My first experience with megalophobia was as a child, playing Spore. The game starts you in an underwater bacterial section where you grow and evolve. There are tons of creatures larger than you, and some are so ginormous that beneath you, you can see distant reflections deeper in the water that can sometimes fill your entire screen with their size. Later, on land, there are still "Epics"; ginormous versions of existing creatures that roar loudly and attack anything in sight. My father told me that there was a section in Spore where if you swam too far, you would get a cutscene of a colossal creature leaping out of the water and eating you. He said that I ran upstairs screaming and crying because that scared me so bad. I won't ever forget Spore for being my first exposure to this concept.
I played Subnautica in VR. Now THAT is true horror. Once you see everything in scale, the true mass of those seacreatures, and the depth of the ocean, become so much more horrific.
In Little Nightmares your're surrounded by an environment bigger than you, creatures who overshadow your bare existence to the point you're actually powerless in comparison
Fun fact: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanocaniosis is only the 4th longest word, the longest one is a name of some element (alternative name) that has 131k+ letters in it. Just simply pronouncing it would take hours
I feel like the vast emptiness of the world in SoC along with the massive scale of the architecture is more psychologically unsettling than the Colossus themselves.
I'm confused about the subnautica part. Isn't that exactly why people are scared? Being tiny in an ocean where you can't see the big monsters loom nearby is all part of the fear. Every time i saw someone talk about the game, they mention the big sea creatures. Edit: I have like 90 replies of everyone telling me the same thing over and over again...
Thats part of it, but I think peoples biggest fear when it comes to the ocean is A) the fact there is no help whatsoever and we are not primarily built to exist underwater, and B) that we don't know what's down in the depths, and without very specific technology we can never know.
I have the opposite, megalophilia I guess, I love the idea of obscenely huge stuff. AC6 recently served that in spades. It didn't have as many huge mechs like AC4A but the structures were huge, from the levels themselves (like the "Honest" Brute mission) to stuff like the Vascular Plant.
I think something directly related to megalophobia is cosmic horror. It's not just the physical size of something, it's your realization of personal insignificance and you really touch on this at the end. You briefly mentioned Outer Wilds; the cosmic insignificance you feel during it (even moreso in the dlc) really makes it personally fit in query these games
I don't have Megalophobia, so I guess that's why for me, super large structures or giant creatures are target of fascination instead of target of fear. This is also why I'm more in awe when scientists found one of those giant-ass squid inside the ocean's deepest part. Same with space, I love space and It's always amazing to read what large natural structure scientists managed to find out there in the universe, whether it's supermassive planets, star formations, or blackholes.
Same here! One thing I've really delved into is the Minecraft modding scene letting you really get a better look at the world through LoD mods, like the one based on Cubic Chunks, or Distant Horizons 1&2. It's so awesome seeing just... the *sheer scale* of things. I love it. It's just so much more to *explore*, to *see* from here to there, to *imagine.* It'd be even better if it works in VR. :D
"Something impossibly huge and ominous lurches across the horizon. Pass a Luck (-1) check or its gaze, with eyes the size of planets, falls upon you, and you lose 2 Sanity."
@@memerreal-tk3mb The Arkham Horror board game! The first time I read that event when I was young, I got chills. This video brought it to mind, for obvious reasons.
Nah sounds unrealistic. Megalophobia + scopophobia, that shit happens to me and my heart explodes like a scared fucking rabbit 😂 Seriously tho 'something so big it's eyes are the size of Astral bodies is looking right at you' is probably my worst fear out of all my fears
I don't have magalophobia BUT In Warframe at the end of the New War Quest there's a scene that gave me chills For a while before the Quest the game teases you with this "Man in the Wall" that's supposed to be some eldritch entity like a ghost whispering to you in the walls, but then by the end of the New War you get to see it immediately after the climax of the last fight, out of nowhere and literal Man in the Wall, like a skyscraper sized virtruvian man in a slab of concrete, flying at your face covering your whole screen and chanting a eldritch language Seeing that slab of a man fly towards me actually gave me virtigo for a second
fax, but i’d like to point out how the background scenery for things like the albericht laboratories, the hub for the zariman, and even lua gives me chills some times
Man, I cannot put into words how freaked out I was after exploring Albrecht's laboratory, heading to the chasm where the fight took place and the phone constantly rings...only to turn around, look up AND SEE THE MAN IN THE WALL THERE, FULL SCALE
One small but important example for me was the erdtree elden ring. No matter where youre at in the game, no matter what region. Its standing. From limgrave, so far away from it, from the other side of the map even, its there, one of the first ever things you notice. It cant be that big, you think at first. But then you keep playing. You travel, its there. You explore, its there. You fight. Its there. And when you enter the capital. You see it up close for the first time ever, compared to a city as grand as Leyndel, compared to a dragon as Massive as Granseax. Its all dwarfed by the erdtree. And you realize why it stood so prevalent throughout your playthrough, somethint so massive commands that attention
I was high as shit when I first saw a video that talked directly about the Erdtree and actually showed how big it was, and it Blew My Mind. I haven’t had the pleasure of playing it (but I’m getting it for myself for christmas, so wish me luck…), but I was watching a video that was primarily discussing the Erdtree’s lore. At that point I knew about it but I thought, honestly, that it was a much smaller tree and that I was misinterpreting it. Nope, it’s like the damn Chrysler building!!!!!!!
13:46 Elite mentioned! Some stats: The furthest station from a system's primary star is Hutton Orbital, which is .22 ly away. When you jump into a star system, you arrive next to the primary star. It takes about an hour and a half to get to Hutton Orbital in a ship that can go over 400 times the speed of light. Recent updates that allow you to "turbo charge" your hyperdrive have knocked that down to a still relatively long 30 minutes. And that's just one corner of the _1:1 scale Milky Way Galaxy_. Some folks do nothing but spend all their time away from civilization for months, sometimes years, traversing this massive galaxy.
There's an ambitious Subnautica mod in the works called "The Return of the Ancients" which's reviving the Gargantuan Leviathan. The only adult Gargantuan is found in the "dead zone", preying on the Ghost Leviathans that spawn there, lol. It looks like it can swallow the Cyclops submarine (the game's largest driveable vehicle) whole. The juveniles aren't Leviathan-big but still scary and dangerous. If you find and hatch an egg, you'd have a pet baby Gargantuan. It can follow you around and takes care of tough predators for you incl. even (adult) Reapers. And it play-bites you, dealing damage. It's kinda like having a pet bear.
I heard about that mod while making this video, but I actually think just alluding to giant monsters in the form of a fossil brings way more questions then just having it in front of you. (especially since it's not natively apart of the game)
@@Cresendexwhen playing games fossils can end up feeling like a bore if the game doesnt already have a living ecosystem that could have supported those fossils. Having a giant creatures fossil doesnt make much sense when everything you see is small. And with me having played games for so long i easily see through the fossils and i just see a asset placed there to impress me. But if you have a equivalent in size creature that actually moves then its easier to imagine those fossils actually being living beings
@@Niiwastaken On the other hand, the human mind can conjure things more terrifying than reality _especially_ when an anxiety disorder like a phobia is involved. Speaking from experience. My own ADs make certain things scarier than they really are. Heck, dinosaurs may not be as scary as we made them out to be. Paleo artists Conway and Koseman once tried drawing modern animals like we usually draw dinosaurs (relying mostly on bones, giving them little to no soft tissue like fat, etc.), and the results were horrifying, lol. You could find em online.
@Cresendex Trust me, seeing the full sized creature in the ecological deadzone is absolutely horrifying. It ticks that megalophobia box instantly. It dwarfs everything else in the game by a massive margin, and its impressive how the game its able to handle such massive models
recently armored core 6 made me realize megalophobia, since the game is built in the same engine as Elden Ring, and everything in that game is made in a realistic-ish scale, its not slow to put 1+1 and realize what im talking about. its a mech game. you start the game crawling through cramped industrial tunnels and passageways, you see railways and some other paths, spaces for you to climb and fly. yet everything seems normal... in a way, made for you to fit in scale. just the right size? but as you progress on the first level, it starts to open up a bit more, the train tracks now have waggons with possibly raw materials for the local industrial plant you seem to be inside, but you cant help but realize, how small that wagon is? you can probably lift it yourself in your mech suit. then you see hanging chains, massive dooways, that world tho, is wrong, its not a world made for humans, its a world where you in your machine, are in your natural habitat, it is massive, YOU in the machine, can fly, can easily jump across bridges and paths, find your way in a incoherent amount of connections junctions and elevations, platforms, entrances, gigantic doors. its a world made for mechs. a small climb for you, would be an impossible wall for a normal human, a small distance you acn travel boosting, would be a agonizingly long walk for a human, a normal door for you, would be the most frightening entrance door to anywhere a person would ever see, that, until the game opens up proper. and it hits you. the impossible scale of everything, the outside of that "industrial plant" you seemed to be inside, is all across the surface of the planet, elevated far above ground by pillars, no matter where you look, the sky is made of metal, but light shines through, it almost looks like a forest of giant metallic trees. and in the horizon, between the sandy desert floor, and the metal sky, the sun shines through the gap between these two, the strangest sunset you'll ever see. from there on you dont have no longer much time to soak in on these astonishingly huge architecture departures, how everything seem to have been made to fit super giant machinery, not human, not made for me, and for you, that is a world made for metal giants and for war. brute, sterile and metallic. no billboards, no visible windows, no noticeable homey aspects. future never looked so bleak. its almost as if nobody has the time for any of that, or that they dont need that, even in the more urban'ish parts of the game, like when we invade a local resistance's fortifications their cities are just tall buildings, no lights, no greenery, no billboards, everything is pale grey, or the Xylem, a colony space ship, is not far behind, with the added difference it seem to have the usual street signs we have, that give us directions in traffic. which seems funnily enough, outdated, but relatable? homes, buildings, cars, trucks... planes helicopters. yet so small you could confuse all of that for a miniature set of toys in a massive toy room.... a massive... toy room? a massive toy room for mechs. just to end my case, the funniest part is when you find out, Rubicon-3 the planet where this game takes place, is a Dwarf Planet. its many times smaller than our earth... 20% the size of earth if im not mistaken. so i wonder how far more insane, massive and impossibly other corporation owned planets might have been altered? what kind of insane structures they might have, other insanely huge machinery, Rubicon-3 has a ring, but not a natural ring, it has rings, made out of man-made structures, probably a Dison-Sphere. and mind you, Armored Core 6, is an Action Mecha Game. so fast you dont have time to think about any of this, but its sheer speed, chaos and action, are a result of you, simply becoming this monstrous machine, a machine that could probably kick the shit out of any cosmic deity, in any cosmic horror novel or book, before it could even think about what is happening to it. if humanity' unstoppable power of growth and being able to create these kind of things on their own, and at absurd quantities, is not at least frightening... i dont know what is.
I don’t think Rubicon-3 is 20% the size of Earth. The planet model as seen in the final boss arena of two of the endings is small enough to make the Vascular Plant stand out more.
Yeah armored core 6 definitely gave me megalophobia feelings, once I realised how big the mechs actually are. Everything is beyond anything humanity can currently build. It's ridiculously huge. And despite being from the viewpoint of a giant mech, even if you imagined the mech is the size of a human, everything is STILL really huge anyway. But yeah it just gets so much bigger when you realise how big a human is by comparison. Like, early on there's just a simple warehouse room that in reality is as tall and wide as a skyscraper, and you're just flying about it shooting shit. I wish I wasn't so shit at the game cos I wanna see more of it. But I've gotta practice, I guess.
