Horror characters, whether that’s the beasties themselves or the eternal thirtysomethings leading franchises, are often easy to spot. Slightly sad in the eyes, usually a bit damp. But what happens when the polar bear goes to Arlington and a horror character leaves its franchise for less spooky pastures? Here are just a few times when horror characters experienced a whole new field.
Pyramid Head – New International Track & Field
Listen, do y’all remember Track & Field? The arcade game that’s probably considered by some to be the reason why arthritis develops later in life, Track & Field depicted athletic sports via some extremely aggressive button mashing. The series dates back to 1983 in arcades, but there have been several sequels and re-releases commissioned by Konami over the years. However, the most interesting game in the series for this video is New International Track & Field for the Nintendo DS. Are we getting ahead of ourselves: No.
Released in 2008 and developed by Sumo Digital, New International Track & Field changed up the formula by swapping traditional button mashing for the DS’ patented stylus controls. There’s plenty of original characters to choose from when picking your avatar, but with this being published by Konami, there’s several guest characters thrown in for good measure. You can encounter some normal-ish characters like Solid Snake from MGS, or Evil Rose from Rumble Rose, but then there’s Pyramid Head. Yes, the big headed manifestation of guilt that stalks you around Silent Hill 2 can also be controlled during the Triple Jump or Shotput, and has a bio that references a killing spree in Hollywood, a nod to the movie that launched around the same time. Hopefully, Pyramid Head didn’t have a… nemesis, on the track.
A Bunch – Marvel Vs Capcom
Marvel Vs Capcom isn’t struggling for horror representations when it comes to the franchise’s roster, and that’s without talking about Capcom’s side of the story specifically. Marvel characters like Dormammu, Shuma-Gorath and even Venom have all embraced a horror tone over the years, whether it’s in comics, movies, TV shows and even video games.
Still, the real Marvel horror is playing MvC 3 and being on the receiving end of someone who knows how to play Sentinel. That’s some scary stuff, but naturally the Capcom roster also has plenty of horror rep. No, we’re not just referring to Darkstalkers characters, though that’s a horror fighting game and still absolutely counts.
As you’d expect, Resident Evil has been incredibly well represented during the course of Marvel Vs Capcom, with Jill Valentine appearing in MvC 2, Albert Wesker being introduced in MvC 3 and Chris Redfield being a core part of the roster since MvC 3.
What’s probably most interesting is the fact that Leon S Kennedy, despite being the series’ hottest poster boy, never appeared in Marvel Vs Capcom, but that’s another story. Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 introduced Nemesis to the game as well, who then became a key part of the narrative of MvC Infinite if anyone ever played that crap. Symbiote B.O.W.s, anybody? They really get under our skin.
Jill Valentine – Under The Skin
Look, we might be doubling up a bit here with Resident Evil, but Under The Skin is a wild game in its own right so we’ll make the most of the opportunities presented to us so we can talk about it. Developed by Capcom for the PS2 and unrelated to the film of the same name starring Scarlet Johansson, Under The Skin does feature some kind of alien invasion, so there’s similarities there.
You play as the alien Cosmi, who hails from Planet Mischief and, as the name would imply, must go out into the wider galaxy and learn how to cause mischief and mayhem. Naturally, he crash lands on Earth and ends up with plenty of hijinks and capers to cause.
The game’s story mode sees Cosmi being guided by fellow alien sensei, Earth’s very own Mischief Master known as Master Itazura. After completing a tutorial and unleashing your new skills on the opening level, Coco Town, players can pick from six different locales, but RE fans should recognize one: Raccoon City. Essentially a whole level devoted to parodying the plot of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, the level features both humans and zombies, with both Jill Valentine and Carlos Oliveira running around trying to survive.
If that’s not enough for you, the objective of the levels requires you to steal coins from Nemesis himself. Who will win? Umbrella Corp’s greatest biological weapon or Capcom’s cheekiest chappy?
Isaac Clarke/Big Daddy – PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale
Depending on who you want to ask, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale was a horror game of its own for various different reasons. I liked it though. Maybe the mixed reception is because someone decided to give one of the roster spaces to Fat Princess of all people. Say what you want about Nintendo, but they don’t have the balls to make Princess Peach fa-, well, never mind. Suffice to say, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale wasn’t the rousing success that Sony were looking for on the PS3, but it did include a varied and interesting roster of characters if nothing else. Remember him?
