If you’re into video games, you already know game developers and sometimes even players can leave Easter eggs deep inside of a game – and you also know that those things aren’t always things you wanted to find.
If you’re wondering what sorts of things people have stumbled across deep inside games, these people are ready to dish.
Buckle up!
1. Help them make it through.
“This war of mine” is a small indie game that puts you in charge of a group of civilians in a warzone. You have quite a lot of depressing stuff to do to help them make it through. The game is so good at capturing the demoralizing mood of being on your own in a warzone that I stopped playing it after a few hours.
I’m not going to mention Stellaris, because invading other planets to enslave or even eat their inhabitants, etc. maybe disturbing when you think about it (you can even genemod them to taste better and nerve staple them to make them compliant), but it’s not displayed in a disturbing manner in the game.
2. It will mess with your brain.
Pyramid Head abusing the mannequins in Silent Hill 2.
It was the first video game that really sunk itself into my brain. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The themes of grief, abuse, self harm, self hatred, and eventual forgiveness were brilliant.
I was 14 when I first played it. Now I’m 34 and it’s still one of my favorite games of all time
3. Just nope.
Not the most disturbing thing, but Centaurs in the fallout games.
The first time I saw one of those things come towards me I noped out quicker than a whippet with a bumful of dynamite.
4. Probably the point.
Also in Silent Hill 2, there’s a bit where you walk into a huge, empty, pitch black room with a little torch that shone maybe 2 metres ahead, and I spent ages going around the perimeter looking for a door or something, until finally I walked directly to the centre and there was just a place ready for someone to get hanged in the middle.
Freaked me right out.
5. That one dude.
That dude with the valve in the back of his head shown in intros of many Valve games.
Fun story, this was added as a stealth update randomly one day to Portal 2 which had the normal ‘non moving head’ until then. My husband at the time went on a trip and left me the house to myself for the first time in years, and I was in the middle of a second play through (the logo wasn’t moving when I started this).
Night comes, I’m all alone for the first time, and I boot up the game only to have the head start to slowly turn and look at me.
I feel like I’m not easy to scare, but I sat there wondering for awhile what just happened and breathing pretty heavy. I had to check online and make sure I wasn’t the only one.
6. Constantly suffering.
The handymen in Bioshock Infinite. On the surface, they just seem a bit like the big daddies; big, strong, semi mechanical enemies, but the more you find out about them the more disturbing they become.
They are constantly suffering, they can’t sleep, they’re socially ostracized and most of them were made from sick or disabled people. Some of them weren’t even sick.
Just listening to their dialogue lines makes you feel so sorry for them…
7. Full of it.
Well, Red Dead Redemption two is full of disturbing stuff, not only for a action/western game, but in general.
You can start with the Night Folk, those creepy motherf**kers surprised the shit out of me in my first random encounter.
They did stuff like putting a wagon with a dismembered horse right outside the camp, scaring my horse, just to name one example. But honestly that’s nothing, the skinner brothers are the real deal, some of the things you see include impaling, crucifying and cooking people to death, disembowel people and as their name might give away, scalp them.
Then you also have the Murfree brood, who do the same thing and more, and when you go to their hideout during the main story you can see some of the atrocities they did to the people they captured, specially the women.
I saw another comment talking about the serial killer, and yes, is pretty creepy and some of the “clues” are gruesome and disturbing. You also have butchers creek, a town of inbreeds and sick people that has a creepy story behind (as all rockstar games there’s a lot of lore hidden in little pieces for you to pierce together).
There’s also Gertrude Braithwaite, who is possessed/product of inbreeding/sick and was left inside a cabin hide in a forest close to the families mansion. You’ll found a couple of death people, including young boys, some for reasons unknown and some, again, you’ll need to pierce pieces together.
There’s more stuff, like a “manmade beast” inside a house, the pig man and his wife/sister encounter, spirits talking at night in one of the forests. I mean, there’s so many stuff there’s dedicated YouTube channels to connect those pieces and “solve” the mysteries, “Strange Man” comes to my mind as one of the biggest, and you also have more than one communities on Reddit to talk about your findings, mysteries and theories about stuff.
Oh, I also forgot. One of the random encounters includes a dude that sexually assaults your character.
Overall, the longer you advance in the story mode the more the game changes from a cowboy adventure to a eerie, creepy, uncomfortable journey where you’re never at peace, which is one of my favourite things, how the story gets darker and the entire environment gets harder, tougher and you discover more and more just fucked up stuff happening on the sides that don’t really interfere with your story but makes you feel uneasy every time you continue your save.
8. He needed a break.
Red Dead Nightmare. I had to take a break after the crying Sasquatch asked me to put him out of his misery because we had hunted all of his family.
I was a young teenager at the time who begged my parents to buy me the Undead Nightmare disc from Walmart. All I wanted was to shoot some zombies but instead I got hit with a moral choice about whether or not to kill this miserable Sasquatch.
I must have spent a good five minutes just thinking it over before deciding to put him out of his misery. I remember feeling guilty afterwards and wondering if I did the right thing.
