- CapCom is remaking Resident Evil 3, which is the Resident Evil game where a big, melting Michael Chiklis in cyber goth gear chases
you the whole time. The Nemesis is an unstoppable hunter. It's the sole antagonist
that pursues the hero through their ordeal, it's the Russian oligarch hunter from The Most Dangerous Game, it's The Terminator, it's Anton Chigurh. And when this archetype shows up in games, it can be viscerally scary, like the kinda scary that knots my guts up and makes me feel physically bad. Just about every game is
chock full of monsters that want to hurt you, but these ones are worse, because you can't hurt them back, and they'll follow you wherever you go. A load screen will not save you. - [Man] Jesus Christ! - But not all personifications
of inevitable death are created equally, so here's a review of all of the monsters
who chased me before. We'll be evaluating our monsters based on three criteria on a scale from one to five. The first criteria is fear. This is where we evaluate the monster on pure horror aesthetics. How do you feel when
you look at the monster? If the answer is pretty good, then it's getting a low score on this one. Danger is where we evaluate how badly the monster
can actually fuck you up. Because a lot of times, the things that scare us, aren't the same things that can hurt us. I've had a lot more nightmares about giant lobsters than global warming, and only one of those
things is gonna kill me. And finally, persistence. This isn't just about
how often the monster is on screen menacing you, it's also about how much time they spend living rent free in your head. If you can tell that a hunter is only going to be tailing you for certain sections, it's just not as scary. A hunter that only shows up when it's wanted is a good person, but a bad monster. There's some natural
overlap with these criteria, and we can see that in our first reviewee. Sinistar is an asteroid-like space shooter from 1983. You fly around, you shoot other fighters, you blow up space rocks
to build new weapons, and then you get chased
by a living planetoid who loved to scream. (makes sound) Sinistar scores above average in both persistence and fear. (makes sound) Remember wasps? Imagine a wasp doing that
thing wasps love to do where they fly to your face over and over again, except that wasp is screaming with a voice of a fully grown human man. Sinistar was one of the first video games to feature real recorded human voices and it was all extremely menacing. - [Man] Run, coward. - Sinistar scores pretty
high on danger as well. He's the most powerful enemy in the game and while you can beat him, he will reappear on the very next level. Also, it's an arcade game which means that if you get caught, and you will get caught, the game is fully over unless you wanna pay more quarters to get yelled at again. - [Man] Beware, I live. - Ubisoft's reboot of the
Prince of Persia series had the perfect tone where it was Disney accessibility with just a touch of spice. And then they made a second one with more sword and blood and babes and metal thongs and wet hair and lots of gray and one Godsmack song that plays for the entire game, the one that was also on the soundtrack to the Scorpion King. You remember it. It also added the Dahaka, a big, inky tentacle man who chases you throughout the whole game. Let's get fear out of the way because the Dahaka is not scary. Honestly, I think his buffness undercuts the fear factor here because it's just too funny. Imagine being told to design a physical manifestation
of inevitability and fate and then just immediately be like oh yeah, we gotta give him
some big fucking muscles, man, just big huge pecs, six-pack abs, big quads. He's also not very dangerous. His role in the gameplay is to put a bit more pressure on you during the platforming segments, but this is a game where
you can rewind time, so it's pretty low stakes. Then again, you do face a
larger than average chance of hearing Godsmack while he's around so, I guess, that's a bit of a risk. Old heavy D scores slightly
above average in persistence because he does chase
you for the entire game, culminating in a confrontation
in the final act. That's the platonic ideal. The problem is the bits
where he chases you are too cut and dry. Once you pass through a
barrier of running water, you know that you're safe until the next time you
hear Godsmack start playing. (rock music) Dead Space, it was Resident Evil 4 in space. You might not remember the hunter, though, because the hunter wasn't that great. It was teased in the game's fifth chapter and didn't appear until the 10th. It was pretty much a
bigger, lumpier version of the game's basic slasher enemies except it couldn't die. Hunter lands average
scores in fear and danger because it shambles at you in a nasty way and if it catches you and chops you up, you gotta all the way back to the recent manual safe point. It scores lower in persistence though because even though it's unkillable, it only hunts you for a
single chapter of the game until you cook it with an
experimental jet engine. That sounds familiar. (rock music) Oh, Pyramid Head, the twisted Joker of game villains. He's one of these video game characters who spawned a weird cult of personality in a cottage industry of
people making video essays that say things like, "Pyramid Head is, without a doubt, the most highly psychological villain in all of gaming." Fan theories positing
that maybe he's actually the good guy and essays
delving into what makes him so iconic and memorable. Spoilers. It's cause he's got a
big pyramid on his hand. He's kind of scary but his incredibly slow animations that in frequent, fully
scripted appearances mean he's not much of a threat. Pyramid Head only really shows up once in a blue moon to
help the protagonist confront repressed trauma or whatever. Metroid Fusion put a fun spin on the relentless pursuer archetype. The intention of every
other hunter on this list is crystal clear, but your time with the SA-X begins as a bunch of
mysterious, creepy near misses. SA-X, who I'm just gonna
call SAX from now on, is a colony of parasites that look just like you, walking around in your stolen armor. As the game progresses, it becomes more and more aware of you and its efforts to catch you ramp up. And a few scripted sequences, SAX chases you down corridors, and eventually you fight it. Most of the monsters on this list are scary because of their visual design and because the way they move, but SAX is scary because of what it is. It's like seeing somebody else on Twitter who's using your face as
