Left 4 Dead

“Turn your flashlight off! Don’t look at the witch!” commands Chet. The Witch is the game’s Ring piece, a sobbing girl who only surfaces from her lachrymose reveries to rip you apart with one hit. For that reason, it’s considered prudent not to shine your torch on her, or shoot her. We wanted to look at the Witch. We snuck a crafty sideways glance at the slouchy mare, just as a teammate let rip with a volley of machine gun fire.

We’re not sure if this was simply to show off her powers, but it certainly had that effect. Sobs became a crescendo of screams, and the inert girl began killing us. The guy who’d shot the gun was the first to go. Everyone else had run off by this stage, leaving us with about 20 seconds of bleed-out time to stare at the now-purposeless Witch, who resumed a kind of hopeless, agonised writhing which would have looked pitiful if she hadn’t just butchered us.