Demonic Spiders/Video Games/Survival Horror

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Demonic Spiders do their best to ensure that these games involve a little less survival and a whole lot more horror.

  • The Bats from Parasite Eve 2. One hit-point, any attack aimed at them kills them... But let them touch you and you are paralyzed for 5 to 8 seconds while it slowly seeps your health point per point... And they come in swarms of ten or more. Preferably at arm's reach. The precognition REALLY applies to this one.
    • Oddly enough, they're instantly killed with a flashlight attachment.
    • Also, the Knight/Bishop GOLEM. These cyborgs are not only powerful, but can turn invisible. In fact, they automatically land a hit on you when you first "detect" them, grabbing you from behind without warning and either poisoning you or paralyzing you unless you can kick them away in time. In addition, they use a decoy attack. Fall for it and it guarantees a hit. So not only are you fighting an invisible enemy that swipes at you with the power of a kodiak bear, but you start the fight with a quarter of your health gone and a serious status ailment. What is worse is, while they only show up in the regular game mode towards the end of it, these bastards show up way earlier in the Nightmare and Bounty modes. And since enemies hit for more damage in these modes, if they land two hits on you it's Game Over.
  • Dead Space has a number of enemies that can prove frustrating, but the Guardian and the Crawler stand out. The former spits out "pods" that explode with considerable force (though, thankfully, not as much as an Exploder) if Isaac gets too close and which otherwise sprout a quill-throwing tentacle and fire at a much faster rate than Lurkers do—and the only way to kill the pod is to sever the tentacle. The Guardian spits out pods at a fairly steady rate, and the only way to kill it is to sever the five tentacles that it attaches to the wall—and which it can pull inside of itself and reattach if it feels like it. Oh, and did I mention that getting too close results in an Instant Death cutscene? Crawlers are small, tend to come in groups, move quickly and can be hard to hit, especially due to their leaping around. Dividers are actually easier to handle then Crawlers; hit the Divider with Stasis, then calmly blast each Crawler component. The Twitcher (due to its speed, random movement and ability to "jink") and the various Advanced Necromorphs, particularly the Scorpion and Lurker, get honorable mentions.
    • It should also be noted that the whole while, the armless upper torso that is the core of the Guardian is letting out screams of apparent agony the whole while. Not only is it really disturbing, but can prove to be a major distraction while fighting the pods and the Guardian itself.
    • Swarmers are like ultra-tiny crawlers but ten times as dangerous: They come in gargantuan groups, they stop you dead in your track until you shake them off (and each individual one takes a second or so to shake off, while a dozen more has jumped on you in the meanwhile), and can with their cumulative damage kill Isaac in a shorter period of time than any other enemy in the entire game except for the Guardians. And did we mention that only two weapons are anywhere near useful against them, and one of them is useless for everything else, and the other one you get fairly late in the game?
    • Don't forget The Pack in Dead Space 2, which can be incredibly irritating on harder difficulties, and Stalkers, which are incredibly smart, as well as fast. Stalkers are capable of playing hide-and-seek, something no other Necomorph can do, and their presence is enough to make anyone's paranoia level go through the roof.
    • The Leapers get an upgrade in the sequel, now they're fast as hell and kill you dead before you can even finish your girly scream after the thing drops on you from the other side of the map.
  • Festers in The Suffering. They're bloated, bulletproof slave corpses who can tear open their stomachs to unleash a horde of exploding rats and have a devastating close-range attack.
  • In a game already the stuff of nightmares with its surprise random encounters which can mystically appear in a room you've been through several times already and often appearing with little or no warning directly in front of you (screaming ensues, if the player is particularly into the game), Fatal Frame has its own demonic spider to fear and fear greatly. The Blind Ghosts, especially in one encounter in a cramped corridor, can turn fear and terror into fear and loathing. They can pass through walls (wherein they become difficult to detect and invincible), move much faster than your character, lunge at you when provoked or if you move (being blind of course means they have superhuman hearing), may not flinch when attacked (this counts as provoking them, naturally), can teleport behind you at any time (including when they're invisible because they're eight feet inside a solid wall, leading to more "AGHHH!" moments when you suddenly catch sight of them less than a foot from your face), and have a nasty tendency to kill you in a single hit. And did I mention they like to counterattack?
  • The Hunters in the Resident Evil series. They're fast, jump at you from across the room, sometimes team up on you, and have their notorious Deadly Lunge attack that instakills by decapitation. Much deadlier than the literal spiders of the series. And they can poison you in parts of Code Veronica.
    • Other possibly worse examples: the Chimeras in the laboratory power room of Resident Evil 1 remake (which can also instantly decapitate you), the lickers (particularly the advanced lickers) in Resident Evil 2 (e.g. "caution" status, licker jumps on you from off screen, you die, thrown controller), and the facehugger-like Drain Deimos in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (at least they don't give you a Face Full of Alien Wingwong).
