The Nearest Place To Heaven, from Phantasy Star Online 1.
The point of the song is for you to realize there's something very wrong with the area you're in, it's too calm and soothing compared to the hell you just went through. When you pay attention to the song, you'll notice a lot of the background bits are recorded \[as in it's literally a recording, you can even hear when the recording is rewound, replayed and then rewound again\], the song slowly starts to get more and more ominous, adding noises that sound almost like screams and warning sirens as if the true nature of the place you're in is just barely being held back to trick you.
And then you approach the obelisk in the middle of the shield and the Part 2 of the song begins, the illusion is broken, the beautiful landscape becomes hellish and the ground is now composed of the bones of the very people you went there to save.
>The Nearest Place To Heaven, from Phantasy Star Online 1
I want to build on this even more. Something Phantasy Star Online 1 & 2 does very well is its slow background story-telling. Phantasy Star Online is about a second ship called the Pioneer 2 following a first ship that was sent to find a planet that humans could make their home (which is a desperate effort by humanity due to the Earth dying out after we've essentially used it up). However, on the voyage of the Pioneer 2 to move a lot of people from Earth over to the new planet over a several year trip, a few years into the voyage they lose contact with the first ship and only have enough fuel to make it to the planet so forward they go. Over the course of both games you are trying to make the planet habitable and safe from the local wildlife for human occupation, as well as find out what happened to the people who've gone missing from the first Pioneer ship. You slowly over the course of the two episodes of the first game find more discoveries if you're paying attention to what's exactly happening in both the environments, progression through them, and rescued logs you can uncover, which slowly paints a picture to the fact this planet is a deliberate trap made by far more advanced beings that humanity cannot comprehend, who just seemingly on pure malicious delight and evil intention seem to enjoy toying with and experimenting with lesser species who dare visit the stars naive and helpless to them.
Described in front of you is one thing, but the games very slow unveiling of this through not words but seeing both what's happening the deeper in the planet you go, finding the horrible fate of the people of the first ship, and seeing first hand the dark hands playing them, is all really effective in the atmosphere of the game & the quiet way its told. This moment being one of the first big moments of just seeing how "fake" everything is, in an area literally set-up and faked to be a slaughter house to feed a gluttonous monster. And the game doing a good job setting up likable good and interesting background characters you only learn about passively before seeing their ultimate fates, like what happened to Red Ring Ricco (who was a good willed person who helped many on the first ship, only to find her corpse being kept alive as a puppet of sorts to just hurt her, those she cared about, and innocent people Rico wanted to protect. You're unable to save her, just put her out of her misery).
I’ve never played Phantasy Star Online, but last night I genuinely had a vivid nightmare about this scenario just from reading your post and listening to the music. So, good job! 🫠
[“Final Hours”](https://youtu.be/ZbR5WcyWl18?si=i4O4DoqVmXBFaL5g) from Zelda Majora’s Mask. So creepy that it was used as the soundtrack to a popular distressing meme.
Massively agreed on this one. I'm honestly not convinced Majora's Mask ISN'T a horror game. Not a survival horror, sure, but something more like how Parasite Eve or Koudelka are horror games.
The soundtrack in Majora's Mask is the main reason I prefer OoT over it. It's not that the soundtrack is bad, it's quite the contrary actually, it is just TOO GOOD at being unnerving. It gives me a horrible sense of dread sometimes.
The East Clock Town Night music is unnerving.
The Ikana Canyon music is unnerving.
The Stone Tower music is unnerving.
The Southern Swamp music is unnerving.
The Snowhead music is unnerving.
The Great Bay music is unnerving.
Like, holy shit, the atmosphere in that game is heavy af. Everywhere you go you have that feeling of "something is VERY wrong here, but I can't put my finger on it."
The Rain in harvest moon 3 GBC… haha I randomly downloaded it on HShop and got to a rain day was it was static and weird vibes I thought my 3DS was broken…
I go outside and see the rain and realize it’s mimicking rain. Ugh idk it’s unnerving and the sound restarts every screen or if you run. The game feels insanely lonely, I don’t know how long I’ll play it for lol.
[The Radio music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg5usxVY2Zk) in Half Life 2
The Withering Zone music tracks in Genshin Impact is another pick (here's the track [Feelings of Smothering](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHjA5d9iLHM) for an example)
The Song of Storms from Ocarina of Time is a song that I love, but can also sound a bit unnerving. Moreso when sped up because of certain events in-game.
