10 of Video Game’s Most Menacing Characters

Being a menacing videogame villain takes more than just having a “Kill, Kill, Kill!” kind of attitude. Menace comes from the antagonist’s presence. For me, how scary a bad guy is knowing that they’re is more powerful than you, smarter than you, more violent, aggressive and sadistic. It’s having a psychological or physical authority over the game’s progression as either an obstacle or a barrier to the protagonist. It’s about unsettling the player and keeping them on edge throughout the game. These are just a few characters that have stayed with me over the years and still managed to haunt my nightmares and memory cards.

 

 

There’s something about that blank stare. It creeps me out and it certainly makes Henry Townsend pretty nervous. I first played Silent Hill 4 a few weeks ago and I was surprised just how unrelenting Walter is. He’s literally everywhere and that ominous presence is what makes him so frightening.

 

 

Walter spent his childhood at the Wish House orphanage in Silent Hill. After six years at the orphanage and after being subjected to numerous occult rituals, he was told that the apartment complex in which he was found was his mother. You can imagine how that might mess up your mind a bit. He spent the next few years visiting the apartment complex. Walter was then told that in order to see his mother come back to life, he had to complete the 21 sacraments. He had to kill 21 people.

 

Walter Sullivan isn’t your typical take over the world villain. He’s a methodical serial killer influenced by the occult. But there’s even more to his character than this. In terms of omnipresence, the entire game is a construction of Walter’s desire to see the apartment become reality. His personality is so pervasive that the worlds you travel to become a reflection of his psyche. His reality is even able to invade your sanctuary in the late stages of the game. Walter is a menacing character in both presence and in his actions. And please don’t pick up the doll! Whatever you do just leave it on the stairs. What, do you think he just innocently left it there as a present? At least the next person on the list doesn’t pull this psychological torture, well, maybe a little…

 

Alma was an unfortunate test subject of Project Origin. This was Armacham Technology’s attempt to harness her psychic powers and impregnate her in order to create super soldiers. What’s worse is that her father, Harlan Wade, was in charge of this abuse. Alma is like a ghost. She has the ability to turn up anywhere, and you’re always left wondering when the developers are going to try and catch you off guard.

 

 

Taken as a research subject at the age of three, Alma spent the next half of her life at Armacham undergoing various scientific tests. Her father wanted to create a new life out of Alma, a god amongst men and a blank slate, so that he could control and manipulate them into being the perfect solider. The only problem is that he underestimated Alma’s psychic powers, and she takes it upon herself to get revenge. This isn’t a good thing for the Point Man.

 

This is where Alma gets her powers to unsettle us. Her psychic abilities are directly linked to the protagonist through their similar genomes. Alma can manipulate his mind and infiltrate his unconscious. We experience this throughout the game through flashbacks and ghostly images. She’s everywhere, and even in your mind. You can’t help but mentioning Alma’s childlike appearance. This is meant to trigger an emotional response from the player. We know that she was abused as a child and her vengeance is totally justified, it’s just that we’re in the way of her pyrokinetic crosshairs. She’s always there, but she does give you time to recover between encounters. The next guy doesn’t.

 

 

Unlike other zombies in the Resident Evil series, Nemesis has some control over his actions. This alone doesn’t make him particularly menacing, but his intelligence may make the player think he can be reasoned with. You'd be wrong. Dead wrong. Jill Valentine isn’t dealing with some kind of bumbling zombie who’ll stumble his way towards you, no, you’re dealing with a relentless and zombified contract killer.

 

 

Nemesis was created from a strain of the T-virus, specifically the NE-T virus. He was designed to be more intelligent than the other “super soldiers” sent after the remaining S.T.A.R.S team members. This really shows in his perseverance as an antagonist. You can knock him down, burn him alive, shoot him and he’ll just keep coming. This gives him an authority over the game’s progression. Everything you do is based around Nemesis’s proximity, or if you know he’s encroaching. You look for safe houses and areas to relax specifically to be away from Nemesis. He becomes the main focus of Resident Evil 3’s horror.

 

His command over the action has a definite effect on your thought process as a player. You have to conserve ammo, plan your route and make sure he’s not around. He’s aggressive and intelligent, not to mention scary as hell. What’s worse is that every time you defeat him, he just gets stronger and stronger. Nemesis is an intelligent and resilient monster, and he’s unlike any other enemy in the Resident Evil series. Maybe.

