Welcome, one and all, to Monday’s Weekly Video Games Thread! I’ll be your host for this Monday, Wolfman Jew.

Ah, the beach! It’s February, so my thoughts turn to more pleasant times outdoors. And the beach is the perfect place. You’ve got the crisp waters, the smell of fish (which only I like, but I really like it), the calming breeze, the murderous Starscourge Radahn… Wait, no, no, Radahn is terrifying, and so is his blood-soaked beach. Let’s instead go to the beautiful water-adjacent sands of the Kanto Region… nope. Place is filled with violent Gyarados. Or maybe DC… no, wait; too many Mirelurks wanting to drink your blood. Okay, I’ve got it! This one’s gonna be great. Let’s just have a fun night party where…

…Really, Oxenfree? You’re gonna take a beautiful beach party at night, give us a warm fire and some camaraderie, and then gonna horror it up with ghosts and electrical signals and trauma?

I’m kidding, of course. I had a delightful time with Oxenfree! But it is kind of interesting how perfect beaches are for horror, spooky, and threatening circumstances. Everything nice is twisted, but still in a relatively picturesque kind of way. So here’s the prompt: what is the BEST scary, upsetting, or unpleasant (but in the good kind of way) time you had at a nasty video game beach? This prompt mostly refers to beaches used in ways like, say, Dark Souls sticking you on an underground sandbar and attacking you with a giant hydra, but go crazy. Like Banjo-Kazooie! Remember how awful and anxiety provoking that shark was at Treasure Trove Cove? That was unpleasant, but memorable.

And whether or not you want to deal with this obviously made up on the fly prompt, how was your video gaming this weekend? I beat Metroid Prime!