Super late to the party but.. Hi. You know what genuinely scared me? The teleporting chest near the beginning of Elden Ring. --Minor spoilers for anyone who hasn't played the game and wants to experience everything blind.-- So at the beginning of the game, you are chucked unceremoniously into an open world. You see a giant armoured knight atop a steed in the distance. If you're a Dark Souls vet, you likely run straight at it to engage in combat, and promptly get your ass absolutely handed to you. That Tree Sentinel is placed there to encourage people to fuck off in another direction, come back stronger and then put the beat down on him. You're meant to fight, lose, and realize you can go anywhere you want! A lot of people, travel East of this area, to a shallow lake. Aside from getting attacked by a fucking dragon if you get too close to a bonfire, you can explore some ruins and generally get used to the mechanics. Until you come across a particular treasure chest, submerged in one of the ruins. The chest opens. Smoke billows out, and your screen goes black. You come to in an entirely new area, a crystalline cave. You venture out thinking "Wow they're pulled out all the stops for this game!" and you immediately get one shotted by any of the enemies lurking in the cave. You might die a few times before deciding to just run for it; it won't be long before you realize you are stuck here. You cannot fast travel underground. You have to escape to keep playing. You make it out, into Caelid, and wish you hadn't. The sky is blood red, the ground is rotted, and giant heaving creatures roil in the distance. The music kicks in (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZCD5iPByFA&ab_channel=dudewhereismyspoon) and you understand this is going to get worse before it gets better. This is an area that is so far beyond your characters capacity that you cannot accomplish anything. Birds the size of elephants aggro you from across the map, half the area is covered in poisonous rot and the rest is laid with traps and enemies. So, Australia. So you escape (eventually). You go back to where you found that Tree Sentinel and you're fucking pleased he's there, something normal. A dude in armour with a halberd. Excellent, I can handle that. Give me more of that. This teleporting chest, so early in the game, so ready to nab newcomers, was peak fucking horror for me. Like, no jumpscares - nothing cheesy. Just atmospheric terror and the visceral understanding that you are NOT meant to be here. I spent the rest of my playthrough knowing I would have to return to this bloodstained land, and dreading it. Even now that music makes me shiver. There were darker and creepier places in that world that I experienced but nothing hit me harder than the surprise Caelid holiday.
That was the moment where I knew this game could and would fuck with me. From then on? I hacked at every chest before opening it. I used to do that in previous Souls games because the chest might actually eat me if I didn't look closely; now I do it because I might be transported to hell. At some point it felt like game was saying "Oh, you're exploring a new area? Heads this hurts, tails this helps. Go ahead. Flip that coin." Caelid wins in my "horrific experiences" of Elden Ring, beating out strong contestants like: - 'giant hands that erupt out of the ground when you walk too closely and scuttle towards you like spiders' - 'ambulatory iron maiden with actual grasping hands that will ALSO TELEPORT YOU SOMEPLACE ELSE if it doesn't kill you first'. - Even winning against 'possessed dead snake with a face in the back of it's neck, it will invite you to join it as family before attacking, stopping only to wrench a greatsword MADE OF PEOPLE out of it's throat'. Fuck Caelid.
Of my main 'gaming' pals, only my brother and I are the Dark Souls fans. Our discord group all bought in, and we could pinpoint exactly what boss someone was at by the mix of rage/resignation/despair they were exuding in comms. You're right, it's absolute bullshit, and it's still the most accessible of the games FromSoft have put out! As a big middle finger to the vets, the first big boss was designed to take everything about movement patterns (beaten into players), and throw it out the window. This dude has a windup attack that lasts 2 seconds longer than it needs to; you roll away? He cancels it. His three hit combo? Adds a fourth if you roll in to punish him. Movement tracking? He's got it up until the final second of a move. He can break away faster than you can, and forces you to bring the fight to him. The absolute opposite of what I was trained to handle. I was so pissed, but eventually pleased that they understood their playerbase well enough to fuck with them so effectively. I have Inquisition, never started it but I heard a similar description to what you've just offered so I may have to give it a hoon.
FFXV was meant to be my resurgent love for the Final Fantasy series. I loved VII, VIII and IX so much growing up, before moving away from the franchise to play FPS games and consume energy drinks with my spotty friends. A friend loaned me FFXV and I legitimately gave up at the tutorial phase of figuring out how to make the dude zip to his sword after he's thrown it away/at an enemy/into a bush. I couldn't do it. No idea why. Button bindings? I'm an idiot? Glitch? I hung onto the game for the better part of 2 years, and my friend finally came round to pick it up last week. I didn't have the heart to tell him I made it five minutes in before rage quitting the tutorial, when I can speedrun a Dark Souls game.. Fuck it I'm going to play Inquisition. Something simple sounds good. Something possibly written by an AI sounds hilarious.