Control is also a great game where the brutalist architecture is so vast and bigx towering over you while still being mosten realistic until you come in to contact with these vast canyons between certain parts of the map that extend infinetely. Gives some propper chills ngl
@@HushtheMag would recommend watching Bricky's review of it if you want to see what the rest of the game is like without playing it. It's alright/good up until the ending which is ASSSSSSSS
When talking about megalophobia, the first thing I remember is the final boss of Intrusion 2. That was my first expirience with that type of fear. The boss is mostly just a big robot, but it *literally shakes the building with your character inside* as one of his attacks. He also crushes the walls of the building with his fingers and fires lasers from them. That's one of the best bosses in the videogame history I remember, btw.
You should definitely check manga “Blame”, the main character wandering for thousands of hours in an apocalyptic self-building structure which is not suited for tiny human
@@NostraDavid2no, I’ve read it recently and they don’t mention the sheer scale of it until later on. Killy is in a room with a similar diameter to Jupiter I believe
I feel like Mass Effect 3's opening does a good job of this feeling as well. Watching as 2km tall machines land on the Earth, dwarfing absolutely everything and laying waste to the entire planet, and the only thing you're armed with is a pistol.
One of my favorite games NaissanceE has giant structures in the 2nd chapter. You're placed in a gigantic city like structure, with no end in sight upwards, or downwards. Almost everything you see in the game is unrecognizable, there's areas that look like a city, some are like airducts. but you can never find a purpose in anything, all the moving parts, windows, and lights, the catwalks, the doors, the archways, it's all alien to you.
played subnautica for the first time this year, amazing and incredible game, one of the best I've ever played and it scared the absolute shit out of me, I remember fearing for my actual life in the lava zones where the size of that beast is even more apparent in the "small" space, fantastic game
Giant things in games scare but intrigue me at the same time, a good example I can think of is the Xenoblade Chronicles series. From giant titan creatures that have cities on their backs, to a massive sky tearing tree that is visible from almost anywhere, massive enemies that you shouldn't be able to fight, or corpses of giant gods that make you feel like bacteria. Xenoblade's scale is terrifying yet beautiful.
I think for the Ultrakill part, the earthmovers in the 7th layer are the better example of Megalophobia in the game. You see dozens around you. You spend a considerable time and effort just to kill ONE. In the lore we learn that these things were designed and succeeded in annihilating earth and making humanity extinct. These boss makes you realize that you may be a threat, you’re certainly a small one
A small but much bigger threat. V1 (the robot you play as), is the last war robot designed for humanity's great war. It is in an incredibly agile, semi-durable, deadly, accurate and self sustaining killing machine in the literal meaning. As told from the logs of the other robots, most robots were designed to counter the previous model before it. This means that V1 was designed to specifically go and bring down titans.
Nah, I see the Earth movers as a massive ego boost. Out of all the robots made during the great war, all the horrors manufactured and metal beasts born from AI's trying to make better AI's for a war that humanity had forgotten the purpose of, you alone are the culmination of all of it. V2 and all the post war bots were made for a peace time force, and so are weaker. You even see it in the game, with the Earth Mover disengaging from shooting another Earth Mover just to aim for you, since it sees you as the bigger threat.
i have to say, it's so rare to see people talk about megalophobia in the expecific way you show in these videos, i definetly don't have "megalophobia" as in fear of the big and vast, i would say i really love the feeling of it actually, it's the feeling of understanding that there is stuff much much bigger than you, and you might not even comprehend it, but you sure can gaze at it's greatness, i love the megalophobia more focused more into the fiction and celestial aspect, as it makes me feel these expecific emotions better, that's a reason of why i love astronomy so much, i used to open Space Engine and explore the universe for HOURS, some of those hours would be me just sitting in a random moon looking into a pretty gas giant in the horizon, it has the feeling of dread there sure, it's kinda burned into the mix, but with it comes the calmness too i think, if it's too big for you to comprehend, in the end it makes a good time for not thinking too much about what isn't important, and just let your mind free into it's wonders for a bit. Great video as allways, loved the first game shown specially, really wanna try it now xD
I think the emotion you are describing, is awe. And yes,, its the same feeling astronauts get when they stare at earth from outside,and realise just how small our little blue planet is. Really makes you feel fear and wonder at the same time. Life truly has endless possibilities
It’s a little less philosophical, but you should definitely play Playdead’s INSIDE if you haven’t. There’s so much environmental storytelling in that game. Signs that things above you are going on, but it’s not super clear what. Rather than space and stuff, it’s more corporate experimentation and every other dystopian thing along those lines. A lot of “lack of control”. It’s a really cool game haha.
if there's such a thing as the epitome of the feeling you're describing, it would definitely be the cosmos. i feel like you can just look up at a starry night sky and be overcome by megalophobia and an awe-inspiring feeling of insignificance, like nothing you do on this earth will ever amount to anything in the vast indifference of space.
I used to have nightmares like this as a kid and often without any monsters just large buildings, I was horrified every time. Only other time I felt like this was Arrival, I really hope this genre gets explored
6:37 this reminded me of the moment in Adventure Time where Jake was given a wish by Prismo to try and bring Finn back from the alternate universe he (accidentally) created with his own wish. Jake was told to be careful with the wish because depending on what he wished for, it could have massive effects, potentially causing or preventing uncountable amounts of events across the entire multiverse. Jake immediately throws up at the thought of it
For quite a while, I had this feeling deep in my chest whenever I saw a grayscale painting of a mountain, a screenshot of a game on top of a mountain towards the vast field, a picture of a giant boss in the distance. I hate the feeling because it makes me uncomfortable, makes me feel small, makes me feel _insignificant_ . Today, I realized that feeling is called megalophobia.
The upcoming War of The Worlds survival game is, in my opinion, the single best use of megalophobia in any medium *ever* . I'm very hyped for it and I'm excited for people to get their hands on it.
5 months later just here to doubt your hype. Animations, set piece videos, and some crude AI. That's all we have to look at for this "upcoming survival game". No one who's been gaming since before covid thinks that this game is doing anything other than a lap on twitch and a flop. It's probably going to be a focus home game watch.
Story time I had a dream where I was sleeping on our house then all of a sudden I had the urge to pee. I went to the bathroom but then, there was a huge quake that had happened. I looked outside and saw a huge mountain, right in front of our house. Then I went back inside but there was just that feeling inside me that really bugged me. That mountain made me feel uncomfortable so I looked out again. I was scared, that thing was crazy big in my dream. I turn my back, I look again and it’s Jupiter now. That made me even more scared. Then I woke up. That’s when I knew I had a phobia of big things. Here’s the 2nd one: I was outside on the terrace just in my inflatable swimming pool. I stare at the blue sky, then I though to myself: “the sky seems endless, what it Jupiter were to be near us right now?” Then that picture in my head just unsettled me. I couldn’t stop looking back and forth at the sky because I was so unnerved. Phobias are crazy things man.
This reminds me of a similar dream i had I was just chilling in a room, then suddenly, like a videogame texture stretching glitch i saw saturn's rings fly past through the room, when i stepped outside i looked up and my vision zoomed out from me into a 3rd person view to show one quarter of earth exposed while saturn and Jupiter engulfed the rest earth was basically the core, with a sliced quarter of saturn next to the earth quarter, and half of jupiter for the rest of the weird planet amalgam
my whole life i've had nightmares where im in a massive city and there's some kinda giant monster attacking it. its only me in the city, which has strangely tall buildings, and for some reason this creature is hunting me specifically. even if i escape the city and travel the world, it always finds me... the creatures are often godzilla like, and this nightmare was caused by me watching godzilla 1998 a lot as a kid. a lot of fans hate that movie, but it's one of my favorites and i consider it the scariest movie ive ever seen
ohhhh no fuck that I have megalophobia (prob most prominently Astromegalophobia) and I've def has some megalophobia-related nightmares. One of them involved me getting a Ridley amiibo (I'm an amiibo collector, and I didn't have one at the time, but have one now) and then in my dream, when I scanned it, a huge Ridley would spawn right on my house. I had another nightmare that there were quite small, but still somehow intimidating diagrams and statues of Jupiter and Saturn inside my house as furniture, and it ended with me being able to look out and see Saturn in the sky. Both of them were pretty scary but god, that sounds terrifying. I shouldn't have watch this video at 9:30 PM, I know I'll have a terrible megalophobia dream tonight.
a game that i think about when i think of megalophobia is playdead's INSIDE. throughout quite a lot of the game there are so many incredible landscapes and buildings. and despite it being a side scrolling game you can still see so much depth in the backgrounds. like literally some of the locations have me wondering "how far does this thing go?!". it's very good god i love megalophobia, especially of the brutalist style good video btw
7:00 i don't think the destruction of the 🗿 creating any negative consequences is the implication here, I'm pretty sure it's the fact that you altered the trajectory of cosmic pendulum when it careened into the head, which i assume is the universes way of keeping time. The results would obviously be catastrophic.
I never knew "Megalophobia" is a thing until recently. I find "Mega" things quite fascinating. One of the very common "Megalophobia" dreams i have is me being underwater deeeeep in the ocean, no lights, and GIANT fishes swimming around, some even bumping into me. I'm Never scared, even within the dream, i find it fascinating. Usually in such dreams i just find myself chilling and floating.
check out the Iterator structures from Rain World! giant supercomputers so large, they go above the cloud layer and have massive cities built on top of them
Some great places to see the scale are: The highest point (as artificer), Some of the rooms around the house of braids (as artificer) The top of the big tree (as gourmand), The top of the wall in the exterior, where stargazer plays (as any other than saint), and the top of the wall right before you get off the tall pole, right before stargazer plays (as any)
add to that iterator facilities as whole, giant foundations of selfrepairing concrete and steel so that infrastructure built on them wouldnt just sink down into terrain that is said to be mud mire everywhere due to constant downpours
I grew up in the suburbs and rarely leave my local area, so when I went to Sydney for the first time recently the sheer scale of the buildings was terrifying and really unlocked this fear for me. I actually walked into a pole because I was so distracted by the scale of the whole place lmao. Another thing was my first time seeing a horse in person, they're obviously not exactly giant but horses feel much bigger in person. Super intimidating and majestic animal.
I have a particular fear of one part of Portal 2. When we are exploring the old Aperture, we can see the huge structures that they used for testing, and i think that those are more terrifying than the "modern" ones, because we can see then fully, rather than just for a glimpse (Ex: The jumps between chambers on Wheetly part). There's something unsusual about the testing spheres, the huge vault doors, gigantic pipes and machinary. They look old because of the rust, but still they imput such a fear in me...
I find it really interesting how the whale-like hums of the reefback start off as terrifying to most new players (see any youtuber's reactions to them, of which there are 100s of compilations) but as you continue through the game and understand that reefbacks are harmless, their cries become a marker of relative safety. Also a lot like whales they add a soothing energy to the infinite sea of dread (pun intended) that is the open ocean.
