For horror fans, October is a month-long celebration of all things horror. It’s 31 straight days of scary movie marathons, staying up as late playing horror games, telling ghost stories, visiting haunted houses, and testing local urban legends.

It’s an endless stream of all things fun and scary that leads up to one very special night of the year where old friends garbed in pitch black robes meet in empty cemeteries to continue ancient traditions of sacrificing innocents to appease the Old Ones, lest they return to unleash 10,000 years of hell on Earth.

Okay, maybe not that last bit, but the rest applies.

This year, my goal is to spend as much time as is humanly possible doing all of the above, with an emphasis on the gaming bit.

I’m going to cram as many hours playing horror games as I can into the paltry 744 hours that make up this wonderful month. When I’m not busy with one of the numerous horrifying releases October has in store for us, I’ll return to my old haunts, the games that scared me the most in the past and continue to send shivers down my spine years later.

This leads me to my question. What is the scariest game you’ve ever played?

That’s a tough question, right? You could go old school, with something like Silent Hill, Clock Tower, Dino Crisis, Resident Evil, or Fatal Frame 2, among about a thousand others. Or you could pick a more recent release, like Condemned, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Dead Space, Slender, etc.

Narrowing it down to just one game that was, to you, the most terrifying of them all, is nearly impossible after you’ve played enough games.

After much consideration, I think I may have come up with the game that, at the very least, comes damn close to reaching the top of my list. That game is Outlast. Its Whistleblower expansion may be superior, but by then I had become familiar with its gory back of tricks.

Since my first visit to Mount Massive Asylum is going to stick with me forever, and not just because my experience with it has been forever immortalized on YouTube. How about you?