The absolute scariest horror game of all time 🇸🇪

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As you know, it's Halloween going on, and my partner and I are reveling in horror right now in the form of movies and TV series. In terms of gameplay, we play Metaphor: ReFantasio for full mugs though, but as you know, there are plenty of nice horror games as well.

Recently, Marie told me about her best horror games, and I was eager to do the same. But after a while of thinking I realized that I would probably prefer to give this blog post to a single game. Because there's a horror game that's so damn rough and unpleasant that I think it beats everything else in that category – and complements this with first-class gameplay. For... Unfortunately, horror games surprisingly often equate to gameplay.

However, the latter was not a trap Monolith Productions intended to fall into. They had previously made No One Lives Forever and F.E.A.R. when they released the Xbox 360-exclusive release title Condemned: Criminal Origins in 2005. FBI agent Ethan Thomas pulled into a story about a serial killer, who quickly took completely different turns than one might think.

The adventure takes place in the slums of a big city based on Seattle, filled with possessed Kraken who attacked with a rarely seen frenzy. We've seen jump scares before, but the panic that sets in when someone screams rushes towards you in a dark room is not to be trifled with. Condemned: Criminal Origins offered really nice combat with a sense of heaviness that I've never actually experienced in the same way. Hitting an opponent in the head with an iron pipe, a feeling I can only describe as unpleasant.

"Unpleasant" is probably how I would describe Condemned: Criminal Origins in general, because it is constantly playing with the player's psyche and several times I had to take a break simply because it was too heavy, and if I were to rank the three scariest moments I have ever experienced in a gaming context – I think all three will come here From the get-go.

You can read Petter's 19-year-old review here (it stands, and he writes, among other things: "I personally have never played a game that made me so scared for such a long period of time as Condemned") and if you really want to scare the crap out of yourself this Halloween, you can download Condemned: Criminal Origins for Xbox here (yep, backwards compatible). I'm not sure you'll thank me afterwards though, because this is horror for real.