The 20 SCARIEST Moments in Nintendo Games

20 Scariest Moments in Nintendo Games

Welcome to MojoPlays, and today we are getting jumpscared by a balloon with a smiley face drawn on it. These are the 20 Scariest Moments in Nintendo Games. Let’s do it!

Pokédex

“Pokémon” Series (1996-)

Across a jaw dropping 30 years, the “Pokémon” series has technically flirted with spooky ideas plenty of times, but none of that comes close to the true horror hiding in plain sight: the Pokédex. But if you actually read about the little monsters in there, you’ll discover “Pokémon” are actually super unhinged. Take this entry from “Pokémon Silver,” for example: “Drowzee. It remembers every dream it eats. It rarely eats the dreams of adults because children are much tastier.” Which is… unsettling, once you realize your carefully trained partner might be snacking on your subconscious while you sleep, it raises deeply uncomfortable questions, particularly about why kids’ dreams are apparently considered a delicacy, creep. Or consider this entry from “Pokémon Black”: “Yamask. Each of them carries a mask that used to be its face when it was human. Sometimes they look at it and cry.” That’s right, the creature you’re ordering into battle was once a human being and is fully aware of that fact. Then there’s Haunter, from “Pokémon Crystal”: “Haunter. It hides in the dark, planning to take the life of the next living thing that wanders close by.” Just a friendly pal, lurking in shadows, waiting to kill something. Cool cool cool.

Weird Faces

“Game Boy Camera” (1998)

The Game Boy Camera is one of those strange Nintendo experiments that quietly slipped through the cracks of history. This was a time before phones had cameras baked into them, when the idea of carrying a camera in your pocket was borderline sci-fi, especially for kids. So when I cracked into this novelty camera with a handful of goofy minigames thrown in as a bonus, I was enamored. Cute. Wholesome. Completely safe… or so it appeared. Then you press a button you didn’t know mattered, and suddenly the screen erupts into distorted, nightmarish faces staring back at you. These weren’t monsters or fictional characters either, but grotesquely altered images of the developers themselves, warped into something deeply unsettling. On their own, they’re uncomfortable to look at, but the real horror comes from the context: kids had no warning, no explanation, and no clue why these images existed at all.

The Trees

“Super Mario Galaxy 2” (2010)

On the surface, “Super Mario Galaxy 2” is a cheerful parade of strange worlds, each packed with bright colors, playful enemies, and whimsical set pieces that keep things lighthearted. But dig a little deeper, and WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!? In Shiverburn Galaxy, something is very wrong. If players switch to first-person view and scan the icy cliffs in the distance, they’ll notice three shadowy figures standing motionless on the top of the hill. They aren’t acknowledged by any NPCs, they never interact with the player, and they serve no gameplay purpose whatsoever. Digging into the game’s files doesn’t help much either, the figures are blandly labeled as “Tree,” a description that raises far more questions than it answers. Just three unexplained silhouettes, patiently observing, and ready to pounce... Of course, they never will, BUT WE DIDN’T KNOW THAT IN 2010!

Clanker

“Banjo-Kazooie” (1998)

This list isn’t limiting itself to games developed directly inside Nintendo’s walls, but also includes titles the company published. If that sounds like stretching the rules, eat my butt, this is MatjoPlays now. After weaving your way through the maze of underwater pipes in “Banjo Kazooie’s” Clanker’s Cavern, you emerge into an open area where the titular character suddenly introduces himself. This is Clanker, a mechanical monstrosity, and maker of 90s nightmares. On paper, his dialogue paints him as friendly enough. Once the initial panic fades, it becomes clear that he’s harmless, but that first encounter is pure nightmare fuel. Series creator Gregg Mayles later explained on Twitter that Clanker was originally meant to be visible earlier through a straight pipe, designed to spark curiosity rather than fear, but hardware limitations forced the team to redesign the pipe with a bend. Hey Gregg, the bend was a bad idea, don’t do it again.