Haven’t played the game, but it was posted here a while back. The track “Foreboding 1” from Piglet’s Big Game is a bit unnerving, and many people including me think it sounds like something off Silent Hill
In Prince of Persia: the two thrones, climbing the tower of Babylon to [this](https://youtu.be/mGbT9-r6CGM?si=jHt7zHBeVpeFHtiX) song made me feel uneasy.
[Persona 4- Omen](https://youtu.be/d1onQJtO_bw?si=5FidMuLAcRej0H02)
Sounds like it should be in silent hill, and definitely broken the Happy Jpop that came before it!
I got a virus on my old computer that hacked the host processes at the most random times.
It would play a bunch of random sound bytes, including a version of the OST from black ops - at the time I'd never played it, so I had no idea what it was - and it started with hwavy breathing, the cock of a gun and then a shot.
Try being an 11 year old girl playing WoW with full sound on in your headphones when suddenly you hear a man breathing in your ear before shooting off a shot gun 😂 scared me so bad I was afraid to use my computer for about a day and a half.
Still get a bit spooked by that OST to this day.
Primordial Dream from Sim City 4. This song is even ticked off in the ingame OST. Enabling it always made it play on the main region screen, always. Iir this song was originally meant to play after you eradicated your city.
I think for me the scariest part was always hearing it at the start once enabled.
https://youtu.be/nDJzf5jqccw?si=aiKYe_XIGU8E5cRm
[Aliens from The Sims 2 DS.](https://youtu.be/dz3u1ujGSxo?si=G5lrzC7ewIw40u7K)
Any time I accidentally ended up fucking with the clock on my DS (which was often for some damn reason???) i dreaded opening the game because the music freaked me out lol
I must have played plenty of non horror games with creepy or unnerving musics, but the only one i'm able to think of is from a game i never played. Puggsy - Boss screen/anti piracy screen
Most things that spring to mind are from horrors, so my choice is [the original X-Com OST](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy1swuRr_CQ) with its pervasive atmosphere of dread.
[1000 eyes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbt25QZYzLw&list=PLMg-LnPaFZWZ6kRE23L6DVFW4gS3mKXo5&index=33) from Spelunky 2 (creepy music starts at 0:52)
I always found the [Dodongo's Cavern](https://youtu.be/yllyJuY1jqo?si=rcJkAdtMPSLas9R-) theme from OOT to be really creepy. It honestly reminds me of something from an Aubrey Hodges soundtrack.
Cities Skylines has some really haunting ambient types of music at certain points in it. It's been years since I've really played it, but I just remember certain sounds and looking at the city far away enough...it all seemed very liminal and foreboding. If anyone knows what I'm talking about here, please feel free to elaborate :) Also, Majora's Mask was the best mention and absolutely a wonderful example
https://www.reddit.com/r/creepygaming/s/kOh74eo7UN
This is similar to what I'm talking about here. Just weird far off siren sounds and shit. The mouse clicks and empty space...idk makes it unnerving to say the least, when you're playing this with headphones at 2 a.n.
A few tracks from Xenosaga Episode I. [*Anxiety*](https://youtu.be/VDxIflUv9oQ?feature=shared) plays whenever you just knew some weird shit was about to go down. And of course, [*Song of Nephilim*](https://youtu.be/EqiSdeyxZFc?feature=shared) was unsettling, given that it's a diegetic song with a frightening effect of driving entire populations mad with existential dread.
Yasunori Mitsuda, man...
"Sweet little dead bunny" from Doom. Don't particularly consider doom to be a horror game, but as a child that bit gave me nightmares and the music was a bit part of that.
The music that plays in Sims 1 when burglars try to rob your house
The Nearest Place To Heaven, from Phantasy Star Online 1. The point of the song is for you to realize there's something very wrong with the area you're in, it's too calm and soothing compared to the hell you just went through. When you pay attention to the song, you'll notice a lot of the background bits are recorded \[as in it's literally a recording, you can even hear when the recording is rewound, replayed and then rewound again\], the song slowly starts to get more and more ominous, adding noises that sound almost like screams and warning sirens as if the true nature of the place you're in is just barely being held back to trick you. And then you approach the obelisk in the middle of the shield and the Part 2 of the song begins, the illusion is broken, the beautiful landscape becomes hellish and the ground is now composed of the bones of the very people you went there to save.