    • The infamous poison moths in Code Veronica. Moth lays larva on you, which poisons you, you use blue herb, then go back through the corridor only to get bitten and poisoned again. Whoops, no herbs left, :dies:
      • There is an infinite-use blue herb tray in the corridor, but good luck using it and then getting back out before another moth can land on you.
    • Regenerators and Iron Maidens in Resident Evil 4. Both can regenerate (unless you shoot them in the right place) and grab you from across the room, and the latter can kill you instantly.
    • What about Novistadors? They latch onto you, and must be shaken off, but their attacks do a lot of damage to you while you try to shake them. Oh, and the worst part? They're invisible.
    • Berserk Dr. Salvador in the Mercenaries level. Can leap to the top of five-story battlements, barely stumbles from all but the most physically devastating attacks, constantly in a state of frenzied swinging of a double-bladed supercharged chainsaw and rampaging balls-out in your direction . Also, those attacks that hurt him? Bring a lot.
    • The Reapers in Resident Evil 5. They move frighteningly fast and just love to use their unavoidable instant kill attack as soon as they get within range (which is often.) And the best part? They are immune to damage until they randomly decide to reveal their weak spots to you.
      • They can be damaged - what would "shredding one of its limbs" count as? It just takes an eternity to kill them that way.
      • Note that hitting one with an electric grenade not only paralyzes it, but also immediately exposes the weak spots. God bless the level designers for placing a batch of electric rounds right before you meet the 2nd one of these. On the other hand if you don't have a grenade launcher with you...
        • ... You use the stun rod. It will make the thing flinch, rip arms off and force it to reveal its gas sacs. If it manages to retaliate, it'll be a slash for minimal damage. Hell, you can even bash it to death with it alone. You can't let up on the offensive, though, or it'll recover.
    • The Eliminators from Resident Evil Zero. You'd think a zombie monkey would be an awesome enemy, but holy shit would you be wrong: they're extremely small targets, ungodly fast in both attacking and avoiding your shots, deal significant damage in a small amount of time, nearly always attack in groups of three or more, tend to appear in open areas with lots of room to get behind you, and they take a minimum of three shotgun shells each—each!—to kill. Compared to these nasty little fuckers, Hunters are about as troublesome as a mild sneeze.
      • Not if they are alone. And they're severely watered down in The Umbrella Chronicles.
      • Also the Leech Zombies. They're sturdy, able to hit you from far away, explode for even more damage unless you invoke Kill It with Fire, and have an incredibly creepy theme that plays when you face one.
    • What about the Plagas from Resident Evil 4? These damn things spawn at random, always emerge from their host when you kill them no matter whether you deliver a headshot or not, suck up more ammo than the actual Ganados themselves, and the type 2s have the ability to bite your head off if they get too close, which translates into instant death. True, they have a Weaksauce Weakness ( flash grenades kill exposed Plagas instantly), but it's not exactly obvious. And, worse, type 3s (the spider/bat ones that detach and start fluttering around on their own) take two hits by default; one to make them leave their Ganado, and a second to kill them.
    • The Cerberus dogs throughout the series. They are difficult to hit with the clunky aiming controls and lock-on, and usually attack in pairs or more, so while you're attacking one, the others can get the jump on you.
      • Unless you use auto-aim and are smart enough to either trap them in a narrow bottleneck corridor or put yourself back against a wall. Then you can unload on them pretty much with impunity until they die.
    • The Bandersnatches in Resident Evil Code: Veronica. They can take plenty of bullets, their stretchy arms deal great damage, they have a large rape radius and they can use them to grapple across rooms. And they have a fairly creepy Leitmotif. And when you first encounter one, you don't have any powerful weapons, making it somewhat of a Boss in Mook Clothing.
    • The Outbreak series has a couple as well, from the Hunter Rs (all the fun of the normal Hunters), to the Wasps (only Goddamned Bats if you have a handgun, which is no guarantee by any means). The Lionesses from the "Wild Things" scenario are the worst though. They have a tendency to attack anything in melee range when struck, they can chase you down with little trouble and they soak up a lot of damage, wasting bullets for the scenario bosses. And the best part? An instant-kill pounce. You have plenty of warning before that one though.
    • The Crimson Heads in the Resident Evil 1 Remake are also a serious pain if you do not burn the dead zombie bodies (or blow their heads off) before they can come back as Crimson Heads, they can run as fast as your character can, do a decent amount of damage, and even worse will sometimes not get up from the ground until you walk right over them. And there is not enough oil to burn all of the zombies in the mansion, so sometimes it is simply best to let the zombies live in order to avoid them turning into Crimson Heads.