Unagi The Eel

“Super Mario 64” (1996)

I feel like I’ve talked about this eel a LOT. Whenever “horror where it shouldn’t be” is a topic of discussion, this is the first thing that pops into my mind. Jolly Roger Bay in “Super Mario 64” lulls you into a false sense of security. It’s serene, beautiful, soaked in calm blue water, and backed by one of the most peaceful tracks in the entire game. Nothing about it feels threatening. Then you dive into the cavern at the edge of the bay, drift down toward a sunken ship, and notice something peering out through a shattered window. That’s Unagi the eel, and it is absolutely not here to be cute. Beyond the obvious issue of it depleting Mario’s health on contact, what makes Unagi so upsetting is how completely alien it feels to the Mario universe. There’s no cartoon charm, no goofy expression, no soft edges, and the game has the audacity to ask you to deliberately antagonize it for the next star, forcing it to burst from its hiding spot and lunge right for you. P**s off, Jesus.

Poo’s Training

“EarthBound” (1994)

When “EarthBound” finally resurfaced for Western audiences via the Virtual Console, many weren’t prepared for just how far the game was willing to push discomfort. This ain’t your Momma’s JRPG. The most unsettling example arrives during The Trials of Prince Poo. Instead of a conventional trial, the game asks him to sit perfectly still while a spiritual entity calmly dismantles him piece by piece. First his legs are removed, then his senses vanish one by one, until even his mind is stripped away. The thing that made this moment so uncomfortable was how the developers used the design to really drive home what was happening. The audio cuts out when your ears are taken, text grows colder as your body disappears, and the imagery disappears with your vision. What makes the scene especially disturbing isn’t just what happens, but your role in it.

The SA-X

“Metroid Fusion” (2002)

Every mission Samus Aran undertakes seems to come packaged with a fresh nightmare, but “Metroid Fusion” raises the stakes by introducing one of the series’ most unsettling ideas yet: the X-Parasites. These organisms don’t just kill, they replicate, absorbing the DNA of any living creature and perfectly mimicking it. Can you take a wild guess what happens next? Enter the SA-X, a ruthless duplicate of Samus at full power, wandering the station like an apex predator. This isn’t a rival you can outshoot or outplay for most of the game. When it appears, the rules change completely, the music tightens, your options vanish, and survival means escape. Remember when everyone lost their minds at games like “Outlast” and “Amnesia”, where fighting wasn’t an option? Metroid fans didn’t even blink.

Mask Transformations

“The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask” (2000)

“Majora’s Mask” could honestly fill an entire Top Ten Creepy Moments list by itself, and it may just do that, give me a few more entries. There are two scenes that filled me with terror as a child of the 90s, one was when Jim Carrey first puts the mask on in The Mask, and the other is EXACTLY THE SAME THING. The transformation sequence every time Link equips a mask isn’t just scary, it’s disturbing. His eyes strain and bulge, his skin fractures and twists, fangs force their way out, and the whole process is underscored by raw, agonized screaming. It’s hard to forget. A Nintendo staff member later explained that Link’s screams are meant to reflect the “boundless sorrow surrounding each mask,” but to children in the year 2000, it just looked like Link was in more agony than a human being can ever experience.

Nighttime Expeditions

“Pikmin 4” (2023)

Never leave after sundown, that’s rule 101 for the Pikmin series. That’s exactly why the idea of “Pikmin 4” introducing a mode built entirely around nighttime exploration feels immediately wrong to long-time players. The game isn’t just breaking its own rules, it’s breaking your nerves. These nocturnal missions arm you with Glow Pikmin, a strange species that exists only after sundown, and task you with rapidly spawning them to defend a base from relentless waves of enemies. The careful, almost surgical gameplay “Pikmin” is known for collapses into frantic chaos as red-eyed creatures swarm in from every direction. Instead of calmly issuing orders, you’re sprinting across the map in a panic, barely holding the line. It begins to feel eerily close to a zombie horde mode, and it's exactly what we didn’t expect in a game like Pikmin.

Zero Two

“Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards” (2000)

The “Kirby” series has always worn a cheerful mask. You give me a lil pink guy fighting an antagonist as silly looking as King Dedede, and you’re gonna make me smile from start to finish. But things changed when the series moved to the N64. For most of the adventure, the game is gentle, forgiving, and cute, conditioning players to expect nothing worse than a good silly goose time. Then the final stage hits, and the tone snaps in half. You’re dragged into an alien, otherworldly space that feels completely disconnected from everything you’ve seen before, and your pants feel primed for a good wetting. The last boss isn’t quirky or whimsical, it’s the physical embodiment of nightmares: a massive, bleeding eyeball with wings, floating in the void, firing lasers with zero sense of irony. There’s no breather, no way to pause and collect yourself, no option to flee, you are just locked in place and forced to confront this thing head-on. I’m just gonna play something else, I don’t need to finish this game.