Outer Wilds was a game that massively triggered my megalophobia. Giants Deep nearly made me sick on approach because its so difficult to judge its scale and distance when you can't see any landmass, and then immediately following that you get treated to thalasophobia once you make it through. Then there's Dark Bramble...
i find this really interesting, for me the outer wilds system was comforting cause it all felt so tiny, with determination you could explore almost every inch of every body with one or two notable exceptions, getting from place to place took seconds or minutes at most, arriving at giants deep the first time was pretty crazy tho, got spat right back out immediately and slammed into the probe cannon lmao
@@Gooberman2YT as someone with serious magalohydrothalassophobia, I managed to complete the entirety of Subnautica and even killed all reapers, playing alone, mostly at night, and without mods it was a true challenge
I always love these video essays about aspects of games most people never even bother thinking about. Asking the question of why something is the way it is in relation to games is always such an interesting point of discussion. Keep up making amazing videos like this, they're amazing!
The first time I felt like I might have Megalaphobia was when I played BioShock Infinite, that damn bird. I feel like the fear is worse when there is like nothing around the creature, like beign in the ocean or the sky. I once had a dream where I was floating in space and the earth was in front of me and between me and the earth was this gigantic creature, even bigger than the planet earth. And around us just nothing, pitch black.
I cant speak for anyone else, but I feel the opposite about large, monumental things. The scale of such things is always so impressive to me. There is a calmness in watching something like a blue whale float by - seemingly unaware of your presence. A calmness in looking at a planet from orbit in games like Space Engineers or Elite Dangerous. It puts your worries and your woes into perspective - essentially meaningless in the face of the infinite. Nature is filled with grand, imposing things that don't even necessarily want to bring you harm - they simply exist, just like you, and that makes me serene.
I have a mix of dread and awe when seeing massive things, whether it’s a monument or living thing. It doesn’t make me feel insignificant: it makes me feel like I’m being used as a scale to gauge the things size. It’s kinda beautiful
Spoilers for No Man's Sky: You forgot the most disquieting and gigantic thing about NMS's story. That the entire universe full of 18 quintillion planets, is all the creation of a computer simulation. Which means theres a reality that is orders of magnitude larger than NMS's explorable space outside of the player's reach. And it means at any moment, some rando event or entity from that reality could turn us all off.
And, spoilers, not only the sense of scale but also time. The reason why "16" shows up all the time in the game is because there are only 16 minutes left of the simulation. Yet no matter how many hours, days, hell, weeks you spend playing, there are still 16 minutes left
"Life is not a question. There does not need to be an answer." they managed to turn the impersonality of the incomprehensible number of computer-generated planets from a criticism into a personally significant experience. (man was it rough at release though)
It's more existential/cosmic horror I think No Man's Sky presents a very unsettling premise: the universe is indeed a simulation. However, the computer that the simulation is running on is is dying, and only has 16 seconds left to live. But how long is 16 seconds to the machine that runs the simulation? And for us players inside the simulation, is there anything we can do to stop the universe's destruction, or is it already too late?
I have megalomania. I was gleeful this entire video! I've been working on a world for a book where bugs became so big that they carry entire cities on their backs. I used blender and maps to visualize the some 20Km long rhino beetle and it was unphatomable. I loved it so much!
Watching these made me think about World of Warcraft, honestly. The zone Vash'jir is full of massive underwater monstrosities, some hostile and some benevolent. There are massive structures in the mountains, the sky, the water. Bosses in raids so massive, your character can't even look up and see their faces. The Sword of Sargeras was a big one for me around the time I quit playing; the sword of what's essentially a god, plunged into the southernmost part of the western continent, so massive that it could have cleaved the planet in half. Yeah sure, its an often dorky MMO, but the cosmic horror aspects of the game and it's sense of scale are very deliberate and designed to mess with the player.
Another great Weirdly terrifying part is in portal 2 when you just finished the Cave Johnson part and open a vault trying to get back to Wheatly. You get this great view of below the main part of the laboratory, where its seems to just go on forever.
One example I remember feeling megalophobic was the underwater segments in The Sinking City. Barely being able to see those gigantic creatures swimming in the murky, briny deep above the drowned city made me feel small and helpless. I always found myself just staring at them as they passed me by. There are also the undersea caves that are the destinations for these sea walks where you are greeted by bottomless and vast caverns where the noises of massive things lurking bellow, out of sight, in the abyssal darkness. Of that entire game, all the detective work and running around the city for hours, it was those moments in the deep and the dark that stuck with me.
I remember playing subnautica for the first time, wandering over towards the aurora and feeling my screen shake as I drew closer to the giant ship, I hear the faint boasting roar that the reaper leviathan makes and seeing it’s silhouette briefly in the corner of my screen. Goosebumps all over my skin as I panic to flee the area. In that panic I wander off into a random location, stare down into the water and can’t see the bottom, about a dozen reefback leviathans scattered around below me, looking like regular sized fish. With the fact that the area I was in wasn’t anywhere near as deep as some of the other areas within the game just freaked me out and I had to pause for a bit to comprehend.
Another ULTRAKILL boss that is definitely worth a mention is the final boss of the Violence layer, the 1000-THR Earthmover. Same as the Corpse Of King Minos, you see them throughout the Violence layer before fighting one of them in the fourth and final level of the layer. And the Earthmover itself is not the boss. It's the level! The lore behind it is also really interesting with how the destruction it caused levelled cities and the ash literally blocked out the sun. Not to mention the hints that these things were only built to counter the protagonist, V1.
Destiny 1 and 2 for me have many aspects of megalophobia, when you wake up on earth the first thing you see is a giant wall, When you enter it, everything is dark, you hear sounds and see shadows, and when you turn on the internal light you realize how vast it is, even with light, certain places are still dark, when you enter the cosmodrome you find yourself surrounded by giant ships pointing towards the sky, big launch pads and hundreds of flying planes and ships spread across the plains, On Venus there is a huge tower that you never see the end of and you only have the chance to climb once, there is also the Vault of Glass, inside there are endless cliffs, tall towers and at the end a gigantic room.
Megalophobia and Claustrophobia go so well together... 2 oppositely different things, but combined can create an atmosphere you wouldn't want to be in. I wish games would do Megalophobia or Claustrophobia or together more.
The corpse of king Minos is big, but the current end boss for Ultrakill is much larger and really sells that feeling. Actually, size plays a big part in Ultrakill as a whole, not just this one boss. In the first layer (actually, layer 0), you find yourself navigating tiny hallways, sliding around the enemies, with the occasional big room filled with enemies. In layer 1, you find yourself in an artificial outdoors, with rooms having enough space to jump around, but not too much. In layer 2, the rooms start to open up, with one level being a giant bridge with only the start and end being large towers you have to spiral up. The majority of the level is spent outside on a thin bridge, but with the ability to jump off the bridge and land on a jump pad that sends you flying above your enemies. In the third layer, you are still indoors, but this time the levels are extremely spacious, and generally you want to be in the center of the room, unlike the other layers where you want to be on the edge of the room jumping off walls. The 4th layer is the beginning of act 2, where you are finally fully outside, but you have to worry about the burning sand that damages you if you touch it, leaving you a large open space, but only small platforms you can stand on. The first boss of this layer is a gory corpse of what could only be described as a giant, using the first boss of the game, which many died to over and over... As a weapon. In the fifth layer, the scale actually takes a turn... You are back indoors, but this time you are underwater. You already talked enough about megalohydrothalassophobia, so I won't go into depth about this layer. Layer 6 is made up of giant cathedrals... Idk my writing creativity has left by this point cathedral big cathedral scary ahhh. The 7th layer, the introduction to act 3 is currently where Ultrakill is at in development, since the game is still in early access. 7-1 seems almost refreshing, you are back in tight corridors, moving around at your own pace, and it's somewhat a puzzle navigating the corridors, rather than a battle. Once you start 7-2, it seems that this may be the entire layer, but you would be wrong. After a pretty easy mini-boss, you find yourself walking through a door into a world completely open to you. While there is a path to follow, you can go right to the middle of the level, but you are blocked by a door that requires a key, so you can't just entirely skip the level. (You actually can skip the level, but it's a tiny little hole off to the side that the devs just added so the speedrunners wouldn't riot lmfao). In the distance, you can see absolutely humongous robots, you can't even begin to gauge their size, but to many players, it just seems like a cool artistic touch... In the final level of layer 7, you walk out the doors of the level start, to find yourself at the feet of one of these gargantuan "creatures", the Earthmovers. Suddenly, a bossbar appears. You grapple a large distance over to it's leg, and climb up to it's body. You parkour along small platforms jutting out of it's side, killing enemies along the way. You keep climbing and climbing for minutes, and finally you get to fight the earthmover. But a new bossbar appears. This is only it's defense system. After a relatively difficult boss, you move into it's chest. Waves of enemies try and stop you from felling this beast, but nothing stands in the way of the player. Eventually, you make it into a fortified room, containing this game's equivalent to shield generators, and the heart of the Earthmover. Once destroying this heart you have only so much time before it explodes in your face. I feel that this boss, after all build up, perfectly captures size and megalophobia in a video game format. If you read all this... What it wrong with you??? (I'm the one that wrote it though so I can't hold it against you)
If "We have Jacob Geller at home." were a thing this would be it. I'm liking the videos so far, but this channel definitely took some inspiration from another video essayist I enjoy.
To my knowledge, the video scripts aren't directly copied from Geller, but almost everything else is heavily inspired. It's almost just like remaking his videos, even down the the video game examples. I don't know if it counts as plagiarism, but I find that it's on the cusp.
you know whats underrated when it comes to this? the game grounded. its a survival game where you are for some reason shrunk to be smaller than an ant and youre stuck in a very chaotic backyard where several fears are _very_ prominent. obviously megalophobia because of how tiny you are, but also thalassophobia because theres water parts of the game, and entomophobia, the fear of bugs, as every single creature you will run into is a bug of some kind, all falling into paceful, neutral, or hostile behaviors. also arachnophobia, though the game gives you an option to make the spiders less spidery if youre arachnophobic, which i find VERY helpful personally great game and really works into this topic imo. theres many games where youre tiny, but grounded had me feeling so helpless in my smallness, and so alone since i didnt have anyone to play it with me.
A big underrated game that you didn’t mention was Ninja Gaiden Z, The boss fight of that game caused my megalophobia skyrocket in my childhood, it was a great game that perfectly captured the boss fight to be immensely impactful
I've always wanted to express my emotions regarding massive things in video games and how much it scared me even when I was still a kid, until now it still disturbs me deeply and I have yet to use words to describe it. You have no clue how much this video means to me, I thank you
I've had multiple nightmares in my life, but nothing scares me more than seeing a bigger than normal moon or a different massive planet in my dreams, doesnt matter if im outside witnessing it or inside, I will get uncomfortable. Something about a massive thing, like planets, not moving is very unsettling.
Yeah. I get that he can't cover All The Games, but Dark Souls is notable in terms of megalophobia because _so much_ of the game is built around beings much, much larger than the normal-human-sized Chosen Undead. Outside of invaders and Hollows, the enemies start out at about twice your size at the small end, and the architecture is mostly built to match that scale.
I am hoping immensely there is a Benjamin reference given there is an Ultrakill bossfight in a video about Megalophobia and all I see is the corpse of king Minos.