From Sony’s own library of games, we had the likes of Nathan Drake and Cole MacGrath from Uncharted and Infamous facing off with the Helghast from Killzone and the aforementioned Fat Princess. Throw in even more memorable fare like Kratos, Sly Cooper, Sweet Tooth and both the duos of Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter, and that’s a stacked roster already. It’s the third party characters that introduced some horror, with BioShock’s Big Daddy giving players the joy of drilling their mates in a purely platonic way.
The DLC even included Isaac Clarke from Dead Space, allowing him to confuse ninjas for necromorphs, but the most horror-infused inclusion is Dante from that oft-reviled Ninja Theory developed Devil May Cry. Oh, the horror, the humanity.
Freddy Fazbear – Henry Stickmin
Look, we’re fully aware that we’re about to alienate our core audience here by talking about a Flash game, so just bear with us for a minute please. Developed by PuffballsUnited and released on websites like Newgrounds and Stickpage, Henry Stickmin was a series of comedic point and click adventure games where players control the titular character as he tries to survive a series of dangerous encounters. Spoiler alert: most of the choices in the five original games lead to Henry getting killed in a variety of silly ways, leading to a lot of trial and error, but the genuine comedy and fun came in that experimentation. Plus, they were short flash games, so who cares if you keep stumbling into bear traps and so on?
The horror cameo in particular comes during Fleeing The Complex, the fourth game in the series, when players are pursuing the Presumed Dead ending route. Players have to escape through the complex itself and are given an option to try and hide in a building. If they do so, they enter a darkened cell that’s illuminated by the eyes and smile of one recognisable animatronic: Freddy Fazbear. Naturally, this is a huge fail state, but the real cameo comes if you leave the fail screen alone for a few seconds, as it triggers the classic Freddy jump scare from Five Nights.
If you want to experience Henry Stickmin for yourself without trying to find Flash websites that still work, PuffballsUnited teamed with InnerSloth to release a full collection plus a brand new episode on Steam a few years back.
Anyway, from a bear horror icon to one who’s more of a twink. Because he’s so… slender.
Slenderman – Runner 2
We don’t need to run a full autopsy or recap on the Slenderman series. Chances are that anyone who’s here watching this video will have either played one of the games or watched a YouTuber scream in terror trying to collect those eight pages. For a while, Slenderman felt like a new horror gaming juggernaut, gaining plenty of mainstream pop culture attention and even spawning a movie based on the character, but that momentum appears to have died out now.
Still, that doesn’t mean Slenderman hasn’t appeared in a couple of video games over the years. Granted, some of those are horror games, including a side quest in the horrific Choo Choo Charles that heavily references the slender one, but there have been non-horror cameos too. Plants Vs Zombies; Garden Warfare saw an off-map appearance of Slenderman, which was then updated not long after it was found to be of Slenderman getting chowed down by a Chomper. Creepier than that though is his appearance in the game Runner2, an indie platforming title from 2013 where Slender stalks you throughout one of the levels.
If dodging bottomless pits and spike hazards in an auto-running platformer was hard enough for you anyway, try doing it while knowing an extra dimensional entity is stalking you from the shadows. Gotta be really in the zone to not get a bit distracted by evil Agent 47.
Buncha People – Project X Zone
Okay, this is the last entry mostly dedicated to Resident Evil, we promise. Honestly, we could have done a list of times that Resident Evil characters have appeared outside of their own universe and still have enough to talk about for a regular video. All of the above, plus Dead By Daylight, Lost Planet 2, PUBG Mobile, Rainbow Six Siege and even Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in the form of Spirits. As I write this, they’ve announced Jill in some mobile game and her tits have their own independent thoughts and agency.
Anyway, enough of that, let’s talk about one of the Nintendo 3DS’ best RPGs, Project X Zone.
