I dont think those games were that scary, a lot of the time they were scary because you'd not seen them before but once you get used to it they arent that scary but the most scary thing about games like that then and now was usually that you'd get sniped or suddenly unleash a shit load of beasties before a save point and lose all your progress. Time wasted scares the crap out of me.
I always thought that Silent Hill was more scary than any of those games because some of the monsters were sexualised or grotesque and suggested mutilation or child abuse was in the town or games back story, it was also highly supernatural, so you know, you couldnt really predict what shit was coming next, how horrible it would be and even if you were to manage to beat the crap out of them with a pipe or something it may not even do you any good. Hell I remember the first game and it was shocking that you could apparently do what was right all the way through, beat all the baddies and still wind up with a finish in which you have to shoot dead your paranormally possessed daughter and then be left screaming as the world falls apart.
There's a lot of these games which operate in the same way that so called youtube "screamers" work, giving you jumps or trying to startle you but back stories like silent hill could really twist in your gut for a bit, the movie tied a lot of things up, while departing from the games story lines, well and captured that same scary element. I'm not going to watch the second one that's out now because I actually dont like the way in which the games have developed, and at one remove the silent hill mythos, with characters like pyramid head becoming more prominant, including endings to the more recent games in which the character you play can be transformed into pyramid head by a cult at the games conclusion.
Project Zero, is that the right title? The one with the shutter bug camera shots of ghosts, was a scary game too, for the same reasons as silent hill was, the investigation of sick shit rituals but also because you had to have the balls to look directly at the scary thing instead of just pointing and blasting a weapon or running away keeping it on the periphery of the screen.
