I recently played the Stalker games for the first time; really liked the atmosphere and world. Then some time ago I randomly came across some article about horror games on rockpapershotgun that mentions COP as pretty much the scariest game ever and I'm confused. The game definitely has some genuinely scary sections and some really freaky moments especially early-game, but the article seems to imply that there's something more going on than what I saw.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are about exploration, encouraging you to dig deeper until, like the dwarves of Moria, you unleash terrible things. And those terrible things are far more terrible than the inhabitants of a haunted house or a derelict spaceship. At their most harrowing, the creatures of Pripyat are the final barrier that stands between you and an understanding of the world. There are anomalies that fuse bone and boil blood, and those can be accepted and circumvented with a little ingenuity. There are blistered buildings and the skeletons of a society, and those too can be accommodated into our understanding with a shudder and a sidelong glance. Even the blowouts, psychic catastrophes that eliminate life and turn the sky to blood, are regular occurrences. Measures can be taken and even if the world does seem to have lost its grip, rules and regulations can be drawn up to calibrate new ways of living. But the things that lurk in the darkest, most claustrophobic corridors and tunnels of the Zone do not allow the mind to linger upon them. They are horrors in the truest sense – entities that behave in a repugnant fashion and that are simply unacceptable. They should not exist and cannot exist. But once they have been encountered, they will always be there, just beneath the surface. Just behind the walls.
This reads immediately silly and exaggerated, but I'm still wondering if I actually somehow missed all the scariest parts of the game because it seems to specifically say there's scary shit in the game that's not mutants, anomalies or blowouts, but I've never encountered anything besides those. The worst thing I ever met in any tunnel in the game was a controller because it makes a high pitched noise and those fuck annoying dwarves that make your gun fly away. Anyway, I read this and it talks about
horrors in the truest sense – entities that behave in a repugnant fashion and that are simply unacceptable
and all I ever saw were some critters wearing trenchcoats.
So question to anyone who played these, was I somehow dumb and missed some spooky shit in the game or was I just dumb for taking anything written on RPS seriously?