This video needs more likes! I don't think i have megalophobia. Quite the opposite, actually. Seeing enormous structures in games and movies gives a strange feeling. The same feeling you get when you think about how small you are compared to the universe. It's humbling in a way. One of my favorite games, Destiny, does this. It definitely isn't a horror game. But it has extremely large structures. You can see where someone with megalophobia would get a little creeped out. Like, the Traveler for instance. It's practically a moon with how large it is. And it just looms over the city, never moving, never makes a sound. It's just, there. (This is, of course, referring to before Lightfall.) If you have megalophobia, and you like to scare yourself a bit, i would suggest playing the Destiny games if you've never played them.
I think Little Nightmares taps into megalophobia pretty damn well, albiet from a different perspective. I reckon that’s majority of the reason why it’s my favourite horror series.
While yes, No Man's Sky is very grandiose with its 18 quintillion planets, I dont think it's scale is communicated that good. You get a number of the total amount of planets, its very far from being grasped by a human mind, only way you can get close to that is throwing big numbers like it will take 2 billion years to see all the planets in the game. That's why I think Elite Dangerous does it better. You have a whole Milky Way to explore, which is 400 billion different star systems, each one different from one another. Its still too big for a human to grasp, but its far scarier than No Man's Sky. Why? Well, you can just look at the galaxy itself. While on the outer edge of the galaxy (which will take you real life months to reach even though you can travel light years at a time in the span of seconds), you can see the whole galaxy, 400 billion stars. And thats what makes it more megalophobic. You literally have a small part of the universe in front of you and even then, with millions of players playing Elite Dangerous, only a small part of the 400 billion stars will ever be explored. And that's what Elite Dangerous does for me.
The Icon of Sin boss battle is hysterical to me. What do you mean a gigantic Demon reborn from the soul of the son of the Betrayer while wearing a suit of Maykr armour can't just squish Doom Guy like an insect. Why rely on other Demons when you could just wreck the puny little guy with shooty bang bangs. Such a gigantic, undead creature not using their extreme power from their size is so ridiculous. The Icon of Sin is almost as large as the behemoths who walk the plains of Doom, carrying actual buildings on themselves. The Icon could just pick up a building and drop it onto Doom Guy. Problem solved.
man the citadel in half life 2 was the original megalophobia moment for me. Never saw something so big that you could get right next to, and then go inside before that game.
The immediate presentation of The Utility Room in this video has made me go from not know or caring about it to wishlisting it on Steam and skipping ahead to avoid spoilers.
I'd like to mention Rain World's Iterators as a great example of megalophobia in games. The Exterior is an entire mid-game region which encompasses the leg, the underside and the side of an Iterator, titanic supercomputers designed and built to accommodate every need of their creators. You spend several cycles climbing your way through the Leg, one of many pillar-like structures meant to hold the superstructure from the ground, then the Underhang, a horizontal stretch between the underside of the machine and the void below, and finally the Wall, a sheer, vertical climb that goes past the clouds. It's easy to forget (or maybe to not even know) when playing the game that basically a quarter of the map (vanilla map at least) is just one whole, distinct, giant machine, towering over every other region. The cherry on top for me comes in the Gourmand campaign. After reaching the jungle outside the Iterator's perimeter, you're able to climb a tree. The view from the top reveals the superstructure, and it's so unbelievably massive that it barely fits the screen.
12:42 I wish there was an absolutely massive leviathan at the bottom of the void and if you stay to long in it, it emerges from the darkness and eats you whole
In the videogame "Kenshi" there is a lot of megalophobia now that i think about it. There is a place called "the bonefields" That is a desert filled with bones of dead creatures, and once that you pay attention, you can see the ribcage of a creature larger that any of the citys of the game. There is also another place called "Obedience" that is an entire cementery of giant robots, with only their dead hands stepping out of the ground, with once finger being bigger than 6 characters piled on eachother. Pretty neat :D
There is a new Act in ULTRAKILL and it includes A 3 KILOMETER TALL WAR GIRAFFE CALLED AN EARTHMOVER. THERE ARE MULTIPLE IN THE DISTANCE. (his name is also called Benjamin :D)
One time I was playing Elite dangerous. I had just warped to a star and quickly started to throtle up my ship to re align myself for another jump. I noticed that the star that was in front of me appeared to not be moving. That was weird, I was moving really fast. Then it hit me. That was simply a star so big that even traveling around it felt slow. Even with a ship traveling ridiculously fast. I was terrified and amazed at the same time
i'm as fascinated by both big spaces underwater and huge objects as i am terrified of them. when i first got subnautica, i thought i would be terrified of the water (and i was, for a while), but i managed to overcome it by sheer fascination and, i dunno, it being lesser of the two fears. somewhat hilariously, it was actually the size of the aurora that kneecapped my progress, which i wasn't expecting at all. i just kept coming up to it and pausing the game or quitting. couldn't do it. can't explain why - just couldn't! massive the bastard. one day i hope to make it inside!
how is sans related to everything that has megalo in it? sure, his theme is great and all that, but whenever i see something about megalophobia, there's always one dude like this
two very horrific megalophobia moments ive found in non-horror games that have stuck with me was the pyramid reveal in destiny shadowkeep. you turn a corner and there's a massive pyramid way out in the distance, disappearing into the darkness of the immense cavern you find yourself in. later it grabs you with a tractor beam and pulls you from the ledge you're on across a total void below you as it pulls you inside it. i cant handle that gap cross, it's genuinely too much for me every time. the other one is from a relatively cute game called sky children of the light, by the people who made journey. there's little quests you can do, and one of the seasonal areas is a cove with an immense underwater section. the second-to-last mission in the questline has you accidentally release the only "enemies" in the game into the ocean around you, a bunch of these kind of big floating snake/dragon things called krill, alongside a MUCH bigger version we have never seen before or since. the final mission has you rescue a friend who went way too far down, and has you swim for a LONG time down through a void of ocean for lack of a better term, and when you finally pick up your friend, that massive dragon you released earlier emerges below you as you desperately swim upwards to try and escape before it ultimately eats you. its genuinely one of the most terrifying moments in a game ive ever experienced. for clips if youd like to watch them, look up " destiny shadowkeep beyond" for the first one and "sky cotl season of abyss mission 5"
Forerunner architecture in the Halo series (especially the original trilogy) always gave me both a sense of existential fear and melancholy, which I think was definitely intentional. i walk through those structures that are always so much more massive than the already tall player character, feeling dwarfed by their vastness, and all I can think about is who once roamed these halls, and how might we compare to them if this is how small we seem in their footsteps ?
If i went to a place where there hadnt been an accident since time began, and i managed to cause one, i wouldn't feel bad, i broke that record, i bested time and gods themselves simply by being enough of an annoyance, thats one hell of an achievement.
My first experience with megalophobia was as a child, playing Spore. The game starts you in an underwater bacterial section where you grow and evolve. There are tons of creatures larger than you, and some are so ginormous that beneath you, you can see distant reflections deeper in the water that can sometimes fill your entire screen with their size.
Later, on land, there are still "Epics"; ginormous versions of existing creatures that roar loudly and attack anything in sight.
My father told me that there was a section in Spore where if you swam too far, you would get a cutscene of a colossal creature leaping out of the water and eating you. He said that I ran upstairs screaming and crying because that scared me so bad. I won't ever forget Spore for being my first exposure to this concept.
As someone who played Spore as a kid, what your father said was true, and it was one of the few things that genuinely spooked me about the game.
W game + that cutscene had me shivering especially since it’s a single player game and in the red water
Not to mention the fact that the Epics live near colossal bones, most of which are bigger than them. The Super-Epics would have been terrifying.
@@TheYeetedMeat Omg super-epics just makes me uneasy thinking about it so glad they were just bones
I fuckin loved Spore
I played Subnautica in VR. Now THAT is true horror. Once you see everything in scale, the true mass of those seacreatures, and the depth of the ocean, become so much more horrific.
That not why it’s terrifying. It’s terrifying because it’s so bad
You can just look at the ratings, and see how wrong you are
@@Minos-gaming______dylanjam5737nice bait
@@Minos-gaming______dylanjam5737how is subnautica bad??
@@chrisi7127 dont engage with bait His goal is to make your day worse
In Little Nightmares your're surrounded by an environment bigger than you, creatures who overshadow your bare existence to the point you're actually powerless in comparison
I love Little Nightmares. it's a really great horror series
I read your comment with Little Big Planet instead of Little Nightmares and I thought "What the fuck is this guy talking about?"
@@jamiroquaii soon there'll be a third one! time to get excited :D
@sambrosi2289 I really hope they do good with it. I don't think the people who made 1 and 2 are making it
@@jamiroquaii oh i wasn't aware of that... kind of a bummer. Hope they can capture the vibe
"Magalohydrothalassophobia" as a word gives me megalophobia
That would be hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. The fear of long words.
Fun fact: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanocaniosis is only the 4th longest word, the longest one is a name of some element (alternative name) that has 131k+ letters in it. Just simply pronouncing it would take hours
@@RocRolDisThe ones who named that phobia really wanted to play with their victims. Lol
@@PelinalWhitestrake9147 wait till you hear about Aibohphobia. the fear of palindromes, words spelled the same backwards as forwards
@@Puncwastakenfr tho, at least pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is not a palindrome
"These giants are hostile" -proceeds to show footage of the only non-hostile colossus in the game
Yeah this guy made a lot of strange mistakes in this video
@@Karizmatyclike what?
@@Karizmatyc the prepubescent is releasing shite videos? what a surprise
I feel like the vast emptiness of the world in SoC along with the massive scale of the architecture is more psychologically unsettling than the Colossus themselves.
I'm confused about the subnautica part. Isn't that exactly why people are scared? Being tiny in an ocean where you can't see the big monsters loom nearby is all part of the fear. Every time i saw someone talk about the game, they mention the big sea creatures.
Edit: I have like 90 replies of everyone telling me the same thing over and over again...
I mean he also said that the size of the skull head was as big as a football field sooo…. 😭
Thats part of it, but I think peoples biggest fear when it comes to the ocean is A) the fact there is no help whatsoever and we are not primarily built to exist underwater, and B) that we don't know what's down in the depths, and without very specific technology we can never know.
as someone who was more scared by the open space than the creatures, i think it probably varies.
Yeah pretty much
thalassophobia😊
Another quiet megalaphobic game is portal, as the aperture laboratories extend hugely, which I love.
Especially Portal 2. All those massive domes, stacked haphazardly on top of each other, so deep beneath the earth.
god, aperture is *HUGE*
I would love a game where it’s procedurally generated and your in like an aperture laboratory place, where there is like a ton of secrets
but also have that claustrophobic feeling, like your trapped in a little corner of this massive facility.
Especially "The Fall" chapter of Portal 2.
I'm glad that ULTRAKILL got mentioned. Corpse of King Minos is a great example, but the Earthmover on layer 7 really takes the huge boss cake imo
war without reason
benjamin
she war on my without til i reason
@@serhiiko7141she movin on my earth till i war
them: "giant corpse controlled by snakes smacking you"
me asf: "giant robot shooting lightning spears that you need to climb"
I have the opposite, megalophilia I guess, I love the idea of obscenely huge stuff. AC6 recently served that in spades. It didn't have as many huge mechs like AC4A but the structures were huge, from the levels themselves (like the "Honest" Brute mission) to stuff like the Vascular Plant.
same bro, i actually like the idea of being so much smaller than anything else around me. maybe i js dont like responsibilities
I think the thing your talking about is Macrophilia (Macro for short)
@@binoobear9607 Saw that term recently, gotta say that the inconsistency pisses me off.