 

 

What’s worse than a zombie, a reanimated one. I think the Crimson Head could possibly be the first meta-zombie in a videogame, and this just adds to their terror. The first time I played the Resident Evil remake for the GameCube, I was unaware of them. It was on the back of the box, pretty stupid not to have checked that. A pretty critical mistake, actually. The Crimson Heads changed the atmosphere of the game and provided a real sense of urgency that wasn’t there in the original game.

 

 

What makes the Crimson Heads so lethal is that they are faster, quicker and deadlier than other zombies. This may seem like a loose justification for them being menacing, but they add a heightened level of danger to the game. As a player, you now have to be aware of what zombies you killed, when you killed them and if there’s enough time to get back, gas them and burn them. An easy way around this was to go for head shots, but unlike RE5: Lost in Nightmares, we don’t have that privilege. This made me hoard as much shotgun ammunition as I possibly could. They made me change the way I played the game. That’s a pretty big impact.

 

For the most part, you didn’t actually see too many of them. If you were like me and had a methodical obsession with dispatching zombies, you didn’t have to worry. But the threat still loomed. If you forget even just one zombie, just one, then you’d have to deal with a deadly reanimated-reanimated enemy. And they are relentless and they will kill you. What’s cool about them is that they effectively changed up the Resident Evil experience. Those quiet hallways that you once thought were safe now had a new kind of evil lurking through them… with big claws, red skin and frothing jaws. Kind of makes you happy that the mansion is so huge and filled with so many sanctuaries. The next guy will find you even if you hide.

 

 

Remember that Monty Python lumberjack sketch? Michael Palin is a barber who has an irrational fear of hair, and he tries a few times to stab Terry Jones in the head with a pair of scissors. Think about that, minus the Canadian thing, the transvestite thing and multiply Palin’s insanity by about six. That’s Scissorman from Clock Tower.

 

 

What makes him so menacing is his contrast to Jennifer Simpson. She’s a weak and defenceless orphan who’s recently been adopted, along with two other girls, by a loving family. Like all good horror stories, they don’t turn out to be that great. What makes Scissorman so alarming comes from his sheer presence in the game. He can come out of anywhere, at anytime and just plain murder you. This wouldn’t be so bad if you could fight back, but you can’t. All you can do is run away and hide. This gives him a lot of power over the game experience.

 

Without Scissorman chasing you around, Clock Tower wouldn’t have been that scary of game. His authority over the experience creates a tension filled pace that pressures Jennifer into exploring the mansion and progressing through the story. And he only got scarier when he made the jump to 3D. You still can’t fight him. You just have to keep running and hiding. The horror of hide and seek chase is something that Japanese developers use a lot in their horror games, and, coincidentally, that’s all you do in the next game on the list.

 

 

Siren: Bloodcurse was terrifying. Forbidden Siren for the PS2 chilled me to the core, and I still get nightmares. You spend the entire game running, hiding and fighting your way through rural areas of Japan trying to avoid the zombie-like residents of Hanuda. They’re called Shibitos. Think of the Shibito as Japanese ghosts who’ve possessed dead bodies. Sounds like a typical zombie affair, but what makes them so menacing is your reliance on them to survive. It’s a game mechanic called sightjacking.

 

 

Sightjacking allows you to take the sight of a Shibito. This shows you exactly where they are and it helps with sneaking. It’s like a survival horror MGS. What makes this so unnerving is the knowledge that someone or something is always lurking behind the next corner. It’s not just a niggling feeling of danger, you know that they are there and you have to rely on them to survive. It’s quite unsettling.

 

The Shibito are scary and monstrous. I know quite a few Japanese people and most of them are pretty reserved. When you first meet the police officer in Blood Curse, you hope he’s there to help you out. He flips out and tries to kill you, leaving your character scrambling for the woods and its countless other dangers. Zombies are one thing, but combined with the atmosphere of the game, the dark forests, your character’s intense fear and the constant sense of encroaching danger, the Shibito make for some pretty menacing characters.

 

 

This game is a golden oldie. Well, not really, but it’s better than Clive Barker’s Jerico. I’ll give Clive Barker one thing as a game developer, he knows how to tell a good story. The characters of Undying are really well developed. Each of the residents at Covenant Estate has their own disturbed past to explore, their own persona and a haunting aura that surrounds them. Aaron’s is probably the most eccentric and menacing of the bunch. Unfortunately that was the best image I could find of him, but it speaks volumes about his character.

 

 

Imagine having your jaw removed, your skin ripped off and while lying dismembered in a cold, dark cellar and being eaten by rats…wait… don’t do that. I was probably too late with the warning, but this is what Aaron’s current existence is like and it's partially why he's haunting the manor.  His rotting corpse is hanging in the attic of the mansion waiting for you to return his jaw. Until you do, he haunts the halls of the mansion trying to get you. He’s an artist, an eccentric and a psychopath.