their profile picture. The creepy doppelganger thing is effective and hearing those intentional,
heavy metallic footfalls is some real nightmare shit, so we're gonna give it a four for fear. It's also pretty dangerous. Once you make contact, the SAX can kill you real good. In persistence, SAX
embodies both extremes. Most of its appearances happen during normal Metroid screen transitions, so every time you bomb through a wall or hop in an elevator, you wonder if it'll be waiting for you on the other side. But since SAX doesn't
usually show up unannounced, once you're in a space, you usually feel safe
until the next transition. Scissorman rules. He put every single one of his points into persistence and it
is not paying off for him. Scissorman is the sole antagonist of the first two entries of Clock Tower, a point and click adventure that was hugely influential in the genre of survival horror. The thing is, he's not very scary. He's got the same energy as
that toddler with a knife, which is to say, very worrying, but not
particularly threatening. He's like four feet tall, he's got a huge set of scissors, he pinches them closed every time he hops. At one point, he literally sends you a handwritten fax that says, "I'm comin' to get ya!" He puts the apostrophe
in there and everything. Your player characters don't have access to any real weapons, but you do get a spray bottle, so you can punish him
like a bad little kitty. Every single strategy for fighting back is completely humiliating for this dude, like the one where you just
gently drape a bedsheet over him and walk out of the room. He's not very dangerous or scary, but God, he's persistent. He sticks around until the final moments of the game where he
gets sucked into a wall for some reason. R.I.P. to a short king. SEGA and Creative Assembly did an incredible job capturing the look and feel of Ridley Scott's original
horrifying Alien film. Hey, Charles. Alien is a huge, intelligent, but inscrutable hunter. It's scary and dangerous. It's faster than you and
it can disappear into vents and reappear where you least want it to. Specifically the vent that you're in. And, over the course of the game, it learns new behaviors and
techniques for hunting you. Alien Isolation makes you
do frustrating, menial tasks while knowing that somewhere very nearby, the Alien is making plans
to eat your entire face. Even saving is an exercise in fear. You gotta jam your punch
card into this time clock and then wait for a count of 100. It's the sci-fi horror equivalent of the moment you hit play
in your totally normal work playlist then realize your headphones aren't plugged in and
then you accidentally misclick and start an also
start a very normal YouTube video then missed the mute button and hit the louder button? That ever happened to you? Gamers? So tired. Mr. X, also known as the Tyrant, stalks you through the
Raccoon City PD portion of Resident Evil 2 remake, and he's also the boss of Leon's campaign. Some aspects of the Mr. X experience are really scary. Even when he's not on the screen, you can hear him angrily stomping around the police station. That constant background presence is super anxiety-inducing, and then when the footsteps go away, you start expecting something. Oh shit! Is that a, is that a fedora? He's imposing but in
sort of a big, huge, dumb bad guy from an action movie kind of way rather than a nasty I got knife hands and my brains on the outside kind of way, like he stomps towards you and you're like oh no, is he gonna lay eggs in my mouth or melt my legs with acid? And then he just sort of does a punch. He's also really slow. His brisk walk is just a bit slower
than your leisurely jog. But, he's got the remarkable ability to appear between you and a save point when your inventory is full of freshly gathered herbs, rare ammunition, and
precious, precious dongles. And that's where you
start getting scared again because that stuff is hard to get, and if this big ass Hulk catches you, you lose it all and then you have to go get it all again or just give up. Jack Baker is just dad bod Mr. X. He gets an extra half point to fear because you're always worried that he's just maybe about
to say something racist. - [Man] You better start running! Oh! - Nemesis is like Mr. X if he didn't set properly before baking. He plays the same role as Mr. X too, but he's even more central
to the game and plot. I mean, they named the game after him. He's also way faster. He can just break into a dead sprint and it is fucking horrifying. He can leap directly into your path. If you think you're
safe behind an obstacle, he'll just yeet himself up into the air and find another path to you. He moves in more threatening ways and he's also just a lot worse to look at. Big, nasty lunch meat man wrapped in trash bags. So he's scoring really high in all of our criteria. But just how scary he is really depends on how
much you have to lose when you see him. And now that I think about it, every unstoppable killer is really only part of the scary equation. When you strip away the horror aesthetics and just look at them mechanically, they're all just ways of putting unavoidable pressure on the player when they deal with the real horror. Our bonus monster. Scarcity. The most effective uses of the unstoppable hunter archetype represent
a threat to your resources. Like bullets or scrounged up medkits or progress in the game. Artificially imposed Scarcity and intentionally archaic save systems mean that when the inevitable threat suddenly shows up, there's no safety net. You're fearing a backpack
full of green herbs and the Nemesis teleports in front of you and suddenly you start thinking about all the work you're going to have to do to get back here. Even though ostensibly you're having fun, the stress reaction is really similar to that feeling you get when you get a vet bill due on the same day as rent and you're afraid to
check your bank balance. I see this bloated Jason
Statham on my screen and I start looking around my apartment for things to sell. It's the feeling that one, unavoidable setback could suddenly make your life much much harder. So that's why it's important to focus on the things
that you can control. Like how much Godsmack
you're listening to. Turn that shit up, baby. Scorpion King, music for and inspired by. (rock music)