  • Therazinos from Dino Crisis are not only insanely strong, highly dangerous and -thanks to their traveling in pairs- nearly impossible to bypass, but they're also given their own Press X to Not Die cutscene which makes you think they're a one-off Dual Boss. Nope. They're a regular enemy from that point on! Be warned: save your poison darts or get ready to snap a few controllers dealing with them.
  • The Shibito in Siren are giggling, bloody-eyed Japanese farmer zombies who somehow manage to pop you with a headshot from across the map through a copse of trees if you make even the slightest error in traversing the level. Apparently becoming Shibito imbues one with the accuracy of a Navy Seal sniper. There's some good news, though—you can actually survive one shot to (hopefully) dive back into cover... and you can use sightjacking to tell exactly where they're looking and when, so you can stay the hell out of the way. Also, not all of them have rifles—although some of the ones that don't are nearly as bad.
    • For an example of "nearly as bad," look no further than the Crawlers. Their melee attacks can kill you in two good hits, depending on the character—the same as a gunshot, for reference—and they're fast and particularly alert and difficult to hide from. Oh, and some of them can walk on walls. The plus side is that since they move on all fours, they can't open doors... and they're usually found in the presence of a shibito brain, which will knock them all out at once if it's taken out. The bad news there is that shibito brains are Goddamned Bats, due to their tendency to be able to tell you're there without seeing or hearing you, then run away quickly.
    • Let us not get started on the flying Shibito, who are essentially snipers with wings.
  • Silent Hill is generally pretty lenient as far as regular enemies go, but is not without its Demonic Spiders:
    • Schisms, Needlers and Swarms from Homecoming, Victims and Wallsnatchers from The Room, and on occasion, Straitjackets from 0rigins. Honorable mention goes to Creeper and Hanged Scratcher from the original.
    • The nurses, particularly in the third game, the Abstract Daddy monsters in the dark and narrow hotel corridors, and the Slurpers, which can knock you down again immediately after you get back up, repeat until death.
    • The Smogs from the same game. Not only do they have a ton of health, their attacks can only be dodged by rolling away, as they can stun you with a smoke cloud that is unavoidable (and does damage). Also, if you can't break out of it, they knock you down, dealing even more damage. While it's easy to run past them, they are also the only enemies to have a ranged attack, and very damaging one at that.
  • Crawlers are this to Cold Fear. It takes a full clip of shotgun shells to kill one, and they are fantastically speedy and stealthy wall masters. They have a nasty habit of jumping on to the ceiling and hiding in a ventilation shaft after you have damaged them, then reemerging from a different ventilation shaft elsewhere in the same room so they can sneak up on you.
    • Also, their Weaksauce Weakness was supposed to be a fear of bright light, but that really just makes them wander off so they can attack you from behind later.
  • After its transition to 3D, The zombie MMO Dead Frontier added several "Boss" zombies throughout the maps. Pretty much the only ones of them that aren't an example are the Bones (which are only moderately more powerful than normal zombies) and the Brutes (which are ungodly slow and whose main gimmick, exploding upon death, is easily avoidable with ranged weapondry). The rest? Oy...
    • The Reapers and Tendrils will oneshot low level players easily with their insane melee attacks, and the Tendrils in particular have a massive attack range.
    • Sirens don't even have any actual attacks, and yet they are the bane of many players because as soon as they detect you, they emit a scream that alerts pretty much every single zombie in the area to your location, with predictable results.
    • The Spiders are ungodly fast and nearly completely immune to knockback.
    • One update added Burning Zombies to the mix. They are as (if not more) fast than the Spiders, always spawn with maximum aggro (which means they home in on you at top speed) and, contrary to what you may expect from a Man On Fire, they have a massive amount of health. On the plus side, they tend to drop mid to high tier loot when they finally go down.
  • The really nasty animatronics from Five Nights at Freddy's can be viewed as either this trope or That One Boss depending on the player. No matter your preferred classification, they're still going to be a massive pain to deal with.
    • Out of the four or five, if you count Golden Freddy animatronics from the original game, Foxy quickly establishes himself to be a real thorn in your side. Unlike the far more manageable Bonnie and Chica, he doesn't slowly meander around the Pizzeria while heading to your office. He rushes down the halls to kill you the second he leaves Pirate Cove. You have barely any time to shut the door on him, and even if you stop him from getting in, he'll bang on the door a few times before leaving, which will drain you of your very limited power. The only way to reign him in is to regularly monitor the cameras, but doing so will open you up to attacks from the other animatronics.
      • Also from the first game, Freddy Fazbear himself is just as big of a threat as Foxy. Not so much on the first few nights where he isn't even active and only comes after you if you let your power go out, but from Night 4 and beyond when he actually comes out to play, he doesn't screw around. His movement pattern is hard to predict, and he's even harder to track on the cameras. And if you can easily see him, he's about to slip into your office and it may already be too late to stop him from getting in.