I think something directly related to megalophobia is cosmic horror. It's not just the physical size of something, it's your realization of personal insignificance and you really touch on this at the end. You briefly mentioned Outer Wilds; the cosmic insignificance you feel during it (even moreso in the dlc) really makes it personally fit in query these games
I don't have Megalophobia, so I guess that's why for me, super large structures or giant creatures are target of fascination instead of target of fear. This is also why I'm more in awe when scientists found one of those giant-ass squid inside the ocean's deepest part. Same with space, I love space and It's always amazing to read what large natural structure scientists managed to find out there in the universe, whether it's supermassive planets, star formations, or blackholes.
Same here!
One thing I've really delved into is the Minecraft modding scene letting you really get a better look at the world through LoD mods, like the one based on Cubic Chunks, or Distant Horizons 1&2. It's so awesome seeing just... the *sheer scale* of things. I love it. It's just so much more to *explore*, to *see* from here to there, to *imagine.* It'd be even better if it works in VR. :D
No, every human being has innate megalophobia, stop the bullshit you aren't special lol
I get exactly what you mean. And that is why I love the idea of the size of The Boötes void
For me it’s like a mix of wonder and fear.
@@caldercockatoo2234 That's "awe" or "awesome" in the most traditional sense. Though awesome rarely gets used like that anymore.
"Something impossibly huge and ominous lurches across the horizon. Pass a Luck (-1) check or its gaze, with eyes the size of planets, falls upon you, and you lose 2 Sanity."
what game is this from
@@memerreal-tk3mb The Arkham Horror board game! The first time I read that event when I was young, I got chills. This video brought it to mind, for obvious reasons.
@@SirHugsalot13thArkham as in DC Arkham?
@@bustanut5501As in HP Lovecraft Arkham.
Nah sounds unrealistic. Megalophobia + scopophobia, that shit happens to me and my heart explodes like a scared fucking rabbit 😂
Seriously tho 'something so big it's eyes are the size of Astral bodies is looking right at you' is probably my worst fear out of all my fears
I don't have magalophobia BUT
In Warframe at the end of the New War Quest there's a scene that gave me chills
For a while before the Quest the game teases you with this "Man in the Wall" that's supposed to be some eldritch entity like a ghost whispering to you in the walls, but then by the end of the New War you get to see it immediately after the climax of the last fight, out of nowhere and literal Man in the Wall, like a skyscraper sized virtruvian man in a slab of concrete, flying at your face covering your whole screen and chanting a eldritch language
Seeing that slab of a man fly towards me actually gave me virtigo for a second
Warframe lore’s already trippy but that little scene made me forget what I was playing for a moment, wack.
fax, but i’d like to point out how the background scenery for things like the albericht laboratories, the hub for the zariman, and even lua gives me chills some times
Man, I cannot put into words how freaked out I was after exploring Albrecht's laboratory, heading to the chasm where the fight took place and the phone constantly rings...only to turn around, look up AND SEE THE MAN IN THE WALL THERE, FULL SCALE
Isn't Megalophobia actually just common sense?😅
Waframe mentioned !
One small but important example for me was the erdtree elden ring. No matter where youre at in the game, no matter what region. Its standing. From limgrave, so far away from it, from the other side of the map even, its there, one of the first ever things you notice. It cant be that big, you think at first. But then you keep playing. You travel, its there. You explore, its there. You fight. Its there. And when you enter the capital. You see it up close for the first time ever, compared to a city as grand as Leyndel, compared to a dragon as Massive as Granseax. Its all dwarfed by the erdtree. And you realize why it stood so prevalent throughout your playthrough, somethint so massive commands that attention
I was high as shit when I first saw a video that talked directly about the Erdtree and actually showed how big it was, and it Blew My Mind. I haven’t had the pleasure of playing it (but I’m getting it for myself for christmas, so wish me luck…), but I was watching a video that was primarily discussing the Erdtree’s lore. At that point I knew about it but I thought, honestly, that it was a much smaller tree and that I was misinterpreting it. Nope, it’s like the damn Chrysler building!!!!!!!
@@JingoTastic It's actually far taller than the Chrysler. I really hope you enjoy Elden Ring. I know I did.
What till you see the moon(its anywhere you look)
13:46 Elite mentioned! Some stats: The furthest station from a system's primary star is Hutton Orbital, which is .22 ly away. When you jump into a star system, you arrive next to the primary star. It takes about an hour and a half to get to Hutton Orbital in a ship that can go over 400 times the speed of light. Recent updates that allow you to "turbo charge" your hyperdrive have knocked that down to a still relatively long 30 minutes. And that's just one corner of the _1:1 scale Milky Way Galaxy_. Some folks do nothing but spend all their time away from civilization for months, sometimes years, traversing this massive galaxy.
can confirm! just came back from 3 weeks out of the bubble. didn't even make it that far
There's an ambitious Subnautica mod in the works called "The Return of the Ancients" which's reviving the Gargantuan Leviathan.
The only adult Gargantuan is found in the "dead zone", preying on the Ghost Leviathans that spawn there, lol. It looks like it can swallow the Cyclops submarine (the game's largest driveable vehicle) whole.
The juveniles aren't Leviathan-big but still scary and dangerous. If you find and hatch an egg, you'd have a pet baby Gargantuan. It can follow you around and takes care of tough predators for you incl. even (adult) Reapers. And it play-bites you, dealing damage. It's kinda like having a pet bear.
I heard about that mod while making this video, but I actually think just alluding to giant monsters in the form of a fossil brings way more questions then just having it in front of you. (especially since it's not natively apart of the game)
@Cresendex i humbly disagree
@@Cresendexwhen playing games fossils can end up feeling like a bore if the game doesnt already have a living ecosystem that could have supported those fossils. Having a giant creatures fossil doesnt make much sense when everything you see is small. And with me having played games for so long i easily see through the fossils and i just see a asset placed there to impress me. But if you have a equivalent in size creature that actually moves then its easier to imagine those fossils actually being living beings
@@Niiwastaken On the other hand, the human mind can conjure things more terrifying than reality _especially_ when an anxiety disorder like a phobia is involved. Speaking from experience. My own ADs make certain things scarier than they really are.
Heck, dinosaurs may not be as scary as we made them out to be. Paleo artists Conway and Koseman once tried drawing modern animals like we usually draw dinosaurs (relying mostly on bones, giving them little to no soft tissue like fat, etc.), and the results were horrifying, lol. You could find em online.
@Cresendex Trust me, seeing the full sized creature in the ecological deadzone is absolutely horrifying. It ticks that megalophobia box instantly. It dwarfs everything else in the game by a massive margin, and its impressive how the game its able to handle such massive models
recently armored core 6 made me realize megalophobia, since the game is built in the same engine as Elden Ring, and everything in that game is made in a realistic-ish scale, its not slow to put 1+1 and realize what im talking about. its a mech game.
you start the game crawling through cramped industrial tunnels and passageways, you see railways and some other paths, spaces for you to climb and fly. yet everything seems normal... in a way, made for you to fit in scale. just the right size?
but as you progress on the first level, it starts to open up a bit more, the train tracks now have waggons with possibly raw materials for the local industrial plant you seem to be inside, but you cant help but realize, how small that wagon is? you can probably lift it yourself in your mech suit. then you see hanging chains, massive dooways, that world tho, is wrong, its not a world made for humans, its a world where you in your machine, are in your natural habitat, it is massive, YOU in the machine, can fly, can easily jump across bridges and paths, find your way in a incoherent amount of connections junctions and elevations, platforms, entrances, gigantic doors. its a world made for mechs. a small climb for you, would be an impossible wall for a normal human, a small distance you acn travel boosting, would be a agonizingly long walk for a human, a normal door for you, would be the most frightening entrance door to anywhere a person would ever see, that, until the game opens up proper.
and it hits you. the impossible scale of everything, the outside of that "industrial plant" you seemed to be inside, is all across the surface of the planet, elevated far above ground by pillars, no matter where you look, the sky is made of metal, but light shines through, it almost looks like a forest of giant metallic trees. and in the horizon, between the sandy desert floor, and the metal sky, the sun shines through the gap between these two, the strangest sunset you'll ever see.
from there on you dont have no longer much time to soak in on these astonishingly huge architecture departures, how everything seem to have been made to fit super giant machinery, not human, not made for me, and for you, that is a world made for metal giants and for war. brute, sterile and metallic. no billboards, no visible windows, no noticeable homey aspects. future never looked so bleak. its almost as if nobody has the time for any of that, or that they dont need that, even in the more urban'ish parts of the game, like when we invade a local resistance's fortifications their cities are just tall buildings, no lights, no greenery, no billboards, everything is pale grey, or the Xylem, a colony space ship, is not far behind, with the added difference it seem to have the usual street signs we have, that give us directions in traffic. which seems funnily enough, outdated, but relatable? homes, buildings, cars, trucks... planes helicopters. yet so small you could confuse all of that for a miniature set of toys in a massive toy room.... a massive... toy room? a massive toy room for mechs.
just to end my case, the funniest part is when you find out, Rubicon-3 the planet where this game takes place, is a Dwarf Planet. its many times smaller than our earth... 20% the size of earth if im not mistaken. so i wonder how far more insane, massive and impossibly other corporation owned planets might have been altered? what kind of insane structures they might have, other insanely huge machinery, Rubicon-3 has a ring, but not a natural ring, it has rings, made out of man-made structures, probably a Dison-Sphere.
and mind you, Armored Core 6, is an Action Mecha Game. so fast you dont have time to think about any of this, but its sheer speed, chaos and action, are a result of you, simply becoming this monstrous machine, a machine that could probably kick the shit out of any cosmic deity, in any cosmic horror novel or book, before it could even think about what is happening to it. if humanity' unstoppable power of growth and being able to create these kind of things on their own, and at absurd quantities, is not at least frightening... i dont know what is.
ARMORED CORE 6 MENTIONED 🗣😤
I don’t think Rubicon-3 is 20% the size of Earth. The planet model as seen in the final boss arena of two of the endings is small enough to make the Vascular Plant stand out more.
damn bro its almost like the game where you pilot a robot is gonna have levels designed for robots
Yeah armored core 6 definitely gave me megalophobia feelings, once I realised how big the mechs actually are. Everything is beyond anything humanity can currently build. It's ridiculously huge. And despite being from the viewpoint of a giant mech, even if you imagined the mech is the size of a human, everything is STILL really huge anyway. But yeah it just gets so much bigger when you realise how big a human is by comparison. Like, early on there's just a simple warehouse room that in reality is as tall and wide as a skyscraper, and you're just flying about it shooting shit.
I wish I wasn't so shit at the game cos I wanna see more of it. But I've gotta practice, I guess.
Its not that deep.
Control is also a great game where the brutalist architecture is so vast and bigx towering over you while still being mosten realistic until you come in to contact with these vast canyons between certain parts of the map that extend infinetely. Gives some propper chills ngl
The run-ins with the Anchor and the Former are great megalophobia moments.
I never got that far because the game was too pretentious and crap for me to continue
@@HushtheMag would recommend watching Bricky's review of it if you want to see what the rest of the game is like without playing it. It's alright/good up until the ending which is ASSSSSSSS
When talking about megalophobia, the first thing I remember is the final boss of Intrusion 2. That was my first expirience with that type of fear. The boss is mostly just a big robot, but it *literally shakes the building with your character inside* as one of his attacks. He also crushes the walls of the building with his fingers and fires lasers from them. That's one of the best bosses in the videogame history I remember, btw.