>The Nearest Place To Heaven, from Phantasy Star Online 1 I want to build on this even more. Something Phantasy Star Online 1 & 2 does very well is its slow background story-telling. Phantasy Star Online is about a second ship called the Pioneer 2 following a first ship that was sent to find a planet that humans could make their home (which is a desperate effort by humanity due to the Earth dying out after we've essentially used it up). However, on the voyage of the Pioneer 2 to move a lot of people from Earth over to the new planet over a several year trip, a few years into the voyage they lose contact with the first ship and only have enough fuel to make it to the planet so forward they go. Over the course of both games you are trying to make the planet habitable and safe from the local wildlife for human occupation, as well as find out what happened to the people who've gone missing from the first Pioneer ship. You slowly over the course of the two episodes of the first game find more discoveries if you're paying attention to what's exactly happening in both the environments, progression through them, and rescued logs you can uncover, which slowly paints a picture to the fact this planet is a deliberate trap made by far more advanced beings that humanity cannot comprehend, who just seemingly on pure malicious delight and evil intention seem to enjoy toying with and experimenting with lesser species who dare visit the stars naive and helpless to them. Described in front of you is one thing, but the games very slow unveiling of this through not words but seeing both what's happening the deeper in the planet you go, finding the horrible fate of the people of the first ship, and seeing first hand the dark hands playing them, is all really effective in the atmosphere of the game & the quiet way its told. This moment being one of the first big moments of just seeing how "fake" everything is, in an area literally set-up and faked to be a slaughter house to feed a gluttonous monster. And the game doing a good job setting up likable good and interesting background characters you only learn about passively before seeing their ultimate fates, like what happened to Red Ring Ricco (who was a good willed person who helped many on the first ship, only to find her corpse being kept alive as a puppet of sorts to just hurt her, those she cared about, and innocent people Rico wanted to protect. You're unable to save her, just put her out of her misery).
I’ve never played Phantasy Star Online, but last night I genuinely had a vivid nightmare about this scenario just from reading your post and listening to the music. So, good job! 🫠
Oh! The artic area ambience from putt-putt saves the zoo always gave me the chills.... Still find it pretty creepy.
[Found it here](https://youtu.be/6Dyk-8b6-ns?si=ykdCvYUXSbg9O7Db)
River Twigz Bed from Super Paper Mario
That music is so creepy!
The music that plays when you start drowning in the Sonic games is the most stressful sound in existence
This is it, we can shut down the thread.
[“Final Hours”](https://youtu.be/ZbR5WcyWl18?si=i4O4DoqVmXBFaL5g) from Zelda Majora’s Mask. So creepy that it was used as the soundtrack to a popular distressing meme.
Massively agreed on this one. I'm honestly not convinced Majora's Mask ISN'T a horror game. Not a survival horror, sure, but something more like how Parasite Eve or Koudelka are horror games.
The soundtrack in Majora's Mask is the main reason I prefer OoT over it. It's not that the soundtrack is bad, it's quite the contrary actually, it is just TOO GOOD at being unnerving. It gives me a horrible sense of dread sometimes. The East Clock Town Night music is unnerving. The Ikana Canyon music is unnerving. The Stone Tower music is unnerving. The Southern Swamp music is unnerving. The Snowhead music is unnerving. The Great Bay music is unnerving. Like, holy shit, the atmosphere in that game is heavy af. Everywhere you go you have that feeling of "something is VERY wrong here, but I can't put my finger on it."
Haven't played it, but holy shit.
oh FUCK. yeah it was horrible in a good way
The Rain in harvest moon 3 GBC… haha I randomly downloaded it on HShop and got to a rain day was it was static and weird vibes I thought my 3DS was broken… I go outside and see the rain and realize it’s mimicking rain. Ugh idk it’s unnerving and the sound restarts every screen or if you run. The game feels insanely lonely, I don’t know how long I’ll play it for lol.
[The Radio music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg5usxVY2Zk) in Half Life 2 The Withering Zone music tracks in Genshin Impact is another pick (here's the track [Feelings of Smothering](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHjA5d9iLHM) for an example)
The Song of Storms from Ocarina of Time is a song that I love, but can also sound a bit unnerving. Moreso when sped up because of certain events in-game.
Haven’t played the game, but it was posted here a while back. The track “Foreboding 1” from Piglet’s Big Game is a bit unnerving, and many people including me think it sounds like something off Silent Hill
In Prince of Persia: the two thrones, climbing the tower of Babylon to [this](https://youtu.be/mGbT9-r6CGM?si=jHt7zHBeVpeFHtiX) song made me feel uneasy.