    • Five Nights at Freddy's 2 introduces the Puppet, and she quickly becomes the most oppressive threat you'll be dealing with. To pacify her, you have to make sure her music box is constantly playing. If the music stops, she'll come out of her box to kill you and there is nothing you can do to put her back in. You can't wind up the music box unless you switch the cameras over to the Prize Corner, which keeps you from tracking the other animatronics and warding them off. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have TEN of them gunning for your ass at once, making later nights are a chaotic nightmare where they're near-constantly pouring into your office. All you can do is hope and pray that you can carve out enough free time to keep her music box wound up, and if you switch cameras to a silent prize corner or suddenly hear a music box rendition of Pop Goes The Weasel? Brace for impact.
      • Mangle isn't that bad in most versions of the game, but she's a lot worse in the mobile ports. In the PC and console versions, she makes an incredibly creepy garbled set of radio noises if she's close, which will prompt you to shoo her off. In the IOS version? The audio cues didn't carry over, and if she gets on the ceiling of your office, she WILL kill you, and there's nothing you can do about it which can lead to some cheap, unfair deaths.
      • Balloon Boy may not actually kill you himself, but that doesn't make him any worse to deal with. If you don't put on the Freddy mask fast enough, he'll get into your office and disable your flashlight while laughing at you like the little shit he is. Once he gets into your office there's no way to make him leave, meaning that it's only a matter of time before Foxy comes leaping out of the darkness to rip your face off. And unlike the other animatronics, he isn't fooled by your Freddy head: you need the flashlight to scare him off.
    • The Phantom Animatronics in the third game can't kill you, but they'll help Springtrap finish you off. The Phantom Puppet's the worst of the bunch, because if you trigger her attack? She gets in your face and prevents you from doing anything for nearly half a minute. You can't defend yourself from Springtrap, you can't fix the ventilation and stop yourself from passing out... nothing. Getting attacked by her on later nights, where Springtrap is at his most aggressive is pretty much a death sentence.
    • Five Nights at Freddy's 4 gives us Nightmare Mangle, from the game's Halloween mode. Replacing Nightmare Foxy, Nightmare Mangle is a lot more annoying than his regular counterpart. For one, he doesn't appear in the hallway like Nightmare Foxy does, so it's a lot harder to keep him out of your bedroom. And once he gets in, he'll hide in the closet and force you to maintain a delicate balancing act of keeping him in there, keeping Jack'o Chica and Jack'o Bonnie out of your room, and keeping the Freddles from forming Nightmare Freddy for the rest of the night. And it's so much harder to protect yourself from the Jack'o animatronics while he's in your closet, because the loud static he blares drowns out the audio cues that are key to your survival.
    • Ultimate Custom Night's 50/20 mode has you deal with all 50 selectable animatronics at once, operating with their AI maxed out. It's an overwhelming challenge right from the get-go, and the following animatronics are the most notorious run-enders you'll be having to contend with.
      • Nightmare Mangle, Nightmare Bonnie, and Circus Baby form an obnoxious, oppressive trio of animatronics that can only be warded off by buying their plushies from the Prize Corner once they show up. You have to spend a lot of Fazcoins to afford them, and if you can't scrounge up enough of them in time, there's nothing you can do to stop them from killing you. Interestingly, you can turn them into Zero Effort Bosses by keeping your camera trained on them, which prevents them from ever attacking you... but by doing so, you open yourself up to having to deal with a quartet of animatronics even more threatening than them!
      • And that quartet is the aggravating ensemble of Funtime Foxy, Rockstar Bonnie, Foxy, and Toy Freddy. On their own, none of them are particularly bad. But when you're using the Plushie Trio's camera trick (a necessity in 50/20 mode), they become complete and utter nightmares because of the way they turn the game into a Luck-Based Mission. Their mechanics revolve around using the monitor to keep them in check, which will get you killed if you turn your attention away from the Plushie Trio once they're ready to attack. If you hope to beat 50/20 mode, you have to hope that A: Bonnie's active in Pirate's Cove instead of Foxy, B: Funtime Foxy's showtime is scheduled at a reasonable hour, C: Toy Freddy can play his video game without needing your help, and D: Rockstar Bonnie needs you to help find his guitar before the Plushie Trio can become a problem. As you might imagine, it's very rare for the stars to align in your favor, and while you can use a Death Coin to eliminate one of these problematic animatronics, you still have the others to worry about.
      • To avoid getting attacked by Nightmarionne, you have to keep your cursor away from his face whenever it appears. Unfortunately for you, it pops up very suddenly and without any warning, and it can cover up areas you need to click on to keep other animatronics at bay. The Death Coin doesn't work on him, so all you can really do is pray for the RNG to show you mercy.
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