Finding another Sasquatch roaming around in the woods a few days later certainly made me feel like a horrible person.
9. He turned it off.
The baby from resident evil 8 was honestly one of the most Horrifying things in gaming ive seen the sounds an looks were enough to make me feel uncomfortable.
I was strangely confident throughout every bit before that in Donna’s house, despite not knowing what was ahead. I was comfortable with searching through the doll of Mia, none of the cheap jump scares got me, and going into the well was a piece of cake; I was fearless.
I was even confident walking into the dark hallway just before it showed up, however, hearing it moan then seeing that thing as it crawled around the corner really made my mood do a 180; making for the first time since I was a kid that I wanted to turn off a game because I was so scared.
Powered through it though, and discovered it’s now one of my favorite sequences in a game.
10. The baby monster.
The aborted baby/monster in Witcher 3.
If you played the Heart of Stone expansion, the whole sequence in Iris’ mansion is pretty fucked up too (Caretaker creeps everyone out).
Cerys’ questline in Skellige can get pretty shocking if you trust her plan.
Whoreson Junior’s place is also quite the disturbing place the first time you see it.
And the random, but very common, hanging trees scattered around Velen.
11. Legit disturbing.
There’s a co-op game on Steam called It Takes Two. It’s not nearly as disturbing as the horror genre games already mentioned; I think that makes it worse.
The aesthetic is really cute—something you might play with your kids even. You’re married parents that turn into puppets when your daughter wishes you would stop fighting (something like that). To turn back into humans, you have to collect your daughter’s tears.
Well, mom thinks it’s a great idea to go murder the daughter’s favorite stuffed toy, who is ALIVE AND SENTIENT. The murder scene is so drawn out, it was legit disturbing. The game forces you to tear its ears off first and then to DRAG (you have to spam X on the controller) it so you can throw it off the side to its death, all while it’s begging for its life in an adorable squeaky stuffed animal voice.
All so you can make your daughter cry.
My partner and I felt so dirty.
12. Mildly eerie.
That stinking piano from Mario 64.
Super Mario 64 in general has this mildly eerie, yet nostalgic atmosphere. And Big Boos Haunt might just be the best example of this.
Either that, or Wet Dry World. Why was there an entire city hidden behind a weird gate in this otherwise abstract water world?
13. Who thought that up?
There’s a mission in I think the second Hitman game where you’re supposed to find the abducted 19 year old daughter of an unnamed client.
The suspected abductors are a couple of brothers in the meat industry, and one of them is throwing a butchery themed BDSM party in one part of their factory, so it’s already terrible.
Anyway, you find the girl in a hidden room, hanging upside down from the ceiling, butchered by the other brother.
You learn he had an obsession from a little shrine in one corner with a photo of the girl with her eyes scratched out and the word “B*%CH!” written over it. F**king terrible scene.
14. Just all of it.
The entirety of both of the Outlast games. There is some gruesome imagery in those games from people being strung up by their entrails to pits of dead babies so i think those games take the unsettling cake.
I came to specifically say the scene where an insane person is having sex with a headless corpse and asks if you want to take a turn.
That will forever stick with me.
15. The eerie rambling.
Portal 2: The Doug Ratman dens where you can hear his rambling through the walls.
Coupled with the eerie electronic music freaked me out when I was a bit younger.
16. Good and properly freaked out.
Not disturbing in the same sense of the others, but the silent ballerina slicers in BioShock creeped me out good and proper.
There’s one section where you walk across a huge room in ankle-deep water and there are some in there, posed. You walk across, with just the ambient sounds of Rapture which are creepy enough, pick up a thing on a little dry patch and turn around. Every one of those splicers is now facing you. Staring at you. And then they run at you.
I panicked and fired my plasmid, the electric bolt one, and killed them all. And they all fall down without uttering a sound.
Brrrr!
17. He hates it.
Far Cry; Only you… that stuff messed with my head irl after.
The atonement and John literally ripping your tattooed sin off your body, the brainwashing in the mountains, the feeling of slowly losing your mind in the bliss filled henbane. The bodies strung up and stuffed with trash? Flowers? I hate it regardless. Boomer’s family 🙁
I don’t blame the people finding cars and fleeing as fast as they could.
18. A little horrifying.
I remember the first time I played through Portal in about 2008. My buddy played through the whole thing himself first, and I went to his house to play through it afterwards.
I kept finding wall panels that should have been used for portaling, but I kept scooting up underneath them.
My buddy hadn’t explored any of that, and the stuff that was written on the walls was a little horrifying.
19. Hope you’ve got a steady hand.
Having to drill a needle into your characters eye for some reason in Dead Space 2.
If you slightly mess up the QTE, it drills your characters brain out and you die.
Stuff happening to eyes is pretty much the only thing that really gets to me in horror media. That segment was absolutely nerve-wracking.
20. Pretty dark.
Murdering the elephant queen in It Takes Two was pretty dark.
My pregnant wife’s hormones had her tearing up and I’m pretty sure my jaw was open to the floor. Ya the earring or pin part was bad lol.