Aquas

“Star Fox 64” (1997)

The only thing scarier than the cold, empty, vastness of space, is the cold, empty, vastness of the ocean. Aquas in “Star Fox 64” is terrifying, in the shiver down your spine kinda way. It violently rips the player out of the game’s usual setting, and sends you to the depths of water, where everything looks different. Instead of open skies and fast-paced dogfights, movement is sluggish, visibility is poor, and enemies ambush you from blind spots. The haunting music and echoing sound design amplify the tension, while the ocean setting removes any sense of escape. You’re not soaring anymore, you’re surviving. Then, when you reach the end of the stage, you face off with Bacoon, the monstrous clam-like creature, believed to have been the reason as to why Aquas was now a 97% ocean world. He. Is. Yucky.

Blackout

“Luigi's Mansion” (2001)

It took Nintendo years to finally let Luigi step out from his brother’s shadow, and this GameCube launch title immediately drops him into a nightmare scenario perfectly tailored to his anxious personality: a haunted mansion. Whoever came up with that idea had to be a real risktaker. By today’s standard it feels like second nature. Back then a pitch like “Okay, Luigi in a haunted house with a vacuum” would have been worth a solid firing. Late in “Luigi’s Mansion,” once much of the house has been cleared and you reach the rooftop, the game pulls the rug out from under you. A lightning strike knocks out the power, plunging the mansion into darkness and forcing Luigi back inside to find the breaker room. What follows is a nerve-wracking trek through pitch-black hallways where visibility is limited, tension is high, and ghosts ambush Luigi at every turn. It goes from cute horror, to regular old horror.

MissingNo Glitches

“Pokémon Red & Blue“ (1996)

MissingNo is one of those things that feels like it should have never been seen by human eyes. The original “Pokémon Red” and “Pokémon Blue” were famously unstable under the hood, packed with programming quirks that occasionally produced results far stranger than intended. But although it's become as infamous as Pikachu himself, it's easy to forget just how spooky MissingNo is to unsuspecting players. On the surface, its effects almost seemed harmless, item duplication, the kind of thing that tempted players to push their luck. And push it they did. Beyond that point, the game began to unravel. Duplicate versions of the player would wander the map, Pokémon sprites would twist into grotesque, Cronenberg-style horrors, and entire areas would collapse into Glitch City, a place built entirely from broken data where walls trapped NPCs and numbers replaced the ground beneath your feet. That is, of course, assuming the game didn’t simply freeze or crash outright. And it actually happened! My best friend ruined his cartridge of Pokémon Blue by pushing MissingNo as far as he could.

Ghost Girl

“Pokémon X and Y” (2013)

Creepy Pokédex entries and the unsettling hum of Lavender Town are enough to unsettle most players, yet “Pokémon X” and “Pokémon Y” delivered one of the most genuinely chilling moments the series has ever pulled off, and I think you know what it is. While exploring Lumiose City, you can chat with employees in an otherwise ordinary office building, where someone casually mentions that no one ever goes to the second floor. Naturally, curiosity takes over. Ride the elevator up, and the game suddenly shifts tone. The screen flickers, and without warning, a pale woman is standing directly behind your character. She silently floats past you and whispers, “No, you’re not the one,” and then disappears completely. No explanation, no follow-up, no way to trigger the event again. What the hell in the Pokemon universe was that!?

Gyroid Face

“Animal Crossing” (2002)

The “Animal Crossing” series is practically engineered to be comforting, it’s most people’s end of the day decompress, not everybody’s start of the day cup of coffee. The real terror comes from a simple mistake: visiting a friend’s village and forgetting to save. It seems harmless at first. You reload the game, and something is immediately off. Your character’s face is wrong, horribly wrong, “Hereditary” wrong. Everyone’s is. Welcome to Gyroid Face. Your avatar now wears the hollow-eyed, open-mouthed expression complete with an empty, lifeless stare that looks like it’s peering straight through reality. This isn’t a quick slap on the wrist, either. The punishment lingers, forcing you to wander this cheerful world as something that looks like it came straight out of your sleep paralysis nightmares.