 

Undying is a really well-written game, but compared to games today its graphics are archaic. This is partly what makes Aaron so terrifying for me today. Just the way he looks speaks to his personality as an omnipresent antagonist. There are a few moments in the game where he appears right behind you bogeyman style, it's kind of cheesy, but it nonetheless scares you because of his grisly appearance. He looks like a low-poly corpse and though he’s anything but photorealistic, his dialogue is so well written it doesn’t matter. He’s an antagonist that’s more substance than style, and he freaked me out back in the day.

  

 

Pyramid Head is probably the most well-known survival horror icon. A creation of James Sunderland’s psyche, Pyramid Head is the manifestation of James’s every unconscious desire. This hulking enemy pursues the player throughout the experience, and simply by existing he torture us with what he symbolizes.

 

 

James is an extremely neurotic protagonist, and I even struggle to give him that heroic qualifier. The people and creatures of Silent Hill 2 symbolize something deep within his unconscious mind. Pyramid Head is by far the most explicit example of this. James’s wife Mary was very sick and unable to live a normal life, she couldn't be an active partipant within the relationship. Pyramid Head is just one big phallic symbol. You might get what’s wrong with James. He is extraordinarily sexually frustrated because he had to repress his desires in order to take care of Mary. This monster is the manifestation of his frustration, and what’s worse is that there are two of them!

 

Pyramid Head isn’t so much an omnipresent antagonist, as he is an intergral part in the game’s theme. You never know when he’ll show up, but he’s always with James subconsciously. Pyramid Head is a part of James. He’s a monster manifested straight out of the protagonist, and he’s trying to kill you. This is what makes him so menacing. Talk about a personality disorder. At least, he doens't have illusions of grandeur like the next guy.

 

 

Here’s a good quote from Andrew Ryan: “What is the difference between a man and a parasite? A man builds. A parasite asks ‘Where is my share?’ A man creates. A parasite says, ‘What will the neighbors think?’ A man invents. A parasite says, ‘Watch out, or you might tread on the toes of God.”

 

 

Andrew Ryan has a dangerous mind. He’s also the deco-punk equivalent to Shodan from System Shock 2. Ryan is always watching and always plotting against you, but his influence has sunk further into the enemies of the game than Rapture has into the bedrock of the ocean. He’s eccentric and a villain, but worst of all he’s outside of society. This means that he is free from ideas of morality and ethics.

 

This is what makes Andrew so dangerous and so menacing. He’s gone outside of the scope of morality. This opens up Rapture to an insane and inhuman element, and he really couldn’t care. His omnipresence as the King of Rapture provides both a subtle atmosphere of anarchy to the game and is a reflection of the psychology of the splicers around you. This is where a character with a dangerous ideology can become a master manipulator of both the player and the unstable elements around him. He's methodical and extraordinarily intelligent, but sometimes there’s no method to the madness.

 

 

I'd hoped it wouldn’t come to this one. The Dopefish. This is the thing of nightmares. I first played Commander Keen: Secret of the Oracle on my old DOS computer and freaked out whenever I had to go down into that well. It wasn’t that I was necessarily scared of the Dopefish, but I knew that it was always lurking around the next corner waiting to eat you.

 

 

There’s something about the way it looks at you that just unnerves the hell out of me. He’s probably the definition of menacing because you can’t tell what it is thinking. It’s a blank-staring bright-green big-eyed fish, and by all accounts he should be a nice guy, but he has a nasty habit of eating you and everything around him. He’s a dope, but that’s a little obvious.

 

You just can’t know his motivations as a villain, and maybe that’s the problem. You can’t judge animal instincts. He’s a neutral enemy running on an impulse that he has no control over. Hunger can be a powerful thing. Still, the Dopefish is probably the most terrifying thing since Zelda for the Panasonic CD-I.

 

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What makes a videogame character menacing? It’s more than just being scary. The common thread that ties all these characters together is how they unsettle the player with their ideas, actions and attitudes. They may be violent, aggressive, ugly and repulsive, but each of these characters has a motivation for their actions. Well, maybe not the Dopefish. Each of these characters creates a unique atmosphere of terror and each instils a kind of visceral horror on the player. Being a menacing videogame character is about changing the game experience, it’s about making you run, hide and scared when you would otherwise take a shotgun to them. I’ll tell you, some of these characters have kept me awake at night. They’re scary, they’re iconic and they’re menacing.

 

I know there are characters I’ve missed. How about ones that you think should have made the list? Feel free to comment below and help add to the menace!