And the cute little voice!
21. That all sounds awful.
In Haunting Ground if you die to your stalkers you can hear them in the background of the game over screen desecrating your body (while laughing or enjoying it).
There is also a bad ending where the main character ends up “impregnated” with the main antagonist as well?
22. An understatement.
In Until Dawn when you read a note and discover that one of the two sisters had to eat the other’s corpse in order to survive…
Pretty disturbing.
23. A cringy hammer dude.
The clock tower series is seriously fucked up. Clock tower 3 featured a 15 year old girl. I had no idea what I was playing but was excited to pick up a horror game. Having to hide from big baddies was thrilling and terrifying until one caught up to me.
I watched this girl desperately crawl trying to flee when the hammer dude decided to bash her mercilessly.
24. How they’re made.
When you find out how darkspawn are made in Dragon Age: Origins.
First day they come and catch everyone
Second day they beat us and eat some for meat
Third day the men are all gnawed on again
Fourth day we wait and fear for our fate
Fifth day they return and it’s another girl’s turn
Sixth day her screams we hear in our dreams
Seventh day she grew as in her mouth they spew
Eighth day we hated as she is violated
Ninth day she grins and devours her kin
Now she does feast, as she’s become the beast
25. The next level.
When you first arrive at the mental hospital in Outlast, you stumble across two escaped patients raping a corpse. They didn’t appreciate being disturbed…
“You like to watch you little sicko? You weren’t invited to watch!”
Or watching the Groom in the DLC castrating the male patients to make himself the “perfect wife”. The DLC really took things to the next level.
26. Not giving birth.
Outlast DLC. You go around a corner and there’s a body on a table set up to look like it’s giving birth.
There’s also a head. Where a head shouldn’t be.
27. A social experiment.
Vault 11 from Fallout New Vegas.
Whilst most of the vaults will have the aftermath of some twisted science experiment waiting to attack you, Vault 11 is completely deserted bar a few mutated insects. Reading the terminals and listening to recordings reveals the inhabitants had to vote for one person to sacrifice every year or else they’d all be killed.
They kept doing this until only 5 survivors remained. The final 5, made a pact that they would not kill another member and would instead wait for the vault to kill them. Only for a message to play congratulating them on their mercy and bravery and called them “a shining example of humanity” for not sacrificing one of their own.
Whole thing was a messed up social experiment to see if they would actually do it.
Of the 5 survivors, 4 killed themselves and the final one walked out into the wasteland hoping to tell his story. Proper messed me up did that one.
28. And there’s more.
Actually, it got a lot darker than that.
The vault residents turned their ire onto the Overseer for not cluing them in into what they where getting into, who was the first to be nominated for Sacrifice. Because of this, the elected overseer would be the sacrifice after serving out their term, leading to the creation of ‘political’ factions known as ‘blocs’ that would campaign to nominate candidates to suit their goals. The nomination process devolved significantly over time, with bloc leaders turning to deplorable actions and manipulations. This would include the Justice Bloc sexually coercing Katherine Stone under threat of their nominating her husband.
When they nominated him anyway, Kate proceeded to murder members of the Justice Block not only in retaliation, but also to ensure she’d be nominated. Upon her election, she issued an executive order that dissolved the current election process, changing it so that the Overseer would be randomly chosen by lottery. This lead the Justice Bloc to stage a coup, resulting in the deaths of nearly all dwellers in the Vault… save for 5.
29. If you carry a torch…
There’s a torture chamber behind a secret wall in Oblivion. As I progressed through it it felt more sickening.
This was one of the things that got Oblivion re-rated from T to M, along with a topless mod. Apparently when Bethesda first showed the scene to the esrb it was with no extra lighting so none of the details could be seen. Of course, in the actual game the player carries a torch or uses light spells and sees every detail.
30. It makes you squirm.
I think the beginning of Evil Within 1 was pretty brutal and disturbing when you start out hanging upside down in that basement area and that big butcher dude slices another guy’s throat in front of you, then walks away.
You’re hanging upside down squirming and can see the blood pouring out on the floor.
31. I would have been out.
That little room in the beginning of outlast 2 where they would sacrifice babies and you walk over all the dead baby’s bodies and it even makes little crunching sounds.
32. It’s dangerous.
Psychonauts.
When you go into Mila’s mind it’s so fun and cheery until you find the hidden room where you find out about her past.
She used to work at an orphanage and it burned down while she was out shopping, because of her psychic abilities she apparently heard all their screams.
She tells you not to go further, and if you do go further you come to a room with a bunch of blobby creatures behind a cage whispering “help us” “save us”. She tells you that it’s dangerous there but luckily she has her nightmares under control.
It was just so sad and shocking seeing something like that in a game I thought would be a happy and funny children’s game. Though I guess the game did end up having a lot of twists which makes that scene seem like a pretty Psychonauts-ish thing now.
I honestly had no idea, y’all.
If you’ve found something that belongs on this list, please share it with us in the comments!