Bottom of The Well

“Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” (1998)

Nothing good ever waits at the bottom of a well, is it lil Timmy? Is it that bloated corpse from “The Walking Dead”, is it a claustrophobic mini-dungeon? IT IS!? Lucky guess. In “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time”, draining the well in Kakariko Village and deliberately throwing yourself into the darkness below takes you to a location that’s unsettling more for its atmosphere than its layout, lulling you into a false sense of security just long enough to lower your guard. Then you meet Dead Hand. This grotesque, swollen creature drags itself across the floor, its disembodied hands bursting from the ground to seize you while it slowly closes the distance. The arena is cramped, escape routes are limited, and panic sets in fast. There’s no clever trick, no safe corner, it’s just a spooky moment in a game that hasn’t exactly prepared you for this body horror nonsense you’re currently experiencing.

Sanity Effects

“Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem” (2002)

It feels like cheating, but Nintendo so rarely publishes survival horror that I have to bring up one of their lesser known GameCube gems, and talk about its crazy mechanics. Plenty of games try to scare you with hideous creatures, but “Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem” takes a far more insidious approach. Instead of relying solely on monsters, it attacks the player directly through its infamous Sanity Effect system, deliberately shattering the fourth wall. Throughout the game, your Sanity Meter constantly fluctuates, and as it drops, reality begins to unravel. At higher levels, the effects are strange but almost playful, a character’s head might fall off and start quoting Shakespeare. As sanity gets lower, the tricks turn cruel. The game convincingly fakes system-level failures, making it appear as if your television has shut off, your controller has disconnected, or your save file has been deleted. The horror doesn’t come from what’s on screen, but what's on your system, and no game since has gotten this level of real world effect into its experience.

E.M.M.I. Encounters

“Metroid Dread” (2002)

As we’ve seen, The “Metroid” franchise has always thrived on tension and isolation, but E.M.M.I units are a different beast altogether. These mechanical predators don’t just threaten Samus, like the previously mentioned SA-X, they dominate entire zones, relentlessly hunting her the moment she enters their territory. If one catches you, it’s instant death, no second chances. Once an E.M.M.I locks onto your position, the game transforms into survival horror, and somehow matches the energy of mammoths like “Alien: Isolation”. In fact, the experience feels eerily similar: panic sets in immediately, the music tightens, and your only option is to sprint, slide, and scramble for an exit before the machine closes the distance. Just thank your stars there aren’t any killer Androids waiting to block your path - Oh wait, maybe this is exactly like “Alien: Isolation”. The stress is so intense that finally escaping often leaves you physically tense. Is this why I always have jaw pain at the ripe age of 30?? I thought it was all the food!

Giygas

“Earthbound” (1994)

You’d be silly to think you wouldn’t see Giygas on this list. Giygas is so infamous for being terrifying in a game you wouldn’t expect this level of terror in, that it almost always gets brought up in discussions about surprising horror. It’s a horror tale as old as time, don’t reveal too much about your monster, ambiguity is your friend, and if you want to scare the pants off a young Mat, don’t let him know exactly what he’s fighting. Giygas isn’t presented as a clearly defined enemy, and even when you finally reach the last battle, it’s almost impossible to understand what you’re actually fighting. This alien force is less a creature and more a manifestation, an idea. I know that sounds wanky, but YOU try and describe it better and I bet words will fall short for you too. Giygas warps reality and saturates the world with a feeling of despair. The warped visuals of one of the SNES’s creepiest finales is painted with oppressive sound design, and increasingly abstract forms that make it impossible to understand what you’re up against. Each phase feels wrong, and it left an impact on gamers still talked about today. At least by me!

End of The World

“Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask” (2000)

It was tough to choose between this and Giygas for the number one spot, but I ultimately chose this because the moon from “Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask” made a 6 year old me cry. While the journey as a whole is packed with disturbing characters and bleak side stories, nothing compares to what happens when you fail outright. Let the final hours tick away without playing the Song of Time, and the game forces you to watch the inevitable: the moon slams into Clock Town, wiping everything out in a cold, merciless apocalypse. It’s not just shocking, it’s final. That single moment drives home the stakes more brutally than any enemy encounter, serving as a result of your inaction, proving that this inaction ACTUALLY has consequences. I could barely look at the moon, but seeing it win was too much for my little soul.