A sequel/spiritual successor to Namco X Capcom, the strategy game for the PS2, Project X Zone saw the most recognisable characters from both sides of the aisle, along with a few SEGA characters for good measure, coming together for a universe hopping story that threatens everything. Standard multiversal stuff, honestly. On Namco and SEGA’s side of things, there isn’t much horror to speak of, but Capcom brought the horror in spades. Alongside the usual suspects from Resident Evil, some Darkstalkers characters and even Frank West show up to get in on the action. Yes, Dead Rising is a horror game, because trying to navigate survivors into that rooftop vent was nightmarish.
Not as nightmarish as getting ports of this next IP though.
Aya Brea – Various
Given that Parasite Eve is considered to be one of the more obscure games from a big publisher on the PS1, relatively speaking at least, you’d think that the lead character Aya Brea wouldn’t appear in any other games as a guest. Clearly, they weren’t big enough to have their own fully successful franchise, why would they appear in another game?
That’s especially considering that Square Enix have basically taken a “locked in the cellar” approach with the Parasite Eve series after the disastrously received The 3rd Birthday on PSP. Soft spot for that one.
Still, Square decided to let Aya Brea out of her exile to make a guest appearance in some non-horror games. Granted, all of them are owned by Square, so it’s not some huge breakthrough for Parasite Eve fans, but it’s something. Aya originally appeared as a secret character in Chocobo Racing, unlocked by beating the story mode seven times then holding L1 and L2 while hovering over Squall. Her render is also spotted in Final Fantasy VII Remake to be used for an in-game advert, which feels like a mix between easter egg and smart asset reuse.
Finally, mobile game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius also featured Aya Brea as a summonable character. We’d add more to this, but we have no idea what the hell Brave Exvius is. Next game.
Sebastian Castallanos & Joseph Oda as SEB-AAA & JSF-001 – Hi-Fi Rush
Are robot versions of two horror characters appearing in another game entirely exactly the same as just normal horror characters appearing in the same game? No, obviously not. Hell, we don’t even think that SEB-AA and JSF-001 from Hi-Fi Rush are meant to be exactly the same as Sebastian Castallanos and Joseph Oda from The Evil Within.
There’s clearly similarities there, based mostly on the fact that SEB is dressed like a grizzled detective and talks at length about the darkness in the world, while JSF still wears those dorky glasses that Oda wore throughout the first Evil Within. Fundamentally, they are separate characters, but you get an achievement called “Have We Met Before?” for finding every piece of dialogue, suggesting they’re familiar to you, and also how often do we get to talk about Hi-Fi Rush and The Evil Within? Not enough!
The Evil Within is a weird one, but it and its sequel are still up there with some of the best horror experiences on PC and current consoles. The lack of commercial success for the second game meant the series was put on an indefinite hold, but when Tango Gameworks made Hi-Fi Rush, they made sure to reference a beloved horror franchise with SEB and JSF, the HR investigators for Vandelay Industries. They’re a loving nod in a game that’s considered by many to be one of the best games of 2023, something Xbox would respond to in kind by closing the whole studio. Never dropping that one, but we are dropping into Tilted. Segue.
Everyone – Fortnite
Yeah, it’s an easy one, so we’re sticking it at the end. The retention graph would look like GameStop stock if we mentioned it any earlier.
It feels like nearly every video game character and their best mate has made some form of appearance within the world of Fortnite, from people like Leon S. Kennedy to Alan Wake. Yes, we know you can easily prove us wrong on that by saying that Speedball 2 isn’t in Fortnite or something, but the point still stands that Fortnite is inescapable. The live service behemoth has been making its money by cashing in on your nostalgia dollar for getting close to a decade at this point, and apparently that includes horror characters from both traditional horror games to horror icons from film and TV too.
Not only have Resident Evil, Alan Wake and even The Binding of Isaac, arguably the most horror roguelike that’s ever existed, appeared in Fortnite, but you also have characters from Alien, Terminator, Predator, Halloween, Evil Dead, The Walking Dead, Saw, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and others too. By the time this comes out, we’ll probably see Art the Clown in Fortnite or some other kind of silly nonsense. Again, there’s still some big names that are yet to make an appearance in Fortnite, with Silent Hill being a prominent example, but “not currently” isn’t the same as “never.”
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