Yes the Subnautica shout in on point! The audio team often used ambient sounds that don’t actually come from anything in game just to always give you that extra feeling that you are out of your element and very much in one where something else had the upper hand. But that’s often most pronounced in caves. Reaper leviathan, on the other hand, do have a specific sound you can usually hear before you see it. I’ve played 200 hours across the two games and hearing the telltale sounds of any of the aggressive leviathan still gets my heartrate up and has my eyes darting around to find where it’s coming from. Fuck I love those games.
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How could I have forgotten about the walk across the bottom of the ocean in SOMA! Holy moly, that was exactly the right kind of terrifying.
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Gonna +1 trudging along the ocean floor in SOMA (especially in that final ending section)
Couple others that come to mind: One is the basement where you have to turn on the generator at the beginning of Outlast. It’s dark, confined, and something about its relatively simple layout (including the fact that there’s only one entrance/exit to each room/section) is just really frightening to me.
The other is the hallway in P.T. The way the game plays with familiarity of a space is so clever and makes the whole experience that much more unsettling. After the first couple “cycles”, you come to understand the layout of the hallway pretty well. Before too long, the game starts to introduce slight changes to the hallway in each subsequent cycle (i.e. maybe a previously well-lit part of the hallway is now dark, maybe a bathroom door that was previously closed is now slightly ajar, maybe there’s now a refrigerator dangling from the ceiling and dripping blood 
). As I played it, it produced such a feeling of uneasiness each time I opened that door at the end of the hallway hoping desperately that it’d be the last time, only to discover, nope.
here we go again
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Kitty Horrorshow’s games were what came to mind at first, but honestly I find them somewhat cozy, in a jagged rusty metal way.
For me, the scariest videogame location has to be the candle world from Yume Nikki
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Oh, heck yeah, the archive in A Hand With Many Fingers is very unsettling. One of my more memorable experiences from the past year is browsing through those shelves and jumping at every shadow.
Another from recent memory is the village of the Pathologic games. In particular, any quarantined area where the disease manifests. The audio shifts into distant sobs and horse croaks of infested villagers, your very limited health resources are drained every second and you need to look out for physical manifestations of the disease. Even when seeking shelter inside buildings infected people may get close to you in a bid for aid, quickening your risk of infection. It truly feels like the apocalypse has come to the village and you have no escape except confronting these situations yourself.
Naturally, outside of quarantined zones you may feel a bit of relieve, but still face limited time to navigate between the different town factions who all vie for domination and will use you for their own ends. It’s a terrifying place to be stuck in.
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Any Metroid game with an “abandoned ship” (so at least Super and Prime) location freaks me out. Prime has a couple other good ones - the Pirate research lab and any situation with the Chozo Ghosts enemy freaking me out in particular. I’m also a scaredy-cat so those spooky parts of non-horror names get to me for sure.
Also coming to mind is the abandoned military base in Oxenfree, where you generally have a pretty bad time. Played it recently with friends and yeah it’s a pretty spooky game, though a bit slow in front of a crowd.
It’s interesting to see the open-ocean theme running through a bunch of these responses. Abzu is an explicitly peaceful game that nonetheless has one or two areas where you swim over a big, dark, empty ocean space that is always unnerving. I’ve played it with friends and always encourage them to swim down into the depths. There are a few whales and big sharks you can’t initially see. They won’t hurt you, but their presence and initial invisibility will send a tingle down your spine.
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Honestly, the scariest location of any game Ive played in recent memory is the deep sea walk in SOMA. It’s pitch black with only these tiny lights to guide you. I’m not sure I can remember a video game section that as claustrophobic as this. Not just darkness, but the almost total lack of light. Gives me shudders just thinking about it.
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I don’t know how it holds up nowadays, but I remember getting to the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows and I quit the game and did something else. I remember entering an abandoned building where there was a distant pounding noise, which got louder and more furious as I got closer and closer to the attic, finding the door to the attic that was shaking from the pounding but when I opened it no one was there . . .
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