It’s a super tiny example but the Twinmold bossfight in Zelda majoras mask fascinated me a lot as a kid
You should definitely check manga “Blame”, the main character wandering for thousands of hours in an apocalyptic self-building structure which is not suited for tiny human
[Spoiler] A structure the size of the solar system :s
@@WanderlustZerothat's a spoiler from one of the first pages, so barely one. A structure going up to Jupiter, I believe. It's wild.
@@NostraDavid2 is the manga still going
@@NostraDavid2no, I’ve read it recently and they don’t mention the sheer scale of it until later on. Killy is in a room with a similar diameter to Jupiter I believe
@@l0sts0ul89blame ended a while ago. 66 chapters I believe
I feel like Mass Effect 3's opening does a good job of this feeling as well. Watching as 2km tall machines land on the Earth, dwarfing absolutely everything and laying waste to the entire planet, and the only thing you're armed with is a pistol.
This, and the first meeting with Leviathan underwater. That really shook me to my bones
@@ripple_2374dont remind me, still scared if it to this day 😞
Also in Mass Effect 1 when you walk up the Citadel Tower and seeing the gigantic Sovereign.
One of my favorite games NaissanceE has giant structures in the 2nd chapter.
You're placed in a gigantic city like structure, with no end in sight upwards, or downwards.
Almost everything you see in the game is unrecognizable, there's areas that look like a city, some are like airducts.
but you can never find a purpose in anything, all the moving parts, windows, and lights, the catwalks, the doors, the archways, it's all alien to you.
I wasnt expecting to see you here, i was thinking about your game while watching this
played subnautica for the first time this year, amazing and incredible game, one of the best I've ever played and it scared the absolute shit out of me, I remember fearing for my actual life in the lava zones where the size of that beast is even more apparent in the "small" space, fantastic game
Giant things in games scare but intrigue me at the same time, a good example I can think of is the Xenoblade Chronicles series. From giant titan creatures that have cities on their backs, to a massive sky tearing tree that is visible from almost anywhere, massive enemies that you shouldn't be able to fight, or corpses of giant gods that make you feel like bacteria. Xenoblade's scale is terrifying yet beautiful.
I think for the Ultrakill part, the earthmovers in the 7th layer are the better example of Megalophobia in the game. You see dozens around you. You spend a considerable time and effort just to kill ONE. In the lore we learn that these things were designed and succeeded in annihilating earth and making humanity extinct. These boss makes you realize that you may be a threat, you’re certainly a small one
A small but much bigger threat. V1 (the robot you play as), is the last war robot designed for humanity's great war. It is in an incredibly agile, semi-durable, deadly, accurate and self sustaining killing machine in the literal meaning. As told from the logs of the other robots, most robots were designed to counter the previous model before it. This means that V1 was designed to specifically go and bring down titans.
Nah, I see the Earth movers as a massive ego boost. Out of all the robots made during the great war, all the horrors manufactured and metal beasts born from AI's trying to make better AI's for a war that humanity had forgotten the purpose of, you alone are the culmination of all of it. V2 and all the post war bots were made for a peace time force, and so are weaker.
You even see it in the game, with the Earth Mover disengaging from shooting another Earth Mover just to aim for you, since it sees you as the bigger threat.
@@cookiecraze1310 I mean yeah, but you gotta feel a sense of dread when looking up when you first enter the level
i have to say, it's so rare to see people talk about megalophobia in the expecific way you show in these videos, i definetly don't have "megalophobia" as in fear of the big and vast, i would say i really love the feeling of it actually, it's the feeling of understanding that there is stuff much much bigger than you, and you might not even comprehend it, but you sure can gaze at it's greatness, i love the megalophobia more focused more into the fiction and celestial aspect, as it makes me feel these expecific emotions better, that's a reason of why i love astronomy so much, i used to open Space Engine and explore the universe for HOURS, some of those hours would be me just sitting in a random moon looking into a pretty gas giant in the horizon, it has the feeling of dread there sure, it's kinda burned into the mix, but with it comes the calmness too i think, if it's too big for you to comprehend, in the end it makes a good time for not thinking too much about what isn't important, and just let your mind free into it's wonders for a bit. Great video as allways, loved the first game shown specially, really wanna try it now xD
I think the emotion you are describing, is awe.
And yes,, its the same feeling astronauts get when they stare at earth from outside,and realise just how small our little blue planet is.
Really makes you feel fear and wonder at the same time.
Life truly has endless possibilities
It’s a little less philosophical, but you should definitely play Playdead’s INSIDE if you haven’t. There’s so much environmental storytelling in that game. Signs that things above you are going on, but it’s not super clear what. Rather than space and stuff, it’s more corporate experimentation and every other dystopian thing along those lines. A lot of “lack of control”. It’s a really cool game haha.
@@DEADEYESSS i LOVE INSIDE, as well as LIMBO, they are two amazing games, you have great taste!
if there's such a thing as the epitome of the feeling you're describing, it would definitely be the cosmos. i feel like you can just look up at a starry night sky and be overcome by megalophobia and an awe-inspiring feeling of insignificance, like nothing you do on this earth will ever amount to anything in the vast indifference of space.
I used to have nightmares like this as a kid and often without any monsters just large buildings, I was horrified every time. Only other time I felt like this was Arrival, I really hope this genre gets explored
6:37 this reminded me of the moment in Adventure Time where Jake was given a wish by Prismo to try and bring Finn back from the alternate universe he (accidentally) created with his own wish. Jake was told to be careful with the wish because depending on what he wished for, it could have massive effects, potentially causing or preventing uncountable amounts of events across the entire multiverse. Jake immediately throws up at the thought of it
For quite a while, I had this feeling deep in my chest whenever I saw a grayscale painting of a mountain, a screenshot of a game on top of a mountain towards the vast field, a picture of a giant boss in the distance. I hate the feeling because it makes me uncomfortable, makes me feel small, makes me feel _insignificant_ .
Today, I realized that feeling is called megalophobia.
The upcoming War of The Worlds survival game is, in my opinion, the single best use of megalophobia in any medium *ever* . I'm very hyped for it and I'm excited for people to get their hands on it.
Like the hg wells book?
No 2005 one@@darthbane5357
5 months later just here to doubt your hype. Animations, set piece videos, and some crude AI. That's all we have to look at for this "upcoming survival game". No one who's been gaming since before covid thinks that this game is doing anything other than a lap on twitch and a flop. It's probably going to be a focus home game watch.
Story time
I had a dream where I was sleeping on our house then all of a sudden I had the urge to pee. I went to the bathroom but then, there was a huge quake that had happened. I looked outside and saw a huge mountain, right in front of our house. Then I went back inside but there was just that feeling inside me that really bugged me. That mountain made me feel uncomfortable so I looked out again. I was scared, that thing was crazy big in my dream. I turn my back, I look again and it’s Jupiter now. That made me even more scared. Then I woke up.
That’s when I knew I had a phobia of big things.
Here’s the 2nd one:
I was outside on the terrace just in my inflatable swimming pool. I stare at the blue sky, then I though to myself: “the sky seems endless, what it Jupiter were to be near us right now?” Then that picture in my head just unsettled me. I couldn’t stop looking back and forth at the sky because I was so unnerved.
Phobias are crazy things man.
This reminds me of a similar dream i had
I was just chilling in a room, then suddenly, like a videogame texture stretching glitch i saw saturn's rings fly past through the room, when i stepped outside i looked up and my vision zoomed out from me into a 3rd person view to show one quarter of earth exposed while saturn and Jupiter engulfed the rest
earth was basically the core, with a sliced quarter of saturn next to the earth quarter, and half of jupiter for the rest of the weird planet amalgam
my whole life i've had nightmares where im in a massive city and there's some kinda giant monster attacking it. its only me in the city, which has strangely tall buildings, and for some reason this creature is hunting me specifically. even if i escape the city and travel the world, it always finds me... the creatures are often godzilla like, and this nightmare was caused by me watching godzilla 1998 a lot as a kid. a lot of fans hate that movie, but it's one of my favorites and i consider it the scariest movie ive ever seen
i dont have megalophobia but i know what you mean
I had the same thing multiple time with the sky.
ohhhh no fuck that
I have megalophobia (prob most prominently Astromegalophobia) and I've def has some megalophobia-related nightmares. One of them involved me getting a Ridley amiibo (I'm an amiibo collector, and I didn't have one at the time, but have one now) and then in my dream, when I scanned it, a huge Ridley would spawn right on my house.
I had another nightmare that there were quite small, but still somehow intimidating diagrams and statues of Jupiter and Saturn inside my house as furniture, and it ended with me being able to look out and see Saturn in the sky.
Both of them were pretty scary but god, that sounds terrifying. I shouldn't have watch this video at 9:30 PM, I know I'll have a terrible megalophobia dream tonight.
a game that i think about when i think of megalophobia is playdead's INSIDE. throughout quite a lot of the game there are so many incredible landscapes and buildings. and despite it being a side scrolling game you can still see so much depth in the backgrounds. like literally some of the locations have me wondering "how far does this thing go?!". it's very good
god i love megalophobia, especially of the brutalist style
good video btw
7:00 i don't think the destruction of the 🗿 creating any negative consequences is the implication here, I'm pretty sure it's the fact that you altered the trajectory of cosmic pendulum when it careened into the head, which i assume is the universes way of keeping time. The results would obviously be catastrophic.
I never knew "Megalophobia" is a thing until recently.
I find "Mega" things quite fascinating. One of the very common "Megalophobia" dreams i have is me being underwater deeeeep in the ocean, no lights, and GIANT fishes swimming around, some even bumping into me. I'm Never scared, even within the dream, i find it fascinating. Usually in such dreams i just find myself chilling and floating.
If I had that dream I would never want to sleep again (thalassophobia)
check out the Iterator structures from Rain World! giant supercomputers so large, they go above the cloud layer and have massive cities built on top of them
Some great places to see the scale are: The highest point (as artificer), Some of the rooms around the house of braids (as artificer) The top of the big tree (as gourmand), The top of the wall in the exterior, where stargazer plays (as any other than saint), and the top of the wall right before you get off the tall pole, right before stargazer plays (as any)
add to that iterator facilities as whole, giant foundations of selfrepairing concrete and steel so that infrastructure built on them wouldnt just sink down into terrain that is said to be mud mire everywhere due to constant downpours
I grew up in the suburbs and rarely leave my local area, so when I went to Sydney for the first time recently the sheer scale of the buildings was terrifying and really unlocked this fear for me. I actually walked into a pole because I was so distracted by the scale of the whole place lmao. Another thing was my first time seeing a horse in person, they're obviously not exactly giant but horses feel much bigger in person. Super intimidating and majestic animal.
Suburbs as in... American suburbs or normal suburbs?
@@ΒασίληςΒλάχος-τ3κ Australia lol
@@ΒασίληςΒλάχος-τ3κ what's the difference? You're still likely going to be surrounded by one story buildings
I have a particular fear of one part of Portal 2. When we are exploring the old Aperture, we can see the huge structures that they used for testing, and i think that those are more terrifying than the "modern" ones, because we can see then fully, rather than just for a glimpse (Ex: The jumps between chambers on Wheetly part).
There's something unsusual about the testing spheres, the huge vault doors, gigantic pipes and machinary. They look old because of the rust, but still they imput such a fear in me...
