Here's a thing about me: I love horror, and I love horror games. Several of my picks for this list reflect that, and many more that didn't get their vote in, yet could've on a different day. I also love finding horror in unexpected places and contexts, which only elevates the expression as these things usually go--novelty and unfamiliarity can be great means of imbuing the fear of the unknown just a little stronger than before. That's why the horror RPG looms so heavily in my mind, for example; I treasure the attempts people make toward it because it's not an easy thing to conceptualize and execute upon and so all the more special any time it's tried.
Ocarina of Time was really my first contact with Zelda to any great degree; we didn't have the NES or Game Boy games and lacked a SNES at all growing up. Maybe I'd seen Link in a Nintendo Power comic or via the animated series, but that's as far as awareness about the series went--this would be the baseline. And like... have you seen Ocarina of Time? It's a really distressing game, and I'm not talking about just the explicitly played for horror segments of it like the Bottom of the Well and the Shadow Temple--it's nearly all of it, in every way it plays out through the tone of the writing and the particularities of the presentation.
So many dungeon and environmental tracks eschew easy melodic content in favour of sheer ambient echoes and distant crackles; even when music insinuates itself back into the action it's something like the Forest Temple's theme that is as unpredictably unnerving as the architecture of its respective surroundings. It's known that at least since Link's Awakening the creators had wanted to populate the games with suspicious, unreliable characters, citing Twin Peaks as an influence, and that mode kicks into high gear in Ocarina, with its jerky weirdos that seemingly reveal much less about themselves than they're suggested to internally have going on, and who are wont to get stuck on odd existential fixations that entirely consume their lives. No one acts "right" and no interaction is entirely comfortable, and it's much attuned to the uneasy adolescence the game is about via its POV character--all the heightened darkness and menace of the setting part and parcel of the jumbled-up growth process Link undergoes.
There's stuff about this game that's just haunting and some of its due to the inherent ideas involved, and some of it is just its time and place and the medium it inhabited. "Imperfections" are a largely acknowledged tool in horror works--people love their VHS artifacts and distortion not just as an era-signifier but a valid storytelling implement; what is obscured and rendered unclear can be that much more evocative. With Ocarina and its immediate follow-up, it's not just that almost everyone at the time played this stuff on a modest TV with a composite signal--it's the way they lived in the moment of early 3D expressions, and how those abstractions fed into the textually unsettling natures of the games. The caricaturish style of character design exhibited by the series turned into ghoulish, angular models of those concepts; the contemporarily staggeringly impressive outdoors contrasted with the static, comparatively dead pre-rendered interior spaces; the framerate hovering around 20fps if that made making sense of the world that much more foggy and difficult to grasp. The series has flirted with being scary at times afterward, but it's never succeeded at it again, with some attempts like portions of Twilight Princess numbering as some of the most forced and embarrassing in memory, and some of it is again due to the ideas conveyed not rating up-- but also the rest suffering from surrounding technology that's too advanced, too smoothed-out, too "solved" to unnerve, the advances of a medium acting as deterrent to the fringe benefits its juvenilia enjoyed.
I don't know how much of what I have and continue to read into the game is intent, but it's not like that matters; people have largely made up their minds about Ocarina of Time as much as any piece of media can be rendered understood that way. Still, in how it's reduced or elevated to The Greatest Game of All Time as it so habitually is, there's a risk of taking it for granted and thinking of it in the way we talk about it instead of how the game talks about itself, which as most things of its stature go, can often be much more surprising and engaging than the associated reputation. That specific context may even make it more appealing as a piece of horror-adjacent errata than a game like Majora's Mask, which is textually and tonally so much more direct about its aims and thus more easily parsed. That a game this universally beloved and picked apart can still feel like an unknowable, esoteric mess of obsessions and anxieties is ultimately why Ocarina continues to stand as one of the rare times I ever truly cared about the series in its long history.
Ocarina of Time was really my first contact with Zelda to any great degree; we didn't have the NES or Game Boy games and lacked a SNES at all growing up. Maybe I'd seen Link in a Nintendo Power comic or via the animated series, but that's as far as awareness about the series went--this would be the baseline. And like... have you seen Ocarina of Time? It's a really distressing game, and I'm not talking about just the explicitly played for horror segments of it like the Bottom of the Well and the Shadow Temple--it's nearly all of it, in every way it plays out through the tone of the writing and the particularities of the presentation.
So many dungeon and environmental tracks eschew easy melodic content in favour of sheer ambient echoes and distant crackles; even when music insinuates itself back into the action it's something like the Forest Temple's theme that is as unpredictably unnerving as the architecture of its respective surroundings. It's known that at least since Link's Awakening the creators had wanted to populate the games with suspicious, unreliable characters, citing Twin Peaks as an influence, and that mode kicks into high gear in Ocarina, with its jerky weirdos that seemingly reveal much less about themselves than they're suggested to internally have going on, and who are wont to get stuck on odd existential fixations that entirely consume their lives. No one acts "right" and no interaction is entirely comfortable, and it's much attuned to the uneasy adolescence the game is about via its POV character--all the heightened darkness and menace of the setting part and parcel of the jumbled-up growth process Link undergoes.
There's stuff about this game that's just haunting and some of its due to the inherent ideas involved, and some of it is just its time and place and the medium it inhabited. "Imperfections" are a largely acknowledged tool in horror works--people love their VHS artifacts and distortion not just as an era-signifier but a valid storytelling implement; what is obscured and rendered unclear can be that much more evocative. With Ocarina and its immediate follow-up, it's not just that almost everyone at the time played this stuff on a modest TV with a composite signal--it's the way they lived in the moment of early 3D expressions, and how those abstractions fed into the textually unsettling natures of the games. The caricaturish style of character design exhibited by the series turned into ghoulish, angular models of those concepts; the contemporarily staggeringly impressive outdoors contrasted with the static, comparatively dead pre-rendered interior spaces; the framerate hovering around 20fps if that made making sense of the world that much more foggy and difficult to grasp. The series has flirted with being scary at times afterward, but it's never succeeded at it again, with some attempts like portions of Twilight Princess numbering as some of the most forced and embarrassing in memory, and some of it is again due to the ideas conveyed not rating up-- but also the rest suffering from surrounding technology that's too advanced, too smoothed-out, too "solved" to unnerve, the advances of a medium acting as deterrent to the fringe benefits its juvenilia enjoyed.
I don't know how much of what I have and continue to read into the game is intent, but it's not like that matters; people have largely made up their minds about Ocarina of Time as much as any piece of media can be rendered understood that way. Still, in how it's reduced or elevated to The Greatest Game of All Time as it so habitually is, there's a risk of taking it for granted and thinking of it in the way we talk about it instead of how the game talks about itself, which as most things of its stature go, can often be much more surprising and engaging than the associated reputation. That specific context may even make it more appealing as a piece of horror-adjacent errata than a game like Majora's Mask, which is textually and tonally so much more direct about its aims and thus more easily parsed. That a game this universally beloved and picked apart can still feel like an unknowable, esoteric mess of obsessions and anxieties is ultimately why Ocarina continues to stand as one of the rare times I ever truly cared about the series in its long history.