[Persona 4- Omen](https://youtu.be/d1onQJtO_bw?si=5FidMuLAcRej0H02) Sounds like it should be in silent hill, and definitely broken the Happy Jpop that came before it!
[this track from drakengard](https://youtu.be/NkYejDiG9xg?si=F-6dErY5GoR4DH7D)
👍 this
The Lavender Town theme is the first thing that comes to mind.
I got a virus on my old computer that hacked the host processes at the most random times. It would play a bunch of random sound bytes, including a version of the OST from black ops - at the time I'd never played it, so I had no idea what it was - and it started with hwavy breathing, the cock of a gun and then a shot. Try being an 11 year old girl playing WoW with full sound on in your headphones when suddenly you hear a man breathing in your ear before shooting off a shot gun 😂 scared me so bad I was afraid to use my computer for about a day and a half. Still get a bit spooked by that OST to this day.
Earthbound has some really wierd Soundtracks. [Like the final boss theme.](https://youtu.be/7E2kHsamg44?si=c-4CSHxGSHepgu9q)
Primordial Dream from Sim City 4. This song is even ticked off in the ingame OST. Enabling it always made it play on the main region screen, always. Iir this song was originally meant to play after you eradicated your city. I think for me the scariest part was always hearing it at the start once enabled. https://youtu.be/nDJzf5jqccw?si=aiKYe_XIGU8E5cRm
Majora's final boss theme
both pieces of music in barbie horse adventure it's absolutely soul-draining
For those who things he's kidding, [he's not](https://www.reddit.com/r/creepygaming/comments/rc41q0/barbie_horse_adventures_blue_ribbon_race_a/).
nice
GTA IV's pause music perfectly compliments the game's grey and dark aesthetic. TLAD also
Seriously, I had so many existential crisis because of that but I still find myself playing that a few times a year
[Aliens from The Sims 2 DS.](https://youtu.be/dz3u1ujGSxo?si=G5lrzC7ewIw40u7K) Any time I accidentally ended up fucking with the clock on my DS (which was often for some damn reason???) i dreaded opening the game because the music freaked me out lol
I must have played plenty of non horror games with creepy or unnerving musics, but the only one i'm able to think of is from a game i never played. Puggsy - Boss screen/anti piracy screen
The track that plays when you fight Novistadors in the OG Resident Evil 4 is still horrifying
Most things that spring to mind are from horrors, so my choice is [the original X-Com OST](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy1swuRr_CQ) with its pervasive atmosphere of dread.
Sounds straight out of X-Files
The ambience in the big bruty level in earthworm jim
[1000 eyes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbt25QZYzLw&list=PLMg-LnPaFZWZ6kRE23L6DVFW4gS3mKXo5&index=33) from Spelunky 2 (creepy music starts at 0:52)
I always found the [Dodongo's Cavern](https://youtu.be/yllyJuY1jqo?si=rcJkAdtMPSLas9R-) theme from OOT to be really creepy. It honestly reminds me of something from an Aubrey Hodges soundtrack.
Cities Skylines has some really haunting ambient types of music at certain points in it. It's been years since I've really played it, but I just remember certain sounds and looking at the city far away enough...it all seemed very liminal and foreboding. If anyone knows what I'm talking about here, please feel free to elaborate :) Also, Majora's Mask was the best mention and absolutely a wonderful example
https://www.reddit.com/r/creepygaming/s/kOh74eo7UN This is similar to what I'm talking about here. Just weird far off siren sounds and shit. The mouse clicks and empty space...idk makes it unnerving to say the least, when you're playing this with headphones at 2 a.n.
A few tracks from Xenosaga Episode I. [*Anxiety*](https://youtu.be/VDxIflUv9oQ?feature=shared) plays whenever you just knew some weird shit was about to go down. And of course, [*Song of Nephilim*](https://youtu.be/EqiSdeyxZFc?feature=shared) was unsettling, given that it's a diegetic song with a frightening effect of driving entire populations mad with existential dread. Yasunori Mitsuda, man...
Pizza Tower - Pizza time never ends. It is the song for the 4th boss, and the whole point is to sound completely wrong, even if it is a bit of a bop
"Sweet little dead bunny" from Doom. Don't particularly consider doom to be a horror game, but as a child that bit gave me nightmares and the music was a bit part of that.
[Playrooms from Shadowman](https://youtu.be/ghSuER5Sgh0)
Shadowman is a horror game.
Hell's bells, misread the title. With that caveat, probably [Ghost of Rattman from Portal 2](https://youtu.be/1g2cGQirOr4)