I adore when Megalophobia is used via some gigantic, unknowable entity
I find it really interesting how the whale-like hums of the reefback start off as terrifying to most new players (see any youtuber's reactions to them, of which there are 100s of compilations) but as you continue through the game and understand that reefbacks are harmless, their cries become a marker of relative safety. Also a lot like whales they add a soothing energy to the infinite sea of dread (pun intended) that is the open ocean.
Outer Wilds was a game that massively triggered my megalophobia. Giants Deep nearly made me sick on approach because its so difficult to judge its scale and distance when you can't see any landmass, and then immediately following that you get treated to thalasophobia once you make it through.
Then there's Dark Bramble...
how is it that you're the first one here to mention outer wilds??
the waves on giant's deep................................
I have ptsd from The first time i went to dark bramble
3 months later, BUT you are RIGHT, it cost me a lot to finish the game because that exact same reason
Hmm, weird hole, I’ll put my camera through it
Alright just branches, fog, some more bran-AAAHHHHHH
i find this really interesting, for me the outer wilds system was comforting cause it all felt so tiny, with determination you could explore almost every inch of every body with one or two notable exceptions, getting from place to place took seconds or minutes at most, arriving at giants deep the first time was pretty crazy tho, got spat right back out immediately and slammed into the probe cannon lmao
I'm horrified of deep oceans. Specifically because my mind goes brrrrrr and imagines unfathomably giant creatures hiding in the endless blue
Thallasophobia?
You should play subnautica then, it has none of that.
@@Gooberman2YT as someone with serious magalohydrothalassophobia, I managed to complete the entirety of Subnautica and even killed all reapers, playing alone, mostly at night, and without mods
it was a true challenge
SCP 169
surprised you covered ultrakill and didnt mention the earthmover. i was genuinely shocked when i first saw it and it’s the biggest boss you face
Yea, the earthmover is MASSIVE
I always love these video essays about aspects of games most people never even bother thinking about. Asking the question of why something is the way it is in relation to games is always such an interesting point of discussion. Keep up making amazing videos like this, they're amazing!
The first time I felt like I might have Megalaphobia was when I played BioShock Infinite, that damn bird.
I feel like the fear is worse when there is like nothing around the creature, like beign in the ocean or the sky. I once had a dream where I was floating in space and the earth was in front of me and between me and the earth was this gigantic creature, even bigger than the planet earth. And around us just nothing, pitch black.
I cant speak for anyone else, but I feel the opposite about large, monumental things. The scale of such things is always so impressive to me. There is a calmness in watching something like a blue whale float by - seemingly unaware of your presence. A calmness in looking at a planet from orbit in games like Space Engineers or Elite Dangerous. It puts your worries and your woes into perspective - essentially meaningless in the face of the infinite. Nature is filled with grand, imposing things that don't even necessarily want to bring you harm - they simply exist, just like you, and that makes me serene.
Agree, it felt so annoying to see this guy talking about how scary these things are when i believe they are amazing
@@V_No_SakkaiAnnoying? It's a normal, albeit irrational fear that many people have
I have a mix of dread and awe when seeing massive things, whether it’s a monument or living thing. It doesn’t make me feel insignificant: it makes me feel like I’m being used as a scale to gauge the things size. It’s kinda beautiful
Spoilers for No Man's Sky:
You forgot the most disquieting and gigantic thing about NMS's story. That the entire universe full of 18 quintillion planets, is all the creation of a computer simulation. Which means theres a reality that is orders of magnitude larger than NMS's explorable space outside of the player's reach. And it means at any moment, some rando event or entity from that reality could turn us all off.
And, spoilers, not only the sense of scale but also time. The reason why "16" shows up all the time in the game is because there are only 16 minutes left of the simulation. Yet no matter how many hours, days, hell, weeks you spend playing, there are still 16 minutes left
I love No Man's Sky. It went from being an underwhelming mess, to a game worthy of all praise it gets.
"Life is not a question. There does not need to be an answer." they managed to turn the impersonality of the incomprehensible number of computer-generated planets from a criticism into a personally significant experience. (man was it rough at release though)
Man that is really meta for a video game that *is* a computer simulation of a universe
It's more existential/cosmic horror I think
No Man's Sky presents a very unsettling premise: the universe is indeed a simulation. However, the computer that the simulation is running on is is dying, and only has 16 seconds left to live. But how long is 16 seconds to the machine that runs the simulation? And for us players inside the simulation, is there anything we can do to stop the universe's destruction, or is it already too late?
I have megalomania. I was gleeful this entire video!
I've been working on a world for a book where bugs became so big that they carry entire cities on their backs. I used blender and maps to visualize the some 20Km long rhino beetle and it was unphatomable. I loved it so much!
"The head is larger than a football field."
Anything but the metric system
We need to bring back the banana for scale lol
Watching these made me think about World of Warcraft, honestly. The zone Vash'jir is full of massive underwater monstrosities, some hostile and some benevolent. There are massive structures in the mountains, the sky, the water. Bosses in raids so massive, your character can't even look up and see their faces. The Sword of Sargeras was a big one for me around the time I quit playing; the sword of what's essentially a god, plunged into the southernmost part of the western continent, so massive that it could have cleaved the planet in half.
Yeah sure, its an often dorky MMO, but the cosmic horror aspects of the game and it's sense of scale are very deliberate and designed to mess with the player.
Another great Weirdly terrifying part is in portal 2 when you just finished the Cave Johnson part and open a vault trying to get back to Wheatly. You get this great view of below the main part of the laboratory, where its seems to just go on forever.
naissance is a really interesting example too, where you traverse vast megastructure. there are plenty of videos about it.
One example I remember feeling megalophobic was the underwater segments in The Sinking City. Barely being able to see those gigantic creatures swimming in the murky, briny deep above the drowned city made me feel small and helpless. I always found myself just staring at them as they passed me by.
There are also the undersea caves that are the destinations for these sea walks where you are greeted by bottomless and vast caverns where the noises of massive things lurking bellow, out of sight, in the abyssal darkness.
Of that entire game, all the detective work and running around the city for hours, it was those moments in the deep and the dark that stuck with me.
I remember playing subnautica for the first time, wandering over towards the aurora and feeling my screen shake as I drew closer to the giant ship, I hear the faint boasting roar that the reaper leviathan makes and seeing it’s silhouette briefly in the corner of my screen. Goosebumps all over my skin as I panic to flee the area. In that panic I wander off into a random location, stare down into the water and can’t see the bottom, about a dozen reefback leviathans scattered around below me, looking like regular sized fish. With the fact that the area I was in wasn’t anywhere near as deep as some of the other areas within the game just freaked me out and I had to pause for a bit to comprehend.
Another ULTRAKILL boss that is definitely worth a mention is the final boss of the Violence layer, the 1000-THR Earthmover. Same as the Corpse Of King Minos, you see them throughout the Violence layer before fighting one of them in the fourth and final level of the layer. And the Earthmover itself is not the boss. It's the level! The lore behind it is also really interesting with how the destruction it caused levelled cities and the ash literally blocked out the sun. Not to mention the hints that these things were only built to counter the protagonist, V1.
One of my worst nightmares is being able to move so fast that I end up losing myself in space, forever looking for earth to return too
Megalophobia, the fear of Megalovania
😐
Grains of sands under the table
i have that
Tarara
Tararararararara...
@danielferrato6406 shut up.
This feels like watching the unofficial sequel of Jacob Geller's 'Fear of' series
Destiny 1 and 2 for me have many aspects of megalophobia, when you wake up on earth the first thing you see is a giant wall, When you enter it, everything is dark, you hear sounds and see shadows, and when you turn on the internal light you realize how vast it is, even with light, certain places are still dark, when you enter the cosmodrome you find yourself surrounded by giant ships pointing towards the sky, big launch pads and hundreds of flying planes and ships spread across the plains, On Venus there is a huge tower that you never see the end of and you only have the chance to climb once, there is also the Vault of Glass, inside there are endless cliffs, tall towers and at the end a gigantic room.
Megalophobia and Claustrophobia go so well together... 2 oppositely different things, but combined can create an atmosphere you wouldn't want to be in. I wish games would do Megalophobia or Claustrophobia or together more.
The corpse of king Minos is big, but the current end boss for Ultrakill is much larger and really sells that feeling.
Actually, size plays a big part in Ultrakill as a whole, not just this one boss. In the first layer (actually, layer 0), you find yourself navigating tiny hallways, sliding around the enemies, with the occasional big room filled with enemies. In layer 1, you find yourself in an artificial outdoors, with rooms having enough space to jump around, but not too much. In layer 2, the rooms start to open up, with one level being a giant bridge with only the start and end being large towers you have to spiral up. The majority of the level is spent outside on a thin bridge, but with the ability to jump off the bridge and land on a jump pad that sends you flying above your enemies. In the third layer, you are still indoors, but this time the levels are extremely spacious, and generally you want to be in the center of the room, unlike the other layers where you want to be on the edge of the room jumping off walls.
The 4th layer is the beginning of act 2, where you are finally fully outside, but you have to worry about the burning sand that damages you if you touch it, leaving you a large open space, but only small platforms you can stand on. The first boss of this layer is a gory corpse of what could only be described as a giant, using the first boss of the game, which many died to over and over... As a weapon. In the fifth layer, the scale actually takes a turn... You are back indoors, but this time you are underwater. You already talked enough about megalohydrothalassophobia, so I won't go into depth about this layer. Layer 6 is made up of giant cathedrals... Idk my writing creativity has left by this point cathedral big cathedral scary ahhh.
The 7th layer, the introduction to act 3 is currently where Ultrakill is at in development, since the game is still in early access. 7-1 seems almost refreshing, you are back in tight corridors, moving around at your own pace, and it's somewhat a puzzle navigating the corridors, rather than a battle. Once you start 7-2, it seems that this may be the entire layer, but you would be wrong. After a pretty easy mini-boss, you find yourself walking through a door into a world completely open to you. While there is a path to follow, you can go right to the middle of the level, but you are blocked by a door that requires a key, so you can't just entirely skip the level. (You actually can skip the level, but it's a tiny little hole off to the side that the devs just added so the speedrunners wouldn't riot lmfao). In the distance, you can see absolutely humongous robots, you can't even begin to gauge their size, but to many players, it just seems like a cool artistic touch...
In the final level of layer 7, you walk out the doors of the level start, to find yourself at the feet of one of these gargantuan "creatures", the Earthmovers. Suddenly, a bossbar appears. You grapple a large distance over to it's leg, and climb up to it's body. You parkour along small platforms jutting out of it's side, killing enemies along the way. You keep climbing and climbing for minutes, and finally you get to fight the earthmover. But a new bossbar appears. This is only it's defense system. After a relatively difficult boss, you move into it's chest. Waves of enemies try and stop you from felling this beast, but nothing stands in the way of the player. Eventually, you make it into a fortified room, containing this game's equivalent to shield generators, and the heart of the Earthmover. Once destroying this heart you have only so much time before it explodes in your face.
I feel that this boss, after all build up, perfectly captures size and megalophobia in a video game format. If you read all this... What it wrong with you??? (I'm the one that wrote it though so I can't hold it against you)
Hell yeah i expect a comment about benjamin
… it’s a 🧠.
correction, they didnt add the hole into the bomb cart for speedrunners, its so you can complete 7-2's challenge, "dont kill any enemies"
I
Ain't reading
Allat
🗣
If "We have Jacob Geller at home." were a thing this would be it.
