Love is the most terrifying of all 
Versus is another series that wasn’t horror, but dealt with some disturbing material that I was creeped out by reading it. I’m a sucker for the atmospheric, underlying themes type of “scary” though so I have a perhaps looser definition.
Highlands, Deep Waters was effective at giving me a swnse of tension that led all the way up to its conclusion, and even had me doubting the nature of the ending and how effectively I had been throughout the game.
Something that I found less scary, but which included legitimate, bone-chilling content I never expected to see from CoG, let alone a main title: Vampire the Masquerade: Night Road. The sheer inhumanity of what it means to be a vampire in the setting is put in stark relief, and the player themselves has more than enough opportunities to act monstrously. Considering the uh, climate of the times, some of those scenes hit me hard.
Shudders I was terrified by Trees Don’t Tell from HG…
I remember way back when I first played Zombie Exodus. My first character was a scientist and generally extremely bad at all physical/endurance challenges. So every zombie encounter had me nervous because there was a real chance I would die.
Which is such a different feeling from the one I got when I played my soldier MC. It seemed like I was playing a whole different game. But I digress, this isn’t supposed to be a post about praising ZE.
Anyway, there’s this mission on an abandoned ship. It’s enormous and, for some reason, this group of survivors thought it a good idea to send my poor lab rat MC to explore it alone. The atmosphere chilled me to the bone. It was so well-written.
From the low, scarce light. Pitch dark in some places, but you couldn’t risk opening your flashlight, not with them lurking at every corner, every pile of rotting items. Old pipes would creak, floors would shift under your shoes, and the air would be so oddly silent, it made the fine hairs on your arms stand to attention. Empty, of course, but for the distant, faint, terrifying moans of the undead.
You could read old notes left behind by dead crewmates, and rummage through their belongings as their corpse dragged itself just outside the door.
I don’t know. I was younger then, and new to interactive fiction, but that mission is stuck in my head. I was terrified. I think I died like 3 times, but I couldn’t stop playing. It was such a relief when I finally got off the ship. I swear my heart was racing just a little bit, and my hands were weak as if I was my character.
Just such a great moment and, to this day, the most frightening experience with COG/HG I had.
VTM is nothing but not disturbing, besides the political machinations. I assume that Night Road is your introduction to World of Darkness and Vampire The Masquerade?
Highlands, Deep Waters and Scratch are among my favourite IFs. The feelings of paranoia, isolation, not being able to trust anyone, never feeling safe enough to just stop for a moment and take a breath, is what makes these games shine for me.
In Highlands: The two scenes that come to mind are when the second detective was digging a dog’s bones and when your first detective blows himself at the cultist ritual. I had to read it in one go, I couldn’t stop.
In Scratch: when you are talking to your partner about the case(s) your father worked on and, later, when you mention killing the bandits at the train and getting shot in the leg, that also glued me to the screen.
I think that a lot of games here, CoG and HG, violence and controversial topics are sanitized in general. It’s not really a problem, as I understand that every game has it’s theme, audience and not every book needs to be dripping in blood and guts to be good, because I’m also a fan of reading light hearted books every once in a while, like Tally Ho.
However, games like Fallen Hero, Samurai of Hyuga, Highlands and Scratch touch on themes that i know happens in the real world. I can’t see demons, superheroes or dragons everyday on the news, but things like violence, drugs, prostitution, discrimination, corruption etc? These I’m familiar with and they “connect”(?) with me more than pure fantasy.
For example, in Scratch when you read about a case where a politician’s son kills a girl just for fun and gets away with it, I can connect with that.
In Highlands, the paranoia and anxiety, worrying about things which may not be true at all, I can connect with that.
In SoH, the effects of the opium on the population and the corruption of the government officials, I can connect with that.
In Fallen Hero, the discrimination and the effects on your mental health (depression, suicide tendencies), I can also connect with that.
The thing that makes these games scary for me is because they talk about things that happen in real life, that I can see and hear everyday, both in the news and around me. Real life issues translated to the page are thousand times more scary for me than a 9 eyed monster, a Dark Lord or a super villain. Not everyone is a fan of books with heavy themes like that and that’s okay. Sometimes I need a Tally Ho to just disconnect a bit and laugh, but they certainly affect me much more than fantasy.
Nah, I’ve been in it since forum RPs in the early 2000’s. A lot of official media outside the RPG tend to sugarcoat it though – even Bloodlines didn’t go as far as Night Road did.
Tally Ho ain’t all sunshine and rainbows either — ever talked to Haze? 
I just realized that I’ve never actually played all that many Horror CoG, despite being a horror movie enthusiast lmao.
But if I had to pick a game, I’d say A Kiss from Death. I wouldn’t call it scary per say, but the feeling of existential dread all throughout was definitely on point.
I feel that Temple of Endless Night can be rather creepy now and then. Even though I didn’t find it scary-scary, it had this sense of claustrophobia. It almost felt suffocating, in a way; in a good way, that is. It has good atmosphere, and some real weirdness. I highly enjoyed following a certain route where my love interest was… not the best of people. Things turned weird and bizarre, and I really enjoyed that. (I wasn’t always a big fan of the main character’s reactions through the game, though; in this certain route they were simply too scared and uncomfortable - I wish I could choose to just embrace the weirdness and the immoral choices.)
Edit: Ah! Forgot one. The conduit-route in Mask of the Plague Doctor. That’s some creepy stuff right there. I loved it.
@Sally_Forth Ha! You and me both, regarding not having played many horror Choice Script games, but being horror movie enthusiasts.
Highlands, Deep Waters - for general paranoia feeling and, damn, that jumpscare. It didn’t even have a sound, but made my heart stop anyway.
The Fog Knows Your Name - had potential to give me chills. But then I was trying to make my MC to woo a ghost, so the mood was ruined.
Donor - I can’t remember was I finished this game or not, but I clearly remember how disturbed and uneasy I was while playing. And not in a good way.
Haven’t read any of the actual scary ones (bit of a chicken here), but the VtM series can be a bit scary. While the fact that you are a supernatural predator does tone down a lot of the scariness, the setting is pretty scary. Out of the four (Night Road, Out for Blood, Parliament of Knives and Sins of the Sires), I think Parliament of Knives and Night Road are the scariest. Night Road is scarier in the traditional sense of scary while Parliament of Knives can be scary due to all the politics going about. Out for Blood isn’t really that scary since it is essentially WoD-lite. Not sure how to rate Sins of the Sires because I think it is a terrible read honestly.