidentally sneak right into one on patrol without spotting them, causing quite the fright.

Grand Theft Auto V

In an open-world game where you’re the criminal mastermind, you should be the scariest entity going to everything else in Grand Theft Auto V. With one of its GTA Online updates, though, the developers decided to flip the script and have all of you hardened robbers and mass murderers running for the hills.

When venturing around Mount Gordo, as GamerRant explores in its article on the Easter Egg, you might just come across the ghoulish Ghost Girl. Rarely seen clearly by those not expecting to encounter a sudden ghost in GTA, the community has since banded together to go ghost hunting, and has found that the optimum time to see her is between 23:00 and midnight with the phone camera open.

Minecraft

A blocky game of pixelated graphics, mining, and also crafting, Minecraft has always been seen as a fun sandbox game where anyone can harvest materials and build up their own world. Along the way, they’ll find precious jewels, team up with others, and even befriend whole villages and ocelots.

Still, due to the way in which you can die in Minecraft and lose all of your harvested goods in a short space of time, or if it falls into the lava, dangerous situations become incredibly tense. This is only worsened when you have good equipment and hear the fuse of a Creeper or accidentally lock eyes with the shifty Enderman. CBR’s correct when it says that Minecraft can actually be considered a horror game.

While certainly not horror games on the outside or even for most of the gameplay, there are distinct occurrences in Skyrim, Minecraft, and GTA V that keep the moments tense and even deliver the odd jump-and-scramble from gamers.