I'm liking the videos so far, but this channel definitely took some inspiration from another video essayist I enjoy.
To my knowledge, the video scripts aren't directly copied from Geller, but almost everything else is heavily inspired. It's almost just like remaking his videos, even down the the video game examples. I don't know if it counts as plagiarism, but I find that it's on the cusp.
@quntface1518 even the thumbnails look the same...
@@quntface1518 its just content milking. basically making the same exact points but said differently for content.
@@CaptainKyleVH Yeah, they are basically the same video just with the words changed.
you know whats underrated when it comes to this? the game grounded. its a survival game where you are for some reason shrunk to be smaller than an ant and youre stuck in a very chaotic backyard where several fears are _very_ prominent. obviously megalophobia because of how tiny you are, but also thalassophobia because theres water parts of the game, and entomophobia, the fear of bugs, as every single creature you will run into is a bug of some kind, all falling into paceful, neutral, or hostile behaviors. also arachnophobia, though the game gives you an option to make the spiders less spidery if youre arachnophobic, which i find VERY helpful personally
great game and really works into this topic imo. theres many games where youre tiny, but grounded had me feeling so helpless in my smallness, and so alone since i didnt have anyone to play it with me.
5:45 the fact this being lived here for 13.8 billion years and NEVER noticed there was an enourmous sharp pendulum???? ya that's not on me bud.
A big underrated game that you didn’t mention was Ninja Gaiden Z, The boss fight of that game caused my megalophobia skyrocket in my childhood, it was a great game that perfectly captured the boss fight to be immensely impactful
I've always wanted to express my emotions regarding massive things in video games and how much it scared me even when I was still a kid, until now it still disturbs me deeply and I have yet to use words to describe it. You have no clue how much this video means to me, I thank you
My attraction to vastness started when I was playing Serious Sam 2. Maybe I'm a bit weird but there are some HUGE things in that game too
Ive always loved the utility room. Thanks for this video!
I've had multiple nightmares in my life, but nothing scares me more than seeing a bigger than normal moon or a different massive planet in my dreams, doesnt matter if im outside witnessing it or inside, I will get uncomfortable.
Something about a massive thing, like planets, not moving is very unsettling.
01:44: "But I'm serious, there is no way I can describe the feeling of HAVE YOU TRIED GRAMMARLY?" Thanks UA-cam!
Look at the full dark souls hydra size. shiz is freaky.
Hi
Ash Lake is horrifying. So is the arena for the Four Kings.
Yeah. I get that he can't cover All The Games, but Dark Souls is notable in terms of megalophobia because _so much_ of the game is built around beings much, much larger than the normal-human-sized Chosen Undead. Outside of invaders and Hollows, the enemies start out at about twice your size at the small end, and the architecture is mostly built to match that scale.
I am hoping immensely there is a Benjamin reference given there is an Ultrakill bossfight in a video about Megalophobia and all I see is the corpse of king Minos.
yeah that was disappointing
This video needs more likes!
I don't think i have megalophobia. Quite the opposite, actually. Seeing enormous structures in games and movies gives a strange feeling. The same feeling you get when you think about how small you are compared to the universe. It's humbling in a way. One of my favorite games, Destiny, does this. It definitely isn't a horror game. But it has extremely large structures. You can see where someone with megalophobia would get a little creeped out. Like, the Traveler for instance. It's practically a moon with how large it is. And it just looms over the city, never moving, never makes a sound. It's just, there. (This is, of course, referring to before Lightfall.)
If you have megalophobia, and you like to scare yourself a bit, i would suggest playing the Destiny games if you've never played them.
I have to admit, seeing that giant swinging pendulum up close is kinda scary. Too bad I don't have a VR to play that game.
I think Little Nightmares taps into megalophobia pretty damn well, albiet from a different perspective. I reckon that’s majority of the reason why it’s my favourite horror series.
Your vocal fry makes me want to eat glass
While yes, No Man's Sky is very grandiose with its 18 quintillion planets, I dont think it's scale is communicated that good.
You get a number of the total amount of planets, its very far from being grasped by a human mind, only way you can get close to that is throwing big numbers like it will take 2 billion years to see all the planets in the game.
That's why I think Elite Dangerous does it better. You have a whole Milky Way to explore, which is 400 billion different star systems, each one different from one another. Its still too big for a human to grasp, but its far scarier than No Man's Sky. Why? Well, you can just look at the galaxy itself. While on the outer edge of the galaxy (which will take you real life months to reach even though you can travel light years at a time in the span of seconds), you can see the whole galaxy, 400 billion stars. And thats what makes it more megalophobic. You literally have a small part of the universe in front of you and even then, with millions of players playing Elite Dangerous, only a small part of the 400 billion stars will ever be explored. And that's what Elite Dangerous does for me.
Holy shoot, Elite: Dangerous mention.
Also, megalohydrothalassophobia makes full sense. Megalo - large, hydro - water, thalasso - sea, phobia - fear. They're all Greek words, stemming from megalo, hidratos, thalassa and phobos.
The Icon of Sin boss battle is hysterical to me. What do you mean a gigantic Demon reborn from the soul of the son of the Betrayer while wearing a suit of Maykr armour can't just squish Doom Guy like an insect. Why rely on other Demons when you could just wreck the puny little guy with shooty bang bangs. Such a gigantic, undead creature not using their extreme power from their size is so ridiculous. The Icon of Sin is almost as large as the behemoths who walk the plains of Doom, carrying actual buildings on themselves. The Icon could just pick up a building and drop it onto Doom Guy. Problem solved.
man the citadel in half life 2 was the original megalophobia moment for me. Never saw something so big that you could get right next to, and then go inside before that game.
The immediate presentation of The Utility Room in this video has made me go from not know or caring about it to wishlisting it on Steam and skipping ahead to avoid spoilers.
Ngl, when the moai got split in half, I could feel the dopamine hitting every part of me.
I'd like to mention Rain World's Iterators as a great example of megalophobia in games. The Exterior is an entire mid-game region which encompasses the leg, the underside and the side of an Iterator, titanic supercomputers designed and built to accommodate every need of their creators. You spend several cycles climbing your way through the Leg, one of many pillar-like structures meant to hold the superstructure from the ground, then the Underhang, a horizontal stretch between the underside of the machine and the void below, and finally the Wall, a sheer, vertical climb that goes past the clouds. It's easy to forget (or maybe to not even know) when playing the game that basically a quarter of the map (vanilla map at least) is just one whole, distinct, giant machine, towering over every other region.
The cherry on top for me comes in the Gourmand campaign. After reaching the jungle outside the Iterator's perimeter, you're able to climb a tree. The view from the top reveals the superstructure, and it's so unbelievably massive that it barely fits the screen.
That mission in rdr2 where kill a bunch of weird people in a cave in chapter 6 was legit a horror game by itself
Try fire bombs
@@scerpi0 I just used the sawed off shotgun
12:42 I wish there was an absolutely massive leviathan at the bottom of the void and if you stay to long in it, it emerges from the darkness and eats you whole
In the videogame "Kenshi" there is a lot of megalophobia now that i think about it. There is a place called "the bonefields" That is a desert filled with bones of dead creatures, and once that you pay attention, you can see the ribcage of a creature larger that any of the citys of the game. There is also another place called "Obedience" that is an entire cementery of giant robots, with only their dead hands stepping out of the ground, with once finger being bigger than 6 characters piled on eachother.
Pretty neat :D
Man, that vocal fry of yours is what scares me the most. Sounds like you're going to die any minute now.
your voice makes me want to clear my throat whenever you hit a low tone
frrrrrrrrrrrr, i searched all the coments to find that 😭
There is a new Act in ULTRAKILL and it includes A 3 KILOMETER TALL WAR GIRAFFE CALLED AN EARTHMOVER. THERE ARE MULTIPLE IN THE DISTANCE. (his name is also called Benjamin :D)
One time I was playing Elite dangerous. I had just warped to a star and quickly started to throtle up my ship to re align myself for another jump.
I noticed that the star that was in front of me appeared to not be moving. That was weird, I was moving really fast.
Then it hit me. That was simply a star so big that even traveling around it felt slow. Even with a ship traveling ridiculously fast.
I was terrified and amazed at the same time
i'm as fascinated by both big spaces underwater and huge objects as i am terrified of them. when i first got subnautica, i thought i would be terrified of the water (and i was, for a while), but i managed to overcome it by sheer fascination and, i dunno, it being lesser of the two fears. somewhat hilariously, it was actually the size of the aurora that kneecapped my progress, which i wasn't expecting at all. i just kept coming up to it and pausing the game or quitting. couldn't do it. can't explain why - just couldn't! massive the bastard. one day i hope to make it inside!
Bros voice cracking mid video is too funny to take this video serious bruv 😭😭
"bruv"
“Do you have megalophobia?”
*a skeleton wearing a blue jacket appears*
how is sans related to everything that has megalo in it? sure, his theme is great and all that, but whenever i see something about megalophobia, there's always one dude like this
don't question why i yap, for i am the goofy yapper
don't question why i yap, for i am the goofy yapper
"How do we decide on a scale"
....uhm....the distance light travels in a nano second seems like a pretty good start.....
two very horrific megalophobia moments ive found in non-horror games that have stuck with me was the pyramid reveal in destiny shadowkeep. you turn a corner and there's a massive pyramid way out in the distance, disappearing into the darkness of the immense cavern you find yourself in. later it grabs you with a tractor beam and pulls you from the ledge you're on across a total void below you as it pulls you inside it. i cant handle that gap cross, it's genuinely too much for me every time. the other one is from a relatively cute game called sky children of the light, by the people who made journey. there's little quests you can do, and one of the seasonal areas is a cove with an immense underwater section. the second-to-last mission in the questline has you accidentally release the only "enemies" in the game into the ocean around you, a bunch of these kind of big floating snake/dragon things called krill, alongside a MUCH bigger version we have never seen before or since. the final mission has you rescue a friend who went way too far down, and has you swim for a LONG time down through a void of ocean for lack of a better term, and when you finally pick up your friend, that massive dragon you released earlier emerges below you as you desperately swim upwards to try and escape before it ultimately eats you. its genuinely one of the most terrifying moments in a game ive ever experienced. for clips if youd like to watch them, look up " destiny shadowkeep beyond" for the first one and "sky cotl season of abyss mission 5"
Forerunner architecture in the Halo series (especially the original trilogy) always gave me both a sense of existential fear and melancholy, which I think was definitely intentional. i walk through those structures that are always so much more massive than the already tall player character, feeling dwarfed by their vastness, and all I can think about is who once roamed these halls, and how might we compare to them if this is how small we seem in their footsteps ?
This guy should meet your mom
Funniest comment I’ve seen today
@@BigBorisAbsolutely
You called King of Minos memorable and then a minute later say “as I said earlier, king of Minos isn’t a particularly memorable boss”
I think you needed a glass of water before recording this
fr
My best thing about the WAR OF THE WORLDS was Megalophobia, and the incredibly unsettling bassy sounds they made!
If i went to a place where there hadnt been an accident since time began, and i managed to cause one, i wouldn't feel bad, i broke that record, i bested time and gods themselves simply by being enough of an annoyance, thats one hell of an achievement.